Spiritual My childhood was strongly influenced by the textual seriousness of fundamental Christianity, and the transcendence of Lutheranism. I embraced atheism when I discovered the life of the mind. These days my spiritual practice is in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Our meditation center is the Golden Blue Lotus Tara meditation center, with Ven. Zasep Tulku Rinpoche as spiritual head.
...in context...
Work I am a professor of Biological Sciences and Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Idaho, with several other appointments. I love discovery, in myself and others. Most of my research is in the crossover between Computer Science and Biology. For details on my professional life, see my work webpage. The best part of work are my colleagues and students.
Family My wife, Martha, and I met (literally) over the tenth book of Plato's Republic. I was the token philosopher in our dorm at the College of the University of Chicago. She was an English major, with a keen sense of the tactical importance of Plato. We have been married since 1981, and have three children: Nathan, Sam, and Abe. My 3 brothers and 2 sisters, and my mother and father and their spouses, are a diverse and wonderful crew. Here is my Dad’s B&B!
For fun Science and Philosophy are the best fun. For hobbies I read classical Greek poetry (when I can), do math, read history, make and enjoy music, and watch movies. Oh, and I fish. I build my fly rods, tie flies, and love the challenge of planning a delivering a perfect cast and drift to a spooky trout. The best part is being in the middle of a river, with no one for miles.
Formal Education I attended a two room schoolhouse in Fulton, Mo. for two years, and sat next to the science bulletin board reading about space. Then came Stony Point elementary and Arrowhead junior high, followed by Schlagle High School in Kansas City, KS. I escaped to Chicago to earn an A.B. in philosophy, specializing in the presocratics, and later an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Everything else is informal!
Philosophy Life deserves examination, and living is worth conscious attention. We are minds situated in Nature, and so both both mind and material reality matter. Meaning is something we create, not something we discover or something revealed to us. We're a strange species on a strange planet, and I find every day a curious adventure. But anyone putting his or her philosophy in a little box on the internet is clearly full of something.