Working as a VLSI CAD engineer, I became interested in data visualization, particularly of multivariate data. It turns out there are some very cool JavaScript libraries for doing this, so for fun I've started to try writing visualizations for various publicly available data sets. From time to time, I'll post some of them here. Because of JavaScript library compatiblity issues, you must use Firefox, Chrome, or Opera to view them. Note also that these visualizations tend to use a lot of client side compute resources.

UFO Sightings!
Evidently, our planet has been visited by extraterrestrials. In fact, according to many well-meaning (I assume) folks, in the US alone this has occurred over 70 thousand times since 1990! (And those are only the observed events. Who knows just how sneaky those ET's might be.) Anyway, I made a visualization of the sighting data broken out by city and state, year, month, day of week, and time of day. Click on the widgets and look for interesting trends.

Astronomy
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has been running for many years, collecting all kinds of data about the universe. I took a tiny slice of their data, consisting of spectra and redshifts of all the stars, galaxies, and quasars observed in a 3° by 3° window of the sky. Since larger redshifts indicate greater distances according to Hubble's Law, the scatterplots are also suggestive of the spatial distribution of these objects.

But this visualization does have a slight problem. The 3D plot at the top works okay, but the breakdowns by object type and spectral band are sluggish, up to several seconds per update. So you need to have extra patience to play with those. JavaScript experts can click here to read about the technical details, and if you are so inclined, to give me feedback.

I teach the course Perl Comprehensive at UCSC Silicon Valley Extension. We start from the beginning, and cover topics such as regular expressions, references and nested data structures, functional programming techniques, and object oriented programming. There is no autograding or multiple choice stuff; we learn by writing real programs.

In a previous life, I used to play a lot of gigs with various other musicians in town. My instrument is the drums, and while I don't play that much anymore, I hope to get back into it. Click here to read more.

Way, way back, as a youngster I was interested in rudimental drumming, and marched snare in the 1980 Santa Clara Vanguard. Someone posted a video of our drum solo (which I liked because it was in 7) on YouTube here. The center snare was a guy named Greg Dilley, and I stood right next to him, although now I can't remember on which side. The video quality is not too good, but it appears that the short guy (me) was to Greg's right (audience's left). But I don't know for sure.

Also in a previous life, I used to like math puzzles and related things. Click here to read one such puzzle (and my solution) on the Feynman Lectures website.

Back in the day, someone showed me Bender and Orzag's wonderful book "Advanced Mathematical Methods for Scientists and Engineers". It's not the usual linear stuff (boundary and eigenvalue problems and the like), but instead describes in great detail the art and craft of analytical approximation methods. Well, recently I happened upon an excellent course of lectures on the subject delivered by none other than Carl Bender himself! Click here to view them.