What did I do on my last Friday in Potsdam? This was a representative day for the period mid-November to mid-December.
I spent the morning on distractions. I woke up at 10 with a warm feeling after having had a long, sorrow-free dream about miss L. I laid in bed for a few minutes wondering about the reason for such a dream. Could it be the plans of moving to Stockholm? After a while, I realized that it must have been that a conversation with miss H the previous night had steered into the importance of human touch for well-being, which had evoked a tender memory. My current model for dreams at the time was that the purpose of dreams is to get experience of one's reactions to / preferences for events that happen too rarely in real life for a normal person to accumulate much experience with, but are nonetheless important act throughout as if one had a lot of experience. A consequence is that it is important to not be aware that one is dreaming: otherwise, one's reactions are not authentic. This dream in particular helped remind me about the caring feelings one can experience in a long term relationship.
Checking my messages out of bed, my friends were discussing the night's election results in the UK. The conservative party had won by a landslide. I had only a vague memory from two months earlier that there was going to be an election at all. My reaction was that it was refreshing that an election settled a clear winner, for once. The conservative victory meant that Brexit most likely would have gone through by the time I got around to moving to London. This was expected anyway.
The following 2 hours, I went back-and-forth a bit with a man in Jerusalem about morality and game theory. I re-read Taleb's Minority Rule, and paid much better attention to the examples than before. I decided to put Feynman's What do you care what other people think? on my reading list. I also kept up some threads with the guys back at the office about a proposal.
At noon, I called K to ask him for a favor regarding a room, and we ended up talking throughout the lunch hour about the recent PISA results. I also told him about my observation about cartographers (aesthetically minded people with no tolerance for bogus), and about my AI Alignment thought experiment (if humans had been created by ants, what would they ask us to do, and should we listen?). We also touched upon institutional rot (which was rule), and had a good flow of ideas about current day things that would be horrifying weirdtopia to an observer from antiquity. It was a very pleasant talk, and well worth the hour.
At 13:30, I went to the usual Indian restaurant. I ordered the same thing as always, and had a good dinner where I thought of the idea for this post. I said Happy Christmas to the waiter when leaving, thinking that symmetrically, I would not object to holiday greetings if living in another country, even if they pertained to a different religion. Afterwards, I took only a short walk through Weberplatz. The weather was clear and well cold.
Coming back in the afternoon, two choices for the day's work presented themselves. Either I could do work to learn more about nonlinear solvers, and to continue my survey of commercially available solvers. Or I could do my own studies and learn more about symbolic manipulators from chapter 2.3 of Knuth's TAOCP. In the latter, I was on the precipice of finding out, through practical exercise, the principles of mathematical engines. Both were long standing wishes of mine. To have two interesting prospects for one's curiosity, is actually worse than having one. I decided to go with the letter, since I had worked on that the day before. Thus I broke my habit of working on the survey on Fridays. It is said that any art, however minor, requires nothing less than total commitment to it, if one wishes to excel in it. I take 'total devotion' to mean devoting about 12 hours of work 6 days a week, as well as softer things like thinking about the art in one's downtime, and to make it a part of one's identity. I reproached myself for devoting only 3 hours of this day to advancing my knowledge of my subject, however I noted that it was better than nothing at all. At any rate, there seemed to be no better activity with which to consume the cream of the afternoon.
The working time did not go well. Due to lack of concentration, I was not able to get past the initial phase of devising a strategy, and coming up with suitable representations, classifications, and definitions. Therefore could not start coding. At 18:20, when E came back home, I gave up and started preparing for the evening's social event at C & R's place. I crummily wrapped a Christmas present to C, and took the bike.
From Babelsberg I took the shortcut through Südliche Innenstadt (which is kind of dodgy). I crossed Havel and got a good speed along Bundenstrasse, turning left at an appropriate red light, to get to Charlottenhof. I arrived punctually at 19:30, and so did most of the other guests. Lovely people, Germans. The others seemed to know each other somewhat, but one girl, miss J, had arrived alone and was new in the city. She spoke quite good English and was on a rather prestigious track for her age. However, she was not in a domain that interested me, so I didn't start to fantasize. She became the center of attention for the first round of Glühwein and I listened intently to her, grasping as much German as I could. She seemed to notice my attentions and started asking me questions. I answered smilingly but quite shortly in English, so as to get past the standard set of questions to see if she was going to try something. In the fourth or fifth question she asked "for how long are you in the city?". If we consider that this is conversation between ESL speakers, this phrase can be interpreted as either "How long will you stay in the city for?", or "How long have you been in the city?", although I think the first interpretation is more correct. Foolishly, I did accept the first interpretation and said truthfully "until Monday", after which no-one bothered much to get to know me. This, I think is perfectly reasonable. I spent most of the evening trying to talk to R and C about how we would keep in touch after I went back. I hadn't established a repertoire of online communication with either of them, but we had met mostly in person. They agreed with my analysis. I extended their hospitality and was one of the last to leave. When the majority left at 23, miss J asked me whether I would come to an event on the Sunday, which I thought was very polite and lovely of her.
I came back home at 01:30. Having received an interesting question from miss G, I responded with a passage about the murder of Olof Palme, Swedish Prime Minister, in 1986. I found an informative documentary about the subject, so I did not fall asleep until 03:00.
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