User:HalMorris

This is my first draft of a user page.

I have been a Math Ph.D. program drop-out, a computer systems analyst from 1981-2001, since 20o1 an online seller of used books still writing my own business software in Perl running on Linux.

History has been more of a calling to me though I've made no living by it. I think it's fair to say I have a bachelor's level knowledge of USSR history, and a Doctoral level knowledge of "History of the Early American Republic". In the 90s, with a well-paying day job, I regularly attended the premier conference on this branch of history -- mostly running from 1800-1850. I put out a newsletter called "Jacksonian Miscellanies" archived at http://jmisc.net/jmisc/index.html It is a sprawling area of history easy to get lost in. When attending SHEAR conferences, attended by around 200 people, I would be the rare person without a doctorate, and for that matter the rare person not presenting, but about half of the people I met knew of me through my internet work.

More recently, I've been struggling with trying to understand the U.S.'s current political climate, and how it is affected by a radically new information order -- trying to create one discipline that I can hardly find anyone doing, that I'd call Economics of Ideas. If there ever is such a recognized discipline then I think seminal works will include Elizabeth Eisenberg on how the printing press transformed the world, some writers of histories which explore feedback loops between lived events and their media representations and how these produce certain cultural phenomena (Benedict Anderson on nationalisms generally, David Waldstreicher on revolutionary and early postrevolutionary America, Todd Gitlin on the SDS in wonderland) -- and dealing with the present state of affairs, Clay Shirkey.

I have also been reading extensively, trying to make sense of social epistemology or rather two academic factions that claim that name but are dismissive towards each other, one in the anglo analytic philosophical tradition and the other picking up strong elements of postmodernism (but also, strangely, transhumanism).

The main venue for my attempts to communicate on such matters, and on some of the madness of some elements of public opinion, has been called "The Real Truth Project". The title is a sort of lame joke because I found two "The Truth Project's, one being 9/11 "truthers" who say it was all faked by the Bush Administration, and the other being a sort of fundamentalist Christian entity.

Wikipedia is enticing as a means of coming in out of the cold or getting out of my head, and doing some useful work while peering about to see whether I can find any allies or people to whom this is not all totally alien, or at least dinner conversationalists.