This page is about non-career related things. For technical/professional life, see Spencer's Projects, LinkedIn, and/or see his Resume.
Note: This page is a work in progress as always, and will be flushed out gradually
¶ Hobbies
¶ Unicycling
In 2007, when I was around 13 years old, I discovered for the first time that our family TV could tune to these newfangled "digital" TV stations. One of these was the now defunct channel G4tv. They sometimes aired Japanese game shows re-packaged for an American audience, including a show titled Unbeatable Banzuke, which featured a large variety of challenges and obstacle courses. One of the popular challenges was a unicycling course called Like a Pierrot (See example below).
Inspired by this TV show, I bought my first Unicycle and started to learn right away. After learning the basics, I got my friend David to start unicycling, and my brother learned how as well, and within 2 years, I ended up owning 5 different unicycles with different wheel sizes and styles.
At the University of Minnesota, I was an officer of the One Unicycle Club for 2 years, which met weekly to help people on campus learn how to Unicycle. It's amazing to me how quickly some people can learn with good instruction and the right mindset. I remember some people more or less perfecting riding forward within just an hour! After successfully teaching dozens of people to ride, I'd say unicycling is quite a bit easier than most people think. With consistent practice and the right learning strategy, I'm confident that most people (you included!) could learn the basics within just 10 solid hours of practice.
These days, I still unicycle a lot for fun, transportation, and exercise. Unicycles are criminally underrated as a convenient form of urban transportation, and I try my best to dispel the stigma around unicycles as a gimmick reserved for clowns and jugglers. Go get yourself a unicycle, join the community, and spread the word!
¶ Travel
I've been very fortunate to be able to travel internationally quite a bit. As cliché as it sounds, traveling really does give you a lot of perspective that can be valuable in many aspects of life. As an arbitrary goal, I hope to eventually make it to more than 100 unique countries, although I'm not really in any rush. Hiking, exploring, and touring interesting and culturally rich places just never gets old!
¶ Twisty Puzzles
I learned how to solve a classic 3x3 Rubik's Cube in 7th grade from Dan Brown's excellent video tutorial. Since then, I've collected and figured out how to solve around 20 unique twisty puzzles, and have maintained a consistent interest in them. In high school, I even helped make a Rubik's Cube solving robot!
Many people are unaware of the vast world of twisty puzzles, as there is an immensely large variety beyond just the NxNxN cubes. As a starting point, check out twistypuzzles.com, which has a fairly comprehensive database of known twisty puzzles. I also recommend checking out Oskar van Deventer's website and YouTube channel. Oskar is a puzzle designer who has been innovating and pushing twisty mechanisms to their limits for decades, and never fails to impress with his mind-bending puzzle prototypes.
¶ SSBM
Super Smash Bros. Melee is a competitive fighting game for the Nintendo Game Cube. It was released in 2001, but continues to have a strong presence in the competitive gaming community to this day. I'm a mediocre player, and avid spectator of the game.
¶ Favorites
¶ Music
I listen to lots of different music for working, enough that this topic deserves its own page.
¶ Card Games
- Oh Hell Trick-taking, bidding game. Also called Up and down the river
- Nerts (or Nuts) Best described as simultaneously cooperative and competitive solitaire. Very high energy, mentally and physically taxing game
- Canasta 4-player partner game played with a double deck. Many variations exist, but I prefer the original rule set
- Chinese Poker Great game for when table space is limited, played a lot of this on the bus in high school
¶ Other Games
- Liar's Dice Addicting dice game featured in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie
- Contact The best word game of all time
¶ Podcasts
- Reply All A podcast about the Internet, but also so much more
- Stuff You Should Know Conversational deep dives on a plethora of common topics
- Stuff to Blow Your Mind Deep dives on more intrinsically exciting material, similar style to Stuff You Should Know
- Radiolab Amazing production value, and consistently good journalism and storytelling. Usually rooted in some scientific topic, but can also get much more personal
- 99% Invisible High production value show about design in the real world with a golden voiced host
- Every Little Thing Answers shower thoughts and questions that are hard to google the answer to
- Twenty Thousand Hertz An incredibly well produced show about sound
¶ Philosophies
Overall, I'd call myself an Absurdist. Basically, I think it's likely that there's no intrinsic meaning to life in general, but that's ok because living can be kinda fun and interesting anyway.
I like some of the following philosophies as well.
- Existentialism Like Nihilism, but with the idea that personal meaning can be created by individuals for themselves (I usually stick to this line of thinking, it's useful for providing myself or others with motivation and happiness)
- Absurdism Rejects the Existentialist idea that individual meaning can be found, and embraces the absurd reality that no meaning of any form exists (I think this philosophy is likely the most accurate, but I also don't think it's very useful to think about, so I don't, because I'm a Pragmatist)
- Eternalism The idea that universe exists in time just as it does in the physical dimensions. Everything that has or will happen is set in stone (I also think that our experience of the flow of time is probably more a consequence of how our brains work rather than something fundemental)
- Fallibilism The principle that empirical knowledge can be accepted even though it cannot be proven with certainty
¶ Recurring Interests
- Recreational Mathematics
- Astronomy
- Physics and Astrophysics Research
- Rocketry, other Space Stuff