Maxwell's Demon

I'm doing something fiendishly complicated at work - really in over my head, basically taking a report to pieces and putting it back together, hacking and cracking bits of code that seem to do the things that I need them to do even though I don't actually understand the code itself. There's an example oft quoted within debate on "what comprises consciousness" about a person locked in a room with a set of descriptions of how to react to instructions - essentially doing blind translations in Chinese without understanding - and I want to call him Maxwell's Demon, but that's to do with heat transferrence in Physics. This is essentially what I'm doing in programming terms.

And I feel like a freak because yesterday in a meeting, one of the bankers asked me what my band was called, and I said "Shimura Curves" and he said "Shim... WHAT?" and so I asked quite casually if he'd read Fermat's Last Theorem (not an unreasonable request - it was on the bestseller list for ages) and they all burst out laughing as if I'd asked the question in Chinese.

But whatever... I was called on the carpet this morning and essentially told to develop more social skills to cope with the FD's foibles or something (when the thing that provoked this was me trying to find a time-proven way to cope with my own shortcomings and poor memory) and burst out crying because of the stress and the pressure and I'm a human being, not a robot, and there's only so long I can carry on working 10 to 12 hour days doing seven impossible things before breakfast before my brain just collapses. (And if I collapse, they really *are* in trouble because no one else here understands the legacy system and What Went Wrong with it.)

I'm not sure what any of that is about. Probably to explain why I was so burned at last night's rehearsal. Which I'll talk about in another post.