simrob

In the past two weeks I've spent a lot of time either at the NC State legislature (2 blocks from where I work, conveniently) or following the various clusterfucks there. This is just my own personal recollections of what happened, and it may not be interesting to others.

( first clusterfuck )

( second clusterfuck )

One of the most fun non-research things I've had the opportunity to do in graduate school is interview people with interesting backgrounds doing extraordinary things with computer science and then write about them for a computer science audience. All these are available from here.

My most recent profile, of the outgoing technical director of the NSA's Information Assurance Directorate, is twice as long as my previous ones, because, damn, it's the outgoing technical director of the NSA's Information Assurance Directorate. This felt a lot like Real Journalism, what with the interviews, synthesis of various first-person and second-person sources, and combing through IBM technical reports and recently declassified (through FOIA) internal histories of the National Security Agency.

There were two great tidbits I couldn't figure out how to include even given twice my normal wordcount, from little lines about life at the NSA like "People come in and they do miraculous things every day" to the line "There are not enough women in this field right now, and we really need to address this problem...We’re certainly not going to out-people them if half the people aren’t getting into the game" which is awesome both because it presents the fact that women are discouraged from involvement in computer science as a medium-term threat to national security - that's a new framing - while simultaneously showing George's cold-war origins by falling into the trope of the enemy-as-unspecified-they.

2017 Update: Wow, a lot of this reads differently in the year of our Luigi twenty seventeen, huh.

In March 2012, George wrote me back to complement the article. I particularly like that he said "I sent the article to NSA's public affairs Office and they thought it was great - fair, well written, even interesting."

Used a not-terrifically-worded question on MathOverflow and the fact that I had two hours to kill as an excuse to finally write out the cut-and-identity-based proof of the completeness of (weak) focusing for the negative fragment, where you don't have to admit that it's only weak focusing. I wrote out all the details in the Weak Focusing for Ordered Linear Logic tech report, but that TR has way the hell too much other stuff going on.