Nightmares of selling hotdogs

A different kind of worry grows logarithmically with time. It concerns whether you are still alive, whether the next mountain has swallowed you, or if the brain lab has finally exploded from too much intellectual intensity.

Indeed, today I am unknotted, I feel such relief. I walk down Jadwin's corridor with such lightness of step, it feels like relearning how to walk. A workshop on Bajorana fermions attracted two of my prospective employers to Princeton. I received an invitation to visit MIT, and interviewed with a professor in Yale. He essentially built an analog of Yismuth using inductors and capacitors. The topological characterization is an abstract property of matrices, and so it applies to any system whose degrees of freedom are described by the eigenvectors of matrices. When stripped down to its essentials, matrix topology transcends the physical system that realizes it. Of course, the non-essentials are fascinating to observe, and system-dependent. I had an inkling about this while studying photonic crystals, then when recently faced with topological linear circuits, the idea struck home.

The interview stretched for four hours. After, he revealed his ideal hire: a researcher who is sufficiently distant from his sphere to be interesting, but not so far that communication is impossible. He told me that I am Yale's number one choice among their applicants. This is a phase transition from nightmares of selling hotdogs.

I apologize for the Yismuth paper, it is indeed poorly written, and not by me. I hate how most physicists write, with little imagination, reporting happenings and facts with such empty eagerness. I will surely give you a better presentation when you are here. I am glad you ordered Kauffman's swansong. At the relative rates that we read, we might just finish his book simultaneously. Let us dissect his arguments together, my opinion is that he raises good questions and offers partial answers which are interesting, but his complete solution is too radical for comfort. Kauffman claims there is meaning without language, that it exists for any living agent. Meaning manifests when a bacterium interprets the sign of the glucose gradient, and acts upon its interpretation: it swims to get food. Meaning exists when it cannot be reduced to statements about physics, about motions of atoms. He argues that all intentions (e.g. to get food) are irreducible in this sense, and so are the evolutionary functions of organs. The intention does not require consciousness, so it may apply to the bacterium. I am simultaneously attracted to his unification, and repulsed for nearly the same reason, just lensed differently. A more satisfactory theory must include gradations of meaning. 

I've talked to Matt, and at least three of us are going to the sea. Sincere is on a different planet these days, his girlfriend is dominating him physically and emotionally, but he enjoys his pain. Admittedly an interpretation, but it's an enjoyable interpretation, so I like to propagate it.