(no subject)

Page 37 of the most recent (Jan. 9 2006) issue of the New Yorker
(in Elizabeth Kolbert's article "Butterfly Lessons") describes
a computer program called "Pollen Viewer 3.2" which allows the
visualization of how fossilized pollen concentrations of many
popular tree species (beech, oak, spruce, ...) have varied over
space and time, over the past 20,000 years (basically since the
last ice age).

In 1990-1991, I (under the supervision of Professor Tom Webb III
and then post-doc Alan Knoerr) wrote Pollen Viewer 1.0. At the
time, it ran only on SGI workstations. When I graduated in 1992,
I handed the maintenance and development of the program over to andrel.

I had a lot of fun writing Pollen Viewer 1.0, but I still remember
meeting the poor graduate students who created the program's database
by classifying and counting individual fossilized pollen spores under
a microscope for countless lake bed samples ...