Rachel Pildis

On the set at Jeopardy!

I'm a (one-time) Jeopardy! champ. If you want to see exactly how I did, visit my entry in the Jeopardy archive. My winners' blog entry is available both there and on the Jeopardy site.

Welcome to my home page, now over 15 years old! Back then, I was an academic, but I moved on to be a web programmer at first a startup company and then a big advertising agency/communications holding company. Now I'm at another startup.

When I'm not at work, I fiddle with a variety of web pages in my spare time (including one for the trip I took with some of my extended family to Lithuania, where both my paternal grandparents emigrated from) and do the homeowner thing in the funky village of Oak Park. As always, my partner in crime is my my wonderful spouse (a.k.a. Don Anderson), who makes everything in life sweeter.

I am a native Middle-Westerner by birth and by temperament, having been born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa. I then did the physics geek thing at Carleton College and spent 5 years becoming Dr. Pildis at the University of Michigan. Two years of being an astronomy postdoc convinced me that the time had come to move on and do something else with my life.

Things I care about....

• YEAH, I'M A CHILDFREE ATHEIST FEMINIST -- I've never been one to be popular...I'm an INTJ, why do you ask?
• I'm also a Bright -- are you? It's not all that rare....
• Do you think that childfree people are selfish and immature? Do you think that more children are needed to save the human race? Get a damn clue! 20% of all species on Earth could disappear in the next 30 years; half of them in the next century. And, if you take a look, the human population continues to grow. There are now over three times more humans than there were 60 years ago, when the planet was hardly empty. Now who are the selfish ones?
• IMPACT Chicago should be required for every woman. It's a hell of a feeling of power to know that you can disable any attacker foolish enough to think you an easy target.
• I am the webmistress for No Kidding! in Chicago. Join us if you want to hang out with fun folks who aren't parents.
• EvolveFISH, a source for all sorts of neat things (a gefilte fish for your car?)
• Nina Paley's great cartoons
• a list of atheist celebrities....lots of familiar yet surprising names
• Joy Williams' most excellent The Case Against Babies

• ESCAPE FROM ACADEMIA -- Believe it or not, even astronomers have useful skills. For some reason academics have been brainwashed into thinking that the only non-university job they are qualified for is McDonald's. Not so!
• Here's why I left and what my resume looks like these days.
• www.phds.org contains everything you want to know about academia from the perspective of someone with a science doctorate degree...and more.
• Do you want specifics about what a Ph.D. is good for in the business world?
• Why are things so tough for astro Ph.D.s? Don Barry explains.
• A Salon article on Why being a science postdoc sucks and a Washington Post article on why being an adjunct sucks worse.

If you're ready to slow down your browser, I have a selection of self-indulgent, bandwidth-sucking pictures:

2008: a wintertime trip to old Mexico and more miscellany	2002 pictures: part 1, part 2, and the family trip to Lithuania
2007: our apparently annual pilgrimage to New Mexico, a Google map of our summer vacation, a few MORE pictures of our rehabbed bedroom, and more miscellany	Pictures from 2001: analog and digital
2006: White Sox Spring Training plus another trip to southwestern NM, my surprise birthday party (plus a flashback to the 80s), garden photos from April, May and June, July, and August and other Soxy (and catty) stuff	Pictures from 2000
2005: our trip to southwestern New Mexico, garden stuff, our new pond, and everything else	Scenes from Summer 1999 and Halloween 1999
2004: winter cross quarter, spring equinox (and trip to St. Louis), spring cross-quarter (and SLC visitors), summer solstice with the new Miata	Winter fun and old stuff
A very few pictures from 2003	Some pictures of Beaune, France, by popular demand