About Me


My name is Ryan, and I am the owner and author of Stationary Waves.

I hold a Bachelor’s degree in economics from Utah State University, and have worked as a statistician, business analyst, and consultant, concentrating mainly in marketing data and workflow process improvement. I am a professional statistician. I can code, but I’m not a coder. I am an amateur musician; you can hire me to sing acoustic cover songs at your pub or wedding, or you can find my crazy prog-rock band playing in seedy venues in the greater DFW metroplex. When I was much younger, I was a promising distance-runner; you can follow my running and cycling activity at Strava, Smashrun, and/or Garmin Connect. At age 30, I acquired LADA: Latent Autoimmune (Type 1) Diabetes in Adults. I have blogged about all of these things.

I am also a lifelong libertarian with an “Austrian School” bent, and that is the closest there is to something “famous” about me. I have had a couple of feature articles at Mises.org and several blog posts at Mises.ca. I have also blogged at OpenBorders.info, and you can often find me in the comments sections of various blogs associated with libertarianism, such as EconLog, Marginal Revolution, Bleeding Heart Libertarians, and the Facebook feeds of various libertarians of note.

My current blogging interests are:
  • The psychology of self-improvement;
  • The pursuit of happiness;
  • Ethics;
  • The preservation of running as a sport and act of meditation, rather than clownishness;
  • Parenting;
  • The science of fitness and longevity, especially with respect to diabetes;
  • Human progress through creativity;
  • Being a good person

Why I Blog

I started this blog in 2008 or so, mostly as a way to spare my friends and family of blog-length diatribes about politics. Once I got going, though, I found that putting my ideas down in a format that enables me to review them later allowed me to link concepts I wouldn’t have otherwise linked. In short order, I had succeeded in formalizing aspects of my personal way of thinking that I never would have done otherwise.

Back then, blogging was a pretty big deal. Google Reader software made it easy and fun to keep up with a large number of blogs. Everyone cross-referenced everyone else. A community, called “the blogosphere,” was born. Then Google pulled the plug on Reader and the blogging community largely evaporated.

In the wake of that evaporation, most of us lost our readership and moved on to more productive activities. (Ha!) By that time, though, I had invested so much of my thinking into my blog that I decided to just keep it around. And so, over time, it became the central repository for my mental universe.

It now exists as a catalog of thoughts that may be of interest to, for example, my daughter. Future people, mostly relatives, may one day become interested in who I was and how I thought. Or perhaps not. But if they do, they have this blog as an archive of what it was like to be Ryan from the years 2008 to present.

No comments:

Post a Comment