I enjoy working on complex projects. ( The trendy term for these may be moonshots. ) At 42, my short-term project to learn about compiler architecture.
If you know anything about compilers, you know this is RIDICULOUS. I actually have no idea at what point I'll stop digging into it, though it's likely that I will have to stop at some point. The only thing that comforts me, is my experience in approaching problems with an unfamiliar solution domain.
In college, from 2002 to 2004, I had two interesting results.
- 1. I obtained a birds-eye view of the history of ideas, ALL ideas, and how they had been documented, and taught, over the history of earth. While impossible to be comprehensive, it was surprisingly interesting to gain this perspective.
- 2. I figured out how to quantify every moment of my conscious experience, and thereby exhausted nearly all my curiousity about its structure. While I had been systematically checking this question since around 2000, I didn't actually expect to reach a conclusion so soon.
After that I immersed myself in more mundane environments, and even there, some interesting projects emerged. Particularly, I have a story about six years in a 24-hour coffee shop, but not here. So back to that short-term project I mentioned ... compilers.
My mid-term project is to build a sort of comprehensive software documentation tool for my studies, integrating literate programming, all of web architecture, and perhaps tools to be acquired via the aforementioned short-term project. My long-term project, since 2005 has been to get around to studying math, but there is no urgency whatsoever about this, as it all fundamentally boils down to killing whatever time I have had left, in an entertaining fashion.
Egad.
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