I work for NIST, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (weights and measures, used to be NBS or National Bureau of Standards). On-line I have a resume (pretty dry, really). My list of useful and interesting links.

I am interested in world travel, reading, computers (algorithms and data structures in general, and formal methods and verification in particular), chess, religion, and space travel. My ancestors with the surname Black go back 300 years, and I believe we are of the Clan MacGregor with more history.

You can contact me by e-mail at p.black(swirl)acm.org.

Personal Essays

My musings and ramblings.

• The beginnings of a design notebook for a Cycler ship.
• Why repentance is the easiest thing.
• The orbiter Discovery's Visit to Utah in 1995.
• On the Composition of the Universe.
• The Old Testament books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles in parallel.
• There are SI definitions of prefixes for binary multiples. Just for fun I thought of two definitions for binary Googol: goobi and boogol.
• More precise Threat or Alert Levels.
• Notes on my lecture to the Software Engineering course on Formal Methods.

HTML Graphics Experiments

In the early days of the World Wide Web and HTML, before frames and tables, I mused about the limits of display. I created some pages in the button style of Star Trek. More recently I built an intricate animated diagram of the plasma distribution system of the NCC1701D Enterprise in less than 160k transmission. (I am still looking for someone with the talent and tools to do it well.) It was also fun to explain things like "EPS conduits," why panels blow up in a shower of sparks, and why the ship's phasers have flashes run along them just before firing.

For completeness, I created home pages for Star Fleet and the United Federation of Planets.

site tools

Labeled with ICRA

Standard Disclaimer

The picture at the top came from the NASA Human Space Flight gallery, KEYWORDS 2005, NASA Programs: Station.

This page was last updated 21 May 2008.

This page's URL is http://www.geocities.com/p.black/.