Andrew Spence

nice Jake--what was Ithaca like in the 70s? well, maybe i don't have to ask. what were you studying?

there's a great bumper sticker around these days:

"Ithaca, NY: 10 square miles surrounded by reality"

-A

Jake951

Ithaca was a lot less "commercial" than it is now. I was last up there in '95 for a class reunion, so that's my basis for comparison. During my '95 visit, I found there were many more businesses and shops in town than in the '70's, and a LOT more traffic. Collegetown has been modernized a lot, too, with new buildings (apartments and a parking garage, I believe) that didn't exist when I was there. Pyramid Mall had just been constructed in the mid-70's and was a source of major controversy because the downtown vendors viewed it as unwelcome competition by outsiders.

I studied EE and ended up with a PhD. I lived on Highland Rd. in Cayuga Heights and used to walk every day over that footbridge that runs over the gorge and connects campus to Cayuga Heights.

I have great memories of my time in Ithaca and Cornell, including one brutal winter where we had two straight weeks of subzero temperatures.

Steve Lavigne

Try getting the wrenches as close to each other as possible and then squeezing them together. If you still can't do it, try squeezing the wrenches together with some long handled channel lock pliers.

M758

You must have missed all the good roads just out of town!


I like the idea of pulling the cooler completely. It is not that hard to do and may be easier than poping off the lines.

Andrew Spence

hey that's cool John. what kind of EE did you do? what are you doing now?

speaking of 2 weeks sub zero--i think it was below zero here for at least a month this past winter. the worst i've seen since 1997, and a prof. who's been here since the 60s said it's the worst in 25 years... that's why i'm moving to Berzerkeley!

speaking of EE--i've just defended in Applied Physics--i'm in the nanofab making multielectrodes for recording from multiple neurons in the cricket. we make silicon multielectrodes, stick them under the nerve cord of the cricket, and then use two 8" woofers coupled into funnels to blow 2D wind patterns on it's rear end--then we calculate how the spike trains in the neurons represents the wind pattern. kooky, but fun!

Joe--i was a punk kid at Tempe High School and i blew all my savings on a crappy boxy style 300zx that immediately broke, though i thought it was the coolest thing ever. so i didn't really know enough to explore the back roads around phoenix--which direction is best? north?

Andrew Spence

oh yeah, and ithaca has really gone commercial--Pyramid mall has Best Buy, Dick's, and Borders, and there's a Barnes & Noble next to Wegmans.

dunno what i think about that.

M758

Northwest, Northeast, and East from Tempe

Never been to Hannagan Meadow, eh?

65 miles from Morencei - 1000 curves or so!

Andrew Spence

wow cool next time i'm home for xmas i'm gonna check it out

M758

Christmas is not good time for that since Hanagan Meadow is at 8000 ft or so. The road is often closed in the winter and not plowed due to heavy snowfall.

For a good winter road follow the map to bartlett lake. Close to town too.

Jake951

I did information theory--my minor was math. After graduation I went to MIT Lincoln Lab where I worked on a variety of stuff, eventually moving into optical communications. That's the area I work in now, although I, too, have gone "commercial" and now work for a small hi-tech startup (http://www.mintera.com that's trying to survive (so far successfully) in the telecom field.

Andrew Spence

whoa cool!

we're looking to use some info theory to calculate mutual information between stimulus and response--a la Bill Bialek in his book "Spikes"

you know, the spike train of each neuron carries 5 bits/sec, but the ensemble carries 50 bits, so there is some information carried in the covariance of the spike trains...

that's what we'd like to show, anyways--we're a long way off.

-A

Jake951

You must know Prof. Berger (information theory guru) in EE. He was one of the professors on my thesis committee. I've read recently about some of the work he's been doing in applying information theory to biological systems.

We're getting pretty far off the topic of turning wrenches, aren't we??