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χαος εν κοσμοι εν χαοι…
Basic Account Created on 30 October 2002 (#758536) Last updated on 21 December 2009 Gift
Name:
jbm
Location:
This is a pseudonym. It's not hard to figure out who i am if you start here, but, knowing who i am, it's slightly difficult to get here. Please don't link here with my real name, etc.
The username is (ungrammatical) Greek. It's part of a mantra of sorts, "χαος εν κοσμοι εν χαοι εν κοσμοι εν χαοι...," translated roughly as "Chaos in order in chaos in order in ..." which is how i view the scientific process. You start out with a big bunch of chaos, find rules that explain a lot of it (forcing order), then you find exceptions to those rules (more chaos), and find rules that explain those, and so on, and so forth. I recently also heard someone talk about the creative process this way, starting with an empty medium and filling it with just what they want. I rather like both interpretations.
My hobbies include cryptozoology, squaring the circle, and Strong AI.
I've spent many years working in software: engineering, reverse engineering, data migration, etc. I like big, complicated, gnarly systems. Mostly because they're hard to understand, which slides up the pay scale and yields great job security.
Recent-ish undergrad degrees in linguistics and mathematics, the result of accepting my irrational love of formal systems. My academic friends tell me that i should do grad school, but first i have to save up enough money to afford it (see above about sliding up the pay scale). My friends also tell me that i might not have the patience for it, so i'm putting it off while i evaluate that.
I'm tired of anonymous comments, because everybody takes "anonymous" a little too literally. If you've got something to say, at least have the decency to register a pseudonym.
The username is (ungrammatical) Greek. It's part of a mantra of sorts, "χαος εν κοσμοι εν χαοι εν κοσμοι εν χαοι...," translated roughly as "Chaos in order in chaos in order in ..." which is how i view the scientific process. You start out with a big bunch of chaos, find rules that explain a lot of it (forcing order), then you find exceptions to those rules (more chaos), and find rules that explain those, and so on, and so forth. I recently also heard someone talk about the creative process this way, starting with an empty medium and filling it with just what they want. I rather like both interpretations.
My hobbies include cryptozoology, squaring the circle, and Strong AI.
I've spent many years working in software: engineering, reverse engineering, data migration, etc. I like big, complicated, gnarly systems. Mostly because they're hard to understand, which slides up the pay scale and yields great job security.
Recent-ish undergrad degrees in linguistics and mathematics, the result of accepting my irrational love of formal systems. My academic friends tell me that i should do grad school, but first i have to save up enough money to afford it (see above about sliding up the pay scale). My friends also tell me that i might not have the patience for it, so i'm putting it off while i evaluate that.
I'm tired of anonymous comments, because everybody takes "anonymous" a little too literally. If you've got something to say, at least have the decency to register a pseudonym.
42, a priori fucked, absurdity, apathy, artificial intelligence, being a dork, being hated by aol, being hated by slashdot, bitterness, books, bourbon, c, chaos, chinese, civil disobedience, civil liberties, cognitive science, complaining, conspiracy theories, corpora, criticizing everything, crossword puzzles, cryptography, dark humor, driving in the country, emacs, embedded systems, formalisms, freaking out the squares, functional programming languages, german, grammar, grey, hack value, haskell, hating slashdot, hating sourceforge, hoodies, ice hockey, insomnia, internet, interoperability, kernel hacking, languages, lateral thinking, like the story, hate the writing, linux, lockpicking, logic, long hair, mathematics, natural language, naughty girls, nice girls, nintendo, noise, ocaml, occasional bouts of insanity, other stuff, paradoxes, parityqueer, patterns, people who get it, perl, philosophizing, pointing things out, postmodernist humor, programming, protocols, puzzles, rain, random cruft, schadenfreude, shiny things, small fuzzy mammals, st. louis blues, sustainability, symbolic systems, tcp/ip, tex_latex, the checkbox tyranny resistance, thinking too much, tivo, trial and error, tricky problems, unexpected emergent behaviour, unix, wit, xntx, z?, “this statement cannot be proven true”
