Consistency and Completeness

Spring is beginning here, as evidenced by the tiny yellow blossoms sticking to my shoes these last couple of days...

It seems a very fertile time for open source collaboration at the moment, and I really want to put as much energy as I can into helping serve a flying kickstart to projects like Userscripts.org, Microformats.org, not to mention the core.os and arbiter...

But...
things have transpired, such that I need to spend the next three months focusing on natural deduction, proving theorums, and trying to better understand mathematical induction. I've been forever putting it off, but I can no longer avoid, the need to delve deeper into the foundations of logic and computation. Unfortunately for me, it's harder than ever to concentrate on philosophy and formalism right now, with the raging progress of domain specific languages and language workbenches, exciting because this is exactly the reason why I moved away from visual design and got so interested in programming this past couple of years, and the ideas are finally starting to make waves on an industry wide level...

But I have to accept my situation - I've got to this point through total autodidactic learning, and my lack of foundation in basic logic and computation is constantly challenging me when working with parsers and lexical technology.

It's one thing to vaguely know about cellular automata, set theory, and state machines - another to actually parse the mathematical logic and relevant proofs, and that can't happen by my usual speed-reading or code hacking.

So I'm a student again. Hopefully it works out a little better than last time.