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,
• realises that this photo is inappropriate as a portrait on several levels, but wants to use it anyway:

But who am I? Well, in one adjective-ridden, incomprehensible sentence, I am an atheist eliminativist dancing skiing computer geek who's newly fanatic about jiu jitsu and just abandoned a perfectly good aircraft. I love wine, and tawny port even more. I'm doing my DPhil in machine learning for bioinformatics at Oxford University and I've 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. I'm usually busy, and I like it that way. My DPhil is all about inferring the causal structure of 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 27 year old Kiwi1) and I despise the passive aggressive cowardice that is endemic in NZ. I'm sick of being a student, but love being a student in Oxford, and know I'll miss it when I finish in late 2010. I can't wait to start my career in consulting. I often contradict myself.

I've been a “strong” atheist since I was 15 and 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 and love to tease, you should not believe anything I say. 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 ethos: DHEC. Dare, Honour, Excellence and Courage. These are fluffy, pretentious, pseudo-motivational (rah-rah-rah), grossly open to interpretation and frequently contradictory. A good starting point.
• 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 don't work. Long term goals are essential.
• Perfection is the only standard good enough to stop at, imperfection is inevitable.
• 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.
• 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 now but if you're interested feel free to ask and I'll try to explain in more detail.

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 machine learning, microbiology, genetics, space elevators, nanotechnology and Vinge singularities. Transhumanism is where it's at and I aim to fund scholarships, research and new business in these areas. Timeline? 10 years.

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.