Introduction

At a very early age I became interested in science. When I was 9 years old I stayed up until 3:00a.m. to watch the first lunar landing. Using my own telescope I made frequent observations of Jupiter's moons, not realizing that Galileo had done the same job very thoroughly several centuries earlier. Before dinosaurs were cool I was reading books about them. I was fascinated with volcanoes as soon as I knew what the word meant, and later witnessed some of the destruction of Mt. St. Helens after it erupted. I studied rocks and ornithology as a youngster.

I studied chemical engineering in college, and became a semiconductor process engineer afterwards, learning on the job about extreme low pressure processing, and about materials science. Later I became a software engineer, where I learned from an expert in the field of signal processing how to use artificial neural networks to classify fingerprints. For the last several years I've been writing software for DNA sequencers.

Life is fascinating. The more you know about it the better you can appreciate it. Whether it's physical science, such as is the focus of this page, or sociology, or psychology or whatever, if it's got "ology" or "onomy" in the name you can bet that there are some amazing things to be learned. If you think about it, science is the behavioral study of God.

Astronomy


The mirror for the Hubble space telescope was manufactured by a company that I worked for. Perkin-Elmer had a large optics division. The company actually sold its name and the optics division, so we don't do that sort of stuff any longer. The mirror is very large, and required extremely fine tolerance during its manufacture. As I understand it, the process to evaluate the mirror to ensure that it met the measurement tolerances was complex and expensive, so NASA opted to go ahead without the evaluation. But once Hubble got into space they found that many photographs were out of focus, so some astronauts were sent in the space shuttle to do some repair work. Since we're on the subject of Perkin-Elmer and optics, my first job out of college required me to learn how to use Perkin-Elmer aligners in the wafer fab. A friend of mine worked dayshift, but often did overtime onto swing shift when I was on duty. She asked me to teach her how to use the aligners, which I gladly did. She is now my wife of over 20 years.

Archaelogy

I haven't done any archaelogy myself, other than using a metal detector to find a 1913 Italian coin beside a tall Douglas Fir tree next to my house as I was growing up, and digging up an old cast-iron waffle iron out in our yard. But I loved to read about the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and about the Pyramids in Egypt, and about old Roman ruins, about Babylon and Assyria, about Schliemann's discovery of Troy, about Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Inca ruins in Peru, Aztec and Mayan ruins in Mexico and Central America.

Geology

Now you can get an idea as to how much shaking goes on it this part of California.
You can also explore the Pinnacles National Monument which is in our back yard.

Oceanography

Genetics/Biology

I'm not a biologist, but I've spent quite a few years working for Applied Biosystems

Pattern Recognition

  • Here's a teaser link: Intelligent Computing: Numenta
  • And another: Statsoft
  • I have it on high authority that Support Vector Machines are a great way to approach the machine-learning game: Support Vector Machines
    • I learned how to use artificial neural networks from my work with Philip D. Wasserman, author of such books as Neural Computing: Theory and Practice and Advanced Methods in Neural Computing. We worked together for approximately two years developing a system to automatically classify fingerprints. He was an excellent teacher, and we achieved a level of success far beyond what I believed was possible. Aside from my work with Phil I have used BackPropagation to identify features in time-series data, and I have spent most of my free time over the past few years developing a system using artificial neural networks to predict stock prices. This is an extremely difficult task, but my progress so far is encouraging.