Amateur Science

I grew up in an academic household and was extensively involved in various neuroscience labs in my early career. This has led me on occasion to hold lofty ambitions about pursuing a PhD purely for intrinsic reward. Alas, it has become clear in my adulthood that a conventional academic career is not in the cards, and systems administration has proven to be a good way to pay the bills.

These days I scratch my itch to live the life of the mind by engaging in citizen science projects. While this constitutes only partial (and mostly peripheral) participation, I still find it gratifying.

In particular, I run distributed computing projects on the BOINC platform or Folding@home on my home computer. The badges below indicate which projects I run and how many credits I’ve accrued:

I also try to regularly go bird-watching and submit checklists of sightings to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird. My eBird profile can be found here.

Occasionally, I have also interacted with projects on Zooniverse and Eyewire.

Evidence of heavier past involvement in academia can be found on my Google scholar page and ORCID.

Reading

I have a small home library containing a number of philosophical and reference works / textbooks. I mostly read non-fiction. Currently my collection is dominated by works related to artificial intelligence, religion, philosophy, and psychology, with introductory level texts for other physical and social sciences.

Digital Preservation

If I find something historical that I think might be interesting to society at large, I’ll usually scan and upload it to the Internet Archive (my profile is here). In the past I used to run an ArchiveTeam warrior but haven’t done this lately.

I’ve also digitized numerous documents from my childhood home for a small personal “family archive” of old VHS tapes, audio cassettes, etc that lives on my personal storage cloud / NAS.

Technology / Retrocomputing

Since I interact with technology extensively at my job, I usually try to minimize the IT work I perform at home to prevent burnout. If there’s a particularly compelling technology I might test it out for a while. If I need to (or want to) do tech work off the clock, I’m more inclined to read a manual or reference book in the evening and then apply that knowledge during regular working hours.

An exception to the above is retrocomputing. Since older technology doesn’t involve the stress or pressure of technology hype cycles and isn’t directly applicable to my job, I often find using emulators or older machines to be relaxing. Retrocomputing also tends to bring out a more diverse array of people due to its overlap with history and other non-engineering fields.