Professional name

One of my co-conspirators on the project is putting together a tech report, and he asked me whether I wanted to go by Alex or Alexander. This is an important question, since this choice will probably determine my professional name for the rest of my career. I know I'm not the only one who has pondered this question: a prof in my lab changed his name from Michael to Mike about eight years after his first publication, and now is so adamant about being called Mike that he will go out of his way to cross out "Michael" on a nametag and write "MIKE" underneath.

I'm going with Alexander, mostly because my webpage is the number one result when you search for my full name (my single Amazon product review is surprisingly high, somewhere around 19...). I had to think about it a while, though.

The crash

People are dumb. Anarchy is certainly not the answer to the shortcomings of capitalism, and hanging effigies of the only people who understand the system is not a way to solve the problems we're facing. Killing the fools who understood enough to get us into this mess sure would make it hard to get out of the mess after the dust has cleared. There is no way that we can simply legislate the banking system into working again: we need the people who know how to make the gears turn. Furthermore, not all bankers are evil, and I seriously doubt anyone who constructed the complicated financial instruments that imploded with the housing crash did it knowing how hard things could fall.

Anyways, those are my thoughts on that.

Livejournal is for wusses

I felt like a change of pace so I've decided to transition to a new weblog service (blog is so 2006). I occasionally have ideas I want to share with the world so if I'm feeling particularly motivated I'll post them here.