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Hello,
My name is Tiisetso Daniel Murray and this is my blog.
I'm a South African living in Milan studying a double masters degree in industrial engineering. I've lived in Beijing for two years where I started my degree and attended Mandarin language classes in addition to travelling all over China.
I moved to Italy to complete a triangle of experiences by living a first world country. China where everything is manufactured and Italy where design is everything. The delicious foods I keep finding may also play a bigger role than I'll ever let on.
Prior to the above I've gained experience as an industrial engineer at a local low friction polymer manufacturer in South Africa that exports a homegrown worldclass product. I saw the inner workings of a medium sized enterprise from the factory floor all the way to the sales office.
I taught physics and chemistry to all grades at a high school. I aimed to instil a love and appreciation for science and the world around us. Science is after all about knowledge. No student left my classes without having seen the Saturn V rocket launch and being challenged to imagine worlds beyond ours then see how little we truly understand about the one we're on.
Those are just my professional roles. I've served as a chef preparing food for sale at Johannesburg's most trendy markets and private events, consulted on a 10 million page claims processing backlog for government, built a preventative maintenance system for steel rolling mills with macros in MS Excel, designed and built electricity-free self watering plant systems for domestic homes, and designed and built a self harvesting mealworm farm as a proof of concept for the mass production of insects to address future protein shortages.
These days you can find me going on week long fasts trying to self experiment my way to finding an antifragile method to extend my life, lose bodyfat, and still get to eat gelato. I believe fasting and drastically reducing carbohydrate consumption is the panacea to our modern health problems and to extending or health and life spans. I'm developing a videogame on the side because it's fun but also because I believe that concepts which are commonly known in videogame design are potentially ground breaking in other fields, especially where systems of humans are involved. You'll find me complaining about antiquated South African banking services (I'm looking at you FNB) to anyone South African who'll listen, I'm so frustrated that I'm learning about UX design just so I can complain with references.
I love learning. I love understanding how things work and why they work. What we do is so much less interesting than why we do it. I love problems, I love iterating through solutions, I love constraints that demand we reach for solutions that are elegant and often seem obvious once found. I want to live in a more equal world, one where we're to explore and no one is condemned to the social class they were born in or at least not the same low quality of life. I like to keep it simple and am a minimalist at heart. My whole life fits into one single check in bag and a backpack. One day it'll just be the backpack. I listen to podcasts like Radiolab, Revisionist History, Planet Money, London School of Economics, Social Science Bites, the Tim Ferriss Show, Farnam Street Knowledge Project, and Dissect (yes, the one about hip hop and rap music) in my between moments.
If you want to hire me, you can find my [CV]({{ site.url }}/assets/pdf/CV - Tiisetso Murray.pdf) here. I can work in Europe until Sep 2019 in person but I can work for anyone, anywhere, remotely.