Other Parts of Life

Adventures in NI

I have a blog. It started out more personal (as open letters to my family) but increasingly has professional content. I basically write there things that I’d kind of like to write a paper about but know I’ll never get to doing that formally, or that I’d like to write as a magazine or newspaper article, but I’ve never gotten around to figuring that out. Some of the entries are still more like letters to no one in particular.

RSI

I also have RSI. I have a datahand keyboard, which is how I type, and a Wacom graphire tablet, which is how I point. If I'm not in my office, I can't always type very well, so apologies if you get stilted or late email off me sometimes. More info on RSI: Jane Greening and Bruce Lynn at least formerly of UCL demonstrated that RSI is nerve damage, which is useful for legal claims. Janet Cahn’s Media Lab RSI Page is also very helpful, especially the “What I learned at MIT …” part.

My Past

In case you are trying to figure out if you know me, or if you just want to know about some really cool people and places, here’s my life’s history:

I am late of Marc Hauser’s Lab at Harvard, the MIT AI Lab, the Division of Informatics and the Department of Psychology of the University of Edinburgh, LEGO both Futura (Boston Branch) and Digital/Darwin (Billund, Denmark), Marble Associates, LaSalle Street in Chicago, The College of the University of Chicago, and Glenbard North Highschool (I started 2 years after these guys graduated!), Saturday morning physics at Fermi Lab, Jay Stream Jr. High and Roy De Shane Elementary School. My three schools were all in Carol Stream, Illinois. (I lived on this street from 1970-1982.) I spent the late ’60s in Omaha, Nebraska (but I don't remember them,) and I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, like Herbert Simon.

Academic Family Tree

From Leora Morgenstern’s page:

Marvin Minsky (MIT) begat
Gerald Sussman (MIT), who begat
Drew McDermott (Yale), who begat
Ernie Davis (NYU), who begat
Leora Morgenstern (IBM).

In turn, she begat

Lynn Andrea Stein (Olin College), who begat
Ian Horswill (Northwestern), Ellen Spertus (Mills College), and me! (Bath)

Weirdly, I know all these people except McDermott, Davis & Morgenstern. By the way, Ellen Spertus is a Blog Sister. Hey, now I've begotten people too.

Sports

I enjoy sports, although I’m not good at any. I’m not one of those people who just says they’re bad, I really am uncoordinated, but for some reason I enjoy things anyway. At MIT I played soccer with The Cold Booters (I founded their C-league team) and D-league ice hockey with the Halting Problem in 1995 & 2000 (I got to play D league 2 years because I never learned to skate). In Edinburgh I managed to find 3 different weekly bad soccer games. When I first came to Bath, sometimes the Math & CS grad students let me play football with them, and Marina De Vos played squash with me, but then I ran out of time for that. More often I hill walk (mostly to work in Bath), cycle (mostly to work in Mannheim) and very occasionally play ping pong.