Conspicuously absent from here are the things I tend to think about during business hours. I’m lucky enough to have some difficult problems to solve every now and then, especially when we have client with a scientific turn of mind. Right now, for example, I’m trying to figure out how to display very complex tree-like relationships between things. You know your family tree? Something like that, except on an enormous scale. Like, a family tree for an entire country. Potentially. Something like that.

So I say “I need something that automatically draws graphs of data,” and start looking around. Turns out that’s a whole discipline within computer science and math. Very complicated. They even hold international symposia in Vienna on this.

On the one hand I hate it when I get a problem like this. Deadlines and all, you know? But on the other … man, I think I could get into graph theory. I wonder if I would have dropped out of CS all those years ago if someone had introduced me to graph theory first. “Wait, don’t go! This is what you eventually get to study!”

We have to decide on our majors too young. We should get to wait until we’re really quite old.