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Just For Fun

Here are some things I’ve published that you may find interesting. I tend to find them more embarrassing. But what’s life without a little embarrassment, right? Perhaps interestingly while none of these seem to reflect upon my career at all, they actually all do quite a bit.

Truly Alien
This was a paper I wrote on the nature of extraterrestrial life. This was a light-hearted paper that was meant to inspire imagination rather than be a rigorous treatment of the type of life that may exist on other worlds.

In My Head
This was a short story I wrote that, perhaps surprisingly, did get published. It’s more than slightly dark in nature but I’ve always been interested in the things that drive and motivate us — particularly when those motivations go awry.

Cold Dark Night
This was a poem I wrote at a dark time in my life. But I do believe that at the darkest times, we are often our most expressive.

Cosmological Constant Manipulation in Extra Dimensions for Exotic Field Propulsion
I’ve long had a fascination with the idea of faster-than-light propulsion methods, based on the Alcubierre model that was postulated way back in 1994. This paper is one of my attempts to look at whether extra dimensions had anything to say about this concept.

I Am, Therefore I Think: Consciousness as an Adaptation
I went through a phase where I was studying everything I could about how the human trait of consciousness may have been the result of evolutionary forces. This paper is one result of some of that research.

The Role of Evolution in the Formation of Consciousness
This was yet another paper in my continuing quest to understand the basis of cosnciousness and how it might have been an effect that was ultimately selected for as part of evolutionary drives.

The Process of Evolution, Mass-Extinction Events, and the Lack of SETI Success
I became very interested in the idea of extinction level events in history and the obvious consequences those must have produced. This paper was an attempt to look at one of the non-obvious consequences or, at least, putting an already formed idea into a different light. (There is a separate document for the figures mentioned in the paper.)

The Basis of Belief Systems
This was a paper I wrote that discusses the nature of belief. This was a paper I wrote for a discussion panel that was convened regarding Pascal Boyer’s book Religion Explained. The goal was to present not only our own understanding of Boyer’s material but also our own thoughts based on previous studies.