Electromagnetics for the win

Now that the UW school year has commenced, a spate of lectures on different topics has been posted. I sometimes have the chance to take the light rail and sample the frontier of knowledge in-person at the Universit of Washington here in Seattle. For example, Smith Hall hosted an interesting talk on the Applied Math series by former Los Alamos, now Helion https://www.helionenergy.com/ scientist Talk.

on the topic of modeling plasmas. This took me back to my days as a research assistant where I developed simulations for high-power electron devices (I confess I had to remind myself of the details of that Cornell work from https://sites.google.com/site/vincentzimmer/cv). I also prototyped and modeled a device to be used as input in ferroelectrics emission research at the high energy lab.

I was amazed to hear that a lot of the basic simulation techniques like Particle in Cell (PIC) from tools I used at Cornell like Superfish https://www.osti.gov/biblio/10140823 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/10140823 are still in use today. The talk mentioned how to reduce dimensionality, etc, for supercomputer runs but the basic algorithmics held. Fascinating. It appears SuperFish isn't open source but a quick web search did reveal https://github.com/OpenParEM/OpenParEM. Perhaps I'll dive back into this area if I can spare a few free hours - my Jackson 'Classical Electrodynamics' book looks lonely on my bookshelf.

It is quite satisfying to see invariants like Maxwell's equations hold.  And happily, not a single mention of AI in the talk. I did hear a funny quote, though, from another senior engineer during a dinner hosted by some executive recruiters at from local tech company when I asked him for his hot takes on AI. He told me that when presented with what he believes is AI generated content, such as a specification, he updated his former reply of 'TL;DR' now with 'AI;DR.'  Nice. 

As always, history doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme. During my time at the Cornell high-energy lab I recall work on traveling wave tubes, ion beams, etc and the mention of applicability SDI / 'Star Wars' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative as a use-case; I don't recall if they had funding for that work or not as I was a lowly undergrad tinkering away in the lab.  And the rhyming continues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_system. 

So back to the UW talk by the Helion scientist.  Ironically here's an email I received 30 minutes before the lecture

So from high-end steak dinner with one tech monster company to a startup solicitation in the space of a day, quite the interesting job scene.

On the theme of job markets (and I promise I'll tie this back to the initial them of electromagnetics), they definitely seem to go in cycles, too. Since I graduated a semester early from my undergrad I missed a lot of the on-campus interviewing and ended up returning to Texas without an offer in hand in January 1992. Given that environment I considered going back to grad school at the time and debated building upon my Bachelor's in electrical engineers by diving deeper into statistical signal processing at Texas A&M in College Station, TX or electromagnetics at Texas Tech in Lubbock, TX. 

I still remember visiting Tech campus and talking to my prospective advisor. He was a tall man of Norwegian descent who had fully acculturated to Texas. I recall how he referred to Lubbock as "the land of 2π steradians" as a clever, nerdy way to describe Lubbock's exceptionally flat landscape.

I didn't do the campus visit for A&M, though. Luckily Tom Parks, of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parks%E2%80%93McClellan_filter_design_algorithm fame, was my Cornell advisor so I was accepted without much concern.

Why electromagnetics? 

I think I caught the bug for the topic while doing my internship at Texaco in the summer of 1991. During that time I was asked to do some measurements on the efficacy of a capacitive sensor for different oil/water mixtures. I think they called them 'water cut' sensors which had commercial value since when oil flows through your pipeline it's important to know how much is crude versus water. Doing the experiments was fun but as always I got the itch to understand the device from first principles. Since it was a first party sensor, what are the options to change the electrode geometry, what are the expected results, etc. As such, I broke out my Turbo Pascal and wrote 1800 lines of a device simulation. I wasn't aware of the latest techniques in writing de novo simulations since I'd used canned tools like Superfish mentioned earlier, so I visited University of Houston and read different books and articles. 

https://github.com/vincentjzimmer/Documents/blob/master/device-simulation-august-1991.pdf

BTW at the bottom of page 1 I mention the technique 'successive over relaxation.' When I was asked to make a technical presentation for my first full-time job post-undergrad at Daniel Industries I discussed this work. One of the interviewers, a British gentleman named Graham(?) if I recall with a crew cut, replied 'that sounds like what I do on vacation.'

Back to our regularly-scheduled programming.

Now that I was onto the problem statement of using physical phenomena for building sensors, during this same 1991 internship at Texaco I proposed and prototyped a fiber-optic technique for measuring properties of fluids. I always enjoyed the software side more than the hardware, though, and I still recall the analog engineer at Texaco looking at my breadboarded op amp circuitry which helped drive my experiments and asking 'where is the hardware'?

As part of my house-cleaning of late, you'll see old items I've mentioned like NSA job letter https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2025/07/early-career-aspirations.html, Cornell engineer magazine https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2026/06/wind-energy-and-long-arc-cornell.html, etc. in earlier blog postings. The above report and below post-internship correspondence also appeared as I loaded bags for the Sammamish shredding event. After the internship, Texaco prepared a patent application naming me as the primary inventor, although I have not located a corresponding published application or issued patent.

I did find part of that post-internship patent application draft

and corresponding office action.

And it looks like attorney is still around, too

https://referlex.com/attorney/50fd243c-6ae1-45c4-ade0-4a7f654e6dfd although Texaco was acquired by Chevron quite some time ago. 

And there's my "Vince" tell in the "Dear Vince" above office action correspondence. I always say that when someone calls me 'Vince' they really don't know me. I'm entirely too high strung to go by such a happy-go-lucky name as 'Vince.' Even as a child my mother told me I'd correct adults who called my 'Vince' by saying 'No, my name is Vincent.' 

And little did I know in 1992 that I would see a raft of office actions across 100's of patents https://patents.google.com/?inventor=vincent+zimmer&country=US&type=PATENT&oq=inventor:(vincent+zimmer)+country:US++type:PATENT&sort=new&dups=language 1997+. You have to have quite a thick skin to wade through those objections without taking it personally. I learned a trick at Intel, though. When lawyers would ask me to help address an office action I'd reply "I'd love to but doesn't my employment contract preclude me from reading other company patents for fear of treble damages in case discovery proves I knew about them" or somesuch armchair lawyering I found myself embarrassingly doing back in the day.

OK. A third Saturday in a row of blogging?  What gives? Maybe some nostalgia from the earlier 90's spurred by finding old papers https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2025/07/early-career-aspirations.html https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2026/06/wind-energy-and-long-arc-cornell.html during the house clean-up? A pause in the storm of project work? Who knows other than time to get back to work.

PS
Wisdom for the streaming vids: "Writing is thinking. If you outsource your writing, you outsource your thinking."  https://cbmm.mit.edu/video/advice-young-investigator-first-and-last-days-anthropocene

Reunion cycle

I just received the following post-card in the mail for https://www.cornell.edu/

[front]

[back]

This round of reunions appears to target graduates in years ending in 2's and 7's

I recall that a couple of Anduril executives, Brian Schimpf and Matt Grimm https://www.anduril.com/anduril-leadership, are each Cornell graduates. It turns out that each appear to be 7's. Courtesy of Linkedin, viz., 

with this being their 20th with the 7 suffix. The CU lineage came to my mind after seeing them together in a presentation shortly after receiving this card. 

For this reunion round I'm targeting my 35th graduation anniversary with a 2 suffix (1/1992)

 

A 15 year gap between their graduation and mine which is not quite a generational gap (20-30 years), although it has definitely been a generation of graduates between my cohort in 1992 and the recent class.

This last point of generational gaps come to the fore for me when I bumped into the parody page  https://theonion.com/man-confident-he-wouldve-been-brave-enough-to-send-thumbs-down-emoji-in-cornell-group-chat/

I guess that I have inadvertently been 'brave' since I find myself often giving the thumbs-up emoji in Slack when I want to acknowledge a message. I confess that I had to Google the below explanation after reading the Onion headline above.

Maybe a potential use for personal ambient AI is to provide me a pop-up when I commit these faux pas in the future :)  

Beyond better instant messaging hygiene, it would be interesting to visit the Cornell campus since I haven't been there since 1992. I wonder if my EE haunt of Philips Hall, the proximate Upson Hall for comp sci on the engineering quad, and the hike to White Hall for math (if my memory holds) are still around.

And given the beauty of the region, Ithaca definitely qualifies for the saying https://alumni.cornell.edu/cornellians/ithaca-is-gorges/.  Hopefully Ithaca hasn't gone all Austin, TX, namely tie-die of "Keep Ithaca Weird". I can only absorb so much change in this era of break-neck AI dynamism. 

Another nice thing about Cornell is that my email address vjz1@cornell.edu is a forever address that is also backed by a free Gmail account with storage

Go Big Red.

UW pulled its free Gmail and storage for my email vzimmer@uw.edu, although it still supports forwarding. And now IEEE is separately charging for its Gmail to keep vzimmer@ieee.org alive. Luckily ACM is maintaining its forwarding vincentzimmer@acm.org. This IEEE change coincides with Intel Retiree organization 'retiring' email forwarding, so I'm now losing vincent.zimmer@intelretiree.com too. Oh well.

The transient nature of email accounts reminds me of the ephemeral nature of the internet. I sometimes snap pictures of web sites I cite since as this blog ages the links end up going stale as content ages off the web.

OK.  Enough random editorial for a Saturday.  Back to work.

Wind Energy and the Long Arc: December 1990

December 1990. I was a senior at Cornell (well, really a junior), and the Cornell Engineer magazine published a piece on wind energy that I was involved with. That issue has been sitting in a drawer — or rather, stored as a scan that I apparently fed into the scanner upside down — for the better part of 36 years. I finally rotated the pages, posted the PDF to https://github.com/vincentjzimmer/Documents/blob/master/Wind_Energy_Cornell_Engineer_December_1990.pdf, and thought a few words were warranted.

Wind energy in 1990 was a niche topic in a way that's almost hard to remember now. The wind farms of Altamont Pass in California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Pass_Wind_Farm had been operating for about a decade — the first commercial-scale wind farm in the U.S. had come online in 1981 — but the economics were marginal and the technology was adolescent. The phrase "renewable energy" had not yet acquired its current ubiquity. Horizontal-axis turbines were winning out over vertical-axis designs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrieus_wind_turbine, but the engineering was still very much in flux.

Cornell was a good place to be thinking about this. The College of Engineering had people working on structural dynamics, aerodynamics, and the applied mathematics that underpins both. The Cornell Engineer was student-run and gave us latitude to write about topics that weren't necessarily part of our coursework.

I graduated in early 1992 and spent the subsequent 30+ years doing systems software — firmware, UEFI, formal verification, very far from wind turbines. But there's a through-line that I think about occasionally: the engineering problems that look straightforward from a distance become deeply interesting at the interface of physics and constraints. Wind turbines in 1990 were a blade-structure-aerodynamics-economics system, the kind of coupled-domain problem that doesn't submit to clean reductionism. Firmware is a CPU-platform-specification-security system with the same character.

The other through-line is time. Wind energy from a marginal 1990s technology to >10% of global electricity generation https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-review-2025/ took about 35 years of sustained engineering, policy, and economics. A lot of the infrastructure that enabled it — power electronics, grid-scale storage, turbine materials — was being worked out in parallel by people who weren't waiting for a clean solution to arrive. That's also how firmware security works, and how formal verification of systems software is working right now.

The upside-down scan is an apt metaphor. Sometimes the record needs a 180° rotation to be readable.

And it looks like some things don't change, either. 

Vincent Quixote?

memories from uw and cornell

This is something of a random blog posting. 

As the new year rolls around, I became thoughtful of the page of milestones. These include my time at the University of Washington here in Seattle https://www.cs.washington.edu/ getting my CS Masters during the 1997-1999 time frame. 

I spoke a bit about the UWCSE in http://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2018/06/ along with the now-closed https://www.livingcomputers.org/. Given the recent interest in retrocomputing https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/style/retrocomputing.html the museum would be overrun with aficionados if it were open.

I frame many of my UW memories via the professors. These included John Zahorjan https://www.cs.washington.edu/people/faculty/zahorjan on computer performance. I recall one project with a classmate Amanda Barrett (then an employee at Teledescic, Macaw's attempt at a satellite communications network in the late 90's) on modeling different web server scheduling policies, such as Round Robin DNS (RR-DNS) using C++Sim. The most interesting part of the effort was the ability to drive the simulation with anonymized, real-life web traffic from Metacrawler by way of UW alum Brian Pinkerton alumni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebCrawler https://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/169/.

The next professor I recall is Anna Karlin for algorithms https://www.cs.washington.edu/people/faculty/karlin. She taught my first class at UW. The take-away I have from that course was the value and extent of mathematical rigor behind algorithms. From my undergraduate and 5 years prior industry experience I saw algorithms more as rote recipes than evolve mathemtical objects.

Next up was the artificial intelligence course with Dan Weld https://www.cs.washington.edu/people/faculty/weld. Like the performance class above, my strongest impression was the project course. The specific project included writing a movie recommendation system for movies. We would create Java wrappers for websites, such as for the recently launched https://www.imdb.com/, to support queries written in Datalog https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-0-387-39940-9_968. It would allow the end user to write queries, such as 'Show me all of the movies in Seattle starring Tom Hanks.' The downside of the system is that this work predated the semantic web and the website wrappers had to continually get updated based upon the changes in sites like IMDB. 

The other part I recall from the AI adventure is that my partner was a local Intel DuPont employee in another team. His manager was much more liberal about taking classes so he had the opportunity to work on the course during the work day. My management, who had initially replied to me when I requested funding for the masters project with 'why do you want to take classes, you are already smart enough?' didn't permit such liberties. So like my patent writing of the last 20 years, my masters work was always a late-night after-hours and predominately weekend activity.

From AI I recall taking a second algorithms class with Richard Ladner  https://www.cs.washington.edu/people/faculty/ladner. I still recall a quote from Ladner early in the quarter, namely "I cannot teach you everything about algorithms since the field is so broad and continually changing, but what I can do is teach you have to do research and learn on your own." The deep project work done in that class involving assessing recent publications has stayed with me. And the wisdom still holds true today, every field is continually changing. Sort of the academic analogy to the pre-Socratic Heraclitis quote "You cannot step into the same place in a river twice."

Another part of the UW journey was sorrow, too, including the passing of my advisor https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/www-cse-public/publications/msb/msb11.1.pdf. 

Just like my undergraduate journey, I didn't have the luxury to take so many courses, so I calculated the exact number of credits I needed to get my degree. For undergraduate urgency the timing was economic based, whereas for my masters it was lifestyle based (i.e., high pressure job with hardware power-ons, new-borne daughter, etc). As such, one way to complete the requirements was through research credits, and one effort involved working on a project with Susan Eggers  https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~eggers/. She was a huge influence on me in computer architecture, and after meeting her, some of the stories I late reach https://egc.yale.edu/how-job-yale-1960s-set-susan-eggers-groundbreaking-path-computer-science did not surprise me at all.

Since distance learning was a bit nascent in the late 90's, I still recall hurrying from DuPont, WA Intel site to the U District in Seattle. I tried to time my arrival such that when the street parking became free at 6pm I could find a slot.

And the old CS building Sieg Hall, ah......

Definitely quite a change from the new EE/CS building, especially the Amazon auditorium. I luckily managed to catch a couple of interesting talks there in the last couple of years, including Patterson preaching about RISC-V https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD-njD2QKN0 (and getting one of the single-page ISA descriptions printed on green paper) and David Bacon on the evolution of quantum computing https://phys.washington.edu/events/2019-12-10/cse-colloquium-quantum-computer-versus-supercomputer.

An interesting aspect of the university, versus industry, is that the rank of a professor is much more explicit, such as the laddering of associate versus assistant versus full versus emeritus professor, respectively. Compare this with the wild variability of job titles in the technology industry https://www.levels.fyi/, for example. A principal at one company versus a partner at another versus....although https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25758663 recently had an interesting discussion thread on the topic.

Speaking of partner title, I still recall one MS partner architect telling me that partner is the 'throw the other guy under the bus' job band. This spoke to the highly competitive nature of the job category since like many domains the higher you advance leads to few openings and broader expectations with the competition to advance and challenge to sustain the level being commensurately intense. 

Even in my early late teens I saw a glimpse into this. At Cornell I recall a fellow undergraduate who had interned at Goldman. He related tales of other interns sniping at each other openly during presentations each was required to make. The same calculus applies - exclusive job category with high compensation, thus some 'throw them under the bus' behaviors.

Speaking of Cornell working on my BS EE https://www.ece.cornell.edu/ece during the 1988-1991 window, a few memories come to mind. The first includes the luminaries who visited campus, such as Normal Mailer and Roger Penrose to give talks. Penrose, Kip Thorne, and other physicists were drawn to a department that still had Hans Bethe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Bethe. This was the same physics department that hosted the Feynman lectures. And for literature Cornell was the abode of the likes of Vladimir Nabakov, too.

Just like UW the professors made some of the largest impacts. These include Dynkin for real analysis https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/11/mathematician-eugene-dynkin-dies-90, Terrence Fine on probability https://www.engineering.cornell.edu/faculty-directory/terrence-fine, and the father of information retrieval Gerard Salton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Salton for discrete math. Cornell didn't just send TA's to instruct undergraduates but instead offered access to world class researchers in their fields.

Moving from maths to engineering, Prof Torng https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/12/cornell-professor-honored-intel-corp-his-computer-chip-improvement taught the course on digital design. K-maps, Mealy-Moore machines, etc. Good stuff. 

And closest to home there was Professor Gries https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/gries/gries.html class on computability theory. This started with computational complexity, big-O notation, and other rudiments, leading into Hoare triples, such as pre-conditions, post-conditions, and invariants.  I still remember walking down the hall of the computer science building and seeing a room filled wall-to-wall with silver-covered Springer-Verlag "Texts and monographs in computer science."

Beyond visiting speakers and professors I recall lots of lake-effect snows and winds during the winter, and beautiful changes of seasons and the rugged environment of Ithaca, New York. There was a common theme on T-shirts and car stickers of 'Ithaca is gorges' as a play on the terrain and 'gorgeous' scenery up upstate New York.

Since I was so far from home and living on a budget, I would only return back to Houston for events like Christmas or summer. I recall one thanksgiving holidays eating at gas station since I had forgotten to do grocery shopping ahead of time. Other times I would travel to visit my aunt in New Jersey by way of New York Port Authority. Port Authority was definitely a stark contrast from bucolic Ithaca, NY or suburban Houston. I recall one trek through Port Authority when there was a body in a wheel chair parked outside of the bathroom. A sheet covered the bulk of the person but the hands were protruding with what looked like the stiffness of rigor. The crowd in the bus terminal where walking around the body as if it were just another obstruction on the path of their daily routine. Another trick I learned going through Port Authority with my suitcase was to put my money in my shoe. I'd leave $5 in my wallet so that when someone invariably wanted to 'help me' find my connecting bus terminal and then requested a gratuity because "you know I could be doing much worse to make money", I could satisfy the request and not get rolled for all of my traveling money.

When I think of growing up in Houston, or the US Southwest, doing undergrad in Ithaca in the US Northeast, and now leaving in the US Pacific Northwest, I'm mostly covered the continental US. Heat in the SW, cold in the NE, and rain in the NW. I'm only missing living in the US Southeast, such as Florida. But after reading Thomas McGuane's 'Ninety-two in the Shade' https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51598.Ninety_two_in_the_Shade in my youth, I wasn't so anxious to move to that area.