This is one of two or three short posts I will be making today, and will as such probably never be seen as a result of not actually having visible text for very long. A casual glance through programming.reddit.com will show a recent surge in interest in Software Transactional Memory. Having missed most of the concurrency train (I still have to read the Erlang book), I am pretty amused by what all this concurrency means. I think the processes themselves are fairly interesting, but I claim to be entirely inept at it, I understand what STM means, what it entails, I haven't used it. However what does interest me about STM is a couple of papers written by Herlihy (there are others, I just happened to run across these while going through what Brown professors did) relating concurrency to topology. The papers are freely available on the website, and while I am still working on actually reading them, I am hoping posting here will shame me into actually completing this eventually. On the positive side, trying to parse the papers has meant having to read and understand a book on point set topology, one of the things I did in the hazy days of my sophomore year and have forgotten fairly successfully. Of course seeing as parsing math texts themselves takes a while, and paper and pen, this is slow going.

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