User:JNShaumeyer

JNShaumeyer is many things: physicist, writer, musician, artist, gay man, person named Jeff, long-time partner, and loads of others in addition to being an obvious lover of labels. To establish context: I was born in 1956, in Kansas City, Kansas.

Status
At this writing (9 September 2005) I am deep into finishing up paperwork to apply to the US Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status for a nonprofit corporation that my partner and I incorporated last year. I don't care much for paperwork, but the process has been illuminating.

Interests
I enjoy words, which is one reason I write. I write fiction, I write non-fiction, I blog too much. I read all the time and feel still feel that I read too little. My favored books are crime novels and popular science.

I started in fourth grade to play the 'cello, which I still play, having resumed after a long hiatus brought on by graduate school. Several years ago I began to sing in performance, first in amateur musical theatre, then in an early-music sextet that is part of a church-music program run by my partner Isaac. This group of people at Isaac's church does two musicals a year, which explains why I've been learning tap dancing lately and why I occasionally do choreography for nuns (i.e., "Nunsense" shows).

I have a Ph.D. in experimental physics, which I got in 1984. I did research on the properties of liquid helium in a low-temperature lab; then room-temperature research in critical phenomena, for a Space Shuttle experiment; more aerospace engineering working on a new computer for the Hubble Space Telescope; some physical oceanography building a deep-water buoy; started a small, satellite-communications company and went broke; still broke and starting a nonprofit, scientific-research organization with a mission in public education about science.