May 31, 2023: I thought this was gonna be a professional blog, but it’s not. After the last few years, I am no longer interested in separating the personal and professional beyond what is necessary to maintain my material comfort. I am one person. One person of soul and science. I am one partner, to my wife, Marisa, and among my selves. I belong to one community, woven through everything, on this one earth, in this one universe. I knew better than I realized when I chose the title. nothing is one thing. Or everything is many things at once, conceived in language as distinct parts, but never fully separable.

Original: My name is Mike Famulare and I’ve been working as an epidemiological modeler at the Institute for Disease Modeling for a decade now. In that time, I’ve been part of a lot of things—some you might’ve heard of like the Seattle Flu Study and very stressful days in February 2020 or This Podcast Will Kill You (transcript), and you probably haven’t (Google Scholar).

During this time, I’ve grown a lot of strong opinions, partially formed and not-so-loosely held, about the practice and philosophy of mathematical modeling in epidemiology. After the last few years, I’m left with a lot of feelings about how to be a good modeler that are bigger and messier than the things I normally do at work can contain. So I need a place to work some stuff out. Hence this blog.