I did it. I finally did it, today. I completed all 1321 pages of Handbook of Data Structures and Applications. I can safely file it away under my read-list after having it dominating my reading-list for so long.
As a survey book composed of survey papers, it suffers the same problem that most books of these type suffer---a general decrease in coherence as the chapters advance, itself a proxy of gradual movement from what is established dogma to the cutting edge, to the bleeding edge where things are still very ill-defined. I cannot tell if this is due to the editorial staff, or just the nature of the topic, but I can definitely say that the last two-thirds of the book was a much scruffier crawl than it should have been. Tighter editorial control on the presentation could have made it much better.
But who am I to complain?
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I find that as the years go by, I just don't get as angry as I was when I was a wee lad. Instead, what I tend to feel instead of anger is disappointment. I was doing my teeth-brushing before bed-time a little earlier and stumbled upon this thought. Even the recent posts that demonstrate some form of anger is really just a more impassioned version of disappointment.
I think this changeover from anger to disappointment as a primary reaction to something upsetting may be due to the increased experience that I have of the world, in the sense that after being in the world for ``long enough'', I generally expect people/situations to be of a higher standard than some uncouth cretin. So when such expectations of decency get violated by their very own actions, I just end up being disappointed in them.
In many ways this is part of the unspeakable angst that I have been feeling about the industry/domain/field that I am in that made me seriously consider (and follow through with) taking a sabbatical. Call me an idealist, or even naïve, the label doesn't really change what I feel about the situation---it is one of disappointment in the apparent loss of basic decency/ethics in the face of crushing potential profits. Suddenly everyone and their grandma wants ``artificial intelligence'', or ``blockchain'', or ``data analytics'', and those who have the know-how refusing to teach the unlearnt about what the buzzwords they spout mean, and more importantly, the circumstances that would help them decide an aye or a nay.
Artifice. Snake oil. Unscrupulousness. I cannot abide by these, even if I am comfortable with viewing the world with a bit more gray than before. It is an affront to the thinking person when they abuse their intellect and skills to peddle in things that would make Satan proud.
I cannot abide by that. They should really know better, and act better, but they are not doing so. That makes me disappointed in them.
On a slightly tangential track, I think that it really isn't about failure that people need to learn more from, but rather the handling of disappointment that may come from a failure. It is very easy to fail---most people can do this without even trying for any given task/situation. What I am referring to is the dealing with the type of failure that comes about after careful planning, which didn't seem to have prevented the failure. Or rather, it is about dealing with the disappointment that comes from such a failure.
One of the borderline joking remedies for dealing with disappointment with respect to tasks is to not set the bar of the task too high to begin with, the so-called ``low bar of entry'', or more mematically, ``setting low expectations''. It's a very 柔 concept, similar to the concept of ``jū'' of jūdo---to avoid something, we advance and parry it off in a direction that it wasn't heading to to use its momentum against itself.
So I suppose what I am trying to say is that one concrete outcome that I would like out of my sabbatical is to figure out what it is that I am disappointed in, and how to make it right again.
Anyway, that's all I want to write. Till the next update.
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