Bigwhoop interview questions Just as a short introduction, I'm doing this because I thought it might be neat if the bigwhoop folks knew more about each other, since there are a good number of people that have weblogs here that I personally don't know almost anything about, and I'm guessing the same thing applies to pretty much all of us. Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions. ------------------------------------------------------------------- I guess I'll start with the basics: ------------------------------------------------------------------- How old are you? 23.353 years Where did you grow up? San Jose, CA Where are you living now? Tucson, AZ Which city would you rather live in right now: the one where you grew up or the one you're in today? The one where I grew up. Tuscon as a city doesn't have much to offer. The mountains surrounding the area are great, but (for a city of about 800,000 people) there isn't much else going on. Especially compared to the bay area. Plus the bay area is much more liberal and progressive, doesn't get so hot during the summer, etc. What do you do for a living? Currently, I am paid to "be a graduate student in the department of astronomy at the university of arizona." This entails taking classes, doing homework, and conducting research. For me, conducting research at the moment means taking apart instruments, putting them back together, and then testing them. In the near future, I am hoping to add "do science" to the "conducting research" aspect of my job. Do you enjoy doing that sort of thing? Yes, very much so. Classes sucked last semester, but they're good this semester. I also feel like options that I'm interested in research-wise are at least feasible and attainable on the timescale of five-six years. Also, every so often I think about my job and am extremely grateful that I do not dread Monday (nor rejoice when Friday rolls around). I also very much like the people I'm around on a daily basis. What would you rather do, if you didn't have to worry about money? What I do on a daily basis. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Moving on to bigwhoop-related issues: ------------------------------------------------------------------- What was the main reason you joined bigwhoop.org? Well, I wanted a place where I could record the things that happened in my life, so that I could always look back on it whenever I wanted. Both my short- and long-term memory suck ass, so any opportunity to help me remember stuff in my life is good to me (this also relates to why I take so many pictures with my digital camera). What do you hope to get out of your website? Like I said, when I started I was mainly concerned about remembering what I did. However, when the comments of "Damn Shane your blog is boring as hell!"started rolling in, I thought more about ways to make my blog more interesting to read. Unfortunately, I have this problem where my creativity completely evaporates when I stare at a computer screen. More than that, my brain just ceases to function when I turn a computer on. Literally, I'll think of something I want to do on my computer, turn it on, and then completely forget what it was I wanted to do as soon as the thing has finished booting. Is bigwhoop going the way you had hoped initially? Yeah, for the most part. I'm very happy with the gallery portion of it, actually. What do you hope others will get out of it? Every now and then I make a post that I'm proud of. I hope that people will catch those when they happen and appreciate them. How many of the other people with weblogs on bigwhoop have you met? There's the three from the legendary Flagstaff connection (Eric, Andy, and Trent) and then there's Andy's friend Jack who I met in Tacoma while travelling through there on a road trip with my girlfriend, Tiffany. How often do you read the various bigwhoop blogs? Recently, I haven't been reading other people's blogs as much. Really, (of the people that I have in the past regularly checked) only Jankowski and Furst update make posts on a regular basis. So when I say I haven't been reading 'other people's blogs', I mean Furst and Jankowski. Still, I try to check and see what the other bigwhoop-ers are doing once a week or month-ish. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Hobbies and stuff: ------------------------------------------------------------------- What sort of side projects are you working on that aren't part of your full time job? I don't really have time for anything other than hobbies. I remember you saying something once about playing racquetball. Do you still do that? What other sports do you play? In fact I do play racquetball. I wish I played more regularly. As it stands now, I play once every two weeks or so. I also play ultimate frisbee on Friday afternoons, something that I look forward to each week. I've been organizing a regular game of softball every Tuesday night for the past several months. Then there's golf, which I really wish I had more time for. And snowboarding, which I used to have time for, until I moved to the desert. Any other hobbies you'd like to mention (poker, fantasy baseball, etc.)? Damn, it's like you're psychic man! Like you're reading my mind or something!! Anyway, yeah, I like both poker and fantasy baseball. Fantasy sports in general have helped me a great deal in understanding which players are good in all four major sports. In addition to poker, I also like to play spades a lot. And chess, can't forget chess. Although I don't play it nearly as much as I used to. Which hobby or sport activity would you have the hardest time giving up? By far, softball. I played Little League for 7 years (Senior League the last three years), and it's the sport I'm best at. It is also the sport that makes me the happiest (both playing and watching). ------------------------------------------------------------------- Big Issues: ------------------------------------------------------------------- In contrast to Matt Jankowski and Eric Furst, who have developed very strong opinions on a variety of important issues in today's society, you don't make your opinions so manifest. Is this because you don't express them well, or because you are simply devoid of any sense of right or wrong? Ouch. Harsh question there. I do have a bit of a hard time expressing myself, especially in front of a computer--as I mentioned earlier. However, I also think that my opinions aren't as strong, or perhaps a better word is hard-line, as theirs are. I would say that my opinions are more malleable than theirs. Maybe this is because I don't have a sense of right/wrong, but I prefer to think it's just because I'm open-minded. I definitely think one of my strong suits is being able to view a situation from multiple perspectives and understanding where people are coming from, even if I don't agree with them--and, consequently--being more accepting of people that are different than me. Please describe your favorite excerpt from any book you have read. A moment of Zen, if you will. I always had this sort of disdain for modern art. As in, I had this belief that it was sort of a waste of time because anyone could do it and because it often was so esoteric that the meaning was not usually clear. But then I read Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. Besides being a great book, it has this one part on page 221 where Rabo Karabekian, an abstract expressionist painter from the book, defends the nature of one of his most famous pieces, a white canvas with one thin stripe of colored tape running vertically from bottom to top... "It is the immaterial core...the 'I am' to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us... It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us... Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything about us is dead machinery." I thought that the idea that in the end we're all as simple as one ray of light was a pretty cool one. I'm not sure about the dead machinery bit, but nothing's perfect, right? Nonetheless, I definitely like to think about people as the same at the very core. Just with a bunch of crap surrounding each person that makes all of distinct. Discuss motivation. All right, this is definitely a big issue (for me anyway). What motivates me? For simple, short-term things, I like to set up goals for myself and keep track of how I'm doing to help me stay motivated. For example, I recently started doing a small amount of push-ups at night. I started doing it because I thought it would be a healthy thing to do that would increase my upper body strength, and I'm helping myself continue to do it by keeping track of whether or not I've done some each day. For larger, longer-term things, I really try to think hard about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. This isn't a daily occurrence mind you; maybe it should be. I don't think so though. I think you can "over-think" some things, especially if you don't give yourself some time to forget about it and focus on simpler stuff. A prime example here would be why I have chosen to do astronomy. It certainly wasn't for the money, although I can't say that I'm in a bad position financially because of my career choice -- it's just that I could make a lot more money doing other things, things that I would definitely enjoy less. It certainly isn't for the publicity, since astronomers aren't the type of people to grace the covers of magazines like "People" etc. So what is it then? Part of it is the challenge, but then there are many occupations that would be challenging. I tend to think of the challenge as something that keeps me interested on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. I think the deeper, ultimate motivation for me is the opportunity to make a significant difference in our knowledge and understanding of the universe. I can't speak in absolute terms (more on this later), but _relatively speaking_, we know more than we used to. And I really want to help continue that trend. "Stand on the shoulders of giants" means a great deal to me. In my mind, anyone who makes any contribution at all is a "giant" that has made a difference. Finally, there's the ultimate -- I would say philosophical -- level of motivation. Do we need an absolute frame of reference? How do we know what is right or wrong? Any time I think about these issues for a long time I get lost. If I was Eric Furst, I would appeal to God as the absolute frame of reference and the bible as my guide to getting as close as possible to that frame (c.f. http://bussmann.bigwhoop.org/archives/furstinterview.txt, Big Issues #1). But I believe that the bible was written by mankind, not by God. So I could just say, "Ok, I don't like the bible, but I still need something to cling to. How about God minus the bible?" Well, that's starting to sound a lot like Matt Jankowski, who says "you need some sort of starting point to your reality ...something that has no cause but can be used to move forward from. I'll admit that 'the universe exists' is just as causeless as 'god exists'. The thing is, I've seen the universe and I know I'm a part of it, but I've never seen god or any evidence of god. So if you're going to have to pick a starting point - and I think you must - I'm not sure what good you do yourself by just kinda throwing this infinite, not definable thing into the picture. (http://bussmann.bigwhoop.org/archives/jankowskiinterview.txt, Big Issues #1)". I tend to agree with Matt here, in fact. The universe DOES exist. That's enough. Enjoy it while you can. You have one to a few sentences to give one piece of advice to people you think might be reading this. What do you have to say? I used to think my best quality was that I was a little bit different from most people I met. Unique, if you will. I still believe that I am unique, to a certain extent, but now I think my best trait is my open-mindedness with regards to other people's beliefs and behaviors. I really try to think about where other people are coming from when they act the way they do. It makes forgiving and healing a much better process. So the advice is: Be open-minded. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Anything else you'd like to add? Feel free to add in your own questions and answers if you'd like as well. No, that's pretty much it. I'd like to take this opportunity though, to thank Shane Bussmann for asking such great interview questions. And I'd also like to thank the editor for this interview, Shane Bussmann, for removing almost of the inane self-references and third-person references that would otherwise have surely been littered throughout the interview. Thanks again for taking the time. -Shane (interviewer, interviewee, and editor)