About the author

The author as programmer

This is what I'm doing to keep bread on the table and roof overhead right now.

I first became a programmer (by some very loose standard) before my eleventh birthday when my father brought home a Apple ][+. I learned the system basic and Applesoft basic and delved a little into assembling using the mini-assembler in the ROM.

High school brought some formal instruction in programming and basic data structures and algorithms course conducted in Pascal. College brought C and a deeper course on algorithms, but I abandoned my formal training at this point in favor of physics.

When I began doing "real" science my programming skills proved valuable and I was roped into writing analysis and occasionally even control software. After a brief foray into vbasic, this meant fortran ('80s dialects) and then C++ as systems programming languages and various shells, awk, perl, tcl/tk, elisp, and python for supporting work.

I'm mostly a unix user (my mac is, after all, just a unix box that comes with the hardware properly configured on day one; and homebrew takes care of the rest). My current professional project is being developed in c++-11 using qt for the GUI and IDE; SQLite for the DB; and python for additional scripting needs.

The author as scientist

College led to grad schools (by way of a detour in substitute teaching for secondary school) when I specialized in experimental work in the transition regime between nuclear and particle physics. Nucleon structure and weak form factors. Then I did a couple of post-docs in neutrino oscillations.

I'm listed as an author on a respectable number of publications for someone who didn't make it as a career scientist and a few of them are quite highly cited, but that just reflect the fact that I worked on some good projects.

Nuclear and particle physics are Big Science (tm), and the role I spent the most time on was always programmer of one sort or another. It didn't get me a job as a scientist, but it did give me a marketable skill outside of physics.

The author as teacher

I was a professor at a small state university in the American Midwest for a few years. There I met many inspiring students, learned a bit of pedagogy, learned that I really like the classroom and mentoring experience of being a teacher, and learned that I wasn't very good at managing most of the other demands on a teacher's time. I wasn't offered tenure.

The author as other things

I'm married and we have a toddler. I enjoy (but don't have much time for) hiking and general physical fitness. I've done martial arts from time to time. I remain an aspiring grownup.