Brian Harvey's answers to the intro questions: WHERE DID YOU GROW UP? WHAT WAS YOUR PATH TO CAL? Manhattan (98th Street, not far from Columbia University). MIT undergrad (theoretically in math, but I really majored in the radio station and the Artificial Intelligence Lab). Various cool jobs, including writing one of the first programs that could typeset math formulas, Atari Research, and a short consulting job at Lucasfilm (not making movies, doing system programming for the Editdroid video editor). Two years in Paris as sysadmin at a computer music research center. Grad school at Stanford and Berkeley. Set up a kid-run computer center at a high school in Massachusetts, which was the most fun and most intense of all. Started teaching at Cal in 1987, recruited by Mike Clancy, who was a former housemate when we were grad students at Stanford. HOW MUCH PROGRAMMING HAVE YOU DONE (& WHAT LANGUAGES)? Way too much, starting with a course in Fortran programming at a Saturday program for high school kids at Columbia (where I also took several advanced math courses -- it was and is an amazing opportunity; look up "Science Honors Program" in Wikipedia). We would write a program, enter it onto punch cards, hand it in, and get the result *a week later*! Often that result was an error message about a misplaced comma, or something like that. It was very frustrating! After that I learned the low-level machine language for the IBM 7094, the most popular computer at science research labs at the time, then the machine language for the DEC PDP-10, my favorite computer ever, then Lisp. Much later I learned C. I've never actually programmed in Java, the language everyone seems to use these days. Along the way I dabbled in other languages including Snobol, Cobol, and APL. But the most important one, for my later career, was Logo, a language for kids that was developed around MIT near the end of my undergraduate years. That was one of the things that got me into teaching. Scratch, the language we use in this class, is a descendent of Logo. WHAT ARE YOUR HOBBIES? I collect art. Not famous dead artists; most of my collection is local artists whose work I discover during the wonderful annual Open Studios events in the east bay, in San Francisco, and on the peninsula. But I also try to pick up artworks as souvenirs of everyplace I visit, including Australia and several European countries. Some of my favorite artists are at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/art.html I have recently discovered that you can buy art on eBay, which is very dangerous to my budget! I'm a big fan of 1964-1968 British rock. I spend two days a week volunteering at Thousand Oaks elementary school, near where I live in north Berkeley. During the school day I just help out with whatever the class is doing, and then after school I teach a Scratch class for 4th and 5th graders, who are cuter and more energetic than Cal students, but not as intellectually developed -- it's a tradeoff. WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR TALENTS & SKILLS? I can bend down the first (outer) knuckle of most of my fingers while keeping the second knuckle straight, the result of lots of practice as a child. I'm pretty good at debugging programs. (Mike Clancy, who's much more into planning than I am, characterizes my programming technique as "debugging a blank piece of paper.") HAVE YOU DONE ANYTHING REMARKABLE? HAS ANYTHING MEMORABLE HAPPENED TO YOU? I think the most remarkable thing I've done was that high school computer center. For a few years we had an amazing, intense, hardworking, supportive community of kids and teachers; 25 years later my best friends are still four teachers and about 40 kids who were part of it. We gave kids keys to the room, and they were in there unsupervised evenings and weekends, and none of the equipment was ever stolen or broken as a result. One of my favorite stories is about the time I wanted to get some programming work done at the school without interruption, so I came in on a Sunday morning -- but all the terminals were in use! And, just as I was walking in, one kid said to another kid, "I hate school!" I was ROTFL. I guess writing my books was remarkable. I wrote the three-volume "Computer Science Logo Style," intended for teenagers, and then later co-wrote "Simply Scheme," the CS 3 text, with Matt Wright, who was at the time an undergraduate and a TA in CS 61A. You can read all of those on my web page, too. WHAT COMMITMENTS WILL BE CONSUMING YOUR CYCLES THIS SEMESTER? "Cycles"? Who wrote these questions, anyway? I'm teaching or co-teaching four different courses this semester: this one, the 500-student CS 61A (the first course for majors), a new version of my Social Implications of Computers class, and the how-to-be-a-TA course for first-time CS TAs. Between that and the Thousand Oaks gig, I should keep pretty busy. I'm also on the Committee on Admission, Enrollment, and Preparatory Education of the Berkeley Faculty Senate. We don't do the actual admissions process, which is done by full-time admissions staff, but we do set policy. Since I joined the committee last year, my goal has been to eliminate the extra GPA point that we give for AP courses, as a first step toward de-escalating the college admissions wars. High school kids are under so much pressure these days; I don't think I could be admitted to Cal today based on my high school record, even though it was quite good by the standards of those days. Kids are abusing stimulants, not for pleasure, but to be able to stay up all night to get their homework done. The result is that a lot of really smart kids end up not actually interested in anything, which is tragic. Oh, and I work on Berkeley Logo, a free implementation of Logo, along with a bunch of undergraduate collaborators.