User:Wvbailey

Bill up against The Wall. The stars are merely an artistic flourish; they are not indicative of his state of mind. However, any blur perceived in the photo can be considered indicative. (BTW: Careful observation will reveal that the gilt is rubbing off.)

Bill is watching you. Be nice. (Observe the tick below my right eye.)

Bill Bailey has had an interest in computing machines since the mid-1980's. This evolved from an early interest in "the mind," as in "consciousness", once again his current academic/research interest. Many years ago he got an AB from Dartmouth, a B.Eng from Thayer School at Dartmouth, and an MSEE from Stanford University. Now he's an old guy (i.e >30 years of age). To give you a hint how old -- he knocks on wood a fair amount, doesn't want to put his mouth on this sort of thing -- he knows how to use a slide rule (oh my god! Speaking of wood it was a bamboo Post, and he still has it). And, he once sat in a seminar when these guys from Intel came by to show off their little 4004 4-bit processor (or was it the 8008? He seems to remember the 4004 was actually on the market. Yikes! Now that's OLD.) Mr. B. worked for a really long time (or so it seemed at the time, now it seems like just a flash) at a company that made equipment for the welding industry. There, early on, sometimes he got to do a lot of assembly-language programming. But usually he was just wire-wrapping and soldering and doing EE-stuff. And then when he got kinda old he got to spend (waste?) a lot of time working on international standards. And now he's out to pasture, building things and mulling over "consciousness" [and better laptop cases, not so much any more]. And so it goes...

Some of wvbailey's professional accomplishments:

• He continues to breathe (usually), and he hopes to continue to do so
• As an undergrad, while working at the Bureau of Mines, he co-authored a paper concerning stress-strain inside mining tunnels. This work was using a new-fangled concept called "finite-element analysis", on a honking Control Data computer that probably had ... maybe a meg of core (Yikes! Can you imagine!).
• He designed two Dartmouth Winter Carnival posters: 1969 and 1970
• He actually has seen a Teletype printer, and actually knows how they work

• As an undergrad he built a datalogger to hook to said Teletype
• Then he built a digital taperecorder to hook to the datalogger

• While at Stanford he worked on ultrasonic imaging hardware
• He has a patent concerning vibrating wire instrumentation that uses phase-locked loops in an adaptive circuit. This was paid for by the Bureau of Mines.
• He is co-patenter of some patents re plasma-arc metal cutting
• He built a little Post-Turing machine from real stuff, and ran a couple baby busy beasty beavers on it.

• He wrote the "Universal instructions" for the aformentioned beasty.
• He's built Post-Turing machine models in C, assembly language, and in Excel. (He likes making models in Excel.)

• He contributed to the design of a shit-load of plasma cutting equipment, as both contributor and team leader
• He ran for and was elected to the local school board, diligently served his sentence for three years (and came to truly understand the wisdom of that old chestnut: "No good deed goes unpunished") and actually stayed on for a fourth year during contract negotiations with the teacher's union.
• For ten years he worked on a consensual industry-committee re-writing ISO/IEC974-1, the umbrella safety and performance standard for the welding industry.
• He wrote a novel called Circle Nine, which languishes in a box on a shelf. (It's actually pretty good: about a kid's first love and his resulting descent, all the way down to Circle Nine, the coldest reaches of the darkest bottom of Hell.)
• He designed and patented "a doll with adaptive behaviors". (If anybody wants to buy the patent, let him know.)
• In recent summers past he worked as a field slave for his son who was doing research on anabrus simplex (katydids: Mormon crickets). Mr. B. did the sound recording (years 1 and 2). Mrs. B. (unlike Mr. B. who blasted away his upper-range hearing while firing M14 and M16 rifles) has acute hearing and can find them in the pucker-brush, but won't touch them, whereas Mr. B. thinks they are cute and he enjoys capturing them (we're now approaching year 7 or 8. Not so many years ago Mr. and Mrs. B took an excursion up the Poudre Canyon (outside Fort Collins). Mrs B. located some and so did Mr. B. Then Mr B captured them and held then and gave them a big hug and then let them go. Year 9 or so the collecting of the beasts occurred in the land of Oz from which Mr. B did return relatively all in one piece (at least the useful parts of him returned).
• He was one of the first adopters of the "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC) laptop (you had to buy two, one for you and one for a kid). He subsequently designed an "front-end" amplifier for the Measure activity, so that users won't blow up their laptops and/or electrocute themselves when they foolishly plug measurement-probes into a 120VAC or 240VAC wall outlet. This can be found at the OLPC site (somewhere or other on the site).
• He has been working on "garden lights on steroids", year 1. These make use of Blocking oscillators. While mistakes were made, progress was made too.