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Ransom’s personal History, from the beginning, to the end... sorry for the inconvenience:
1961 Born, Oakland California - fifth generation Californian
1968 Attended first Oakland Raiders football game: Raiders 13 - Buffalo 10
1977 Saw Led Zeppelin’s last North American concert appearance
1978 Bought first car, a 1969 Dodge Charger ($600)
Joined a gang, The Nomadz
1980 Graduated Las Lomas High School, Walnut Creek California
1980-1984 BS Physics, UC San Diego, cum laude
Met Miles Dylan
Had long hair, didn't wear shoes
1982 Attended Birmingham University, England
1984-1990 PhD Physics, UC Santa Barbara
1985-1990 Worked on the TPC/Two-Gamma experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
1985 Married Heather’s mom “what a great party, I knew everyone and they all liked me"
1985 Held a baby for the first time, Heather L Stephens
1986 Joined UC Santa Barbara's Particle Physics Group
1989 Named the James Chadwick Scholar of the Ettore Majarana International School for Subnuclear Physics, Erice, Sicily, Italy
1990 Discovered the R(1525), a particle created in the interaction of a nearly-real and a quite-virtual photon
Was not awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics
1990-1993 Postdoctoral Research Assistant, University of Florida
1991-1993 Worked on the CLEO experiment at Cornell University
Performed the world’s most accurate measurements of rare decays of bottom-quarks
Was shot in the chest while riding bike to work - they wanted $600 to take the pellett out... it’s still there, 6th rib down on the right.
1993 Professor of Physics, University of Texas at Arlington
1990-1999 Worked on the D-Zero experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Lab
Was on the team that discovered the top quark
1995 Bought a goofy looking house in Mansfield Texas
Saw an ad in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for free German Wire-Haired Pointer puppies, brought home my Uncle Sherman
Presented results on the top-quark discovery in Ho Chih Minh City, Vietnam
1996 Spoke on Quantum Chromodynamics at the Quantum Field Theory and High Energy Physics Workshop (QFTHEP96) in St. Petersburg Russia
Learned the lesson of Vodka with a wierd guy from Trinidad and a nutty Belgian woman
1997 Taught relativistic quantum field theory to high school and junior high students
1998 Spoke at the XXXIII Rencontres du Moriond confrence on QCD in Les Arcs France
Breakfast 7-9a, talks 9-12, ski 12-5p, talks 5-7p, dinner 7-10p, hang out in the lounge 10-12p, repeat - realized that bruises after skiing are like scratches after sex - they just mean you're doing it right
1999 Director of Advanced Technology, Enhanced Messaging Systems, a wireless-web startup
Worked for a megalomaniac - learned everything I needed to know about business, intellectual property and engineering.
At Scarborough Renaissance Faire, Standing Bear Cooper told me that I am "a portal"
Became “The Stand Man” selling food in the grandstand at high school football games to support the Band Boosters - made a lot of wise cracks, never had my ass kicked, but deserved it.
2000 Spent 4 hours under the bridge in Aberdeen WA where Kurt Cobain composed because it meant something to Heather. I don’t know what.
2001 Scientist, Agilent Technologies, Dallas Texas, part of Agilent’s Field Sales Force
2002 Toured the US giving day-long seminars to engineers on fiber optics
2003-2004 Toured the US giving half-day seminars on timing noise (jitter) in high data rate systems
2003 Searched for the Holy Grail in Cornwall, bought a coffee cup at King Arthur’s birthplace instead
2004 Moved home to California
Driving across the Arizona border, there was a rainbow behind us - I am somewhere over the rainbow
Pub Creep through Petaluma on my birthday
2005 Visited the tomb of King Arthur, searched for the Holy Grail in Devonshire, Ireland, and Scotland (bought two coffee cups)
Writer, physicist, public speaker, Petaluma California
2006 At Litquake - natural born MC
Found me a Button and joined that elite club of California real estate owners...
2007 Ran for Petaluma City Council - humiliating, but amusing and welcome defeat
2008 Daughter graduated from UC Santa Cruz - meeting the minimum requirement I set for her the day she was born. Felt a cosmic pat on the back.
Stared at the ocean from the deck of a cruise ship for 10 days - it was “swell”
2009 Uncle Sherman Died (1995-2009) - Uncle Sherman was a wire-haired pointer, well, he was sort of big for a wire-haired pointer, but, of course, he was from Texas.
He was the right dog for the job.
Professor Buckley, Spot-headed Hill Dog, applied for and was granted his position.
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