Tobin at Berkeley

Hello! Once upon a time, I was an undergraduate EECS/Math/Physics student at Berkeley. Now I'm a graduate student in physics, though by the time you read this maybe I will have graduated from that too. I have a more recent personal web page on another server. However, I keep some stuff here too:

• My page about Exploring the UC Berkeley Steam-Tunnels.

• A look inside the UC Berkeley Co-generation (power) plant

• Some hot spring stories, including the internet's best page about the abandoned but not entirely forgotten San Juan Capistrano Hot Springs.

• Or maybe you are interested in building and firing Potato cannons?

• Some projects:

  • The Hoshen-Kopelman Algorithm for Cluster Identification gets a surprisingly large number of hits.

  • JpegRescue, a tool for undeleting JPG image files, or extracting them from a corrupt filesystem. (I wrote it to get the pictures back after accidentally formatting a memory card.)

  • Playing with a Magnetic Stripe Reader, including some hardware and software to read magnetic stripes in Linux

  • Solving and playing the logic game Quinto

  • Some computer-generated images of seashells, made for my CS184 course

  • A term paper on colored symmetry (in group theory)

  • A little OpenGL widget to display time-series waveforms

  • A term paper on Wavelets for image compression

  • Micromouse: a small, autonomous maze-solving robot

• "Gravity is Cool, or, Why our Universe is Hospitable to Life," text of Freeman Dyson's Oppenheimer lecture, given at Berkeley on March 9th, 2000

• Hang-gliding pictures from when I was active in the UC Berkeley Hang-Gliding club (a.k.a. the Berkeley Hedonists)

• Death valley pictures, from a camping trip.

• Summer internship (2002) at the Weizmann Institute, single-particle reconstruction in electron microscopy.

• Other web pages: Tobin at XCF (2010, via archive.org), Tobin at CSUA

Here's a quite I took from Hilfinger's quote file:

"I loved the night. I think secretly all scientists exult in working alone, surrounded by the urgent private quiet of the dark. I remember the exhilaration of working through the night in the lab, drinking thick pasty coffee that had been on the burner for hours, walking out into the sunrise, grabbing breakfast at a diner and watching the city come to life. To be doing something no one had ever done, to generate rows amd columns of numbers that hinted at a solution to a problem no one had ever solved ... to be alone and out on the edge like that, there was no feeling like it in the world." — Steven A. Rosenberg (from Unlocking the Mysteries of Cancer by S. A. Rosenberg and J. M. Barry, as quoted in the NY Times Book Review of 18 October 1992.)

Please feel free to contact me!