everything all at once
work
I'm officially a tenure-track assistant professor!! I'm so excited to finally be officially work at Stevens. The campus is already buzzing with the new undergrads, and even though I'm not teaching this semester, I'm happy to have the campus more full. It just feels like people are getting in gear.
At the same time, my projects are also all picking up at the same time. It's actually pretty stressful to have anything flare up at once, while I still have various onboarding tasks to do for Stevens. At least I don't also have a class on top of this, and I think I should be able to push hard and finish some projects in the next month or so. Then, I'll move on to grants, PhD admittances, and prepping my course for next semester, I think.
non-work
At the same as work is kicking up, I have a host of non-work things that are happening. This weekend, I'm actually back in Chicago at a wedding, and that's only a week after we got a new kitten to join our place in Hoboken. It's been sad being away from him, but we have a good system of people coming over to cat sit and ways to monitor the house and see the cats remotely.
Fortunately, the travel helped me finally finish MaddAddam which finishes off the trilogy! The whole series was well written, and the ending made me both a bit sad but optimistic. I think the third book did a good job of tying together a lot of stray threads. I almost wish there was a bigger grand narrative behind what happened, but I guess that's not really in step with the genre. Anyway, I haven't decided what I'll read next, but there's a good chance it's Sword Catcher or The Fifth Season.
things i saw this week
From Proton, Meta's privacy policy allows it to scan camera photos
From SCW podcast, why we should stop using encrypted email, especially PGP
From PBS Spacetime, information about a very useful satellite and how the current administration is trying to destroy it
questions
What is the most valuable thing that formal verification can provide to cryptography?
How much more practical are Secure Agents than MPC?
This is heavily related to a project I have under review and haven't had time to digest the paper yet.
Thanks for reading to the end! Here's a picture of the Stevens students gathered for their Wittpenn Walk:
