TheoryA Says: I honestly think the whole CS theory community would benefit from an extended question and answer session entitled “What’s the point of Theory B?”. The questions would hopefully be answered by the leading lights in their respective areas.

Here we have a typical Theory B researcher: Helmut Veith 1971-2016... Hmm, nobody told me that he died already.

Well, I certainly knew that Martin Hofmann had died. And at least on reddit/dependent_types, both that he was missing and that he was found dead was also communicated.

Why do I write this? If that request by TheoryA would have been a bit more friendly, or if he would have agreed to change the title to make the whole thing a bit less loaded, I would have tried to convince Martin Hofmann or Steffen Jost to do such a session, or to recommend somebody suitable for it. But as things turned out, there was not really much interest, and when he died I realized just how little interest there was, based on the complete silence.

And today I found out that Helmut Veith had also died recently, and I didn't hear anything about it, neither on stackexchange, nor on the "theory A" blogs that I frequent... I guess this means that the divide between theory A and theory B is just as real today as it ever was in the past.

@ThomasKlimpel thx for the news/ pov. coincidentally was just reading this from a Physics chat ref. but it can turn into a zen question, who is really uninterested? psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evolution-the-self/201604/…

When the NSA Hired Mad Men / dailybeast

Underpaid and exhausted: the human cost of your Kindle / guardian