About me

I'm Ricardo Wickert. Or Whiskas - but not your regular canned cat food. I'm 36, a Ph.D. physicist, and an amateur elite rider with Team Magnesium Pur.

I ride a bike, take photos, make pancakes and drink lots of coffee, first while pretending to be doing quantum mechanics , now while developing machine learning methods for forecasting in the energy industry. While fighting a war that many would only dream of, I face some of the best problems in the world. And when inspiration hits me, I update this blog, where I first wrote about the adventures and misadventures of life in Grad school, then cycling, work, and now mostly keep eventual philosophical digressions and a diary of life in the trenches.

Self-descriptions can be boring and stereotypical, but, well - I'm a non-orthogonal, stochastic, or maybe symplectic luminary-hearted soul who got some of it wrong. I'm "The Loneliness of the Middle-Distance Runner" in a "Stars of Track and Field"-kind of way. I'm not Ulysses, I'm never going home. I currently suffer from Transatlanticisms. I can throw parties - and knives. I know the trick is to keep breathing, and will spell "Ha-ha-ha, I've destroyed the hopes and the dreams of a generation of faux-romantics" while still appreciating the smell of coffee on the breath against my neck. And I'll blow you all to the wall when you realise what I've been working for. [ If this doesn't make any sense, check out A Musical Affirmation ].

There are a number of entries here I'm particularly fond of, but, given the wide variety in background and interests of those reading, I'll keep my list short.
>> "The Updated Whiskas Facts" has all the trivia about me you could ever want.
>> "The Consecration of Spring" is, to date, what I consider to be my most inspired piece of writing. (Actually, I'd vouch for the Portuguese original, but the translation didn't miss much).
>> My life in general (as of early 2012) was best summarized in "Unspeakable: legibility, the sum of all fears, and the Yay! philosophy".
>> My grudges with Academia show up now and then in "Dear Humans: you're doing it wrong, part I" and "..., part II", or "Something rotten in Denmark"
>> While cycling is an integral part of the struggle, it's seldom directly a topic. Besides "Something rotten in Aigle", or "Life - a racing metaphor", I keep promising more cycling entries will follow; for the time being, you're invited to read my past posts in the Slowtwitch forum .

Always Yay!,

R.