My name is Daniel Goldman, and this site is about the most important brand I own: myself.
I am an aspiring polymath and a rōnin scholar — someone who studies broadly across disciplines and conducts independent research outside institutional walls. I have largely rejected academia in its current form. Instead, I publish using open repositories for omniprints — making research freely accessible and breaking down the barriers between fields.
What I Study
My research interests span mathematics (probability theory, statistics, graph theory, theory of means), public health and epidemiology, economics and market systems, computational systems and AI, the scientific and historical study of religion and alcohol, linguistics, anthropology, and physics. I look for the connections between these fields — the structural patterns that recur across seemingly unrelated systems.
32 works are indexed on my ORCID profile, covering topics from voluntary cyclical distancing models for pandemic response to exergy-based economic theory, from graph reals to the architecture of thought, from fluctuations in sexual modes to digital sentience. The breadth is the point — a trans-disciplinary approach that integrates ideas from one domain into another.
What I Build
68 public repositories on GitHub in Python, Rust, Forth, Solidity, TeX, JavaScript, and HTML. Current projects include retro computing emulation (Megapad-64, a CDP1802 spiritual successor), Forth-based systems, natural language protocols, scholarly networking tools built on the AT Protocol, and blockchain-based economic systems. I build across the stack, from low-level machine emulation to web applications.
I am also developing Cricket Frog Hollow — a stewardship-driven eco-tourism bed-and-breakfast on 11 acres of riparian landscape in Orange County, New York. The project pairs a commercially disciplined hospitality operation with an independent conservation non-profit on the same site. The pre-development work product — QGIS spatial analysis, financial architecture, zoning interpretation, environmental policy, and operational planning — is a 300+ page body of work I built as a single-operator effort.
What I Write About
I edit five publications on Medium and maintain several blogs:
- The Spiritual Anthropologist — the scientific and philosophical study of religion and alcohol, vaccines, and public health
- Politicoid — politics from a scientific and philosophical lens
- Trading Politics — how government and politics shape markets and investing
- Geekers Keep — crowdfunded games, technology, and geek culture
- Medium — long-form writing across all of the above and more
What Drives This
I believe the walls between academic fields are artificial and counterproductive. Research should be trans-disciplinary, openly published, and integrated with project management and design thinking. I founded Reform Academia to promote this vision — breaking down the silos that constrain how knowledge is produced and shared.
I believe the gig economy needs member-owned infrastructure. I created the Guild Association to help build modern guilds for independent contractors — cooperatively owned, member-governed organizations that serve the people doing the work.
I believe land stewardship and commercial hospitality can operate on the same site, strengthening both. Cricket Frog Hollow is the proof-of-concept for that thesis.
And I founded the First Church of Penguinism, because sometimes the best way to explore questions about science, religion, and philosophy is through a satirical church dedicated to penguins. What started as a joke with my nephew about penguins and Linux has grown into a genuine framework for thinking about the questions religion tries to answer — answered differently.
Identity
I use they/them pronouns. I'm queer, Jewish, and a secularist. I care about these things and I'm open about them.
My amateur radio call sign is AC2YB (Extra Class). I'm based in Orange County, New York.