Natassa

Natassa talked about her PhD work today in class. She
was a student of DeWitt's at Wisconsin. She was interested
in (architectural) resource utilization of processors
running database programs. She found some amazing stuff,
eg. that the processor was only doing useful work at most
%50 of the time, the rest spent mostly waiting for memory
requests. She had a nice comment in the middle of the
lecture somewhere. To paraphrase:

"It was the most miserable time of my PhD work. I had just
done all sorts of tests and generated millions of numbers.
I was just kind of staring at them for weeks. I had no idea
what I was looking for, but I KNEW there was something
interesting going on."

And she found the interesting stuff! I like her. She's
such a database person.
I was talking about an idea for a theorem database with her
yesterday, and all through my exposition she's firing ways
of how to represent the knowledge in relational tables.
Pretty funny how different people approach the same
problem.

"A common mistake people make when trying to design
something completely foolproof is to underestimate the
ingenuity of complete fools." -- Douglas Adams