Who Is This Guy, Anyway?

My name is Zachary Heaton, and I am an undergraduate student of Mechanical Engineering and International Studies (Peace and Global Security Studies) at the University of Dayton. To be blunt, I am not formally qualified to hold forth on any subject at all, but this weblog provides me with a wonderful opportunity to do so anyway. Given that there are readers of this weblog who take me seriously (particularly in regards to my discussion of computer security), and who are themselves very well qualified to hold opinions on the issues I discuss, I like to think that I'm not too far off base. However, your mileage may vary.

Every fleeting thought you've ever had in your life, no matter how bizarre, is someone's lifelong obsession. And he has a website. — Skif's Internet Theorem

Where Do You Get This Stuff?

Occasionally, I am asked where I come up with the material I write about. The answer is simple: I try to read the work of as many other intelligent people I can, and see what interesting ideas they're playing around with. Sometimes those ideas are good for a quick "Hmm," sometimes they're good for a weblog entry, and sometimes they're worth a major shift in life philosophy. I have tried to list most of the works which fall into the last catagory below - these are either works which exposed me to a completely new avenue of thought, which crystallized a general area of thought I had been struggling with, or which are simply a fascinating and informative read. I recommend all of the following works highly, and encourage you to take some time to check them out.

Complex Systems and General Science

History and Sociology

The War on Terror

Philosophy

Technology and Security

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. — Charles Babbage

Contact Information

If you wish to contact me, you can leave a comment on the weblog or send me an email at port80weblog@gmail.com. I generally respond to e-mail within a day or two. (This is not my only e-mail address – if you have another address of mine, please keep using it.)

Design Notes

This website is laid out entirely in valid CSS and XHTML. The site design is original, but the techniques used were inspired in large part by the tutorials at A List Apart, the CSS design information provided by Eric Meyer, and the list layout techniques used in the Kubrick theme for WordPress. This site is hosted by the excellent BlogSome.

While I created the layout for this site, I cannot take the same credit for the images in the header rotation. The header images are modified forms of the following photographs from the Stock Photo Exchange:

Legal Disclaimer

This entire site, and the works contained within, are Copyright 2003-2004 by Zachary Heaton. They are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderiv 2.0 license, the full text of which is available here. For a quick overview of this license, see the nonbinding summary page available on the Creative Commons website.

Mirroring this site is prohibited, unless you are about to slashdot it, in which case mirroring is expressly requested.