me code good someday

I care about about Science, Math and Engineering education ...

Encouraging equity, diversity and inclusion in STEM is important to me. Three of my sources of inspiration (on that front and beyond) are Claire Evans, Vi Hart and Emily Graslie. Of course, there are less visible heroes being role models and leaders just doing their thing all over. Yay!

Things I've done towards this: in Winter 2008 I organized a math circle in my daughter's school. In 2010 I volunteered to help OMSI reach out in this area. The project I helped with became Design Zone. In 2011 I started a "math club" after school on Fridays. Other parents and I help the students use the Khan Academy, MIT's Scratch, play math-y board games and other activities (like Modular Origami and Hexaflexagons) - it is well-received, and amazingly well attended. Since 2018 I've been on the Board of the Saturday Academy - an Equity and Inclusion-focused, hands-on STEAM learning organization. I co-taught a Lego robotics course with them back in 1998, and have been impressed by their work ever since. It's a privilege to be able to help them.

After retiring from Galois, Inc. in mid 2016, I wrote a CC-licensed Book about Cryptography, Math and Programming targeted at 9th - 12th graders. More recently, in 2020-2021, I helped Galois develop some training materials for their SAW software verification tools.

I have been a visiting professor of computer science at Reed College. (This link only works in the on times, which so far have been 1997-200, 2017-2019 and 2022-2024). I truly enjoy learning and teaching amongst an amazing community.

My blog is where I'm recording works in progress, and is updated more often than this website.

I have thoughts about AI

I've been thinking about this 700+ "proof-dump," and why it's bugging me. In my understanding, documented open math problems are curated stepping stones to help math researchers take interesting and useful next steps at the frontier of knowledge. It's way less interesting (IMO) to solve 700 of those problems than it is to pose 700 new problems, described so clearly that a non-expert in the relevant sub-field can understand each one. By solving 700 problems without posing any new ones, OpenAI has effectively amputated and cauterized some of the frontiers of math. If instead of solving them, they had clearly phrased new problems at the frontier of math, then I'd be impressed instead of distressed.

The environment

As part of our efforts to help slow climate change, my family has two electric vehicles - one for jaunts around town and another for long-distance trips. We also pay our utility an extra amount to prioritize renewables (which in Portland is hydro and wind power). We're being more intentional about air travel (by making sure our carrier buys offsets, for example). Probably most impactfully we have continued to reduce and be mindful of our meat consumption.

I am sympathetic with the author of this blog post, "Promise of change without changing at all: The electric car as a talisman of false hope" - just changing what kind of vehicle we commute in is not sufficient to affect climate change. However, not doing at least that is giving up. For our part, my family rides bikes for most of our daily business. We have also reduced our meat consumption significantly. I'm not advocating everyone do the same, but it's made a lot of sense to us. I do advocate that everyone be intentional about their choices. It's becoming increasingly clear that collective action is going to be key to getting us out of the mess we're in.

I Think Video Games Are Important

Way back in October, 2004, I gave the keynote talk to the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges titled Using Video Games to Motivate Computer Science Here are the slides from that talk.

Demos I gave:

Here's a link to balldroppings

Here's a link to Bridge Construction Set

I Enjoy Programming

Cheap Impostor

I wrote Cheap Impostor because I wanted to make booklets, books, and magazines out of PDF files I created myself, as well as from web pages and downloaded manuals, etc. I learned that "imposition" is a prepress process that consists of reordering pages and n-upping them so that larger sheets of paper can be sliced and folded and turned into books or magazines. Cheap impostor does a simpler version of this, just 2-up, but it does do either books or magazines. I decided to release it shareware, and the response has been very gratifying.

Software toys

I love software toys, early examples were Pinball Construction Set and the original SimCity. Kapwing is a simple pure-java toy I wrote, inspired by balldroppings, but more controllable. Right-click on a paddle to control which MIDI note and channel a ball collision causes. I haven't touched it in a long time. I apologize for the fullscreen-only interface. On macOS, it used to make sounds by default, but now you have to right-click on a paddle and change the MIDI device.

Things I think are cool

The spirit of creative mayhem in Phrack and 2600 magazines lives on in the wonderful new PoC||GTFO online magazine. At least one issue is both a bootable Operating System and a readable PDF file. I love that each article both shows you something amazing (like an MBR/PDF polyglot), and then teaches you how to do it yourself.

I love coffee. Heidi and I have been on a coffee journey for the last 30 or so years. We were at ground zero of the second wave in Seattle in the late 80's / early 90's, then at the center of the third wave in Portland in the late 90's / early 00's. One eye-opener for me is that you can make fantastic espresso from either light- or dark- roast (or anything in between) as long as you adjust your recipe (grind, brew temperature, shot duration and dose) accordingly. I had some thoughts about some research about grind and dose.

Work to eat, eat to live, live to bike, bike to work

I like to ride bicycles. I love my custom Vertigo cross bike. I think Portland, Oregon is a wonderful place to live (but I fear many of its recent immigrants don't love it for the same reasons* I do).

Footnotes