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.
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