User:Stellar-TO

I live in Toronto, Canada. I was born in a small town in eastern Saskatchewan in 1952. I'm a computer programmer. In the past I've written software in Fortran, PL/1, REXX, SQL and several other computer languages. I worked mostly in the VM/CMS mainframe world. These days I do C programming.

I love music. I have a "small" collection of about 500,000 MP3s. If anyone wants to look up the name of a song, and see what albums it's on, my "Song Index" web page allows you to do that very quickly:

http://66.11.164.72/index.htm

It's probably the fastest song look-up on the Internet. For each album you can see a complete track list. (I trust self-promotion is allowed on user pages.)  :-)

Before I became "officially" a programmer I attended the University of B.C. in Vancouver in the early 1970's and studied chemistry and physics. In the late 1970's and early 1980's I worked for several years in earth physics, specifically seismology and geomagnetism. I was a technician.

I've lived and worked in about the most isolated place in Canada, namely an extremely remote weather station in the western high Arctic, at 76 deg. north, or about 1400 km from the north pole. I was there for three years, 1977-80. I operated a geophysical observatory there for the federal government's earth physics division. The approximately ten other people there were weather technicians or support staff. All the Inuit were south of us. We were way up there where even Eskimos would have frozen to death in the winter.  :-)

The seismograph station I ran there was known as MBC (for Mould Bay, Canada). It was the first non-U.S. seismograph station to detect underground nuclear tests in Nevada, in the early 1960's. They did not think it was possible for them to be detected outside the borders of the United States. In fact, they were so surprised and skeptical that some people from the U.S. Air Force set up their own seismometers there, and sure enough, they could detect every shot.

Since MBC was located almost exactly midway between the primary Russian nuclear test site at Semipalitinsk and the primary U.S. test site in Nevada (and was even closer to the Russian test site at Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic), it served an important role in the monitoring of underground nuclear tests. But, like any seismograph station, its primary role was to provide data which allowed the epicentres of earthquakes to be determined.

MBC was the most sensitive seismograph station in the world, of the network of about 600 stations. I'm rather dismayed that it's since been closed, for budgetary reasons. Its sensitivity to ground motion was exquisite; if the ground there moved only ten Angstroms (a millionth of a millimeter, also known as a "millimicron"), at a frequency of about 1 cycle/sec, I could report that as the P or primary wave arrival from an earthquake, somewhere in the world.

Its detection range was global. Even relatively small earthquakes of about magnitude 4 in China, New Zealand and really anywhere in the world could be detected there, because the background seismic noise was unusually low. So the instrument gain could be set higher than at other stations, which would have been swamped by background noise. Even the large computerized seismic array at Yellowknife, also operated by the federal government, didn't have the same detection capability as the three X, Y, Z seismometers at MBC. There, background seismic noise was usually close to zero.

The station I ran was also unusual for another reason: the vertical or Z component on magnetograms was very smooth, rather than jagged. Magnetograms indicate changes in the strength and direction of the local magnetic field in response to the solar wind. Typically, on a magnetogram, the Z component is - like the X and Y components - jagged. The trace contains a lot of short-period, high-frequency changes. But there, the Z component was smooth. Both the extreme seismic quietness and the filtering out of the high-frequency magnetic Z component were evidence of some very unusual geological feature under the island, which was Prince Patrick.

Nowadays I enjoy writing code for computers. It suits my logical mind.

My first contribution to Wikipedia was for the neurotoxin, batrachotoxin. I was doing some research for a novel I've been writing, whose main characters live in the Amazonian rainforest (where poison frogs live). I found just a stub for batrachotoxin, so I completed the entry. It was fun.

I think Wikipedia is a terrific project, and Jimmy Wales has my respect for starting it.