Lars Toomre

Some have asked how posts (such as what you are reading now) are first stored on Lars Toomre's website(s) and then automatically cross-posted to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Let me briefly explain how it is done. Lars' Twitterfeed picks up (via RSS feeds) recent original content posted both to the Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") website and to Lars' personal ("LT") website. Both of these websites are running what is known as Drupal — what arguably is the most popular Content Management System ("CMS") currently in wide-spread use.

Drupal, an open-source CMS software package, dynamically creates each web page that is rendered for the human (or bot) website visitor. What content is displayed depends upon what then is in the website data bases; the various parameters that are set beforehand on a system-wide basis; and what specific URL the visitor (or bot) requests (as in at the top of a typical web browser). Drupal is truly a pretty amazing piece of collectively engineered software!!! The original content published with Drupal as a customized RSS feed is then collected by Lars' Twitterfeed and automatically fed as input to his Twitter account (@ltoomre).

If one were to log into the Twitter website, one could peruse the content that has been automatically cross-posted and then published to various external sources. One might notice that the two websites (LT and TCM) are set-up slightly differently. Whereas the TCM site will only "publish" in its RSS feed original content posted to the blog category, the LT website "publishes" in its RSS feed everything at that point in time was displayed on the front page of the LT website. As a result, the LT portion of the Twitterfeed picks up such items as "Lars personal" events like library entries, recipes and quotes as well as whatever original content Lars might publicly post. The TCM RSS feed does not currently publish such entries like a quote of the day, something that was entered in the Reference section or an event that TCM might be participating in.

This combined feed from Twitter is then available to be "consumed" by a wide variety of RSS reader applications. One of those RSS readers has been incorporated into Facebook as an application. When the parameters are correctly set (and then verified), the Facebook application periodically reads my Twitter feed and then cross-publishes new entries as new content on my Facebook account with links back to the original post. Hence, without any manual intervention, much of the original content shows up on both the TCM/LT websites as well as appearing as links on various social networking sites.

I do have one question though for the reader. Should the TCM RSS feed be modified to include a broader range of content types? Your thoughts and comments (whether public or private) are most welcome.

Fans of mechanical engineering marvels, steam locomotives and trains in general often visit what is known as the Steamtown National Historic Site (run by the U.S. National Park Service) in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Some years ago, I took Kyra to this National Park Service site at the start of a great loop trip that included stops in Altoona, Pennsylvania (Horseshoe Curve), Dayton, Ohio (National Museum of U..S. Air Force); Sandusky, Ohio (Cedar Point Amusement Park — The Roller Coaster Capital of the World!); Dearborn, Michigan (Henry Ford Museum — or as Kyra refers to this marvel, "The How Things Work" museum); Niagara Falls; and her grandparents home in West Newton, Massachusetts before returning to Fairfield County in Connecticut. During that first visit, we stayed at the Radisson Lackawanna Station Hotel — a truly amazing historic landmark that once served as a passenger train station rivaling Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal.

Almost every year since, I have returned at least once to this wonderful hotel and the nearby Steamtown National Historic Site. Standing near the entrance is Union Pacific engine 4012 (pictured to left), an example of what arguably was the most powerful type of steam locomotives ever built in the United States. This steam engine has wheels in what is known as a 4-8-8-4 configuration, combining two sets of eight driving wheels with both a four-wheel leading truck for stability entering curves and a four-wheel trailing truck to support the large firebox.

During World War II, these giants were used to haul a huge volume of the heavy ammunition trains over the Wasatch Mountains in eastern Utah and western Wyoming. In fact, during the war, after German agents filed reports that the Americans had giant steam engines that were moving huge trains full of vital war material over steep mountain grades at high speed, their reports were dismissed as "impossible". These locomotives were so powerful and relatively easy to run that they were among the last steam engines to be removed from active commercial service in the late 1950s.

Kyra knew that one of her father's prized possessions was a brass H2O model railroad version of this engine. Hence, she suggested that we make this stop as part of that summer's "tasting tour" focused on learning about how things work. We very much enjoyed that trip to Scranton as I did alone again this past weekend. I hope, though, that one day soon that Kyra might again accompany her father on such a learning adventure.

Erik and Lori Toomre are blessed to have three really healthy, happy and very talented children. This year I spent part of Mother's Day with Erik and his family out in the San Francisco area. While there as an uncle from the far-off New York City region, I had a chance to catch some of those children's essence. I also came away from those couple of hours again quite impressed with each of the three.

Part of the joy of returning last week to MIT's Tech Week activities was having some time to catch up with both my parents and brother, Erik. Teagan, Erik's middle child, accompanied her father from California on this trip back to Massachusetts. She came with the Toomre adults to both The Tech Night at The Pops and MIT's 2009 Commencement the next morning.

Along the way, I had the opportunity to get to know Teagan better and came away even more impressed than before. Teagan reminds me quite a bit of when my daughter, Kyra Toomre, was that same age. I recall how fascinated Kyra was during a trip alone with her father to Dearborn, Michigan and as Kyra called it, the "How Things Work" museum (Henry Ford Museum). Kyra was so fascinated that she insisted that we return the next day as well. Teagan shares that same fascination with the world and how things work.

The picture to the left was taken as Teagan was momentarily distracted from observing and trying to understand what a commencement was all about. Somewhere there is a picture of Kyra taken probably eight or nine years earlier in almost exactly the same pose. It is very eerie to this father at least how both girls share so strikingly similar appearance and fascination. Teagan was truly a joy to be with and to get to know better.

On Friday June 5th 2009, my father, Professor Alar Toomre, likely participated in his last Commencement ceremony as an active member of the MIT faculty. Twenty-seven and twenty-five years earlier, Dad had likewise participated in both of the commencements when his two sons received their MIT degrees. Hence, the Toomre "boys", Lars and Erik, decided to return home for the 2009 Tech Week activities and to see Dad for one last time in a red gown!!

Like many academic institutions, MIT likes to celebrate its various achievements, which includes the strength and diversity of its faculty. As a result, each faculty member who participates in a formal academic ceremony (like a commencement) is encouraged to wear the academic gown of the college or university from which she or he received his PhD.

As one might expect, any such MIT ceremony is richly represented by the MIT robes made in the school colors of red and gray. Equally as well represented are the unique gowns of academic institutions like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford universities. However, then in such a MIT gathering, there always seemed to a few that always visually stand out from the massed collection of grey and black. A couple might be made of a brilliant blue or even a bright red material.

Now my father is not exactly a small man standing at more than six feet three inches tall. Hence, one tends to notice those occasions when he dons his academic robe from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. Of course, his robe is one of those made in bright red reflecting the University of Manchester's royal heritage and links to the British monarchy.

Ahead of this year's commencement, Dad needed to again try on his academic gown. The picture to the left was taken on the second-floor porch of the long-time family home on Thursday, June 4th 2009 as Dad did so. From left to right are Erik, Teagan, Alar, Joyce and Lars Toomre.

We all enjoyed teasing Dad about his red academic gown that evening. We also were glad he was so easy to spot the next day amongst a crowd of more than 2,500 academic robes at the 2009 MIT Commencement. Congratulations to all of the 2009 graduates of MIT!!

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ("MIT") held its Tech Week 2009 activities during the week of June 5th 2009. My father, Professor Alar Toomre, first came to MIT back in the fall of 1953 and graduated with a couple of degrees in the Class of 1957. He went on to get his PhD in England as a Marshall Scholar (first awarded in 1954, these scholarships are named for Gen. George C. Marshall, architect of the European Recovery Act and constitute Britain's official thank-you for U.S. assistance following World War II, tenable at any U.K. university). In 1960, now married to Mom (Joyce Stetson Toomre), he returned to MIT as a member of the Applied Mathematics Department.

Dad has been at The Institute virtually ever since save for a few short periods on sabbatical at places like Princeton, CalTech or University of Groningen in Holland. As a mathematics professor over the past half-century, he has taught many an undergraduate the finer details of calculus in courses like 18.03 (Differential Equations) or 18.04 (Complex Variables With Applications).

As my father's elder son, I too went to MIT where I also had Dad as one of my calculus professors and graduated in the Class of 1982 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering ("BSME") — or as those around the MIT community would say, I was Course 2. My sole brother, Erik Toomre, followed me to MIT and likewise had Dad as one of his calculus professors. Erik graduated two year later in the Class of 1984, also with a BSME.

As a consequence, this Tech Week included the celebration of the 25th anniversary of my brother's class graduation. By happen chance, Dad also officially will be retiring later this year. (As with most MIT alumni, we do wonder though just what that definition of "retirement" might really mean, especially with our Dad!!) The commencement held on Friday morning June 5th was likely his last as an active member of the MIT faculty. Hence, the Toomre "boys" decided to return home for this year's MIT Tech Week both to meet up with old friends and to celebrate our family's long association with MIT.

Teagan Toomre, Erik's middle child, accompanied Erik from California on this trip back to Massachusetts. We all had a wonderful evening on Thursday at the 112th annual Tech Night at the Pops. That was followed by the graduation ceremonies on Friday in the Great Court where the picture at the left was taken of Teagan and Erik. Friday night the assembled Toomre clan all went out to celebrate at Legal Seafood restaurant in Chestnut Hill. That was followed up excellent presentations and conversations at Tech Day 2009 on Saturday morning where the focus of the presentations was entitled "The Mind's Eye." Erik and I both had a chance to meet up with former classmates, lab partners and even a fraternity brother or two!

While at dinner on Friday night, Mom reminded us all that her connection to MIT even preceded her marriage to Dad. Her father had been an electrical engineering undergraduate back in the Class of 1926. Obviously in that time period, the electrical engineering problems were more focused on the generation and distribution of electricity rather than microprocessors, semi-conductors and computer science. Nonetheless, he was an MIT electrical engineer. Mom further went on to point out that if my daughter Kyra or one of Erik's children like Teagan were to attend MIT, her connection with MIT would span four generations and very nearly a full century.

Erik and I both laughed as one of our classmates later teased us "Those Toomre boys had no brains at all! No wonder they had to go to MIT: They needed to learn how to think!!" We had a great time being back for a few days with that world-class community of thinkers. Thank you, Mom, Dad and MIT!!

Thank you friends and family for your various thoughts about the situation with Kyra. As a particularly close confidant reminds me, sometimes teenage adolescents are proverbially just upside down. Often too, they eventually right themselves and proverbially take a longer path back to their true home.

The picture to the left was taken on the grounds of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Lori Bogard (Erik Toomre's wife) took this photograph of Kyra, her father Lars Toomre, and her uncle Erik during a May 2000 visit to the academy grounds.

Members of the whole Toomre family are fans of a good and vigorous walk. Year in and year out, one of the most popular American Volkssport Association walks is the one at West Point. As a consequence, the AVA walk books of the collective Toomre clan contain quite a number of West Point stamps representing the completion of yet another day with more than 10,000 walking steps. For those who have not yet had the pleasure of the experience, you are encouraged to look further into a visit and a walk at West Point.

As several people have said, hopefully Kyra might soon find a path back to her Toomre family heritage. Maybe Kyra might even accompany her father and some of his family and/or friends on yet another walk around the West Point grounds. Hopefully she will not find herself upside down while there, but one never knows!! *smiles*

Today my daughter Kyra Toomre turns sixteen. Happy Birthday Kyra!!

The picture to the left was taken during Kyra's first visit to Southern California and Disneyland back in the Spring of 2001. As with each of her trips to the western United States, Kyra very much enjoyed that trip with me, her father. (At one point, Kyra even had on her MySpace profile that what she missed most these days were those trips West.)

Generally, the preparation for each trip would start around Christmas time. Somehow Santa always knew that some ski equipment (for the trip to Snowmass), a book about the Oregon coast, Grand Teton/Yellowstone National Parks or some artifact from California, Colorado, or Washington states might come in real handy during the coming year. Having divorced parents always was hard for Kyra. However, during those weekends when Kyra was with her father, we would read stories together about say the Lewis and Clark Expedition. We would discuss those readings in the weeks and months leading up to the time away. Imagine Kyra's surprise to discover that her trip with Dad that year might also cover some of the same territory that Lewis and Clark first explored nearly two hundred years earlier!

Along the way, Kyra became very proficient at reading a map and locating amusement parks that she surely needed to explore. She largely mapped out a two-week trip from Redmond, Washington to Palo Alto, California via Mount St. Helens; the Columbia River Gorge; Yellowstone National Park; Grand Teton National Park; Jackson, Wyoming; Yosemite National Park; and the Monterey peninsula. Several trips to the Greenwich Library ahead of time helped Kyra better appreciate beforehand the significance of say a volcanic mountain that lost much of its top.

During that first Southern California trip, together we spent four full days at Disneyland, even returning two of the nights to view the daily fireworks display. There were also several day-long side trips to places like Universal Studios; Caltech; Palomar Observatory, LegoLand and SeaWorld north of San Diego; and the San Diego Zoo itself. Virtually the entire rest of that trip Kyra spent as a proverbial fish in the hotel swimming pool not believing how warm the temperature could be in the early spring. It certainly was not like that back in Connecticut, she exclaimed repeatedly!!

Kyra then was and continued to be quite sweet as a young child. I shall always cherish one particular memory of young Kyra. This was described in the post Reflections on Father's Day 2007 where Kyra was so determined to use some of her limited trip allowance money to buy train tickets for her father. She was just so sweet in wanting to use some of her precious money to do something for someone else. Kyra was similarly sweet back in 2003 when she so diligently and carefully created a "memory box" for Father's Day that year about what made her Dad so special to her, his daughter.

My primary workspace has two large 27" monitors that optionally can be used with my laptop or the Toomre Capital Markets LLC server, both running at a screen resolution of 1920x1200 pixels. It is a real pleasure to use such screen real estate for reading from various websites, developing computer code or creating original content like this blog post.

As a result, I optimized the current Drupal theme used by both the Lars Toomre personal website and the professional website for Toomre Capital Markets LLC for this high level of screen resolution. Several readers though have complained that the current theme does not scale well on smaller screen resolutions like 1024x768 pixels. On such small resolution monitors, the primary menu currently overlaps the site name and other XHTML elements are similarly in poor position.

Over the next few weeks, I will be creating a new theme that hopefully will address these scaling issues and a few other noted problems. Simultaneously, I will be redesigning and adding some new features first to the personal website. Once the new features have been tested, the plan is to migrate both the new theme and features over to the professional website. Should you have any thoughts or concerns about the current website design, please let me know and I will attempt to incorporate your views as well.

Two guys are playing golf, and they're on the 14th hole when a funeral procession passes by. In mid-swing the first guy takes off his hat as a sign of respect.

His friend says, "That's the nicest thing I've ever seen you do."

The first man puts his hat back on and replies, "Well, we were married for 25 years."

Twenty-three hundred years ago Aristotle concluded that, more than anything else, men and women seek happiness. While happiness itself is sought for its own sake, every other goal — health, beauty, money, or power — is valued only because we expect that it will make us happy. Much has changed since Aristotle's time. Our understanding of the worlds of stars and of atoms has expanded beyond belief. The gods of the Greeks were like helpless children compared to humankind today and the powers we now wield. And yet on this most important issue very little has changed in the intervening centuries. We do not understand what happiness is any better than Aristotle did, and as for learning how to attain that blessed condition, one could argue that we have made no progress at all.

The above quote is from start of the first chapter of the fascinating book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience written Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a noted psychologist from The University of Chicago. This was a New York Times bestseller back in 1991 and attempts to explain to the lay person some of the current academic work in modern psychology about happiness and a concept referred to as "flow". In particular, this book explores the very ancient question: When do people feel most happy?

Since its publication, Lars Toomre has periodically read this book every couple of years or so. Recently Lars started reading this book again in parallel with a special friend after both of us were talking about happiness and flow, particularly during these difficult economic times when business seems to be contracting everywhere and there is considerable uncertainty about the future. Readers of this blog are encouraged to read along as well and to share their thoughts and observations.