Jamel Cato's Postmodern Bio
Five Things You Didn't Know About Me
- I'm a morning person.
- I'm fascinated by Ancient Egypt.
- I was born and raised in Philadelphia.
- I wrote a novel.
- Shockingly, I am not the only person in America named
Jamel Cato.
I'm lucky to be here because…
Several years ago when I was on vacation in Virginia Beach a boy was attacked by a shark in the exact spot where I had been swimming earlier. On the news that night they showed an overhead shot of the area from a helicopter. You could clearly see a whole school of sharks circling in the water. I only swim in pools now.
What I've learned
- Don't look back.
- You can earn a graduate degree in statistics without taking a single economics course, but it’s impossible to earn a graduate degree in economics without taking many statistics courses.
- I'm pretty good with databases.
- The high points of my life, by a wide margin, have been the unscripted moments of bonding and laughter I’ve shared with my children.
What I've learned the hard way
- Don't lose the baby's pacifier.
- If you're a professional data analyst, don't use Mircosoft Excel 2002 or earlier to run linear regressions because you will get negative values for R^2, F-tests and Sum of Squares. Like I didn't have enough problems in my life.
Things I suspect, but don't know for sure
- Tony Soprano got whacked.
- There are parallel universes. No, seriously. Before you disagree, read The Fabric of Reality by physicist David Deutsch.
- It’s not too late to become the Jamel Cato I could’ve been.
Favorite Quotes
"After the game, the king and the pawn go into the same box."
- Italian Proverb
"No man was ever wise by chance."
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
"There are no asterisks in real life, only scoreboards..."
- The Ari Gold Character from the HBO series Entourage
If I could do things over
- I would pursue an I.T. career right from the start.
- I would take the blue pill, no matter what Morpheus said.
- I would avoid all my mistakes. But then, the world doesn't really need two Barack Obamas.
Things I wonder about
- Do cab drivers drive just as recklessly in their own cars?
- What is the biological purpose of dreaming?
- Why can't Donovan McNabb stay healthy?
- If time travel is possible, does that mean that people from the future are here right now?
- If the PC replaced the mainframe, and the Internet replaced the PC, what will replace the Internet?
Where do you send your alumni donations?
Go St. Joe's. 
Go Georgia Tech.
On the Meaning of Life
Kurt Douglass once told Esquire Magazine: Maybe when you die, you come before a big, bearded man on a big throne, and you say, "Is this heaven?" And he says, "Heaven? You just came from there."
I couldn't say it any better.
© 2007-2008