There are a number of nerdy subjects that I’ve wanted to write about for a long time, but I haven’t really had the right venue for it. My poker blog occasionally strays from poker. But, it’s probably not fair to the people who come there to read about poker to do that too often, so I save it for things that I feel a strong moral compulsion to discuss.

So, I created a new venue.

This blog will be standard fare–If I have a thought about something other than poker and feel like writing about it, I’ll probably write about it here. (I’ll still maintain my poker blog in the sense that I won’t rule out writing future posts for it–I’ve even got some in mind—but, as a blogger with a history of breaking promises to his readers, I ain’t makin’ no more of those right now.)

Topics of interest include virtually anything nerdy, with a specialization in computer science theory. (I’m currently waiting to hear back from PhD programs in that field.) I assume that my readership will start out as roughly the nerdier 10% of the people who read Subject: Poker or my other blog, most of whom don’t have formal math training. So, for now at least, I’ll try to keep the content accessible to laypeople.

If that’s the sort of stuff you might want to read, you should subscribe to my RSS or follow me on Twitter.

I suppose I should also answer the obvious question: “What’s with the name?” I believe that only my mind and my thoughts exist, so I call myself a solipsist. This is a boring fact. I’d live my life in essentially the same way if I were a materialist, except that my navel-gazing would be a bit different (and I suppose the title of my blog). Whether the world is imagined or not (and I strongly believe that it’s imagined), it still exists by any reasonable definition, and I still have remarkably little conscious control over it.

Indeed, probably the most interesting thing about being a solipsist is the fact that the philosophy is so starkly different than others, and yet it leads to essentially no behavioral difference. In particular, I don’t believe that other minds exist in the same way that my mind does, but I’m still social, interested in what people have to say, and extremely interested in sharing my thoughts with people. The title of this blog is meant to convey the view that I am writing a journal for myself about the world that I think I’ve imagined. The joke, of course, is that I’m writing it on the internet with the obvious hope that other people read it.

Solipsism probably won’t come up much in the future. As I said, it’s boring.

Anyway, less introducing, more writing about stuff that interests me. I hope you boys and girls enjoy.