I like pie, Ira Glass, music festivals, science, and my bicycle. Not necessarily in that order. The order actually changes quite a bit from day to day.

I have recently taken up, with varying levels of enthusiasm and commitment: soccer, tap dancing, rock climbing. I am terrible at all of them but I don't seem to mind. Except for when I kick the soccer ball in what I am later informed is the wrong direction; then I feel a little bad.

I like science and math. Like, kinda a lot. I'm more comfortable making no claim about something than making a claim that isn't backed up by some sort of rigorous analysis. Unfortunately rigorous analysis is a lot of work, and I am fairly lazy, so this means my opinion on a lot of things ends up being "I dunno, someone should probably gather more data about that!", or "What are we trying to optimize again?" I am a big hit at parties.

Recently transplant from NYC to start grad school in cognitive neuroscience. Ideally I'd learn some evolutionary biology and synergize it up with with my background in economics to help understand why we make the kind of decisions we do, and maybe figure out how to make better ones. But I'd happily settle for using my slightly OCD tendencies and modest math skills to help people analyze their data. Experimentalists as a group are surprisingly terrified of statistics!

Bayesian pickup lines. Such as, hey baby, you must be an annealing process, because you're raising my temperature, and, honey you've got a thick tail; what's my probability of being in it? And of course, I wish I were a metropolis algorithm so I could sample from your posterior.

Tap dancing. Not right now, but someday! I just need a good training montage.

Affability.

Books: The Once and Future King, Home and the World, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, Vision, The Selfish Gene, The Belgariad, The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, oh and Gene Wolfe is an amazing writer go read something by him, but mostly The Once and Future King.

Calvin and Hobbes. They get their own line.

Music: The Flaming Lips and The National. I touched Matt Berninger's butt once several years ago and it was awesome and I have yet to stop talking about it. Honorable mentions: Sunset Rubdown, Low, Aimee Mann.

Movies: Citizen Kane I'mma let you finish but My Neighbor Totoro is the greatest movie of all time.

Food: Dosai and Japanese curry... and risotto and paella, and good cheese generally, and grilled pineapple. And BBQ. Also everything ever. That's good too.

If anyone would like to advise me regarding things I should be eating now that I'm in Durham, that would be super cool!

~ ~ /
(8>)( 0 ){
~ ~ \
_|___________
|To be a glove... |
|upon thy hand!|

Poor Emotipenguin is quite smitten. Also the tildas are there because otherwise his wings would be coming out of the side of his face; an altogether unfortunate state of affairs.

what to eat next. Eating, serious business. Just like the internet!

Also, how we know the things we think we know, and how justified I am in thinking the things I currently think about the world.

Attempting science, hanging out with friends at a bar/club/house, biking aimlessly through the wilderness.

I grew a beard after touching Matt Berninger's butt at Bonarroo. The causal chain was surprisingly direct.

I'm a geek but I find a lot of geek culture embarrassing. I think it has something to do with all the misogyny and misanthropic wish-fulfillment fantasies. Not that those things are unique to the geekdom.

If you know where to get a dosai around here. If you want a partner in exploring the triangle's bicycling and eating opportunities. If you want to play co-op Mario or Four Swords (I thought there were going to be more geeks in grad school! Life scientists are the bros of nerd-dom).

If you're passionate about something cool and you want to explain it to me. If I might be intimidated by your intelligence. If you like hypothesis testing as much as you like hypotheses. If you have an impressive burp.

Also if you are Kristen Schall, Vi Hart, Marceline the Vampire Queen, Winifred Burkle, Matt Berninger, the Batman, or any subset of the above. Well, except for the null set. That subset sucks.