Cosma's Home Page
And you may ask yourself
Well... How did I get here?
And you may ask yourself
"How do I work this?"
And you may ask yourself
"Where is that large automobile?"
And you may tell yourself
"This is not my beautiful house!"
Mail to "cshalizi at bactra dot org dot oryx". (My address doesn't
really end with the name of a genus
of antelope.)
Actual human mail is welcome, though I'm a criminally slow correspondent; if
I don't get back to you, rest assured the fault lies with me. (This does not
apply to strangers asking me for jobs, internships, post-docs, or for help
getting in to grad school. In any case, I am not taking new students until
2020 at the earliest.)
Attention Conservation Notice: What follows is long, self-absorbed,
and boring to look at; much of it was written ten or even twenty years ago.
- Research
- What I work on, and links to my publications and CV
- Teaching
- Lecture notes, students' evaluations of my courses, etc.
- Book Reviews
- There was a time when I'd write a half-dozen book reviews every few
weeks, and add them to The Bactra Review.
(There were a hundred and thirty-odd reviews the last time I counted.) I still
write reviews, but more sporadically. There are no set subjects, which means I
get to spout off about whatever I like; there are no other contributors or
editors, which means the opinions are entirely my own; in short, you get what
you pay for.
- Notebooks
- Notes, small essays, explanations, reminders, reading lists and
questions on various (400+) topics.
- Weblog
- Writings too occasional to be research, or reviews, or even notes.
- Popular Science Pieces and Profiles
- Articles about other people's science, mostly for the Santa Fe
Institute Bulletin, but now also for Quantitative Finance. I've
been paid to write them, so I guess I'm now some sort of science writer. Most
of them are about economics and other kinds of social science, subjects in
which I have no qualifications whatsoever; I understand this is typical of
science writers.
- Books
- Putting old books on the Web used to be one of my hobbies. (I
haven't put up any new ones for years.) I started with some strange old books about the future.
- Poetry
- Similarly, I put other people's poems on-line. That was back when
we sent packets by tying them to the backs of gophers.
- Links
- The links I use frequently.
- News
- Gets a page of its own.
- People
- Friends, relations, correspondents, total strangers with
interesting pages.
- Madison, Wisconsin
- I lived there for almost five years. I liked it, after a while.
- Older and Even More Pretentious Stuff
- Things I wrote a long time ago, which might still have some shreds
of value. Or might not.
- Personal
- You have better things to do than read this.
About These Pages
Which is my face, which is a
building
This is the "worst home page
ever," according to yankthechain.com. I'm very proud.
My site is deliberately low on graphics. Not that I object to pictures on
principle: here are depictions
of me, my
office,
my work
(note the matrix for hidden Markov models in the background) and my
old neighborhood
in Madison. Nonetheless, this page
is proudly optimized for
PinealWeb.
This website is powered by fossil
fuels and contributes directly to global warming and climate change.
The Name of This Band
The headings of these pages are taken from Talking Heads lyrics. I like
the music a lot, the songs are sufficiently cryptic that there's usually at
least one line I can twist to the topic at hand, and it's probably some sort of
intellectual property offense: what more could one ask for?
