Every few weeks I toy with the idea of dismantling komplexify, mostly because it can be hard to maintain during the school year, which is itself less a consequence of a particularly grueling academic pace than my utter inability to prioritize or manage my time.
Part of the problem is that I don’t really know what komplexify is. Once upon a time (back when I was in grad school) it was really a blog, in the ancient sense of weblog: it was a frequently updated collection of links to other sites I thought were cool, together with what I hoped were pithy synopses of said sites. I still try to do this with the ever-more increasingly misnamed “Link o’the Week” post, but really, I just don’t have the time to web-surf like that anymore.
And while I post stories about me and my family, komplexify is also not a blog in the more current sense of online diary. Anyone who reads it knows that I stay away from particularly personal or sensitive or controversial issues, partly because I am worried that my employers will take offense (and I read Dooce), but mostly because I don’t think anyone else would care to hear my opinion, least of all me. (I’m stuck listening to myself enough as is.) Furthermore, anyone who knows me knows that my memories of events are heavily influenced by the philosophy that the least important aspect of a story are its facts, and so anything I say is liable to be, at best, slightly hyperbolic and, at worst, a downright lie.
I had read that young lawyers are starting their own blogs largely to discuss issues arising out of the law, and have taken to calling such things as blawgs, which is actually quite clever; slightly less so is the verb they use for posting to their blawgs, which they call blawyering. Mathematicians are doing the same thing, and one of them (I forget who) suggested that as a community we should call such things blaths, which isn’t particularly endearing until you consider that the verb describing the posting to such things would be blathering, which is funny as hell. Unfortunately, komplexify isn’t really a blath, since math isn’t really its primary focus and furthermore, if truth be told, I’m a pretty mediocre mathematician to boot. Far better examples of blaths include Division by zero or Good math, bad math or God plays dice.
I guess I try to post whatever tidbits I think might be funny to people with a similar sense of humor as mine, like a slightly more quantitative version of Defective yeti or Gesse aplenty. Unfortunately, I haven’t their wit, and upon re-reading old posts, what I thought was hilariously funny at the time comes out feeling a little… blah.
Hey! Maybe that’s what komplexify is:
A blahg.
