User:Zen-ben

Musical interests
I have something of a passion for IDM, and a lasting fondness for netlabel releases; together, these have led me to spend hours on end listening to a single half-hour release from an artist who appears to have since drifted off into space. Additionally, I enjoy listening to albums from Tryad, a collective of artists spread out across the planet.

Recently, I've found a liking for Field recordings, especially those of nature preserves. Other useful listening that I've found for working hours is Hearts of Space.

Literary interests
Far and away my favourite poem is "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver; it's a poem that spoke to me when I first read it, and captured my imagination painfully clearly. Similarly, "Déjeuner du Matin" by Jacques Prévert was very striking early in my study of French.

Dune has been exceptionally influential on my life and thinking, as has Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Open source and free culture
I'm an active mentor and organizer for the Community Data Science Workshops held at the University of Washington in the spring and fall, and I'm actively maintaining a project for the workshops that aims to teach data collection and analysis techniques using Wikipedia's REST APIs.

Myriad other interests
A topic area I've seen more and more about recently is Aquaculture, farming aquatic creatures and plants. I've especially become fascinated with edible seaweed as a more significant dietary component, and I want to explore introducing more farmed shellfish into my diet (though I still need to try geoducks.) I'm also curious to try Caulerpa lentillifera, also known as Sea Grapes, although I don't know how possible that is on this side of the Pacific.

Specific articles about Aquaculture
So! As you probably already know, deciding what to eat from the oceans can be complicated. We basically treat fishing as this "go wild, the oceans are vast" sort of resource, which is completely unlike how we manage any other form of resource at this point in time. But just because something's farmed doesn't make it great (farmed salmon? Yeah, that has a few problems.) So ... what to do? Well, look at the options. But even then, there can be differences. Turns out, scallop aquaculture is mostly a function of capturing the spat (larval scallops) in the wild, while geoduck aquaculture and oyster aquaculture both rely on spawning in captivity. (There's an idea here, really.)

Other stuff
I'm sure I can add more here.

Interesting Wikipedia pages
I just learned about Superfest, an ultra-durable glass process/series of glassware. It's neat!

Fascinating oddities
I have a tee shirt for a magazine that dates back to about the turn of the millennium; the shirt has outlasted the mag, by about five times its lifetime. That magazine, Fringe Golf, existed for a short time online, as well as a short time in print. Now, the only references to it are in the dusty archives of magazines about the industry.