Brian's Interests

Personal Interests

Taoism and Tai Chi

I've been studying and practicing off and on for a few years now. If you know a master who lives the Taoist practice in the Seattle area, let me know.

Science Fiction

Stanislaw Lem writes the best science fiction that most people have never heard of, with the exception of Solaris, which now has been cinematized twice.

I also love many of the popular classics, which are a bit trite to list, but I despise serial fantasy/sci-fi novels.

Music

Ambient music, space music:

• Steve Roach
• Future Sound of London
• Terre Thaemlitz
• Most artists signed with Instinct Records, even Moby.

Jazzy electronica

Experimental music

Industrial/gothic music

Radiohead (one of the few rock bands I still enjoy)

Sleater-Kinney. Yes, I mean it. They do rock.

Academic

Mathematics

Here are some fascinating topics you may like looking into. Truth and beauty were what people used to talk about mathematics. I believe in the beauty part, but only the truth part inasmuch as Heidegger's concept of aletheia as truth.

• Topology (Set-theoretic and Combinatoric), Network Theory, Combinatorics (various applications), Graph Theory, Knot Theory.
• Linear Algebra, Tensors, Vectors and Matrices, Inner and Exterior Algebras, Group Theory, Galois Theory.
• Geometry (Euclidean, Bolyai-Lobachevsky, Riemannian, ...), Homology Structures, Curved Spaces.

Logic

Atomic Logic, Axiomatic Semantics, Operational Semantics, Formal Language Theory, Model Theory, Category Theory, Substructural Logics, Arrow Logic, Linear Logic, Reflection.

Philosophy

Despite all of that formal logic and notation in the previous section, I generally have a very human and almost poetic perspective on things in general. In fact, I consider it essential to me that I bring these together.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a great resource for a broad picture of philosophy and logic, as well as some decent explanations about the fields. Naturally very little of this can appeal to the average interest, but it's the place to go when you have just enough interest to look.

Philosophers or psychologists whose work I've found to reflect what I always thought most natural:

• Martin Heidegger (not for his Being and Time, but Introduction to Metaphysics, On The Way to Language, and even What is Called Thinking?)
• Friedrich Nietzsche, for many varied thoughts that helped define a century.
• Lev S. Vygotsky (for Thought and Language and Mind in Society).
• Lao Tzu, and many others, who made the great corpus of work behind what the modern world calls Taoism.

Engineering

Mechanics, stress computations, aerodynamics.

Programming

Some books I own and use

Languages:

Practical:

Smalltalk, Lisp/CLOS, ANSI C/C99, C++, Objective-C, C-Sharp, Java, Pascal, Basic.

Familiar:

Beta, Forth, Haskell, Perl, ProGraph, Oberon/Juice, Maude, Self, J, ML, Clean, Joy, Erlang/OTP, Ada, Cobol, PostScript, Tcl.

Assembly & Machine Code:

Intel 80x86 family and Pentium series, IBM PowerPC family (603e and 750), Motorola(?) 6502 and 65c02, Motorola 68k, Sparc 9, Alpha, MIPS.

Software Environments:

• AppleDOS, MS-DOS, DOS4GW, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT
• Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS, MacOS 8.0 - 9.1, NeXT and OpenSTEP, Mac OS X
• Language-based platforms are a particular favorite: Symbolics, Inc. Genera Environment for Lisp Machines (I personally own a MacIvory II), Squeak Smalltalk

Design Principles:

• Refactor a Program into its most natural and practical Ontology in small tested steps.
• Use design patterns to document and communicate ideas. Turn them into actual programs themselves when possible.
• Program functionally when the need arises.
• Use Reflection and partial evaluation whenever the costs are amortized.
• Use the right language for the right job!