Hello!

I am a mathematician who has been pretending to be a software engineer ... and I want to do useless things, impractical things, weird and curious and unusual things, beautiful things, and, hopefully, delightful things ... I want to explore both the World of Ideas described by Plato and the Physical World we live in.  And, who knows, maybe something I work on will be taken by someone else, and revolutionize the world!  Or maybe I'll create a thing or two that will at least allow someone with the desire to do so, to launch their own business, one that makes people's lives a little better ....

And thus, I present the Trash Panda Arcane Research Center -- as an attempt to capture the creativity I've had as a child, making toys out of what others would consider trash -- as an attempt to capture the spirit of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to pursue the weird and wonderful and (mostly) useless things that have, ultimately, made computers something that everyone could use -- and as an attempt to reproduce my study of mathematics and some of the weirder aspects of computer science, to find the things that may sometimes bring delight, and may sometimes prove to be very useful after all ... or may just prove to be a dud, because who knows what research might provide us?

And that's the funny thing about research -- you cannot predict whether or not something will be useful.  After all, I decided to become a mathematician when the novel Jurassic Park pushed me down the rabbit hole of Chaos Theory, and I ran smack dab into conversation with Benoit Mandelbrot, who was asked "do these mathematicians know you're using their mathematics for practical things?" and his answer was "No, and they probably don't care". Wow! Mathematics is so beautiful, that people pursue it because it's not practical!  I knew then that I needed to become a mathematician, and I went on to earn a PhD.  And yet, despite this impracticality, mathematics has simultaneously proven to be the most practical of all human disciplines ever devised! Mandelbrot, after all, was describing how he was using "useless" mathematics.

For years, however, I have pursued the visions of other people for making the world a better place, doing "mundane" things to make "mundane" systems work a little better -- important work, to be sure, and work that was sometimes interesting, at least initially -- but I had always intended to go home and work on mathematics, or explore computer languages like Common Lisp and Elixir on "large" computers and Forth on "small" ones, or to design and maybe even make an unusual camping trailer, or to design a ternary logic computer to explore how things would be different if we stepped out of the "box" of binary computing, or to explore how dual quaternions can be used to explore GPU-powered 3D graphics and simulations, or a table-top role playing system using a pack of cards as the source of randomness and quirkiness, among other things.

Only, things never worked out as expected.  Every time I started a new position, I had a burst of creativity, where I would explore a new and unusual idea ... only to gradually get tired, burned out, and unable to do anything interesting ... eventually to the point where I couldn't even do the "mundane" things I needed to do for work.  Over time, I have come to the realization that, if I don't start now to pursue my own visions (as useful or as useless they may be), I'll never have the time and energy to pursue them!

Hence this Research Center!  It will start out as a "brain dump" on my blog, The Power of Epsilon , of various ideas and thoughts I've had over the years, and to provide progress reports on projects I'm working on. And while I hope that some of my ideas and projects will prove inspirational -- heck, I hope that some of these ideas take physical form, and maybe even make it to market or get published as books -- I don't think I can promise that I go certain directions, at least for now, because I don't entirely know how my interests will yank and push me, and I don't know what brick walls I will careen into -- but I would be happy to entertain requests!