I'm a stereotypical geek (computers, video games, science fiction and fantasy, dungeons and dragons), and I have longish hair.

Politically, I'm pretty liberal, though probably more socially liberal than economically liberal. I identify as a feminist, and by "feminist" I mean slogans like: "Equal Pay for Equal Work". I don't think feminism should be equated with blanket approval of all affirmative action legislation. Blanket approval of almost anything sounds dubious to me. I think the copyright laws should have to prove yearly that they're doing more good than harm, just like nonprofits are supposed to.

Religiously, I'm pretty atheistic, though technically agnostic. My father once studied to be a Jesuit, my mother was raised Protestant, and they took me to a few Quaker meetings while I was growing up, so I guess I'm culturally Christian.

Scientifically, I like evolution in general and Steven Pinker in particular. I think Wolfram's "New Kind of Science" is interesting stuff, even if the stuff that's most interesting isn't Wolfram's, and all of it is overhyped. Woit has made me dubious about String Theory. Sokal has made me dubious about postmodern literary theory.

I have a part-time job as an embedded linux programmer, at a vetrinary instruments company, and I'm working towards a masters in CS at my local university.

I took Cello lessons for more than 10 years, and haven't touched it since going away to college.

Writing unit tests, refactoring, debugging systematically using bisection. I used to be good at discrete math, theoretical computer science, and logic, but I'm getting pretty rusty.

Also, I like to play Dance Dance Revolution on Hidden. (Hidden is the mode where the arrows disappear before they reach the top). I'm not good at DDR in general - I'm not fast enough - but I'm decent at that.

I have longish brownish hair.

(a) "The Player of Games" by Iain Banks, "The Lives of Christopher Chant" by Diana Wynne Jones (b) I like watching movies, but I'd rather not identify myself with any of them. (c) "The Future Soon", "Mandelbrot Set" by Jonathan Coulton (d) peanut butter and jelly

I do not want to list six things I could never do without. So I will use this space to list some things I like, taken from my lj. 4-bar linkages, AI, artificial intelligence, batmud, blind source separation, board games, bond graphs, books, catastrophe theory, category theory, cellular automata, chocolate, chunky peanut butter, coding, cognitive science, compilers, computer science, computers, contra dance, contra dancing, curry-howard isomorphism, D&D, dancing, ddr, escape velocity, fairy tales, fantasy, feminism, finite automata, fire, folklore, functional programming, functional programming languages, gaming, geeks, girls, goms, haskell, haverford, haverford college, higher-order functions, homeschooling, hoods, integer sequences, intelligent conversations, interactive fiction, juggling, lambda calculus, logic, love, markov chains, math, moxy fr�vous, moxy fruvous, neal stephenson, nerds, nethack, nomography, ocaml, open source, open-source, optical flow, ordered binary decision diagrams, passive dynamic walking, paul simon, peace, peanut butter, programming, programming languages, proof search, protocol analysis, raven ring, reading, reinforcement learning, rock paper scissors, rogue, role playing, role playing games, role-playing, roleplaying, roleplaying games, rpgs, scheme, sci-fi, science fiction, scifi, sf, shadowrun, sleep, sleeping, stealing interests, strategy games, terry pratchett, tetrahedra, the princess bride, trees, truth, type theory, unschooling, vernor vinge.

Context-free grammars. It's one of those neat trapdoor ideas, that seems complicated and arbitrary and irrelevant when you don't get it yet - but after you get it, it seems simple and natural and useful.

I've spent some time on finite automata, too.

Doing homework at the USM computer science lab lan party.

I read internet fanfiction.

You want me to reply.