I'm finally writing the post I've been putting off for months! Since my mom has her own post, I figured my dad deserved one too. Just kidding, this is something I've been wanting to write since I thought of Blog.phia. It's a story I tell everyone whenever I get the chance because I'm so proud of it.

My dad's currently busy working on who knows what in his favorite place, the garden, so I'm writing this purely from my memory of the many times he's recounted to me (at my request) his days as a physics PhD student at UC Santa Cruz in the late '80s and early '90s.

My dad's particular subfield of physics was high energy or nuclear physics. As his avenue into the US, he researched subatomic particles under Professor Don Coyne who funded his student visa and other living expenses, so long as he assisted him in his research. They would take Prof. Coyne's Porsche two-seater from the wooden house he built himself in Bonny Doon through Highway 9 (the winding one lined with redwoods through the Santa Cruz Mountains and one of my favorites to drive through) to get to the Stanford Linear Accelorator Center, or SLAC.

I haven't taken a single physics class in my entire life so excuse my lack of domain knowledge here: At SLAC, my dad worked the graveyard shift, monitoring the accelerator's acceleration (???) of electrons and positrons, colliding them with each other to the point of atomic breakdown, producing the subatomic D* particle, his thesis' subject.

This was great and all but even more fascinating to me was the production of another scientific finding that happened at the exact same time my dad hung out at SLAC: the birth of the very language I'm using to write this post, Hypertext Markup Language or HTML, which in turn enabled the launch of the World Wide Web!

To communicate their research progress with CERN (the European equivalent of SLAC) across the sea, scientists at SLAC used CERN physicist Tim Berners-Lee's brand new invention called "HTML tags", to format their research—figures, paragraphs, headings, and all. Isn't that the coolest thing? As usual, Wikipedia does a better job than me of explaining things in depth, so check out the history of HTML and Tim Berners-Lee's Wiki.

I don't have a playlist for this but I do have a song (I always do)!

Since this is my dad's blog post, this is his song, as in, a song I love that reminds me of him, and especially of his days at UC Santa Cruz. As a graduate student, my dad rented a room in his Aptos home to a painter who got paint all over his walls and carpet, and paid rent using his credit card. These lyrics from "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" by Bob Dylan (I saw him live two weeks ago!) fit that image in my mind exactly:

The empty handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets

While I'm at it, another tenant worth mentioning is the Japanese chef specializing in French cuisine who had long hair and cut his toenails on my dad's front porch (no need for a trash can). We use his BBQ drumstick recipe to this day. Recipes blog post coming soon!

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8/17/24 UPDATE: After getting this blog post "peer reviewed" by my dad, he issued the following corrections and clarifications written on a loose piece of mail, naturally. "A few changes" he said:

"D-star particle" is actually the D* particle and CERN worked on proton-proton collisions while SLAC electron-positron collisions. Also, not written was the clarification that his Aptos house was after grad school. "Grad students can't afford a house!"

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10/26/25 UPDATE: I just found a cool 🆒 (actually, rather scathing) clip of Ted Nelson's take on Berners-Lee's hypertext system.

His take on the World Wide Web follows with something else quite notable. Ted Nelson outs himself as a vibe coder??? Kidding. But it's quite close. For context, Nelson is known to be the coiner of the word "hypertext," but his "Xanadu," the online hypertext system that embodied all the values he, Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart, and others advocated for in the early days, lost to the WWW as he describes in the video. Here's my imperfect transcription of what he says next. I believe there's something quite important in here:

[7:46] Ted: I consider myself an artist. It's very hard to delegate. If Rembrandt said 'Put another little touch up there, now go over there with the pink.' it would've slowed down and considerably lessened the impact of his work. I don't program, I am a producer and director of software, so I have to work through others, and this is extremely difficult. I have to bring other people on board. My special ability is that I can visualize things other people can't, and trying to get that vision to where you can see it and use it is the hardest thing I face...

Knowing what directions are viable—it's like striking out cross country in land you don't know... The enthusiasms of the present and the future have to be tempered by an understanding of the enthusiasm of the past, and where they landed and didn't lead. We want a future in which the dreams and ideals of the past can go on to the future in the best possible way with the best outcome and not be hijacked by local considerations and scaremongering and narrowminded thinking.

How to see the possibilities when there are so many things around you that are a certain way? I don't know. My first software designs were largely done with my eyes closed, thinking 'If I hit that key, what should happen?' I was able to imagine—they say this can't be done—but when my interfaces were built they always felt the way I knew they would, and the people at Xerox PARC said that's never possible. All I can say to the young is: Close your eyes.

Feel free to ponder this one with me. Was Nelson an early practitioner of "vibe coding?" The art of coding-less coding? Design-less design? Would the WWW have been Xanadu if Nelson had Cursor 50 years ago? Or was he urging us to stay true to our own instincts when enticed by more "mainstream" or "recommended" visions, implementations, and narratives? What did he really mean by all this? I'll have to get back to you on this one.

"The enthusiasms of the present and the future have to be tempered by an understanding of the enthusiasm of the past, and where they landed and didn't lead."
~ Ted Nelson