User:RogerPerkins

From Palaeos.org

About me

Hello, I’m Roger, a SysOps and a scientist at Plaeos.org. I know enough about the former to break software, and enough about the latter to be dangerous. I grew up in Ronald Reagan’s hometown – the corn belt of Illinois. A half century later I still dislike his politics. I was a solid C student through high school, whenever I attended that is. Many of my classmates smelled like a farm – not that there is anything wrong with that. I preferred playing in the woods. The university was far less boring. I grew my hair long, bought a Martin guitar, learned about studying (and partying), got married, yada yada, and the rest is history.

My first career was as a nuclear reactor core physicist, fast breeder reactors, actually. I later helped start up the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and then went on to direct a supercomputer center. If I told you some of my jobs along the way, I would have to kill you.

For the past dozen years I’ve been engaged in IT management and computational biology / bioinformatics research. If you Google Roger Perkins, a D.C.-based lawyer will pop up. That is NOT me. Nor is the sculptor. If you add MAQC microarrays QSAR, SAR, proteomics, bioinformatics, toxicology, classification, estrogen, and I’m sure other keywords to the search, my publications should pop up.

My ardent hope is that this web site can inspire some young people to become scientists. In America, we are exporting jobs wholesale, and importing scientists wholesale. There is something wrong with this picture, but this is the wrong place for that discussion.

My current (avocation) interest is Precambrian evolutionary biology. My personal goal is to write like Darwin, and to not write like Gould.

Apparently, I suffer from excessive compulsive disorder, which I define as “anything worth doing is worth overdoing”. I also serve as webmaster for The Virtual Fossil Museum, a site I believe complements this one very well. I just hope it is not true that “no good deed goes unpunished”.

My wife, a shrink, gives me hope however, assuring me that I’m quite sane. I’m not sure yet about the sanity of the rest of the eclectic crew building Palaeos.org. The pay is really lousy, and the prospect for a raise is even worse. It’s sorta like being back in college.

Cheers -- enjoy and learn from Palaeos, or help improve it!