Friends -- Um. I've been thinking about the lab. I guess it's all I've been thinking about for months now. Have you ever watched a cat before it makes a big jump, say, from one tree branch to another? It just sits there, hunched up, twitching, estimating the jump and playing it out in its mind, over and over and over. Eventually it actually jumps though, which I guess is where the analogy fails to hold so far. Anyway, a few weeks ago, some of us were walking around the new space, and I was thinking about how the space would be designed, and also thinking about all the projects I had been writing down in my notebook, trying to make sense of them, and I guess it was too many things for me to think about because they all mushed together into the same thing. I wrote it down. http://worrydream.com/cdg/ResearchAgenda+FloorPlan-v0.15.pdf You'll probably recognize a lot of the things I've been working on, or at least mumbling about, for some time now. Here it all is in a coherent (or at least cohered) framework. You can think of this as a plan for the next 30 years. Except I'll probably make another plan like this next year and it will be totally different. This is a draft -- please don't share with anyone yet. It's not public, and might never be public -- it's more grandiose than I'm comfortable appearing right now -- but I'll send out a revised version later which you'll be free to pass around, with discretion, if you feel like it. Patrick called it a "samizdat research plan"; I kind of like that. If you have any comments and suggestions about clarity of presentation -- things that could be explained better, phrases that don't mean anything to you -- they would be very welcome. I'm not really looking for criticism of the content right now -- these are my precious fantasies, after all, and I'm too worn out from the writing to muster a defense. --- Every creative project is a forced march through despair, that's just the way my compass points, but this one was particularly grueling because of the ethereality of the source material. It's not really a research proposal so much as an attempt to condense into words an emotional sense of longing and desperation. I hear that the NSF prefers research proposals to emotional senses of longing and desperation, so thank goodness they're not involved. The words don't work. I can describe attributes and requirements, but I can't capture the potential, the result, the thoughts that will be possible once this exists; I don't have words for instincts. I gave up on persuasion entirely; either this resonates with you or it doesn't, this won't convince you. Every line offers a dozen misinterpretations, I just have to live with that. There are too many words, they dilute. It reads like a bunch of different projects, but it's really just one thing, seen from a bunch of different angles. I can't explain the one thing. But this is probably the closest I've come so far to explaining/understanding it. Thanks for being here with me. -Bret