I just finished writing by half-way report. I was looking forward to documenting everything I hadn't done, but then I realized that list wasn't too long. I also realized that I am having a great summer. : )

Research was great this week. I was as stressed out as I get during finals week, but it was still fun. I think I finally crossed the hurdle I had been facing for the past few days. My current task is to analyze rmax, a function to delete the largest node in a binary search tree, and write and prove it in as many ways I can think of. So, I will to get in touch with my inner creativity over the next week. And this is when the real hacking starts, where I can spend hours over 5 lines of code. My favorite part of research.

I also got to attend two research talks this week which was fun. The first was about representing programming languages, and how polarity was the difference between call by value and call by name languages. I found it enthralling as I am a closet math fan. Stephanie also provided me with a paper on it, so I have bed time reading for the next few days. The other one was given by a graduate student at UPenn, and it was about how a simple language can be used to represent complex ideas by building up on it. The paper had really simple ideas, but these ideas had a huge impact 40 years ago.

I went to the UPenn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology today. I spent two hours dreamily walking around artifacts from thousands of years ago. They have a good collection of items from around the world.

Next week will be challenging, but I am looking forward to being challenged!

July 7 - July 13