Tracking the Beast
Cities where I've lived for at least two months, all in the USA for the moment:
- Mount Bethel, PA for about 5 years, from birth until my family moved to...
- Allentown, PA (actually a suburb called Lower Macungie) where I graduated from Emmaus High School in the East Penn School District and headed off to...
- Pittsburgh, PA for 3 years, for undergrad at Carnegie Mellon University, with a break in...
- West Long Branch, NJ for a summer internship at Avaya
- Berkeley, CA from summer 2003 to fall 2007, enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, save for a break in...
- Redmond, WA for a summer internship at Microsoft Research
- Brooklyn, NY from fall 2007 to summer 2008, where I worked writing software for high-speed algorithmic financial trading at Jane Street Capital for about 6 months
- Cambridge, MA from summer 2008 to present day, where I'm doing a postdoc at Harvard and working on an Internet start-up company
Food
- I stick to a vegetarian diet, and I try to stay as vegan as possible.
- I chose to go veggie mostly because:
- The tangible cost of preparing animal-based foods in my society is very high, whether you want to think of it as "environmental" or "economic" cost.
- Plant-based foods are healthier in general, and in fact my digestive system has a very weak tolerance for animal-based foods. I have nightmares about McDonald's french fries, which take me out of commission while I catch some quality fetal position time in a corner somewhere.
- I'm a spicy food aficionado. In the past I've been into super-hot sauces like Dave's Insanity Sauce, but today I stick to Tabasco. I'm just a white boy from Pennsylvania, after all.
The American Dream
- I hate driving cars, and I hope I never own a car. I walk almost everywhere I go. When I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, there was City Carshare for rare instances when public transit wouldn't do. Public transit always did in New York City, and, in Cambridge, I've managed to live in walking distance of everywhere I go that involves lugging stuff around.
- I've never owned a television, and I rarely watch TV anymore. The thing that got to me about it was that the scheduling of programs would take over the pace of my life. Commercials aren't much fun, either!
- I also hope to avoid living again in a traditional single-family home, since the American middle class style of living strikes me as wasteful, with incredible underutilization of most rooms, appliances, etc., in a household. Maybe an intentional community is in my future.
Politics
- I like to avoid labeling myself as uniformly ascribing to the beliefs of some political movement, but I've been strongly influenced by what I've read about far-left political philosophies like anarchism and Participatory Economics. It's amazing what we take for granted about how a society should be structured, and how often the ideas we've grown up with fail to hold up under scrutiny, and so I'm always on the look-out for new viewpoints like these.
- I believe in logic and science as the right foundation for organizing society. I think working knowledge of these systems should be spliced into our idea of the basic civic knowledge a person needs to be a productive member of society.
- I'm a newcomer to the world of cooperatives, but the basic ideas really appeal to me, and I'm currently gaining experience following my founding of HCoop, the Internet Hosting Cooperative.
- I think I have more faith than usual in the inherent good nature of people and less faith than usual in the good qualities of most people today. This ties in with my biggest political crusade, which is...
Education
- I think that education is the most important issue in the world today, period. After reading The Underground History of American Education, I was turned on to how the schools that I grew up with follow a pattern designed to impede real intellectual growth and promote blind obedience to authority figures.
- I think that the Internet should revolutionize how people learn, and I can't wait to see today's mainstream schools crumble. Folks like the Founding Fathers of the USA did just fine without structured schooling to distract them from learning, but we can do even better with these new opportunities for global distribution of information.
- My approximate generation is the first to be able to take advantage of this, and I think I have to a good degree. Nearly all of the knowledge with long-term value that I picked up before starting college came from the Internet: I was introduced to computer programming through Teen Programmers Unite, and my TPU friends suggested a string of amazing fiction and non-fiction books to read that had an incredible effect on my view of the world.
- While we're on the subject, I'd might as well take a stand with the assertion that computer programming is the single most valuable subject for young people to learn, behind only natural language reading and writing skills. Programming is the most accessible form of mathematics and logic. It forces you to think rigorously about problems and their solutions, and these skills generalize to life at large, including thinking critically about large-scale political issues. Plus, in contrast to traditional math curricula, it's possible to do very sophisticated kinds of programming exercises that are graded by a computer and don't require any human "teacher"!
The Written Word
Eternal Truth
- I'm addicted to math.
- My work in formal logic has had a huge effect on my life philosophy. I want to frame any debate in terms of a structured proof from a minimal set of axioms, or at least think about a debate that way for my own benefit. What's that? Your argument isn't in any shape to be checked for correctness by a computer? Well, then you're not really being honest with yourself. ;-)
My Sordid Past
- While I'm largely TV-free today, in high school and earlier I was first a Trekkie and then an X-Phile. I've been watching various TV series on DVD lately, and my favories include Carnivàle, Heroes, Lost, Millennium, Twin Peaks, and The X-Files.
- I studied Karate for 10 years, from 2nd grade up till when I left home for college. I'm a black belt, but I'm way out of practice.
- I was also involved in drama and musical theater for about 8 years, ending around the start of high school. My parents signed me up for summer camps early on and it took a while for me to shake the inertia and realize that I'd rather be doing other things. Nonetheless, I did retain a flair for the histrionic, and I know a bit more about theater than you might suspect.
Geek Stuff
The usual questions:
| Operating system? | Linux |
| Which distro? | Debian |
| Editor? | Emacs |
| Web browser? | Mozilla |
| Programming languages? | Standard ML, OCaml, Coq |
I spent many of the formative years of my life as a heavy Internet Relay Chat user, first on EFNet and then Freenode (where I reside to this day). Today, I'm in regular communication with many more old IRC friends than old in-person friends.
Naturally, you'll find more geek stuff on my programming page.
Profiles Elsewhere
This Web Site
- I write all of this HTML by hand with Emacs. When I was your age, we had to walk 10 miles uphill in the snow just to get to an image tag.
- I created all of the images on this web site, with the exceptions of the individual webcomic logos; the HCoop logo on the front page, which Anil Narayanan created; the old TPU logo, which Chris Cox created; the image of Burp, which David Palumbo drew and I colorized; the TI-86 image, which is extracted from an image on an old Texas Instruments web site; and the Jane Street Capital swirl.
- To create the images, I used a mix of Inkscape, the GIMP, OpenOffice, digital camera photos, and screen shots of software that I've developed.
- The "things that I like" pages are generated from XML data using XSLT.
