A Question

The Question

I recently restarted working on this CS theory blog. One reason that I took a bit to get it going again is really stupid. Really silly. And perhaps I should not talk about it. It does not make me look smart. But here it goes anyway.

My email system stopped working recently. I got connected to the help desk. I told the help desk person H that I was not getting lots of messages.This was something that H could not figure out. Why were some messages being lost and others were not. H sent some test message to me and they never seemed to get there. H had set what I could see as what they could also see. What was making messages get lost? That led H to get me a ticket for a better expert at the help desk and said: “please wait a while and then use the ticket to get better help”. I thanked H and started to wait.

The Solution

While waiting my dear wife—Kathryn Farley asked me how the help desk was going. She knew I had finally had talked to the help desk.She was just interested in hearing if I had finally fixed things—were messages now getting there?

She is a PhD in acting from Northwestern, and is now working hard to become a real actress in various forms of theater. I explained the problem to her. She solved it immediately.

Kathryn noticed that the email program was ordering the messages not in date order as I usually did. Rather it was ordering them in alphabet order on the sender’s name. So a message from asmith@some-where would be way before xfred@some-else. This made it look like certain messages were never received at all. We reset the order to date based and all the missing messages now appeared. Pretty cool.

Kathryn made me proud. Her insight was brilliant. It solved a problem that the help expert H could not do. I certainly could not do it. But she could see right away what would fix it.

Kathryn noticed that the email program was ordering the messages not in date order as I usually did. Rather it was ordering them in alphabet order on the sender’s name. So a message from asmith@some-where would be way before xfred@some-else. This made it look like certain messages were never received at all. We reset the order to date based and all the missing messages now appeared. Pretty cool.

Perhaps I Should Explain The P=NP Question To Her?

Does this mean that sometimes we all have a bad view of a problem? Can we need some cool insight to see how a problem can be solved? Perhaps I wondered. So many of us think that P is not equal to NP and could we all be missing some easy solution. Not clear to me.

By rjlipton