I'm a nerd, but only pretty much all the time. My fields of interest vary constantly over just about the entire range of everything there is to be interested in. As far as I can tell, I will be interested in anything that challenges me, and things that don't challenge me generally won't interest me.
I qualify everything I say with "just about," "almost," "pretty much," "probably," "I think," and other similar expressions. Pretty much, you should just ignore them and read them with the strength they probably should have. I think I've developed a level of certainty with respect to some things that it kind of shifted everything else down in my vocabulary.
Also, my attention span is kind of unpredictable. Sometimes I can concentrate on something for hours, or weeks, or months on end, and other times, I forget what I'm talking about before I've started to actually say anything.
So, with that in mind, back to the things that fascinate me. The thing that fascinates me most is the way people's minds work. Since mine is the one most accessible to me, I do a lot of introspection. I don't know that this particular interest of mine will ever be dethroned from the top of my list. The others come and go on a rather unpredictable basis (this is probably related to the state of my attention span). In the past, I've immersed myself in physics, in biology, in philosophy of science, in chemistry, in electronics, in philosophy of education, in literature, in mathematics, in psychology, in poetry, in music composition, in meteorology, in geology, in linguistics, and probably some other things that aren't coming to mind too easily right now. At the moment, my passions are in graph theory (particularly coloring problems), and in ethics.
I've devised a proof that P is not equal to NP (which is sound, as far as I can tell, but is still being looked at by some people who may know better). This, despite being rather obscure and kind of boring to describe, may be the most exciting thing I've ever done. Not because my life is particularly boring (it's not, though I sometimes claim that it is), but because if you know the implications of the problem, it really is very exciting. So if you're interested in what exactly this entails, or why it's worth a nice million dollars (which it is), or think you can stand to hear me talk about it for awhile, feel free to ask!
As far as ethics go, I'm working out a paper that explores the evolutionary origins of human ethical systems. Make of that what you will--I'll defer my judgment until the paper's done. That may be awhile, because there's a whole lot of study that has to go into it that I currently don't have the resources for. Maybe someday I'll make it a Ph.D. dissertation.
Everything I do, I challenge myself with. I try to do it as well as I can, and I work to understand what I'm doing so I can practice it as efficiently as I can. It doesn't always look like I do a lot of work, but a lot of time that looks idle is time that I spend practicing things in my head.
An unfortunate side effect of this habit of challenging myself all the time is that it makes me rather competitive. If you haven't experienced it, that's ok, it's definitely there.
There are a couple things that I enjoy more, I think, than anything else. One of them is playing music. Another is playing ultimate frisbee. Almost any chance I get to do one of these things, I will take. So, if you are playing frisbee or need a percussionist, give me a call!
