User:OldTimeNESter

I live in the United States and work as a statistician and computer programmer. Sometimes I use the R_programming_language and do both at once!

I'm fascinated with older video games, particularly the Nintendo_Entertainment_System. I like to play on an actual NES, but I also use various emulators to explore how the games work and to write my own small programs in 6502 assembly. My user name is taken from "Nester," who was the fictional sidekick of faux-Nintendo President Howard Phillips in he early Nintendo_Power magazines. Lately, I have also been playing with the Basic_Stamp, which is a programmable microcontroller. While I enjoy working with complex data structures, my true hacker self will always be most at home in the world of assembly language and hardware interrupts.

My background is as a social scientist, and I'm still partial to mathematical models of social behavior/explanation. I'm influenced by the work of Vernon_Smith, Elinor_Ostrom, and public_choice in general. For an alternative framework that I also find compelling, see Analytical_Marxism. I've become more interested in engineering as I've studied differential equations: at the moment, I'm working on understanding the Lorenz_system.

I'm a big fan of Samuel_Beckett, and an overall believer in absurdism. I like post-structuralist philosophy, in particular Michel_Foucault, but my epistemology falls closest to coherentism of the analytical philosopher Willard_van_Orman_Quine. I also write poetry (primarily free_verse), and among other things have written about John_Odom_(baseball), Michael_Larson, and the Demon_Core.