I’ve been much remiss in updating this here little blog, and hopefully I will give it more attention soon. Via WorldChanging I heard of this lovely table that eats leftovers; this sort of thing makes me want to stay on the bio side of the fence.

One of the debates that’s been consuming me for a while is the question of whether ‘tis nobler to enhance the minds or methods of man; for me and my talents, that seems to come down to whether I grow microbes to replace fossil fuel / fossil plastics or whether I build a distributed internet 3d collaboration thingy. For a while now my answer has been “why choose?”. This upcoming semester I’m working on doing a directed study in distributed computing to try to get some of the abstract algorithms I’ve been studying into actual running code, and while my culturing experiment has languished I continue to work with a great micro professor at URI.

Writing it out now it seems like the “why choose” answer remains correct; at this point I’ll minimally have a BA in biology or maximally a BS in biology and computer science after the next four semesters. Both projects are beyond the scope of any one human to accomplish, so if I want to see them happen I’ll need to do something like the Masters in Technological Entrepreneurship at Northeastern to buff my management skills; during my masters I can do a more systematic evaluation of the potential effects, existing demand, the timing/size of liquidity events, whom I manage to persuade to join, and most realistically, the interest of VC.

I think a lot of my agonizing about the future has been a way to displace thinking about the present, but now that I’ve written it down this way I might be able to use my ‘urgency angst’ to do things in the present rather than fret about where I’ll be in five years time.

Its funny, because there’s a lot of literature out there that talks about how people tend not to have a ‘planning horizon’ of much more than a few months. From the perspective of someone who tends to prefer to think in really long time intervals, I’d have to say that the general tendency of mankind is far more adaptive in our present society, and that if society genuinely wants to get people to think in longer intervals we need to have more support for not thinking about the moment (sabbaticals, more vacation time, shorter work week, etc).

Vika and I got to hang out with my bio-dad and my two half brothers for turkey day, and although we came back with a new and irritating virus, I would have to say it was fantastic. I was just myself with very little of the monitoring and self-modulation I usually engage in when in the presence of “family”, and yet at the end they still liked me, which was very pleasant. I hope to hang out with my brothers some more soon, as they’re in NYC and Boston, so we’re pretty close.

I must say that the fruit doesn’t fall very far from the tree, as both of my brothers are much like myself at their age; skinny, freaks in our own right, and not following a traditional path. I’m now the stodgy traditional one, of course, but I suspect that’s the price of being the eldest.
I need to be in touch with all my friends, family, and loved ones; if I haven’t contacted you lately it’s because I’m a lamer not because I’m not thinking of you.

Next semester looks amusing. I’ve finally given in to the inevitable and recognized that if I don’t learn the notation and grammar of calculus I’ll never understand these theoretical CS papers, so I’m buckling down and taking calculus; my fantastic roommate has offered to tutor my dim self on that subject. I’m taking chinese 101 (again) but this time at the providence campus where the level of apathy is generally lower, and I’m also doing the History of Sub-Saharan Africa because my historical knowledge is pitifully Eurocentric.