Visit OHSU primate center

[Nathan McCorkle]

I would like to visit and just found out it's possible with a group of at least 10 people older than 10 years old:

https://www.ohsu.edu/onprc/tours

Anyone else here interested?

[Ward Cunningham]

Wow. Great video. Recorded four years ago as a substitute for in-person tours.

I liked that they didn’t shy away from their role of breading tests subjects for medical research.
I hadn’t realized the scale of science conducted on-site by full-time staff.

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[Eric Garner]

My son visited there with his Health Occupations class last year. He was pretty impressed.

They are still requiring proof of COVID vaccination to visit, so if you want to go you need to find your card

Eric

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[Russell Senior]

In the grand tradition of hijacking a thread on a barely relevant
topic (apologies), once a long time ago I got a solo tour of
Bonneville Power Administration[1]'s Dittmer Control Center, where
they manage their entire transmission system, at the Ross Complex in
Vancouver WA. I don't remember exactly how it happened, other than it
was somehow arranged for me by my father who worked for BPA at Ross. I
am pretty sure it was sometime during my college time in the early
1980s. One of the things I saw on that tour was their computer, a PDP
10 with disk packs and a wild terminal station with what looked to me
like a fighter plane joystick with a thumb jog switch. Apparently a
young Bill Gates and Paul Allen had worked on their control system for
TRW [2] not long before. I think about that tour every time I drive
by, which I did recently. It prompted me to inquire whether such tours
were still possible, and the answer I got was a somewhat predictable
"um, no, not at all, you must be joking".

[1] https://www.bpa.gov/-/media/Aep/environmental-initiatives/cultural-resources/transmission-projects/corridors-of-power.pdf
[2] https://www.columbian.com/news/2018/oct/16/paul-allen-honed-his-chops-in-vancouver-for-bpa/

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Russell Senior
rus...@personaltelco.net

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[Rob Wilcox]

I would visit the OHSU Primate Research Center.

I worked in bio twice, before going to the dark side of electrical engineering and chips. The first time I was 15 and worked in a federal virology lab for a Summer. We were using the plaque assay method to quantitatively detect virus in sewage. The use of monkey kidney cells for plaque assay was within the memory of the researchers, though by then a continuous cell line had been developed. So we got our cells delivered frozen from FedEx. Before the cell line, monkeys were the source of the Marburg Virus outbreak in a virology lab in 1967. The second time in bio, I worked in an orthopedic biomechanics lab. Our Orthopedic lab in the medical school shared a Modcomp minicomputer with a neurology lab. Some days the Modcomp gathered data from our material tester, and other days it measured action potentials of giant squid neurons.  Our research was focused on the the biomechanics of the knee, the material properties of ligaments, and joint replacement materials. In one experiment, we used standard beagles, severed the knee ligament, surgically repaired it, then split the dogs into a control group and a group that had exercise while healing. Standard beagles live their entire lives indoors in cages. For our exercise group, we rented space on a farm. The beagles had never seen the sun or rain. They played like dogs do. Their ligaments healed stronger. In the first lab, it was frustrating to throw out contaminated experiments, in the second lab, although I support animal models in research, I think they should be more judiciously used as judged by medical review committees. 

I consulted at BPA on software systems. They are very security-minded, for good reason. They hire many veterans, some of whom come easy to that. I did take a NW Energy Policy class which allowed US persons a tour of Dittmer. The class was https://www.pdx.edu/center-for-public-service/northwest-energy-policy-and-columbia-river. It was created by Mark Hatfield at Lewis and Clark, and is now every 2 years at PSU. It is a great class and recommended for those interested. 

The Columbia River system has a large change in elevation sources to the Pacific. I believe RODS was being ported to a DEC VAX in Gates project. I have also had a lot of VAX experience. From public sources, part of RODS simulates the river. It has weather forecasts, river gauges, and the load forecast. It optimizes when to fill each dam, when to drain through generators, and when to spill, computing the entire system, then hourly, now every 5 minutes. I'm not in favor of removing the 4 lower Snake dams or making one giant Western energy market, but I would like for fish passage to be opened upstream of the Grand Coulee into Canada. I believe before the PDP-10, the calculations were done on punch cards. At Intel my first VAX was bought by Tim May for his famous soft error rate research. May later founded the Cypherpunk mailing list. 

Best~

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[Russell Senior]

On Tue, Apr 8, 2025 at 5:15 PM Rob Wilcox <robwi...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I consulted at BPA on software systems. They are very security-minded, for good reason. They hire many veterans, some of whom come easy to that. I did take a NW Energy Policy class which allowed US persons a tour of Dittmer. The class was https://www.pdx.edu/center-for-public-service/northwest-energy-policy-and-columbia-river. It was created by Mark Hatfield at Lewis and Clark, and is now every 2 years at PSU. It is a great class and recommended for those interested.

My boss of ~20 years was a BPA alum, also. He had a PhD in low
temperture physics at Stanford and then somehow ended up at BPA's Labs
working on high voltage field phenomena. I'm not sure Labs really even
still exists today, or perhaps is a mere shadow of its former self.
Then he left BPA and set up a boutique scientific consulting firm that
hired me as their programmer/data manager. One of the first projects I
worked on was an HVDC line exposure assessment near Grizzly Mountain
between Madras and Prineville, where they zapped cows and wheat under
the line and at a control site 1000 yards away, and measured a bunch
of electric field and corona parameters (which we worked on) and a
bunch of biology things (that someone else worked on)[1]. Although
most of our consulting was with EPRI, we interacted a fair amount with
BPA, including by adapting some of their engineering code from
kind-of-horrible-written-by-EE's-in-Fortran to C and running it on PCs
and later, Linux. Low hanging fruit everywhere, but also written
pretty clearly so you can understand the intent. One of my favorite
things was taking a bunch of code filled with sines and cosines and
tangent function calls, and converting it via trig identities to dx's
and dy's, multiplies and divides, with like one tan2() call and a
sqrt().

[1] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6378085

Oh, heh, my name even made it into the 473 page technical report in
Appendix C. I'm immortal!

--
Russell Senior
rus...@personaltelco.net

[Ward Cunningham]

I remember Russell telling me of his work on “an HVDC line exposure assessment near Grizzly Mountain between Madras and Prineville” when I first started hanging out at Dorkbot. This is how we come to know things. Thanks for additional details.

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