Chris,

I've got 44 GS proposals and more than 100 NSF proposals to read for panels in the next month, for example. I've had a lot of practise reading text trying to sell some idea, and the flaws in EDG's ideas are so frequent and deep that it's not a time sink. I mainly comment on him because he's unbelievably offensive, although he has no credibility to damage in my view.

However, sometimes I wonder at the time I've spent reading and posting on this and the syzygy board, but aside from presenting some technical details to a more general crowd, it is a break from more tedious work.

Yesterday, for example, I spent the entire day trying to reconstruct the work done by a recent graduate student. This involved renaming and organizing hundreds of files on several Unix computers (poorly named and documented), combining saved and archived emails again spread over several computers, and gathering the associated images made for research, papers, and talks. It only made sense when I kept track of the dates of creation of the files and directories and correlated them between figures, files and emails.

Today, I'll devote to trying recreate the most recent figures, so I can hand the project to a post-doc.

My point is that reading and posting on boards is a break from details that I like doing, but from which I need frequent breaks.

(The week-end devoted to work is because the family left for vacation early, and I look forward to joining them Weds.)

John