Statistical physicist interested in self-organization, complexity measures, computational mechanics (a method for building causal models from data) and cellular automata.
His 
notebooks are worth checking out.
I first heard of Mr. Shalizi when he reviewd the CoV for the Hyper-Weirdness web site back in 95.
An offshoot of the Extropians. It's actually not so much a religion --- even a "a memetically engineered atheistic religion" --- as a bunch of militant rationalists who've O.D.'d on Richard Dawkins and general systems theory (the latter a boondoggle if there ever was one). "The name Virus was chosen to be deliberately antagonistic, to put people on their guard and let them know this idea was designed to infect them. Call it truth in advertising." {CRS, himself a militant rationalist fond of Dawkins}
-- DavidLucifer
See other InterestingPeople.