Achilles' Tent Notes #14 written by Nathan Lilienthal on September 12, 2023.

I went into the lab the other day… it’s all torn down. I guess they’re making room for a new batch of students or RAs or something finally. I had to retrieve my old workstation and a few other desk items. It’s been years since I was working on the project and I had almost forgotten about some of these crazy ideas, but underneath all the confused notes and half-baked implementations, I still feel like we were working on something with a bit of merit. So it pains me that I have nothing more than countless memories of discussions with colleagues, random notes, a few dead repositories, and a year of research experience on my CV to show for it all. I guess I shouldn’t complain though. This is a better end for research than trying to keep alive something which insists on dying. In the end, I was spinning my wheels trying to make too many things work together at the same time. Had I taken the time to distil a few ideas and focus on them, perhaps it would have been more successful. But then there were the requirements to consider, and looming evaluations of our satisfaction of said requirements. It was all seemingly hopeless at the end, then poof COVID-19 really killed everything. Who knows, maybe down the road some breath will be given to a new life of something similar and exciting?

Anyway, I just wanted to leave a note here concluding this line of research for now. The tent was pitched and now it is collapsed and I suppose I’m packing it up as we speak.