CURRENT MISSION

To enjoy living a sustainable life.

ABOUT ME

Non-practicing scientist, practicing cyclist. Mystic in experience, but emphatically naturalist in belief.

I'm an active homebody. I like doing things that are free, and bring me closer to the people I love. Potlucks, hiking, biking, book groups, watching movies or talks and home and discussing. Late night coffee fueled chats. Cooking from scratch. Non-fiction reading.

PHILOSOPHY

I call myself an Amateur Earthling. Amateur in both the literal and figurative sense: I'm living for the love of living, not for money. I also don't really know how to live well and ethically/sustainably at the same time. None of us do. I'm trying to figure it out.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

Since signing up with CS, I've been inundated with requests... more than one per day on average, and it feels bad to keep saying 'No', so I'm going to try and make this a little bit more restrictive...

I'm interested in hosting international travelers, especially those who speak one of the languages I've spent time studying, or would like to study in the future: Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic, and Russian (it's my housemate Bryan who has studied French and Brazilian Portuguese, and also Spanish).

I'm also interested in hosting US travelers with whom I share a lot in common. If you ride a bike, don't own a car or a TV, enjoy spending time in the wilderness, have a naturalistic (as opposed to supernatural or religious) experience of the world, and work with or study science or technology, there's a very good chance we'll have an enjoyable interaction.

I'm also interested more abstractly in CS because it's one system exploring mechanisms for building trust in populations of people who don't know each other (yet). That kind of trust and reputation system is vital for the effective distributed sharing of resources which the internet enables, and responsible sharing is a great way to reduce our overall footprint, without reducing our overall quality of life.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I haven't yet used CS directly, but I've certainly done plenty of couchsurfing, most often while on bike tours in other countries. People can be incredibly hospitable, and it feels good to reciprocate, even if it's with different folks.

Interests

Bicycles! Urban design and transportation planning. Human powered wilderness travel. Artificial intelligence. Computational biology. Anything relating to sustainability. Cooking.

• books
• design
• cooking
• coffee
• drinking
• technology
• movies
• reading
• tv
• traveling
• cycling
• hiking
• kayaking
• biology
• languages
• mathematics
• physics
• science
• tours

Music, Movies, and Books

Syriana, Brazil, The Big Lebowski, 12 Monkeys, Dr. Strangelove, Gattaca, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Lives of Others, Memento, In the Mood for Love, Nobody Knows, Never Cry Wolf, Ten Canoes, The Fast Runner, Lord of War, Touching the Void, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, GASLAND, Dive!, Rebel Without A Car Productions, Fight Club

Ambient, electronic, psy-trance, Celtic folk, Spanish guitar. Radiohead, Bjork, Biosphere, etc.

Pale Blue Dot, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Green Mars, The Selfish Gene, The Prize, Brave New World, Desert Solitaire.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

My partner and I spent 10 weeks kayaking down the coast of Baja California (on the Sea of Cortez side). For three of those weeks in a row, we didn't see another human being. Eventually, pinned down by bad weather, we had to distill our own drinking water. To know the wilderness as a wild or even semi-feral human is ecstatic!

Teach, Learn, Share

Bike mechanics, car-free living, programming in python, mathematics, physics, computational biology.

Countries I’ve Visited

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Belize, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Romania, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom

Countries I’ve Lived In

Guatemala, Japan, Russian Federation, United States

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