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contra
I've been contra dancing all my life, but got really interested in it in college. I help organize our local dance and dance weekend, play for dances with my two bands, lead open bands, maintain listings of local dances and weekends/camps/etc, and used to call.
tech
I'm a software engineer at the Nucleic Acid Observatory working in bioinformatics. I used to work on webpage optimization and ads at Google, and am still interested in web browsers, web APIs, and improving privacy/security/efficiency by adding new capabilities to browsers.
covid-19
The pandemic has been a huge part of our lives, displacing many things and shifting how we do many others. A large fraction of my 2020 and 2021 posts chain back to the pandemic, even if I haven't categorized them that way here.
money
A mix of economics, policy, and my personal experience. I'm especially into financial transparency, writing up our personal finances and those of projects I've been involved in.
kids
Julia and I have three kids, Lily, Anna, and Nora. As of Summer 2023, they are nine, seven, and two. As a parent, my goal is to show them how to do things, do for them what they can't do yet, and help them grow into the people they want to be.
ideas
I often have thoughts about how things could be better, and enjoy writing them up. Sometimes I end up building a prototype or otherwise making them happen, but most of them don't get past the idea stage.
ea
I'm interested in how I can most effectively turn my time and money into making the world better, and Julia and I have been into effective altruism since ~2009. In 2022 I switched from earning to give to trying to identify future pandemics earlier: more.
music
I grew up in a musical family, and learned guitar as a kid. Later, I taught myself piano, mandolin, bass, foot drums, whistle, brass, and other things. I play for contra dances with Kingfisher and the Free Raisins, and enjoy figuring out how to play as many things simultaneously as I can.
food
Everyone needs to eat. Looking through past posts, I see a slow progression from a focus on frugality, to veganism (vegan housemates), to kids.
house
Julia and I have a two family house in Somerville, where we live with our kids and housemates. Physically, the building was initially in pretty rough shape, and we've put a lot of work into fixing it up and making it the way we like it. Socially, we like having other people around, and I really value the 'socializing by default' that comes from having housemates.
ling
I majored in linguistics in college, along with computer science, and am still interested in language. I especially interested in changes in how language handles gender, and have been following the slow and steady growth of singular they.

All 2,222 posts going back to 2004: