Origins: choose your coordinate system carefully

The first post must be a meta-post.

Riv-bar is a kanji mistranscription of my last name, given to me when I competed in my first kendo tournament. I used it as the title for this blog because it reminds me of Planck's constant, h-bar, which describes the scales at which systems behave quantum-mechanically.

This blog will be a dumping ground for recipes, research notes, cartoons, cognition, and admittedly angst, at least until I figure out what kind of posts get the most attention.

My background: I graduated from Case Western Reserve University in 2007 with a BS in Mathematics and Physics and a BA in Linguistics and Computation (self-declared). I finished my first year of grad school in theoretical biophysics, but am taking the year off because I am totally burnt out and am in an identity crisis. As I seek employment in some mathematical field, I also hope to continue exploring the world of research in my area of interest: brain and network theory.