Job Ideas

What excites me? What floats my boat? Things like astronomical, geological, or oceanographic modeling and visualizations that might be done at NASA, USGS, or MBARI. Or computer modeling and special effects at such outfits like Lucasfilm or Pixar.

To limit the search, I'd like to produce this eye candy in an elegant, rich, productive, and secure language such as Java on a robust system such as Unix rather than on one of those limited proprietary, bug-ridden, and insecure systems. To do my small part in preserving the environment, I'd like to be able to walk or ride my bike (Menlo Park, CA area), or take Caltrain to work.

Anyway, here are a few links to give you some ideas on the kinds of projects that I would enjoy working on. They are currently weighted towards geophysics, but I'll be adding biotech, oceanography, and astronomy visualizations as I find them.

Mashing up something like Google Earth with any sort of data such as USGS earthquake data to get images such as this.
This volume visualization of the Orion nebula teams up the San Diego Supercomputer center with the Hayden Planetarium to give visitors a virtual tour of the Orion nebula.
The SETI@home screensaver is a very small window on a very interesting project.
The wind vorticity during the winter storm of March 1993.
A Java wind simulation (first turn on Java in your browser).
The USGS Terraweb project which includes the Seafloor Image Map of the Monterey Bay Region.
Landscape Visualization at Geomantics.
ESRI's maps.
The ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics issue on visualization including the top ten visualization problems.

Also, visualizations can be subtle. Take for instance a scrollbar which renders a mini-version of the content. If the content is code, color can be used to show the age of each line so that recently modified code can be very quickly identified (useful for finding bugs that have recently cropped up). It is visualizations in this category that might be used in e-commerce sites and would make the job at an e-commerce site interesting to me.

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