I always had a mild interest in astronomy, and it became a strong interest in the 1990s, triggered by a homework assignment given to my ten-year-old son to go out at night and identify some constellations. I took him away from the city lights to a park where we could see the stars emerge from twilight. On that beautiful fall evening, we found the constellations he was looking for, and we also saw Jupiter, the brightest object in the sky. Through binoculars, we were surprised that we could see its moons. This caused me to wonder what else I might be able to see if I were to look a little closer.
Continue readingAuthor Archives: Thor Olson
A New Host for Thor’s Life Notes
I started this blog when I retired in 2019, just before COVID. It was an activity that occupied me during those months of quarantine and allowed me to share my interests and projects. I was, and still am, ignorant of blogging technology. Yes, I have, in my career, written code for the world of web pages and browser-based applications, but every time I did so, I wondered, “How could this ever work?” It struck me as a house of cards, with fragile links and unreliable and inconsistent page renderings.
Continue readingBill Glass is Gone
Hard to believe. A man who was larger than life in our circle of friends and coworkers is gone. He was regarded as a wizard in our particular cohort of engineers, enabling computers to perform powerful tasks beyond everyone’s expectations. He was among the pioneers of computer graphics, a key contributor to a technology that garnered an Academy Award for motion picture special effects. If, in our work, we encountered an insoluble problem, it was assigned to Bill. Which he then solved.
Continue reading