About Me and This Site

WRSomsky Portrait

About Me

My background is in theoretical physics, with a Ph.D. from Princeton University where I worked on computational particle physics.

For the past thirty years, I have been a Senior Computer Specialist and the Linux Guru for the Physics and Astronomy departments at the University of Washington (Seattle), entrusted with the care and feeding of the departments’ Unix/Linux workstations and servers.

Site Mechanics

This site – as evidenced by the URL – is hosted on GitHub Pages, and is built with the Hugo static site generator using the Mainroad theme with a liberal amount of tweaking.

The site logo depicts a planetary gear system w/ an offset sun gear that nonetheless still meshes and turns perfectly. Puzzlemaker Oskar van Deventer (Web, YouTube) was able to 3D-print and post to YouTube such an eccentric planetary system with three planetary gears, calling them “Looney Gears”, but expressed doubt that any such configuration could be mathematically exact. This intrigued me, and after some work, I found that there were whole hosts of mathematically exact configurations. After I relayed this information to Oskar, along w/ notes as to some possible configurations, he then proceded to produce a new eccentric planetary system with four planetary gears, which he dubbed “Somsky Gears”. The logo is a depiction of that planetary gear set.