Theoretical physicist, Linux sysadmin, skeptic, cynic
Activities:
Folk Dancing, Weight Lifting, Walking, Reading, Coffee, Slinging Lisp
Interests:
Computer and Network Security, The measurement problem in Quantum Mechanics, Time, Symmetry, Protein Folding, Evolution, the Origins of Life, Nietzsche, Stirner, Archeology and History of the Bronze and Iron ages, the Kings Tyrants and Republic of early Rome, the Presocratics, the Indian influence on Classical civilization, Skepticism, Critical Thinking, Lisp, Lush, The Unscented Transform and Unscented Particle Filters
Favorite Music:
Classical Music, Hildegard, Corelli, Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Wagner, Strauss, Mahler, Stravinsky, Bartok, Orff, Balkan Music, Romanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Croatian, Greek, Middle Eastern, Armenian, Turkish, Arabic
Favorite Movies:
Samurai Rebellion, Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, Ran, Kwaidan, Dr. Strangelove, The Seventh Seal, Metropolis, The Third Man, Das Boot, Antonio Gaudí, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Unforgiven, A Clockwork Orange, The Great Escape, Spartacus,
Favorite Books:
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morality, The Ego and its own, The Shape of Ancient Thought, War before Civilization, Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, AI: a modern approach, Symmetry in Science, The End of Time, Godel Escher Bach, The Illiad, Shakespeare, MacBeth, King Lear, Hamlet, Faust, Manfred, Dostoevsky, Crime And Punishment, Demons, Bierce, An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, The Devil's Dictionary, Rimbaud, Une Saison En Enfer, Baudelaire, Les Fleurs Du Mal, Rilke, New Poems, Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus, Kafka, In the Penal Colony, The Castle, Karl Kraus, Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths, The Library of Babel, Babel, Red Cavalry,
Teenage Favorites: The Antichrist, The True Believer, How I Made $2000000 in the Stock Market., Calculus for the Practical Man, Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe, The Night Country, Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, At the Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Howard, The Hour of the Dragon, The People of the Black Circle, Asimov, The End of Eternity, Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
Childhood Favorites: Fox went out on a chilly night, Life Story, The Walt Disney Story of Our Friend the Atom, The First Book of Codes and Ciphers, Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery, Asimov, Realm of Algebra, The Neutrino, Inside the Atom, The New Intelligent Man's Guide to Science, The Roman Republic, Welles, The Outline of History, The Time Machine, Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Favorite Quotations:
"A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us." -Kafka
"Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self." -Stirner
“Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control - these three alone lead to power.” -Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things." -Nietzsche
"Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." -Bierce
"Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true." -Mencken
"Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." -Mencken
“War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off.” -Karl Kraus
“The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.” -Elbert Hubbard
"Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." -Richard Feynman
