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Welcome

I'm Dan (aka Danimal, Donny, Lenski, Big Head... whatever you wanna call me). I'm a ~~sophomore~~ ~~junior~~ ~~senior at~~ ~~soon-to-be~~ graduate (yikes!) of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. I am a brother of Α Φ Ω, a community service fraternity. I'm now a physics grad student at the University of Maryland at College Park. Home for me is East Lansing, Michigan.

You are visitor to this page, since I made this counter on May 19, 2003. It only counts actual humans who visit, not web-crawling bots, at least if my script works right...

Try my (somewhat retarded) online quizzes. I made them myself :-P. Enjoy!

If you want to know what I'm up to, please read my LiveJournal, because I update it ~~pretty often~~ once in a blue moon. This page here was last updated on .

My domain name is TolEressea.net. Tol Eressëa is an island in the mythological world of J. R. R. Tolkien. It means "The Lonely Isle," and it's the name of an island off the coast of the undying land of the gods, which was just barely visible from the island of Númenor, where mortal men live. It was like being able to glimpse heaven at a distance and it drove them nuts. Read more about Tol Eressëa if you like. Anyway, it's a cool domain name I think.

Sports and Hobbies

I like to ride my bike... absolutely everywhere possible! Especially since the traffic is so bad in Maryland and it drives me nuts. Plus it's good exercise and it makes me feel like I'm polluting the environment less! I've got a fairly complete set of bike tools and I'm an obsessive tinkerer and so my bikes are not even remotely stock. Also, I'm a serious cheapskate and craigslist addict, so I've managed to own a few fairly cool bikes on my grad student budget. Read my biking page or read about the bikes I own (or want).

I like computers a lot. I program them and fix them and build them. Sometimes I even get paid for it :-) See my computers and Linux page (though I haven't updated it in a while...)

I played ultimate frisbee with the University of Maryland Ultimate team from 2003-2005. It was tons of fun but I've now used up my 5 years of College Ultimate eligibility :'(. Over the summers, I played with a couple of DC club teams, and at Cornell I played Ultimate Frisbee with the Buds, the men's club team. During summer 2002 we had an Ithaca summer ultimate league, and I played on Papa Smurf, the blue team. In high school, I used to run track and cross country and swim.

I also love rock climbing, though don't have much time for it anymore. Whenever I can, I go to cool area like Carderock, conveniently close, or Stone Mountain, far away but totally awesome! I'm now a member of the Terrapin Trail Club :-). You should check out my climbing photos, or read about my amazing spring break climbing trip. I mostly learned to climb at the Lindseth Climbing Wall at Cornell, and with my bud Mike Rathke at home in Michigan.

I am a fan of cartoons and comics. Mostly not Marvel and DC comics, like Superman and X-Men, but the kind that are funny. My favorite American comics are Calvin and Hobbes (could you guess?) and Foxtrot and Jump Start. I also really like French comics, which I found out about when I lived in Montpellier, France four years ago. My favorites are Astérix, which is about a bunch of ancient Gauls, Gaston LaGaffe, about a lazy, clumsy, genius named Gaston, and Lucky Luke which is about a cowboy.

Academic Interests

I now work in an experimental condensed matter physics lab here in Maryland. Check out our lab web page.

At Cornell, I was a double major in both physics and linguistics ... Yeah, I know, it's a strange combination. I speak French thanks to my one-year stay in Montpellier, France when I was in high school. I also speak Spanish well enough to read books and find my way around. I took classes in Hebrew my sophomore year. I love learning languages and figuring out how they work and how they're related.

I worked for a while at the Ithaca branch of Speechworks (before we merged we were Eloquent Technology), a Boston-based company that develops text to speech software. I worked there from February 2001 to March 2002, full time in the summer, part time during the school year. It was a cool company with an awesome product, and it fitted perfectly with my academic interests in linguistics, computers, and physics.

I've chosen to continue in physics for graduate school! I'm interested in condensed matter physics and also cosmology. I've always been fascinated by black holes, quasars, the big bang, and all that cool stuff. But these days I am getting more interested in hands-on stuff, and not just theory. I had a job at a biophysics lab lab at Cornell for the summer between junior and senior years. I was been a teaching assistant for intro physics for non-majors for my whole senior year, which was a very great experience!