Fun Facts

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

• Calvin Coolidge

I think that it is useful to know that your professor is a normal, nuanced human. This is a list of some of the aspects of my life that you likely wouldn’t otherwise know about. Feel free to think of these as conversation starters if you want to chat!

Education and CS:

• I’ve worked as a motorcycle mechanic when I got tired of computers during the summer after my Junior year as an undergraduate. This convinced me never to own a motorcycle, and to never stop playing with computers. If you’re disillusioned about CS, a break might be a good way to refocus your priorities. Not all professors always knew that they wanted to work in academia, nor even work in CS!

• I have a minor in Philosophy with an emphasis on ethics. It motivates my view that productivity is a core human ethical responsibility. This informs my life and decisions even more than my CS education. Please consider a minor in an unrelated field.

• I have a set of inherent learning difficulties, and I form my life to compensate for them. The major ones:
  1. I learn subject matter very slowly – so semesterly classes were challenging as I understood the information well only about a year after the class.
  2. My motivation is mainly driven by interest in the subject matter (rather than by status, money, etc…) – which makes it very hard to productively make progress on tasks that I don’t care about.

  Unfortunately, life isn’t perfect, and sometimes you need to learn things quickly, and very often you have to do things you don’t want to do. I’ve learned to structure my time allocations and calendar to make all of this work.

  If you know that you’re less able to learn material in specific ways, and you’re in one of my classes, come chat! Office hours are for more than just going over the class material.

• During the 2008 financial crash, I learned a lot about macroeconomics, and wish I had taken that class as an undergrad. This knowledge has been useful during the decade of steady (and often increasing) quantitative easing and debt. During the geo-political turbulence and seeming decline of the US around 2018, I started learning quite a bit about geopolitics. Again, I wish I had taken relevant classes as an undergrad. I’d recommend that undergrads take a broad array of classes – the “liberal arts education” has significant value in refining how you approach the world. Learning it afterwards, during normal life, isn’t productive nor thorough.

Place in society:

• I used to have dyed-black hair down to my shoulders, and only listened to the likes of Fear Factory. I had to dye it to match my leather trenchcoat and steel-toed shoes. In short, I was a walking stereotype. I got over my angsty-phase by focusing on improving myself and my responsibilities, while de-prioritizing a focus on all of the ills of society.

• I am naturally an introvert, but realized after undergrad that not interacting with people prevented success (I’m a slow learner). I have strategies for managing being an introvert, but still interacting productively with others. If you have a similar dilemma, I’d be happy to chat. On technical issues, I’ve commented on how to converse productively.

  One of the main strategies is being very deliberate about your calendar, and when you socialize. I stack meetings into large blocks, and often try to make them at the end of my day – I know that after a lot of social interactions, I’ll have no energy to be productive.

• I think that I’m the only person (at least among my colleagues) who thought that Covid-19 quarantine in 2020-21 was liberating and quite comfortable.

Hobbies:

• I have achieved masters rank in 2v2 Starcraft 2 (top 3% – an acceptance rate only rivaled by the NSF). Unfortunately, my video-game playing time has decreased to nearly zero (with a small amount of Slay the Spire remaining).

• I have an unhealthy obsession with board games. I have an irrational attraction to card games, and an aversion to dice. Likely too much Warhammer 40K as a teenager, and not enough poker.

• To demonstrate this point, I wrote a discrete event simulator, and a series of articles analyzing an aspect of a card game.

• I’ve done a century in Seattle (100 mile bike ride).

• I ran the Boston Marathon in 3:18 as a bandit (shamefully) when that was still an unofficial option.

• I’ve been quite surprised by how productive Twitter as been for me. I focus my usage of it entirely on technical, research, and academic issues, and avoid it as a general social nexus for public commentary. As such, I’ve learned about other’s research, promoted our own, and I’ve kicked off collaborations through it. I don’t “use it well”. Regardless it has had a decent time investment to payoff ratio.

Health and Lifestyle:

• My knee’s meniscus prevents me from heavily committing to running, so I mainly row now for exercise. Rowing is fantastic as the ratio of time spent exercising to physical benefit is quite impressive, and it is relatively “whole body”. If you’re struggling exercising when your life gets busy, you might consider it. You do have to prepare yourself by earnestly learning how to do it with good form; you can hurt yourself easily if you don’t.

• My wife and I have been vegetarian and dairy-free (i.e. we still eat eggs) since around 2015. For her, the moral issues around animal treatment were the main motivation (look into the conditions and treatment in factory farms if you want to learn more). For me, environmental and health concerns were the primary motivation (Americans consume an amount of resources that would require 4 earths if extrapolated to the entire human population; a pound of beef requires 1799 gallons of water compared to 108 for corn; the 80% of agricultural land devoted to livestock produces only 20% of the calories; and this is something that we can individually impact). I’m quite conservative by disposition, and take living within means as an ethical responsibility.

• I’ve been gluten-free since around 2002 when I learned that I had Celiac Disease with a rare, piggy-backed autoimmune disorder (Dermatitis herpetiformis). Though it annoys me when gluten free is the fashion of the week, it certainly has made it easier to shop!

• I got the “disease of the kings”, gout, which typically afflicts those who eat too much meat and drink too much. I find this ironic given that I got gout after I stopped eating meat. Consequently, I’ve also stopped drinking booze as well. My friends complain that I have no more vices. Little do they know how much coffee I drink.

• All of my dietary restrictions make me a massive buzzkill to go out to eat with.

Family & fun:

• My wife founded a dance studio, and I’ve been known to both work the front desk and be the floor manager at performances. Her focus is on enabling everyone to be the best that they regardless their background through hard work. We have very similar views on pedagogy. I’ve been promised the role of the rat king in the Nutcracker in the future. I’m not sure how to take being given the role of the villain.

• I married a ballerina. We both get to have fun with our work all the time.

• I started lindy-hopping in ’99. It’s how I met my wife! We find it prudent to avoid throws. Unfortunately, this part of our life has fallen off as real-life became more demanding.

• I have an unhealthy appreciation of coffee shops, and am most productive in them (esp. without Internet/email access).

• I’m from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I still visit my family there! Despite stereotypes of the southwest, it is likely closer to most people’s mental model of Colorado, than the desert. It is at an elevation of 7000 feet, we have a ski basin, and it is part of the Rocky mountains.

Jobs:

• My first job was as a magician for kid’s birthday parties. I even made a bill float on a stage as an opener for a real magician. Coin-based sleight of hand tricks are obviously the best, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong. One thing you learn very well when doing magic is the power of patter. Because of this early focus, I learned the power of being careful and intentional about your language and pacing.

• I worked as a coffee shop barista for three years in high-school. Though I have an unhealthy love for coffee now, at the time I ironically refused to drink it.

• I’ve done internships at the lab that created the atom bomb, Los Alamos National Labs. I was very far from their nuclear operations, so I only mildly glow in the dark.

• I’ve played with supercomputers at Cray Inc. while making a small contribution to a Linux-based single-system image system. As part of this, I forced FUSE to uncomfortably get plugged into the network subsystem.

• I decided to be a professor rather than a programmer or a research scientist in a company for a number of reasons.

  1. I require a strong motivation to be productive, and I’m motivated by problems that interest me. As a professor I can choose my research agenda and how I spend my intellectual time. Thus, any lack of productivity is entirely my own fault, and something that I can alleviate.
  2. I’ve always approached teaching as an engineering challenge. How do we properly create the scaffolding in student’s minds to understand challenging and intriguing concepts? In that way, it is in many ways even more challenging and interesting than technical innovation and research.
  3. I like being in a position where I can apply my own time to enable the ambitions of motivated others. This is why I work with many undergraduate researchers to enable them to achieve (hopefully) beyond what they thought they could, and why I take PhD mentoring so seriously.

Music: I get asked what music I like a lot, and I don’t know why. I don’t have refined tastes in any way, and appreciate it when music impacts my mind with blunt impact. Regardless, here you go! Don’t try to look for cohesiveness; I use music as a means of personal emotional manipulation, so it jumps around quite a bit:

• Industrial Rock and Industrial Electronic (NIN, Tool, Crystal Castles, The Prodigy, Author & Punisher, Lorn)
• Triphop (Portishead, Massive Attack)
• Folk/Blues (The XX, Kaleo, Homesick James, Muddy Waters, Johnny Cash)
• Grunge (Nirvana, Garbage)
• Classical (Chopin’s Nocturnes, Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins, Mozart’s Requiem, and the Beethoven’s Concertos 2, 5, and especially 9)
• Assorted electro-tango and electro-swing (Gotan Project, Caravan Palace, Parov Stelar)
• I also have a long selection of singles that span genres – a 5 hour, personal “best of” list. I also have a short list of songs that I can play on repeat for perpetuity that encourage mental flow: