Tobi's Fun Stuff

This is a collection of random things collected since about 1990 - some of them saved from the original pages in Carver Mead's Physics of Computation lab at Caltech.

• Video knot tying guide. Some MPEG movies showing how to tie some useful knots.
• Alexander Selkirk: The Real Robinson Crusoe. An wonderful account of a trip to Robinson Crusoe Island, 400 miles off the southwest coast of Chile, written by my uncle and aunt Stu and Stevie Bruce. Includes photographs of the island and other stuff. (Originally published in The Explorers Journal, but with additional images.)
• Jimi Hendrix pictures. Some scans from ca 1990 from various places.
• Line art from Judge Dee chinese detective stories, written and beautifully illustrated by Robert Van Gulik.
• MIT lock picking guide.
• An interesting article from IEEE Spectrum about the design of behaving agents in video games.
• The winning T-Shirt design that Mark Tilden, Nici Shraudolf, and I put together for the 2002 Telluride workshop on Neuromorphic Engineering. Robots, poker, tequila,; nicotine, and large amounts of unmarked cash...
• A Friend with Junk is a Punk : bumper sticker that stuck in my head after a drive through Milpitas or someplace with my friend Chris Lindstrom.

Max Delbruck papers and other material

My father Max wrote some papers and articles of general interest that I really enjoy. There is also a good oral history from Caltech's Engineering and Science Magazine. This content was inspired by the Max 100 Centennial celebration at Cold Spring Harbor that took place August 2006, followed by the Delbruck Centrum Berlin centennial and the subsequent Delbruck Centennial in Salamanca in Oct 2006. The first Delbruck centennial took place in Nashville Sep 2006, and the last one will take place at Caltech 8 Jan 2007.

Essays/History

• Max's chapter entitled "Out of this world" about his friend the physicist and practical joker George Gamow, for the Gamow Memorial Volume edited by Fred Reines, Cosmology, Fusion, and Other Matters. It is a wonderful snapshot of the culture of physics in Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen in 1928. To me, the title is curious because it is also the name of a famous and very effective mind-reading card trick from Paul Curry that Max liked to do for people.
• Max's annotated copy of his 1978 Caltech commencement lecture "The arrow of time"
• Max's 1972 piece "Homo Scientificus according to Beckett" done in question/answer style with Norm Davidson about Sam Beckett, his literary hero
• The 1971 article Max wrote "Aristotle totle totle," in which Max discusses Aristotle's view of life. From the book From Microbes to Life edited by J. Monod and E. Borek.

History related to Max from others

• Gunther Stent, "Telling Nature" (source unknown), contains history of molecular biology.
• Janet Manning's Personal History of Hans Delbruck (Max's father, the well-known historian)
• Max Delbruck oral history from Caltech's Engineering and Science magazine

Scientific articles

• Max's 1970 review paper "Lipid Bilayers as Models of Biological Membranes" from The Neurosciences: Second Study Program
• The famous 1935 paper "Uber die Natur der Genmutation und der Genstruktur (On the nature of gene mutation and gene structure)" by N. W. Timofeeff-Ressovky; K.G. Zimmer; M. Delbruck
• The 1980 paper Max wrote "Was Bose-Einstein Statistics Arrived at by Serendipity?." Max argues here that Bose-Einstein statistics (describing boson statistical mechanics) was a lucky double mistake, first on Bose's part, then on Einstein's.

Videos

• The 1980 video interview of Max by Peter van Zahn, the well-known german reporter who covered America. Warning: this is a 400MB download in Windows Media format (wmv)!