work

Stevens and I were back from spring break! And honestly it feels a little like whiplash. I think I've (mostly) managed to keep on top of important things, but I've also noticed things slipping past me. Obviously the past few weeks have been a bit insane for me, so I wasn't able to get ahead of the class notes and problem sets over break. I was late uploading some files, slow to respond to some emails, and inattentive in some meetings this week. I'm sorry to those affected by the chaos, and I'm hopeful that in the coming weeks I'll get back into the groove (now that I've moved and after the FOCS deadline).

More specifically, I actually think my class went pretty well though. It felt weird teaching a class for the first time in 3 weeks because of the midterm and break. We also started key exchange and will go more into different forms of public-key cryptography! It's definitely what I prefer compared to the symmetric-key stuff, so I hope to have a lot of fun in this half of the class.

non-work

My weeks of business are finally coming to a close! After going home to see my family and finalizing my moving details, I've officially moved! I'm a bit sad to no longer be in Hoboken, but I really like the place I found in Union City. It has more room, and I expect to stay here longer than my previous place. I still have a bit to unpack, but I'm like 80-90% done, and it just feels really nice to be able to settle down.

I've also started reading Brave New World because I never have before. I never really appreciated classics in high school, but I like getting to choose which ones I read. I'm not too far in, but I'm excited to see where the story goes. It definitely is enlightening to see how people thought about the world and communism many years back.

questions

• What are good things to ask undergrad/PhD students to do between weekly meetings?
  • As I'm learning to manage a lab, I'm trying to figure out how to guide research.
  • So far I just go explain a paper to them, but I'm not sure if I should ask them to more actively run the meetings.
• How much overlap is there between philosophy of science and cryptography?
  • I thought there as a decent amount, but maybe it's not so clear.
  • It seems like Giuseppe Persiano really enjoyed talking about cryptography through a falsifiability as a core principle vs a more Kuhnian approach of paradigm shifts.
  • But I recently spoke with Nikolas Melissaris who is interested in the intersection but seemed to think there wasn't much beyond this
  • I think it'd be fun to teach a CS+Philosophy class though

Thanks for reading to the end! Here's a picture of Timmy escaping from our back patio into the neighbor's yard.