Advanced Algorithms is killing me softly. There seems to be some chemical in the ink of our problem sets that puts me in to a lethargic state after even brief exposures. I took the class after I got booted out of my tech writing class, thinking “hey! this will probably be really useful in the future”. Whoops! Little did I know I was signing up for never-ending lectures on proof theory and rather obscure applications of basic ideas. This is not to say that I haven’t learned some useful stuff from attending these lectures. My chances of proving optimality of an algorithm somebody gives me has gone from nil to somewhat-likely. My chances of actually being able to come up with an algorithm to solve a practical problem remains as bleak as before.