No news and good news

The River – by Aristide Maillol (1938-39) at the MoMA sculpture garden

It used to be that having no news from people for extended periods of time would be the norm. Without going back to the pre-phone era, you would still leave for a trip, and maybe call home once a week. Your parents would have the latest news, and your friends could call on them to have updates "they saw the pyramids!", "they went to Times Square!". They would be the guardians of the knowledge about where you were and when you had arrived there.

Fast forward one internet revolution later and now it's almost surreal if you can't know where a person has been for the past 4-5 days. If your brother has not written on whatsapp in 2 days on his trip to India it's already grounds for some worry. Conversely, if you haven't provided any news in a couple of days, you start to have the feeling that people should know more about what is happening to you. If you keep up with the traditional means of letting people know that you are alive, then that's fine, but if you have elected to use a blog as the means of conveying your activities, impressions and experiences in your expatriate life, one week of no news starts to give you that "I should call mom" feeling. Blame it on the digital divide (my dad has expressed his opinion on the subject) or on my oversize ego, but it feels high time for an update.

The past week has been busy, yet productive. For my part the coding binge I started last week has not really ended yet. We're on full engines on a project with Pomelo, and to extract the best information and data, Guillaume and I, with the beta-testing contribution of a dozen of our students, have been working ceaselessly on extending, improving, expanding our software and code. So much so, that our code has changed by roughly 40'000 lines of code in a week and a half. Marion has been busy as well, taking on again a challenging formal proof of her axiomatisation, which has been bugging her for the better part of the past two years. She has more or less solved that, much to her elation, but only after several days of incessant mathematical development. Now she'll have the unenjoyable task of transforming a plethora of handwritten pencil notes into digital form…

The week, while very busy, has not been devoid of enjoyable moments, such as a visit at MoMA, or a walk down Riverside park for a view of  New Jersey's shoreline and Manhattan's urban landscape. And this afternoon, a talk on, of all things, the philosophy of communicative acts.