Contact
- Email Address: chris@nesteduniverse.net
- Website: http://www.NestedUniverse.net
- Location: Atlanta, Georgia, United States
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One-Line Bio
Science and Technology Blogger. Futurist. Singularitarian.
Biography
I was born in 1967 and was fortunate to have an extremely loving and
nurturing family. My mother, father and grandparents all fostered an
intense sense of wonder about the world and the universe, and they
never grew tired of my endless questions about the way things work.
At 3, I attended a Montessori-like
school which was owned and operated by an expatriate French-Canadian
couple. I acquired a lifelong fascination with the French language from
them, which I continued to study throughout my school years and beyond
through programs at Berlitz and Alliance Française d'Atlanta.
Unfortunately, I've never had the the opportunity to immerse myself in
the French language, so although I consider my reading fluency to be at
a high level, my speaking and writing abilities are more modest.
As a child, my interests ranged from model rocketry to super 8mm filmmaking, deciphering the unsolved Beale letters through computer search techniques, Number theory, Prime number theory, the Riemann Hypothesis, and Fermat's Last Theorem.
My interest in languages did not stop with French and I have studied Egyptian Hieroglyphs (Gardiner's work Egyptian Grammar
is fascinating), Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Russian and Arabic. I have
always had a deep interest in computer languages as well, beginning
with Basic and 6502 Assembly on an Apple IIe when I was 16.
An intense interest in Pi
resulted after a promise by my high school trigonometry teacher to
award an extra credit point for every digit of the number that could be
memorized. I was able to recite 100 digits then, and later extended
that to 900 digits, although a lack of practice has degraded my memory
to the first 200 or so digits now. I proudly participated in my high
school's Academic Olympics team where we placed 2nd in the state of
Nevada for the 1984 school year.
In 1984, I first read Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer prizing winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
which forever altered my view of the Universe. Professor Hofstadter's
literary works are beyond their time, and he will be remembered as the
Albert Einstein of his generation.
I started with National Data Corporation in 1984, first in management,
then in IT. I developed a terminal emulator in x86 Assembly language,
and wrote a manpower scheduling system that was used to automatically
schedule over 4,900 service agents in 7 call centers around the country
by applying my interests in programming and Mathematics (specifically queuing theory and Poisson distribution).
A Games Magazine
contest drove me to develop a computer solution to a topological
mathematics problem through brute force exhaustion of the search space,
for which I tied for 1st place. My interest in investing became a
passion when I helped form a very profitable stock club partnership in
1992, which I served as Treasure of until it was retired in 2007.
My introduction to distributed computing started with the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. I later joined the seti@home project in 1999, and have strongly supported this highly effective, low cost search for extra-terrestrial intelligence financially for several years now. I recently began participating in the rosetta@home distributed computing search to understand the folding structure of protein molecules which may ultimately lead to cures for some major human diseases.
This year, I continued my philosophy of financially supporting causes for which I am passionate about by joining the SETI Institute, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and the Lifeboat Foundation. The SIAI's mission: "In the coming decades, humanity will likely create a powerful artificial intelligence. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) exists to confront this urgent challenge, both the opportunity and the risk."
I work today in the Atlanta area for McKesson Corporation as Manager, Distributed Systems Engineering and have 23 years of IT industry experience.
My Top 3 "Top ?" lists (all listed in no special order):
Top 9 Singularity Heroes (influence, ideas and style)
Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Douglas Hofstadter, Ray Kurzweil, Ben
Goertzel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Tyler Emerson, Bruce Klein, Michael
Anissimov
Top 3 Books
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, The Mind's I, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
Top 5 Films
Donnie Darko, The Matrix, Groundhog Day, 12 Monkeys, eXistenZ
Affiliations
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Founding Donor
Lifeboat Foundation, Vice-President, Scientific Advisory Board member, and Blog Contributor
World Transhumanist Association, Member
SETI Institute, Member
