Seven years ago, I changed careers from theoretical physics to engineering, and discovered a deep love for understanding the things which make real-world systems work. This blog comes from that interest; while it discusses everything from AI to Middle East politics, the shared thread is seeing how things work in the real world, what makes them work well or poorly, and how they can be changed for the better.The interests reflected here are my own eclectic set. Some of them come from my professional or academic background — engineering, physics, history. Others come from long-running passions of mine; I’ve been a news junkie since I was seven, played the piano since before that, and have read avidly and widely for as long as I can remember.
Open questions
Some of the questions I’m presently most interested in are:
Who am I?
Professionally, I’m a principal engineer at Google and Chief Architect for Social. My primary responsibility is the overarching technical design of Google’s social products, especially the Google+ Project. I’ve been at Google since 2003, during which time I’ve worked on artificial intelligence (in the search quality / ranking team), search infrastructure (as head of the ultra-high capacity search group), and planet-scale distributed storage.
Before that, I was at Stanford’s Institute for Theoretical Physics, where I worked on using unconventional geometries and topologies (noncommutative, twistor, etc) to study the low-level structure of spacetime. My physics papers are available via the arXiv.
During my undergraduate and graduate careers, I became very interested in history — first in Late Antiquity and then in the early Middle Ages. My core interest was initially in social history and the study of daily life in these periods, and gradually mixed with my existing interest in religion to an especial interest in the religious history of these periods. This led to extensive coursework and research, and almost led to my doing a graduate minor. Lately I’ve been moving my eye backwards a bit and starting to study the emergence of monotheism in the Late Bronze Age Middle East.
I come from a large Jewish, Israeli family. On the religious side, it varies from the ultra-Orthodox (In the rabbi business for over 2,500 years) to ultra-secular (Karl Marx is my Nth cousin), and watching this discourse play out left me deeply interested in all the related matters, from individual faith (and how it differs for people) to the social meaning of religion. On the political side, you can’t grow up with wars breaking out at the drop of a hat and not become a news junkie. You just can’t. So I read it compulsively. And analyze it compulsively, looking for signals of what’s really going on and what’s about to happen.
The Really Important Disclaimer
This is my personal blog, not an official Google blog. All statements and opinions on this blog are my own (or those of the respective commenters), and do not necessarily represent those of my employer or of anyone else.