Paul Conklin

Conklin Northern Light Farm continues to grow and diversify. We provided vegetables through our CSA to 23 families, and are producing eggs, broiler chicks and honey. Beef, apples, raspberries and a native grass pasture in the works. (Can anyone provide me some help with chaos theory?) I teach part time in Geography at Bemidji State University too, while Becky works more than full time trying to keep all 50,000 acres of Itasca State Park in order. Hannah works more than full time at 4th grade, gymnastics and Community Theater.

Richard Garner
Email: richard.garner@alum.mit.edu
Address: 4 Menotomy Rocks Drive, Arlington, MA 02476

Dear Carleton Physics Community, the past year has been somewhat busy for my wife and me. Our twin sons, Max and Joshua, were born September 2003 and we have learned how to survive with perpetual sleep deprivation. So far it's pretty easy, as long as the coffee (which we refer to as "adult formula") is available. I had thought of naming them "spin up" and "spin down" but resisted the temptation. I did have little T-shirts made with "+1/2" and "-1/2". That leads to some interesting comments when we're out walking around. But, when you walk around with twins, you get plenty of attention anyway.

Since 1996, I have been working in the so-called Central Research division of Osram Sylvania, the lighting company. My work involves basic applied research in gas discharges and other aspects of fluorescent lamps. I am now especially into sheath physics which, for the non-plasma physicists out there, is the very thin region of a plasma at its boundary with another medium (e.g., the surrounding wall or an electrode). I am fortunate in that I am able to practice physics in my job because I still thoroughly enjoy all aspects of physics. I have very fond memories of my days at Carleton studying physics and the teaching (physics and otherwise) was absolutely fantastic!

Happy New Year to everyone out there.

Dave Rapp
Email: rapp.david@comcast.net
Address: 6004 27th Ave. NE, Seattle, WA 98115

I still live in Seattle, and I am still working in software development and testing. It is quite remote from physical oceanography, but has its challenging and fun moments nonetheless. I have a 5 year old boy and a not quite 2 year old girl who are completely opposite from each other, delightful, and humbling. I play soccer, volunteer in Seattle's aquarium, and once in a blue moon try to go canoeing in Seattle's version of an arboretum. Pleases look us up in Seattle anytime.

Thomas Carroll
Email: Thomas.L.Carroll@nrl.navy.mil
URL: http://chaos-mac.nrl.navy.mil
Phone: (202) 767-6242

With all the pressure within the Navy to produce immediate results, I feel I am very lucky to be able to continue working with chaos. On the one hand, I am working with our radar division to try out chaotic signals for radar, while on the other hand I am also getting funding from our electronic warfare division to find new ways to detect and characterize these signals, so I feel like I am working for both sides. I am also looking at how rf signals can cause interference in low frequency circuits. PN junctions in these circuits are highly nonlinear devices, and I am seeing several different mechanisms by which the high frequencies in the rf signal can be converted into much lower frequencies.

On the trail club, we finally finished the hand built log cabin that we have been working on for 8 years. Towards the end of the project, a few battery-powered tools began to appear as patience wore out. I am working on a couple of other cabin projects for the club—one is a 1917 frame farmhouse far back in the woods, the other is a log cabin that was moved from its original site and is being reassembled.

I think that the science course at Carleton that I most remember was the history and philosophy course that Rich Noer taught with David Sipfle. I think I gained a sense of perspective on science by seeing how our current way of thinking came about, and I try to be aware of the beginning assumptions that go into any theory.

Dave Wiesler
Email: dave.wiesler@alumni.carleton.edu
Address: 28 Blue Jay Drive, Newark, DE 19713
Phone: (302) 369-3218

Greetings! Nothing much new since last year, but since last year's submission didn't make it into the newsletter for some mysterious reason, I'll recap. My wife Julie MacRae finished her residency a year ago and we moved to Delaware where she has joined a practice in plastic and reconstructive surgery. With luck, by the time this newsletter comes out, she will have passed both her written and oral boards, her last major hurdles. Julie loves being out of residency, and we're both enjoying the additional time we can spend together. I'm still making my "living" (such as it is) playing and teaching music, mostly for folk dances. This past year my music took me out to the West Coast a couple of times, up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and out to Scotland twice. If you're driving up I-95 anytime, stop on by for a little bit (we're right off the interstate) and save yourself the $2.00 toll in Delaware!

Molly O’Dell Coulter
Email: coulters@corecom.net

Happy holidays from Alaska! Gary, Scott and I continue to enjoy our days in Alaska. I’m still teaching math at Chugiak High School, and I was named Math Department Chair this year. A new school will be opening next year in our area; so much change is in the air. It will be interesting with 500 fewer students and 20 fewer faculty members. Scott will be joining me next year—I can hardly believe he’s almost in high school. (I’m not sure if it is because he has disabilities and is so different from a typical ninth grader or if all parents are this surprised.) Gary remains at the Red Dog Mine working hard to change the environmental image of the mining industry. We would love to have visitors.

Tom Albrecht
Address: 6469 Oberlin Way, San Jose, CA 95123

We returned from a 20-month assignment in Switzerland (at the IBM Zurich Lab) last December, and I have rejoined my old team working on disk drive technology. While I was away, IBM's disk drive division was sold to Hitachi, so now I'm a Hitachi GST employee. My current project is managing a group developing so-called "patterned media," which is viewed as perhaps the most likely technological choice to move magnetic recording to significantly higher densities over the next ten years. It's probably the most challenging assignment I've had, but also the most fun. If we succeed, there is a definite and immediate need for the technology, and it should impact the entire magnetic recording industry.

Catherine and I very much enjoy our three little girls Laura (age 4), Christine (age 3), and Sarah (age 2). Naturally, things are very busy in our house. The kids are showing quite a bit of interest in music (can't imagine where they got that from), with Laura taking piano lessons and enjoying it, and Christine trying to see if she can match everything Laura learns, without taking any lessons yet.

Catherine had a bit of a scare late this year when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, but fortunately the treatments appear to have been very successful, and life continues more or less as normal.

Merry Christmas to all!

Jamie White

Email: white@juniata.edu

Greetings from down under. I am on sabbatical from teaching at Juniata College, Huntingdon PA. My family and I arrived in Melbourne Australia on July 12 and we will be heading back to Pennsylvania at the end of May. I am working as a Senior Fellow in the Atom Optics group at the University of Melbourne. Sara (8) and Joanna (6) are attending North Brunswick Primary School for the second half of this school year and the first half of the next. Laura is volunteering a few days a week at their school, visiting museums, and catching up on nine years of reading. If classmates are interested in more family news in Australia, please feel free to browse http://faculty.juniata.edu/whitej/Australia.htm. If you are roaming Melbourne this year, look me up. If you do, we can work together on investigating the Coriolis Effect in the bath tube drain and why the crescent moon looks backwards.

David Wilson
Address: 20 Recordridge Lane, Lyme, NH 03768

Greetings to all! I hope you are having a very enjoyable holiday season. This will be the third Christmas for my family and me in New Hampshire. Two years ago, we shivered in a charming but drafty house built in 1792. Last year, we moved into our new house the day before Christmas. Things should be much more settled this time around. The small-town life and scenery of this area have been quite a change from D.C. Everyone is in good health and the kids continue to grow: Daniel (9), Annalee (8), David (5), and Abigail (2).

I continue to manage the Seismic-Acoustic Team at the Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, NH. The research effort spans a spectrum from basic to applied, and has branched out from strictly cold problems to include other types of environments. Recently, I received an Army Research and Development Award for my work on quasi-wavelet representation of turbulence and its application to sound propagation. Quasi-wavelets are similar to customary wavelets in that they are based on a parent function that is rescaled and translated; however, they differ primarily in that their spatial positions and orientations are random.

Steve Cederbloom
Email: cederbse@muc.edu
URL: www.muc.edu/ph/~cederbse

Greetings! It's hard to believe this is my 13th year teaching at Mount Union College. As part of a push for interdisciplinary courses, I am trying to develop a course in planetary geology. I am also trying to start research projects on variable stars in both optical and radio wavelengths. Stacey is teaching math part-time here, so Justin and I have office hours together several times a week. Justin is 22 months old now, and climbs anything that doesn't move (and some things that do move). Flags, planes, wheels, computers and the Moon fascinate him. It is fun to watch him, but it takes a lot of energy to keep him away from all the equipment in the General Physics lab.

Jim Hollenberg

Greetings to all! I have been working in a pediatric office handling all of the computer responsibilities (software installation, troubleshooting) as well as insurance verifications. In some of my spare time I think about plasma physics, my Ph.D. dissertation field (UW Madison, 1994), as well as various ideas and projects. I’m training for the L.A. Marathon in March 2005, and looking forward to reunion in 2006. Love to all.

Tara O'Brien Pride
Email: mezzotara@hotmail.com

Nowadays my daughter (a 2nd-grader) will sometimes speak to me in Spanish and, here's the amazing part, I can often reply in Spanish—meaningfully! I must be learning something in my weekly Spanish class. It's fun, anyway. Something else amazing: I've become a PTA Mom. Who'd have thought? I try to keep my energies as much in the classroom and out of the politics as possible. I devise activities in art and geography and sometimes give presentations to the kids. I'm having a great time.

Brian Potter

Happy Holidays to everyone! This year my son, Alex, now 11, moved to Seattle with his mom for at least this school year. It's an experiment for us all, so we'll see how it goes. So far, he's doing well and it's a reason for me to get out there every 2 or 3 months. I miss him, of course, but it's a great experience for him.

Working for the Forest Service is still rewarding, though every day it feels more like I'm part of a Dilbert comic. My boss doesn't have pointy-hair, but he's from Texas, says "nuke-U-lar" and just got 4 more years. I stay sane by telling myself that I really work for Smokey Bear.

Here in the trenches, though, I've been working on new views of wildland fire plumes, new tools for fire weather forecasters to use, and teaching the front-line wildland fire fighters about new science that can save their lives. Our original 1 32-processor Beowulf cluster is now retired, and we are running 4 or 5 other clusters with a total of 130+ processors for various types of forecasting, climate simulations, and case studies.
I'm still very involved in the Unitarian Universalist church here, teaching the high school youth and soon to teach an adult religious education class. It's one of the things that give me hope that maybe people in this country will someday respect one another's dignity, right-of-conscience and free will.

John Robinson

Surprise, surprise, this year the semiconductor sector is experiencing another rapid up-turn, which of course we are expecting to be followed by another dramatic downturn. Some things never change. Personally, I'm gainfully employed and am responsible for advanced data analysis products as well as research and development both within our company and with our strategic partners in the area of microlithography. More importantly daughters Anna and Sydney are in the second and fourth grades, respectfully, and are doing amazing things (in my unbiased opinion). My wife, Andrea Abel (also class of '86), is working her way into a writing career. This past summer we took a vacation to Israel and Egypt and had a wonderful time visiting friends, family, sites, and as well I managed to squeak in a little work to help foot the bill. As for the looming mid-life crisis, I've been doing as much kayaking and mountain biking in order to stem the tide...

Warren Anderson

I'm now with Intel, my fourth company. Without ever having applied for a job, I've ridden the current of mergers and acquisitions from Digital Equipment Corp. to Compaq to HP then to Intel. I'm still in a microprocessor design group, working on high-speed IO circuits and techniques. I'm moving shortly to a group that does more advanced development for high-speed IO. The push into multi-gigabit per second links has been an evolution. It will be interesting to be part of the revolution required to further increase off-chip speeds.

Family life is good. Elizabeth is now ten, and Benjamin is six. Both started on the violin a couple of years ago. They have picked it up at an amazing rate, far surpassing their father's musical abilities at the same age. It will be a thrill to see where they go from here.

Christopher Carlson
Email: christopher.carlson@dnr.state.wi.us
Address: 3008 Arapaho Drive
Madison, WI 53719

Somehow in the crunch of last fall, I neglected to get my email together and off for last year's newsletter. At that time I was busy trying to close out a ten-year regulatory process involving a proposed zinc-copper mine in northern Wisconsin. In late October, at the time the DNR was to formally a completion date of February 2004 for the environmental impact statement, we were told that the mining permit applicant had been sold to two Native American tribes and that the permit applications were to be withdrawn. We had then begun the process of "moth-balling" all of the work that had gone into the permit review, with the goal of closing the books on the project by the end of 2003. Those last months were fairly frantic as we tried to make sure that materials would be left in an understandable form should the ore body be proposed to be mined in the future. I also gave a paper at the Fall AGU meeting on our work predicting contaminant migration from a proposed mine.

Unfortunately, the DNR is going through some serious budget issues right now, with layoffs and realignment of priorities. This situation does not appear to be likely to change as we move into the next budget cycle at the end of this year. Right now I am spending most of my time on IT planning and Environmental Management System (ISO 14000) implementation. Hopefully, things will change in the near future to allow me to get back into more applied science, either at DNR or elsewhere. In the interim, I have taken a part-time position as a research scientist in the Soil Science Department at UW-Madison (joining my wife, Martha Anderson '87) to add some groundwater expertise to efforts to model phosphorus and nitrogen transport off of farm fields. This work has potential to influence policy development as Wisconsin tries to better address non-point pollution. I will be presenting a paper on this work at the annual meeting of the Agronomy Society of America-Soil Science Society of America-Crop Science Society of America in Seattle in November. Little did I ever think that I would be dabbling in anything related to agriculture on a professional basis.

Otherwise, this year was the 20th since I spent a semester off-campus in Denmark my sophomore year. This spring, we traveled to Copenhagen to visit my host family and former haunts. Then we went on to Bergen, Oslo, and Stockholm. We had largely good weather, though it was fairly chilly in Copenhagen. I highly recommend visiting Scandinavia! Take care.

Randy Ellingson
Phone: (303) 331-1424

My wife Maria and our cat Lynx, who's 12 now, have had a good and busy year. Spending long-saved vacation days, we ventured widely over Europe this summer, visiting Netherlands, Germany, Czech Republic, Switzerland, and France for Maria's first visit to continental Europe. I had managed to avoid scheduling work over there, and had to decline just one visit and speaking gig in Berlin.

Work is going well, but the battle between the demands of a science career and the many other interests outside of science keep me on my toes. For fun, lately it's been more woodworking, backcountry camping, golf (I'm as bad as I've been all my life), and ultimate. Denver's got a great summer league. For work, I'm on the ropes trying to get two papers published at the moment, and it appears I will be joining the Basic Energy Sciences division of DOE for a one-year detailee position quite soon. I was hoping to be there during a more significant change in the administration, but alas the guy who values science lost the race for the hearts of those who voted. While with DOE, I hope to help develop a workshop (planned for spring of 2005) on the current state and future goals of basic research in the science of solar energy conversion. They will allow me to return to my home base about a week a month so I can maintain continuity in my research.

One last note: anyone teaching the sciences at NREL should keep in mind the SULI program, which offers a great opportunity for a summer internship at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, CO: http://www.scied.science.doe.gov/scied/erulf/about.html.

Steven Glapa

Hi, all: life has been treating us well in California. I'm still marketing smart antenna technology for broadband wireless systems at ArrayComm, enjoying long-sales-cycle service provider engagements all over the planet and the continuing thrill of the Silicon Valley version of Survivor.

Kids are all in a great phase—life is full of rollerblade tag (try skating to catch a crafty 9-year-old on his scooter!), homework tutoring, armfuls of books from the local library, baseball, Bible stories, Tonkas in the sandbox, programming with Lego Mindstorms, and generally keeping the mind-numbing influences of TV, GameBoy, and the mass market at bay. We've just added a new old piano to the family and we're all learning how to play. Getting my old brain, atrophied by years of what one does after getting an MBA and having children, to make my fingers do several different things with precision at the same time is a truly humbling experience, but fun nonetheless.

Congrats to the school for staying in the top 5. I'll have to give some more grief to my niece who, in a fit of negative association with her uncle, decided to go to Grinnell instead...

Laura McColm

This year, I've been studying physics via rotorcraft. Not only are helicopters remarkably eccentric and unstable contraptions, they also have a dramatic monetary impact; as the helicopter goes up, the savings balance goes down. But at last I am a private pilot and am now contemplating the next step. Still programming in the meantime, playing gamelan, and watching trashy sci-fi films with my guy, now fiancé. Life is grand.

Jonathan Alberts

I continue to work at the Center for Cell Dynamics, University of Washington, where we use experimental and computational methods to understand the emergent behaviors of cellular systems. In addition, I build biochemical/mechanical simulations of cytoskeletal elements; those physics laws come in handy... thanks Carleton! At home Sara Jackson (Chemistry '90) and I have added a second daughter to our (now complete) family: Josephine (6 months) and Gladys (2.5 years). Kids are really the most accomplished scientists...Gladys has formed a unified theory of inquiry with "Where?" subsuming the now outmoded who, what, when, how, and why.

Eve Fillenbaum
Email: fillenbaum@earthlink.net
Phone: (612) 789-1608
Address: Cleveland St NE.
Minneapolis, MN 55418

Hi all, things at home having been going fine. Amethyst is 20 months old, now climbing everything (frequently needs to be removed from the top of the kitchen table!) and saying a few words. She has learned to do so much in the last year! We've taken her on her first camping trip, up on the North Shore, and also did a trip to North Carolina this summer in which we got to the mountains at long last.

Things at work are a different story. I'm still at Retek (retail software company), but after another round of layoffs and several people choosing to leave, the team I work on (which does support for almost everyone else) is now way too small to get the job done, so work is chaotic and stressful. I need to find something else (though my coworkers would probably hunt me down with evil intent were I to leave now!)

Andrew Gabor
Email: amgabor@cox.net
Phone: (401) 621-7806 , (H) (508) 357-2221 (W)
Address: 54 Holly Street., Providence, RI 02906

Our girls Jasmine and Maya are now 3 and 5. They don’t listen to me much, but nevertheless seem to be turning out pretty well. Unfortunately I missed the reunion last summer. But there was this conference in Paris? I am coping fairly well with the demise of Phish. Will I ever open my heart like that again? There are other bands, but the passion is not the same. Not yet. I don’t think I’m having a midlife crisis, but I did just buy my first electric guitar.

Evergreen Solar continues its expansion. We are filling up the capacity of our current factory toward around 15MW of solar panels per year, and we are actively planning for the next factory. The corporate culture is changing with the arrival of a new CEO, but the work continues to be exciting and rewarding with new projects and responsibilities. The sign over my desk says: “It’s Diffusion Stupid!” We actually might be profitable sometime soon. Gratitude, of course, goes to the wise and farsighted support of the Bush-Cheney administration.

Kent Lindquist

Hello all, I hope the year has treated you well! I am still consulting in real-time geophysical monitoring (http://www.lindquistconsulting.com). My big news of the year is that I bought a cozy little house outside Fairbanks, and I love it. Take care.

Bryan Miller
Email: bmiller@gemini.edu

Life is good in the southern hemisphere. I'm now in my fourth year as a staff astronomer for the Gemini Observatory, which runs 8-meter telescopes in Hawaii and in northern Chile. My main responsibilities have been commissioning new instruments and defining procedures for queue observing. It's been really interesting and fun.

Outside of work the big news is that I'm getting married at the end of November. Waleska is Chilean and is studying to be an event producer, so the wedding planning is great practice. I'm still playing a bit of Ultimate; we have a group that plays pick-up on the beach.

It's always great to see Carls at astronomy events and it was really enjoyable to visit Carleton again last year. If anyone is traveling through South America feel free to stop by La Serena.

Rachel Pildis
Email: rachel@pildis.com
URL: http://www.pildis.com
Home Address: 910 N. Taylor Ave., Oak Park, IL 60302
Phone: (708) 358-0602

I am slowly recovering from the brain-eating virus called buying a house. It's amazing how much of your mental CPU gets taken up with the process! We ended up with a nice old Arts and Crafts bungalow just 1.5 blocks outside of Chicago whose small backyard I am transforming from a dog and child run into a backyard wildlife refuge. My spouse and I are enjoying our survival of that ordeal with our new adopted 14-year-old: 1990 red Miata. Cheap, great gas mileage, and open to the air: what else could you ask for?

I am still a VB.NET web developer for the same company, albeit with several name and e-mail address switches over the past year as us non-advertising people get shuffled off into our own division of the holding company. The past 3 years have been the longest time I have gone without being switched to a new development environment, so I hope I get to learn something new in 2005! (Being a quick learner is how one sells the astro Ph.D. to business folk....)

Matthew R. Stoneking
Email: matthew.r.stoneking@lawrence.edu
URL: http://www.lawrence.edu/fac/stonekim
Address: 62 South Meadows Dr., Appleton, WI 54915

I am now in my eighth year on the faculty at Lawrence University, a small college in Appleton, Wisconsin. The physics department has five faculty members and graduates about 10 majors per year. I have been teaching the calculus-based introductory physics course for several years now, as well as electronics, E&M, advanced laboratory, plasma physics, astronomy, a tutorial on cosmology and assorted laboratory sections. My research project is an experimental investigation of toroidal magnetic confinement of pure electron plasmas. This work resulted in a Physical Review Letter this past year and a new grant (NSF-DOE) to build an improved experiment. I spent a summer sabbatical at the University of California at San Diego and am on leave this fall to continue my research work.

My wife, Laura Smythe, practices law in Appleton, teaches ethics and conflict resolution to children at our daughters’ school, mediates legal cases out of court, and serves on the boards of several nonprofit organizations. We have two daughters, Emma (6) and Kathryn (3).

I attended the 15th reunion for members of the class of 1989, and was pleased to see a few physics classmates (Joanna Bare, Mark Mulhern, Eve Fillenbaum, and Kevin Pettit) and former instructors and mentors (Rich Noer, Cindy Blaha, and Joel Weisberg). I look forward to hearing from more of you (John Daniel, Brian Miller, Darwin Serkland, Mark Lagerquist,...) in the next year.

Jenny Ashton Wora
Email: ashwor@msn.com

We added Natalie Marie, our third child, to the family roster last March. She is a true blessing, expecially as I delivered a ruptured appendix six weeks prior to her arrival! Things were a bit shaky there for a while, but we are all happy and healthy now. Still enjoy being a full-time mom and part-time veterinarian.