Not-So-Frequently Asked Questions
About My Not-So-Vital Statistics

Why Doc Bug?
My nickname is 'Bug. The Doc part got added when I got my PhD. 'Bug, in turn, is short for Ladybug which is yet another nickname.

How many nicknames do you have anyway?
I've collected a lot over the years, each coming from a different community I hold dear. These days I most people just call be Brad or Bradley (and a select few call me "Dad"), but I'll still answer to most of these albeit not all on the first ring. Here's a quick chart in reverse chronological order for the curious:

Name Reason
Gypsy My username when I was at Google. This was the name of my wearable computer back when I was in grad school, and since my first job at Google was working on Glass I took it as my user name.
Doc Rhodes My high-school friends always had crime family nicknames after getting arrested for fireworks, but I was with my girlfriend that night. Finally about a year after I got my PhD a couple of us were pulled over for driving with Krispy Kreme donuts in the car, so I got a crime name. I'm so proud.
Purple Borg I used to be one of the MIT Media Lab Cyborgs. If we had been Power Rangers, I would've been "Purple Borg."
BJ I wanted a new nickname when I hit grad school. My friends weren't very creative, so they went with my initials. Never really stuck. I guess I should've taken my brother's suggestion and gone with "Flash."
Finagler As in "one who finagles." I picked it as my username after two years of suffering as "gt0741c@gatech.edu."
'Bug Short for Ladybug.
Ladybug I was something of a flirt back in my undergraduate days. Upon joining my fraternity, they dubbed me this because I bugged the ladies.
Bradley James C.F. Rhodes You don't want to know.
That Hobbit Hairy toes. This one goes back to high school days.
Stale Mate I used to be a member of the Atlanta Hash House Harriers and Harriettes (a drinking group with a running problem). They named me this 'cause I was on the high-school chess team.

Any other not-so-vital statistics?

Well, there's always my Erdös number (5), traced as follows:

Erdös (0) → Rudin (1) → Roscoe (2) → Rosenfeld (3) → Pentland (4) → Rhodes (5)

  1. P. Erdös, M. E. Rudin, A non-normal box product, in Infinite and finite sets (Colloq., Keszthely, 1973; dedicated to P. Erdös on his 60th birthday), Vol. II, 629-631, Colloq. Math. Soc. Janos Bolyai, 10, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1975
  2. Collins P.J., Reed G.M., Roscoe A.W., Rudin M.E., A lattice of conditions on topological spaces, Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 94 (1985), 487-496
  3. Kong TY, Roscoe AW, Rosenfeld A (1992). Concepts of Digital Topology, Topology Appl. 46, 219-262.
  4. Dickinson SJ, Pentland AP, Rosenfeld A (1992). From Volumes to Views: An Approach to 3D Object Recognition, Proc. CVGIP 55(2):130-154, March 1992
  5. Augmented Reality Through Wearable Computing, by Thad Starner, Steve Mann, Bradley Rhodes, Jeffrey Levine, Jennifer Healey, Dana Kirsch, Rosalind W. Picard, and Alex Pentland. Presence, Special Issue on Augmented Reality, vol 6(4), Fall 1997

I don't have a Bacon number, unless you count TV appearances (which I gather is cheating). If you count TV then I have a Bacon number of 3, and thus a Bacon+Erdös number of 8:

Bradley Rhodes → Alan Alda → Tori Davis → Kevin Bacon