Personal History

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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

      Started using e-mail

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

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

    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

At Scarborough Renaissance Faire, Standing Bear Cooper told me that I am "a portal"

2001  Scientist, Agilent Technologies, Dallas Texas, part of Agilent’s Field Sales Force

2002 Toured the US giving day-long seminars on optical networking technology

2003-2004  Toured the US giving a half-day seminar 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

2004  Technical Marketing Engineer, Agilent Technologies, Santa Rosa California

    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 emcee

    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

2007 Introduced Ransom’s Notes to you!

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Like a dragonfly, darting from task to task and mastering every  one.