{"id":481,"date":"2007-02-20T22:43:18","date_gmt":"2007-02-21T03:43:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/?p=481"},"modified":"2007-02-20T22:57:41","modified_gmt":"2007-02-21T03:57:41","slug":"memes-ville-5-things-you-dont-know-about-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2007\/02\/20\/memes-ville-5-things-you-dont-know-about-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Memes-ville: Five things you don’t know about me"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Bristles<\/a>
\nThis is arguably a poorly formed concept since its meaning can vary wildly depending on the referent of “you” but, hey, if Mr. Tozier is silly enough to tag me<\/a> I’ll play along :-).<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. I’ll start with something really random and meaningless: I have short pinkie fingers Actually, the fingers themselves are proportional to my other fingers, but there’s something a little off in the bones of the hand and both my pinkies start “too soon” and thus end about a joint short when compared to their neighbors. Its not exactly a big deal, as I didn’t even realize it until I was 13 or 14, when my piano teacher and I noticed it when I kept doing long reaches with my fourth finger insead my fifth. While I’m sharing trivial physical abnormalities, I also have a slightly curved spine, and smaller feet than expected for someone my height. My mother blames it all on smoking enthusiastically during both her pregnancies.<\/li>\n
  2. I’ve only considered leaving UMM once since coming here in 1991. As a Reed<\/a> (math) grad, I had always dreamed of helping found the computing department at Reed. They weren’t kind enough to set something up just as I was coming out of graduate school :-), but did advertise for their first computing faculty a few years after I came here and I couldn’t resist the opportunity. I didn’t even make the interview, but I have no regrets. I’ve been (and continue to be) really happy here at UMM.<\/li>\n
  3. Like Bill<\/a>, I read very slowly, although I think in different ways than Bill. I read slowly to begin with, and tend to do lots of daydreaming and thinking about what I’m reading on top of it. This is one of the reasons I’m a crap citizen of the blogsphere and related on-line worlds. There’s just way too much great stuff out there, and I’m way too slow a reader to stay on top of them. I suspect that’s one of the reasons I like Flickr; I can process a lot of images in the same time it would take me to read a fraction of PeeZed’s output<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  4. Dr. Seuss (and my son) helped me learned to sing. I’d always enjoyed music, but only started singing with any regularity when Sub-Evil Boy was born; it was nice singing to an (infant) audience that was so wonderfully non-judgemental. Reading lots<\/em> of Dr. Seuss at the same time also taught me volumes about timing and rhythm. While I don’t miss diapers, I definitely miss reading to him every night.<\/li>\n
  5. I have an Erd\u0151s number<\/a> of 4. (Go to the Erd\u0151s Number Project<\/a> for more info on how to compute your own Erd\u0151s Number.) The cool thing for me isn’t the number itself, but that it was lowered from 5 to 4 by a UMM alum (Nick Hopper<\/a>) who I did research with when he was an undergraduate with. He went from here to CMU, where his advisor (and co-author) was Manuel Blum, who has an Erd\u0151s number of 1<\/a>. Absolutely one of my highlights of my career at UMM, and I suspect this will be as low as my Erd\u0151s number ever goes. Rather remarkable it’s apparently the same as Bill Gates<\/a>, but I suspect there are precious few other similarities between us.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\nNo tag for this post.\n\t

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