100 things about Dan

1. My earliest memory is when I was 2 or so, on a family vacation to Florida. I remember throwing an enormous beachball into the waves, and it drifting out to sea. Very traumatic.
2. Another very early memory is falling down some (carpeted) stairs.
3. I played a lot with blocks and tinker toys when I was little. There are pictures of some pretty fantastic structures that I built.
4. I learned to read when I was 3, from Uncle Scrooge comic books that my dad had collected. I am still a connoisseur of old Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic books from the '50's. I had many imaginary friends.
5. I also learned a lot of words by copying them on an old manual typewriter, one at a time, from a "Superfriends" dictionary.
6. I read a lot when I was a kid. My parents didn't have a TV, so reading kept me entertained. I went through many many stacks of books from the library.
7. I didn't go to kindergarten. Meeting the principal before starting first grade, I told him that I had built a "hovel" in my back yard, which, I am told, impressed him with my vocabulary.
8. I grew up in Dearborn Heights, a suburb of Detroit. This is "Ford Country", and most of my friends' parents worked for Ford or the automotive industry in some way or other.
9. My neighborhood was working-class, with sidewalks in front of all the houses. Every other house on my street had one or two kids near my age.
10. I was the neighborhood Dungeon Master, and I can still recite obscure Dungeons and Dragons facts and statistics.
11. When I was 11 my parents got me a puppy (a miniature schnauzer who I promptly named "Fritz"). He was lots of fun and very sweet, but kind of dumb. Before that we had a toy poodle named "Cupcake". He was a rather spiteful little dog, as I remember. Probably because I chased him around a lot, or perhaps because he thought his name was humiliating.
12. I was an only child until I was 12, when my brother Gabe was born. I followed his progression month by month and read all the baby books. I would baby-sit him for $1/hour, and that's how I got my spending cash all through high school, and gained much experience in changing diapers.
13. I was definitely the class nerd, with big thick glasses. I was very nearsighted until getting Lasix a few years ago. Eva and I both had it done (it is amazing!). I did it first (the guinea pig).
14. In second grade I wanted to be a paleontologist (I knew all the dinosaurs), but then by fourth grade I wanted to be an architect. I had discovered graph paper, and used it to draw building plans.
15. I decided that I wanted to be a physicist when I was in fifth grade, during a science fiction-reading phase. I flirted with the idea of being an economist a bit in my first year of college, but decided that I'd rather be a mediocre physicist, pursuing larger truths, than a good economist, studying how people behave. Immature, I know, but hey, I was in college.
16. In any case, I've always planned on being a college professor. I've always felt that ideas, pursuit of truth, and discovery are noble pursuits, and being a professor lets you pursue truth for a living.
17. My job is my dream job, but I have a long way to go before I'm especially good at it. The responsibilities weigh me down, the multitasking is extreme, and I make a lot of mistakes. But sometimes I discover something new (if obscure), and that's pretty exciting to me.
18. My parents are both academics. My dad is a philosopher (philosophy of language) and my mom is a historian (Russian history).
19. Favorite chore: filling/emptying the dishwasher. It's well defined, you can easily think about something else, and it doesn't take too long.
20. Least favorite: yard work, especially during allergy season.
21. My favorite color is green. It was yellow when I was young, then I realized this was too girly and switched to green. In high school I switched it to blue, but then I came back to green in college
22. My eyes are green (so are Eva's).
23. I met Eva when I was in graduate school, at a party thrown by my fellow graduate student Carlo and his wife Becca. I didn't expect to meet any dateable girls at the party, but I heard there was food.
24. I like to cook, and I'm learning new recipes all the time now that I can cook for both of us. I particularly like to make spaghetti, fish stew, a north african lamb dish, and key lime pies.
25. I love to play chess, but I am depressingly bad at it. I can waste hours online playing other mediocre opponents.
26. For last Christmas, Eva and my dad teamed up and got me an acoustic guitar. I have wanted to learn to play most of my life, but could never justify buying one until now. I would love to someday learn to play as well as my dad.
27. When I was 10, I lived for a year in Helsinki, Finland, and went to a Swedish-speaking public school. By the end of the year my Swedish was quite good, but it has atrophied ever since.
28. Once, in the playground at the Swedish school, I started rolling a snowball, and decided to see how big I could make it. Pretty soon all the kids on the playground were helping, and I was just pointing to tell the rest where to push it to pick up the most snow. It got to be about 8 feet tall. Later in the classroom, we looked out the window and saw that a snowplow was about to wreck it! The teacher let us run outside and save it.
29. I love reading about history, especially ancient history.
30. For books, I like ones that are well-written but have a discernible plot.
31. I bought my car, a green Ford Escort ZX2, in my third year of grad school. It is still our only car, my bachelormobile, also know as the "Lizard". It is now at 104,000 miles and I hope to keep driving it until it falls apart.
32. I don't understand religion or how anyone could be religious. The claims religions make seem ridiculous to me, and I think that most religions exploit their members. I also think that many politicians exploit religion to attain or retain power.Though the real "opiate of the masses" is professional sports.
33. I am addicted to following professional basketball and baseball, mostly by keeping track of the Detroit teams on Sportsillustrated.com.
34. I am very liberal, especially on social issues. I am a political addict, and am easily entertained by reading the news.
35. I ran cross-country and track in high school. I was one of the better, though not the best, long-distance runners at my school.
36. I play basketball twice a week, Wednesday and Friday mornings at the gym. It is great fun, and I look forward to it all week. My excuse for taking the time to do it is that it is good exercise, and good stress relief.
37. One of my favorite summers was one during grad school I spent in the French Alps, at a summer school in atomic physics. We would go to lectures by (mostly) Nobel Prize-winning physicists in the mornings, go hiking in the afternoons, and eat dinner on a porch overlooking Mont Blanc. One weekend we drove up to central France to watch a solar eclipse.
38. I am a good whistler.
39. I am very ticklish.
40. I like beer (especially India Pale Ales) and red wine.
41. I love watching movies (all kinds, but especially film noir, science fiction, mobster/crime movies, and thrillers).
42. I have a checklist of the top 1000 movies of all time, and have seen about 200 of them.
43. If left unchecked, I will eat dark chocolate until I feel sick.
44. My favorite animal is the turtle.
45. But our cats (Calamity Jane and Cyrano de Pussycat) are terrific and highly entertaining. I am now more a cat person than a dog person (though I like dogs too.)
46. I was terrified of talking on the telephone when I was little.
47. I was terrified of asking girls out until college. I never had a girlfriend until the summer after college.
48. I went to the University of Michigan for college. I got into Cornell, U Chicago, and Berkeley, but they were all too expensive by comparison. At U of M, I had a 3.9 GPA, graduated with "highest honors" and got an award for the best senior thesis in the physics department. It was about measurements of positronium decay. Positronium is a bound state of an electron and a positron (like hydrogen, but replacing the proton with a positron) and lives only 140 nanoseconds before the electron and positron annihilate in a burst of gamma rays.
49. I was valedictorian at my high school. My valedictory speech was about comparing life to a cross-country race.
50. When I got to Harvard for grad school, I quickly realized that I wasn't the smartest person in the class anymore. So I decided that classes didn't matter, and that pleasing your advisor, working hard, and thinking imaginatively were more important. Now the professors at Harvard who taught my classes have all retired, and no one will ever know my grades in grad school.
51. I played soccer in grade school. There were lots of Dans on the team, so I was called "Mac". Another kid named Dan was Polish, and he was known as "Ski". I played right midfield, generally.
52. I like to plan trips and read travel guides. I can stare at maps for hours. So much information!
53: I have been to: Canada, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Italy, Greece, and Japan.
54: I had 4 years of French in high school, but I have forgotten most of the vocabulary I once knew.
55: I have been to all the states except: Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, North Dakota, and Alaska.
56. On the weekends, I like to hop in the car and spend the day exploring somewhere new.
57: I like limericks, and have a good collection of them in my head.