Talk:Jeremy Mould

Additions by MichaelCrawford

I am Wikipedia member User_talk:MichaelCrawford.

Just now I added the Research, Observing Runs and Collaborators sections to Dr. Mould's article without logging in, as I am having some trouble with my eMail and so cannot recover my long-forgotten password. That's a transitory problem; I'm sure I'll get my password reset before long.

I worked for Dr. Mould as a Research Assistant when I was an undergraduate Astronomy Major at Caltech during 1983 and 1984. I was a "Scurve", that is, a resident of Caltech's Ricketts House.

Dr. Mould is an incredible man, and I was then and remain deeply honored to have been given the opportunity to work with him.

Drs. Mould and daCosta performed the Colorimetric Photography for the cluster age measurement work at if I remember correctly, Cerro Tolollo Interamerican Observatory in Chile. I performed the data analysis on a VAX 11/780 with a Grinnell image processor - more or less a refrigerator-sized box of memory chips - with custom software I wrote in FORTRAN. Dr. daCosta prepared numerical models of Hertzprung-Russell Diagram curves bases on the observed metallicity of each cluster as well as a rough guess of each cluster's age. After having prepared the H-R Diagrams, I fit Dr. daCosta's curves to my diagrams to determine each cluster's age.

Dr. Mould is the most incredible man. Despite being quite tiny, polite, pleasant and unassuming, he looks and talks just like Paul Hogan, the Alligator Wrestler of Crocodile Dundee fame -- "Never bring a gun to a knife fight" -- all the way down to his enthusiasm for Foster's Lager.

Despite the incredible experience of performing original Astronomy research at Caltech as well as observing on the two hundred as well as the sixty inch telescopes at Palomar Mountain Observatory, I found myself strangely unsatisfied with my work.

After a great deal of contemplation, I eventually determined that what I enjoyed so much about Astronomy was making telescopes, a hobby I had practiced since the tender age of twelve and which was largely responsible for my acceptance to the Institute, rather than looking through them.

But Astronomers never make their own telescopes; that is incredibly difficult and specialized work. They hire opticians to do that. At the time there really weren't any new optical observatory telescopes being built, and had not been for many years.

My good friend and study partner Mike Roberts - a "Darb" or Dabney House Resident - suggested I would be far happier as a Physics Major. While there is little variation among Astronomical telescopes or their instrumentation, because every Physics experiment is very different from every other one, it has always been very common for Physicists to design and build their own equipment.

I took his advice and did change my Major to Physics, and in the end turned out to be quite good at, and quite heavily into Physical Experimentation.

While I attended some graduate school at UC Santa Cruz, I never completed my Doctorate. However my studies of Physics have always colored my "Day Job" as a software engineer. The result of all that was that on July 27, 2006, I invented something of some significance, which I'm afraid I do not wish to disclose yet, but which my company Dulcinea Technologies Corporation code names "The Holy Grail".

While primarily implemented in software, The Holy Grail is founded in quite a fundamental way on Physics, to a large extent because the only Computer Science course I ever enrolled in in my entire life, Caltech's CS10, was taught by an Electrical Engineer and VLSI design pioneer by the name of Carver Meade, whose lecture on the first day of the course entirely focussed on the motions of Electrons in doped Silicon Crystals, with the final project for the course - which I completed with great success - being to write a full-featured color vector graphic editor on an HP Chipmunk Motorola 68000 workstation that run the UCSD P-System.

I am expecting to announce the first commercial release of the first product derived from The Holy Grail during late Summer, with many more products to follow over the coming years.

I'm sorry, but I cannot be too specific as yet, but I will say that I fully expect that a paper I write on the Physics behind The Holy Grail will be accepted as the PhD Dissertation I have always sought, and that far from what for me was the Religous Pilgrimage of Astronomy study, The Holy Grail will have a profoundly beneficial effect on all of humanity.

Had Dr. Mould not taught me what he did during the time we worked together in Pasadena so long ago, I would never, ever have found The Holy Grail. 50.131.200.103 (talk) 02:19, 16 June 2012 (UTC)