CURRENT MISSION

specializing in the impossible and inadvisable

ABOUT ME

I get paid to think. I'm a researcher who uses computers and data to understand how people's decisions add up to social phenomena. Interested in social theory and democratic theory and political philosophy, also math, design, exploring, and community. Naturally, I love couchsurfing.

blog and research at
http://enfascination.com/research

PHILOSOPHY

science for awareness of ignorance

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

Once hosted a lot. Now doing some travel.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

A lot of surfing and a lot of hosting, both before and since I learned about CS. Also my brother surfed Europe for a year on CS; he can vouch for me.

Interests

I'm passionate about eating fruit and building community and collecting people who love living.

I study how groups of people solve problems together.
I also live with a lot of people and we create and solve problems together.

I break/repair my bicycle, admire print design, seek good conversation, and think about clear communication. I get inspiration from organizational, industrial, and institutional economics; political philosophy; old-school anthropology; animal behavior; statistical physics; and nature writing. I love people’s fascinations (peculiar or not), and fixing things (broken or not).

• animals
• insects
• arts
• culture
• writing
• books
• literature
• architecture
• design
• fashion
• diy
• coffee
• crafts
• politics
• movies
• blogging
• coding
• woodworking
• cycling
• surfing
• anthropology
• cartography
• economics
• history
• languages
• mathematics
• physics
• science
• mountains

Music, Movies, and Books

Dillard, Calvino, Borges, Grass, Whitman, Muir, Thoreau, and Stanislaw Lem.

After watching The Graduate I was in a daze for 72 hours. The Big Lebowski, Wes Anderson, I Heart Huckabee's, all these are spiritual.

Also Fela Kuti, James Brown and dancing to old funk and soul. Hip hop too!

Listening now to amazing noise rock band Lightning Bolt

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Got vaccinated against COVID-19!

Teach, Learn, Share

I study the mind, the brain and how individuals come together into groups, so we can talk about that too. I like to teach people to ride a bike and to drive stick shift.

Here is an incomplete list of things I'd love to learn more about:
native creations and cosmogenies
"How to make a $XXXX Y for under $XX"
"How to make a $XXX Y for under $X"
How to make a Y out of Nature
How to build a house
How to plant a tree
How to prune and maintain a fruit tree
What is the smallest amount of land you need to sustain yourself
(foodwise). What is happening on it?
DIY/grassroots Science. Is it going to happen? Where is it starting?
"In this niche craft/gadget market, these guys are the most amazing,
and this is why"
Simple life changes with big impact
plant motion.
Plants are verbs.
literary scientists
literature of California
The Hills
the statistical physics of society
technocracy
technocracy and the farmers
the farmers
utopia today
the arcology, or "Soleri today"
Oxford comma, convince me.
a lost treasure
most recent awesome archeological find from the Old World
good trees out there
the legacy of the situationalists
also the futurists, Italian or Russian
Muir
Thoreau
Whitman
what was Herman Hesse smoking?
U K LeGuin or A L Kroeber
U K LeGuin and A L Kroeber
Agee
Steinbeck
Borges
Calvino
Gunter Grass
William James
Stanislaw Lem
Russell (non snarky)
Popper
Wittgenstein
Russell on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations
everything that rises converging
peeks into the flimsiness of our apparently stable perception of an
apparently stable reality
self-contained, self-consistent, completely incomprehensible worldviews
like a strange, irresistible, forgotten folktale or something
when such worlds collide
little worlds and small precious things
one perfect little poem
stories
old China's demons and mischeif-makers
nonsense literature in the East, Mideast, South, etc.
the history of authenticity (did it exist before commerce?)
diplomatics and palaeography
The Old Man Who Does As He Pleases
social behavior, language, consciousness. Are we pretty sure that we know what came first, second and third? Or is that a dumb question?
One of the many things that the Japanese have taken and made way
better (and how)
life's works
real or fictional maps
real and fictional maps
fictional libraries
fictional books (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_books)
things about water: culture, politics, physics, all in between
rapid prototyping
Modern dilettantes
topics in type and typography
"Thinking in (math, code, other abstract symbol system) made me
see/realize something about my life"
modern alchemy
what's so great about polyhedra?
2+2=5?
behaviorism today
Your book
What is Craig Ventner up to?
What is John Koza up to?
What is Emperor Akihito up to?
The most underappreciated thing on the whole damn internet
R^2
Mediterranean climates of the world.
the vocabulary of woodwork
The insults and curses of one of the world's 7000 languages, living or extinct
you favorite monastic/ascetic
DIY Science
other involved trade vocabularies
involved obsessed conspiracy accounts of something that most people don't really think is important
Account of some forgotten dogfight between communists and anarchists, pref. in Europe.
The fertile crescent
Why is the fertile crescent a desert now? It was totally humans
pushing the land too hard, right? Climate change, right? But, wait,
why are there deserts in the Bible? Enlighten me of this burden.
a microbe
architecture and design
anything on the history of arts and crafts
William Morris, everything he thought, did, wanted, accomplished and left behind
Identification of local plants
Identification of local trees
Identification of local insects
The most beautiful thing that has ever burned down (Dresden? Library of Alexandria? Pre-Columbian American civilization?)
pre-Raphaelites
The history of heaven as a history of how our mirror has changed
The history of hell " " " " " " "
you
and, uhh, I don't know. Lightning bolts are pretty awesome.

Recently learned because of couchsurfing:
How to whistle (took three years)
The palatal click
How to drum three against four ("pass the goddamn butter") and the difference between polyrhythm and polymeter.

What I Can Share with Hosts

Energy, knowledge, time

Countries I’ve Visited

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Liechtenstein, Mexico, Morocco, Myanmar, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom

Countries I’ve Lived In

Switzerland, United States

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