What is this place?

This place is Piles of Sand, my personal macro blog. I defended my PhD in Spring 2026, and as of writing I have a lot of free time on my hands, so I'm going to try messing around with some new-fangled technologies like "the written word", both as a mechanism for advertising myself to potential employers (hire me!) and also to create space to work out my thoughts on certain topics. I'm going to try to keep posts below 500 words, just to set an arbitrary cap. We'll probably start talking about optimal transport a little bit in the next post. All this is going to be highly informal, but I will cite and link out to relevant work wherever seems appropriate.