This morning, I was chatting with a colleague, Richard Hotte, and we were discussing research, funding, and the relation between the two. I’ve also had these discussions with Martin Brooks. Richard pointed out that John Travolta has figured it out all some years ago when he received a prize at Cannes for the movie Pulp Fiction. According to Richard, Travolta was asked then about how it felt to finally win a prize that he surely coveted for many years. John Travolta answered that his goal was never to win a prize, but rather to grow as an actor. The prize was nice, but not his goal.

This echoes my own feeling about funding for research. If your goal is funding, you’ll probably get some, maybe a lot, but unfortunately, you may never become a great researcher.

The Canadian Broadcast Corporation has an article about a nose-controlled pointer. Basically, you can get rid of your mouse and replace it by a webcam. I’ve seen this life and the inventor was a colleague of mine not long ago. They do some fantastic things at NRC, you know.

Today, I attended an excellent talk on Semantic Web by Michel Gagnon from the École Polytechnique. One cool idea Michel has is to create an ontology for Linux documentation so that you can search the documentation for concepts and not just keywords. I’m puzzled how the user interface would look like.

Yesterday, Yuhong flew over from Fredericton to the big city (Montreal). I had a great time chatting with her. Some of our joint work, though still a bit immature, is turning out to be quite exciting. Thanks to Yuhong, I discovered the field of qualitative modelling and I really ought to know about it a long time ago.

Today, I had lunch with Gilles Raîche at UQÀM professors’ restaurant. Yes: it is little known facts that UQÀM professors have a small restaurants to call their own downtown. It was news to me! Gilles works on user modelling problems in education.

From Peter Turney, here are two books to convince you that analogies are an important concept: Metaphors We Live By and Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being.