The future, singularitarianism, transhumanism, cryonics, & existential risks; science, skepticism, atheism, & secular humanism;
bioinformatics & computational biology;
machine learning & evolutionary computation; evolution, human origins, & evolutionary psychology; consciousness, philosophy of mind, psychonautics, oneironautics, & floatation tanks; drug legalization, universal healthcare, and copyright reform; SETI, TED, independent theater, speedcubing, sex, and Zen.
I also used to be really into sadomasochism, bestiality, and necrophilia, but I gave all that up. I realized I was just beating a dead horse.**
**That one will never get old. They'll be taking me to the electric chair and I'll still be telling that joke.
Music
Check out my playlist for a sample of the soundtrack of my life.
Movies
Airplane!; 2001: A Space Odyssey; The Terminator; Donnie Darko; Strange Days; Team America; Office Space; Memento; Chasing Amy; Fight Club; sex, lies, and videotape; The Aristocrats; The Fog of War; Boogie Nights; The Comedians of Comedy; The Man from Earth; 12 Monkeys; Heavy Petting; WarGames; Comic Book Confidential; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Tootsie; Lone Star; Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask); It Came from Hollywood; Why We Fight; Walk Hard; Building Gods; Young Frankenstein; They Live (that one gets a little silly, but it's still a classic). And I'm the one person in the world who liked Vanilla Sky.
Television
Mostly South Park, Family Guy (I admit it), and miscellaneous documentaries. There is some good stuff out there if you know how to find it, but it's mostly just shadows on the cave wall. Bah.
Books
The Blind Watchmaker;
The God Delusion;
Guns, Germs, and Steel;
The Selfish Gene;
God is not Great;
Rational Mysticism;
Engines of Creation;
The End of Faith;
Letter to a Christian Nation;
The First Immortal;
The Truth Machine;
Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use;
Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition;
Consciousness: An Introduction;
1984;
The Future and Its Enemies;
The Demon-Haunted World;
The Transparent Society;
Getting Things Done; etc.
Heroes
Richard Dawkins,
Susan Blackmore,
Steven Pinker,
Carl Sagan,
Michael Shermer,
Christopher Hitchens,
Mikhail Gorbachev,
Timothy Leary,
Ken Kesey,
Jared Diamond,
Vernor Vinge,
Robert Ettinger,
Sam Harris,
Alfred Kinsey,
Margaret Sanger,
Lawrence Lessig,
Noam Chomsky,
PZ Myers,
Nick Bostrom,
Jill Bolte Taylor,
Gregor Mendel,
John Lilly,
James Randi,
Charles Darwin,
Edward O. Wilson,
David Buss,
Devendra Singh,
Leda Cosmides,
John Tooby,
Julia Sweeney,
Pete Stark,
Peter Lewis,
Peter McWilliams,
Jacob Sullum,
David Brin,
Virginia Postrel,
Ernst Mayr,
Siddhartha Guatama,
Buckminster Fuller,
and John Brown.
About me:
A few things about me, in no particular order:
I'm in the Biotechnology program at Tulsa Community College.
Sometimes I wear plaid pajamas.
I can unscramble a Rubik’s Cube in about two minutes.
I have a growing collection of anthropomorphic robot action figures.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I was a little surprised when Andy Kaufman didn’t come out of hiding on May 16, 2004.
I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them.
I'm one of the few people who liked New Coke.
I burn a lot of tealights and incense.
The Zig-Zag Man has a tattoo of me on his arm.
And I like my women like I like my coffee -- hand-picked by Juan Valdez.
I am as spiritual as a person can get without actually believing in anything "spiritual." I take the universe seriously, but I don't expect it to reciprocate. I seek enlightenment, transcendence, and immortality, and I intend to solve the mystery of consciousness even at the risk of tearing my soul apart. (So to speak.)
If I had been born thirty years earlier, I would have ended up a hippie with a clean shave and a crewcut. But instead, I was born in 1976, at least fifty years ahead of my time. As a result, I'm one of those rare people who have actually arranged to be put into cryonic suspension some day. (The "poor man’s time machine.")
As Clarence Darrow said, "I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood."
Who I'd like to meet: Explorers in the further regions of experience. Or anyone who read my profile and was happy to have found one of their kind.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, Every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. Thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, Every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every hero and coward, Every creator and destroyer of civilization, Every saint and sinner in the history of our species, Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, In glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, The delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, Are challenged by this point of pale light, It underscores our responsibility to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot.
