The Dayton Hamvention
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Saturday is the biggest day. There are a lot of technical forums, more time browsing the vendor booths, perhaps other trips out to the flea market to see if the bargains have gotten any better. Local hams from around Dayton come in force.
I am quite fond of the Contest Dinner held Saturday Night. There are often world-famous (in the ham radio community, at least) speakers. My favorite was Joe Taylor, who was into ham radio as he was growing up. He turned his interest to astronmy, and has ended up with a partial autobiography here :
Joseph H. Taylor Jr.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1993
Autobiography
Joseph H. Taylor Jr.I was born on March 29, 1941, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the second son of Joseph Hooton Taylor and Sylvia Evans Taylor. When I was seven we moved back to the family farm in Cinnaminson Township, New Jersey, then operated by my paternal grandfather. We were three children, joined later by three more, plus two Evans cousins; like the farm's peaches and tomatoes, the eight of us grew and ripened in a healthy and carefree environment on the eastern bank of the Delaware River. Among my fondest boyhood memories are collecting stone arrowheads left on that land by its much-earlier inhabitants, and erecting, together with my brother Hal, numerous large, rotating, ham-radio antennas, high above the roof of the three-story Victorian farmhouse. With one such project we managed to shear off the brick chimney, flush with the roof, much to the consternation of our parents. That incident was one of many practical lessons of my youth, not all absorbed in the most timely fashion, involving ill-advised shortcuts toward some goal.
He has an entry in Wikipedia.
His Nobel Prize was for studying detailed information type of pulsar, which is thought to be a rapidly rotating neutron star.
In an odd bit of coincidence, the discoverer of pulsars was another Quaker, Jocelyn Bell Burnell. This work led to another Nobel Prize, but unfortunately not to her, but to her professors.