Boy, oh, boy, is this profile out of date. Back in January I convinced a beautiful girl I had been courting that it might just be a good idea to kiss me. Simultaneously, I founded a company that now has enough money coming in to comfortably support myself, take a leave from my Ph.D. program, lease an office building, and hire employees.

That girl from the start of the paragraph is still kissing me regularly.

My life is really strange right now. I'm probably going to be terrible about replying to OKC messages.

I design and implement machine learning algorithms to recognize how people position themselves in a conversation, and how that impacts them and those around them. We could talk all day.

There are a lot of airplanes in my life. When I do actually find myself in Pittsburgh, I spend most evenings sitting in coffeeshops, eavesdropping on other people's first dates, and silently awarding them points for style.

Cupcakes and whiteboards. Arranging hotel reservations for puzzled family members. Missing something crucial about my own hotel reservation. Losing my keys. Agreeing - to a fault.

Acronyms (initialisms). Brackets (punctuation more generally).

"I didn't realize you were so tall."

There was a time when people would instantly comment on my height - childhood, I suppose. Now people are startled by it, but only after half an hour of talking with me.

I must spend too much time sitting.

I look for humor from Douglas Adams, ideas from Isaac Asimov, optimism from John Green and pessimism from Chuck Palahniuk.

I cycle through a loop of fun., Cake, Grouplove, Vampire Weekend, Mika, The Raconteurs, Yeasayer, Passion Pit. Lately I've been working my way through Slightly Stoopid.

I'm all in favor of televisions, on a conceptual level, but they're not turned on often as of late. The Perks of Being a Wallflower just came out. I hope you caught it.

I know I've slipped into a particularly weird circle of friends when watching NFL games is a guilty pleasure.

Changes of scenery on both short- and long-term time scales, facilitated by industry-standardized USB charging ports for all of my mobile devices.

We ought to take some time to talk about words. Lists are for pageviews on Cracked.com.

In the car one morning, it struck me that if it were a noun, the Latin plural of "minus" would be "mini" and this led me to check if the words "minus" and "miniature" came from the same root. As it turns out, they do - but it goes back much further than I anticipated. "Miniatures" originally referred to pictures in illuminated manuscripts. They were named as such because they were painted in red, using an ink containing minium, a reddish lead common in Iberia during Roman rule. Thus the shared etymology goes back to "mineral," a turn I did not expect.

Further exploration revealed that these words were later applied to golf, attested from 1893, and Cooper, from 1959.

My fuzzy relationship with work-life balance. On the whole, I'm happy with whatever equilibrium I've found myself in, but it's a thing requiring finesse.

Good ideas seem to grow throughout the week and sprout on Friday afternoons. Sometimes, they're research-related; at the very least, they're related to language in a way I can play around with in the company of friends.

So, usually, experimenting.

I'm irrationally pleased by unsolicited messages from strangers on OKCupid.

I have a distinct urge to write a few more rhetorical questions at an implicit audience. I'll try and hold back.

You know, when did we decide easy-going and laid-back were universally positive attributes to strive for?

Well.