After the first time my research was written up in the New York Times, I was pretty excited. Sure, my name didn’t actually appear in the article, but I had no complaints. After all, it’s not every day people outside of computer science actually care about my research. I know, it’s shocking that the general public doesn’t care about trace caches or return-oriented programming without returns, but that’s just the world we live in.
But that’s not what this is about.
Recently, I was reminded that I appeared in a newspaper half a decade earlier—that’s right, The Daily, UW’s daily student newspaper—and in a much different context: Kendo, the Japanese martial art. As I recall, I was just about to don my armor for my first match of the day (and the only match of the day as I was promptly eliminated without scoring a single point), when I was asked what I enjoyed about Kendo. At this point, I uttered the immortal words, “It’s fun, it’s exercise, and you get to hit people in the head.” Truer words were never spoken.
If you haven’t experienced the joy of hitting people in the head with bamboo swords, I highly recommend it.