In brief:

• Christopher Graeme Fogelberg,
• male,
• born 27th of March, 01982 (feel free to send birthday presents),
• blue eyes,
• brown hair that sticks up,
• 74 kilos, roughly 178cm,
• really, really, ridiculously good looking.

See, here's a photo:

But who am I? Well, in one adjective-ridden, incomprehensible sentence, I am an atheist eliminativist rock climbing ballroom dancing skiing computer geek who's played around with magic tricks here and there. I love wine, and tawny port even more. I'm doing my DPhil in machine learning for bioinformatics at Oxford University and I've also been known to dabble in economics and investing now and again. I study Mandarin and drawing and write fiction when I find the spare time. My DPhil is all about inferring causal relationships in large networks, like genetic regulatory networks. Yes, this means I'm building an army of genetically engineered clones which I will use to conquer the world.

More about me? I'm known by most of my friends as “Christo”. I went through a phase where explaining that my name wasn't Christof (Or Crystal. Or Christine) was just too difficult and so a few people know me as “Chris”, largely through no fault of their own.

I'm a 26 year old Kiwi1) who loves Oxford to bits and I've been a “strong” atheist since I was 15. I used to care if you thought differently to me but now I don't, so long as you leave me and everyone else alone. From time to time I worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster and anyone who brings me good wine. I'm sarcastic, so you should be somewhat distrustful of anything I say. I despise the passive aggressive cowardice that is the default Kiwi attitude.

I sat down at the end of 2005 and thought a bit about my values and who I aspire to be. As time has gone by they've grown a bit, and I'll set them all down here. Perhaps that will help make me more accountable to them. Or maybe it will just make me sound naff and pretentious.

• The initial virtues: DHEC. Dare, Honour, Excellence and Courage. Very fluffy, pretentious and pseudo-motivational (rah-rah-rah). Also grossly open to interpretation and frequently contradictory. But they're a good starting point.
• Touch things only once, attack all problems head on, reply to email when I read it. Life is short.
• Keep a diary. And a journal.
• Choose so that I regret what I did do rather than what I could have done. Within limits. Extremism is dangerous in any form.
• Long term plans are a fool's game. Long term goals are an imperative. Phrased almost as pretentiously as DHEC.
• Perfection is the only acceptable resting place, but imperfection in me and everyone else is inevitable and also acceptable. Also pretentious.
• Be nice. But be consistent and don't take any shit.
• It is OK to judge.
• “Tall Poppy” is a goal, not an insult.

Philosophically I'm a wide eliminativist. I quote the Churchlands' argument for p:

• Certain of my opponents claim to think that not-p; but it is precisely my thesis that they do not. Therefore p.

That one's a joke. Sometimes it's hard to work out which philosophical arguments aren't. My position is simple: There is no free will; you cannot choose. There is no personal identity; “you” and “I” don't exist. Folk psychology is wrong; I don't believe in beliefs. God doesn't exist; what I mean by that is more obvious. But - and this is a very important but - all of this aexistence doesn't matter in our day to day lives, because those concepts are just good but untrue approximations to a much more complex objective reality. Sewing that all up into a convincing argument would take a lot more words than I can be bothered to type right here but if you're interested feel free to ask and I'll try to explain my reasoning.

If you've known me for long, or even for short, you'll know I'm also very good at over-committing myself. I dance, sometimes in time to the music. I'm working on that novel and have ideas for the next few. I may not finish the first. I used to do yoga but just do circuit classes with the rowers and stretch each morning nowadays. I can finally get to my toes without too much effort. This is neat, and one day I'll fold up like an accordion. I'm treasurer of our MCR, which mostly means collecting receipts and writing cheques for people. Oh, and something about a DPhil. Over the past few years I've also been working on some software which finds novel patterns in time series data. Which sounds mind-numbingly tedious until you translate “finds novel blah blah blah” to “predicts the stock market”. I'm selecting the most robust parameters now, the initial results have been extremely promising. Exciting times.

I claim intelligence is nothing more than the habit of using a skill, that I or anyone else of normal ability can learn to do anything, and I love to learn about everything, especially the nearly-scientific speculations of microbiology, genetics, space elevators, warp drives, nanotechnology and Vinge singularities. Transhumanism is where it's at. Perhaps one of these days I'll be able to fund scholarships in these areas?

And that is me in a paragraph or two. Isn't the web great…? I can spend an hour writing about myself, and people will read it! Ahh narcissism… how I do love thee. And me.