Brags and belches

Lester Earnest (les at cs.stanford.edu)

2014.02.22

Below is a chronological list of more or less significant events, including both accomplishments and embarrassments. Under hindsight it is evident that I and my colleagues invented a number of things that others subsequently developed into successful commercial products though we didn’t set out to do that. In most cases it was an accidental result of my entering the field early (1950s) and whenever I thought of a something I needed, I tried to build it. In several cases this was to compensate for my mental shortcomings as discussed in my Viewpoint.

I and my colleagues developed the first computer network in the late 1950s (SAGE) and the first general purpose computer network in the late 1960s (ARPAnet). In 1973 I helped Vint Cerf set up his research project under the same government contract I used and his group then developed the Internet Protocols that made the Internet possible.

I also played a central role in initiating a number of other developments that ended up being useful or that soon will be, including the first spelling checker (1961), search engine (1961), autonomous road vehicle (1967), online restaurant reviews (1973), network news service (1974), and social networking and blogging services (1975), though the terms “social network” and “blog” did not come into use with their modern meanings until about 25 years after that.

I harbor no jealousy toward those who have benefited from further developing these ideas because I didn't take out any patents, aside from one I got to make some vulture capitalists happy. It was a software patent, a category that I would like to see eliminated. Happily software patents didn't exist at the time of my early work and if I had found a way to patent those inventions the patents would mostly have run out before they were commercialized.

In 1984 I led an investigation into blood doping at the Los Angeles Olympic Games by members of the U.S. Cycling Team, which was legal but unethical. I then introduced a rule prohibiting it, the first of its kind anywhere in the world. That rule was subsequently adopted by many international sports organizations and recently caught Lance Armstrong and his colleagues.

Also in the early 1980s I pushed for adoption of a strong helmet rule by the U.S. Cycling Federation (USCF) to reduce the serious injury rate that was mostly a result of head impacts. However that proposal constituted a break with tradition and was so unpopular that I temporarily lost my seat on the national board of directors. However I kept pushing and got it adopted effective January 1, 1986, again the first rule of its kind anywhere in the world. It subsequently was adopted by many racing organizations around the world and then was picked up by recreational cyclists, was enacted into laws in some places, and has saved many lives.

Below is a more complete list of my activities, including some bad stuff, listed by their year of inception. Most became operational a bit later, though not all of them worked well at first. Some of these items include links to related short stories and more of those will be added over time. Each item is preceded by one or both of the following marks: “+” for a Brag, “–“ for a Belch .

A short video by astronomer Carl Sagan puts bragging in perspective: The pale blue dot.

Brag and Belch list:

1930 + – Born in San Diego, California at the beginning of the Great Depression and soon became a bicycling beach boy. Arrived on what had been a Roman holiday called Saturnalia but was about two thousand years late for the party.

1937 + – Rose through the Cub Scout ranks to almost Lion status but was dishonorably discharged because of artistic misconduct. Consequently I never became a Boy Scout.

1938 + – In Second Grade began writing fictional stories that my teacher and my mother seemed to enjoy though my cursive handwriting was ugly and my spelling was deplorable.

1941 – After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, my Mission Hills neighborhood, which overlooked the aircraft manufacturing plants of Convair and Ryan Aircraft, among others, suddenly acquired two anti-aircraft gun batteries within a block and a half of my home while a playground at my grammar school became the launch site for a large barrage balloon, so that its cable tether could tear the wings off any attacking bombers. When my family stopped going to a nearby Japanese restaurant I asked why and was told they had “moved away.” I didn't learn until many years later that they had been put in a concentration camp at the request of the racist California Governor, Earl Warren, with the approval of the racist U.S. President, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

1942 + Co-developed a cryptographic scheme that earned me an FBI record at age 11.

1948 + – Was admitted to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) on a scholarship, ran wild and flunked out but was allowed to continue. Under the influence of my outstanding Freshman Chemistry teacher, Linus Pauling, I elected to major in chemistry only to figure out later that I was more interested in electronics. Soon see the Pope of Blacker House.

1949 + In a summer job, served as a guinea pig for J.C.R. Licklider to evaluate the intelligibility of digitized speech using various encodings and sampling rates.

1952 + Was selected as All-Conference Defensive Guard in football even though our team was generally the worst in the league.

1953 + After graduating from Caltech I avoided being drafted into the Army during the Korean War by serving as a Aviation Electronics Officer at the Navy's Aeronautical Computer Laboratory in suburban Philadelphia, where I rewired an IBM Card Programmed Calculator (CPC) so as to substantially improve its performance on flight simulations of missiles and manned aircraft.

1955 + Appeared in a local light opera production of The Student Prince and ended up marrying the assistant director.

1956 + – After completing my Navy service I went to Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), becoming principal designer of weapons control functions for the SAGE air defense system. SAGE included the first computer network, with connections to hundreds of radars nationwide, the first to use large screen displays, the first computer timesharing system, the first point-and-click graphical user interface, the first packet radio system, and the first remote control of weapons by a central computer, all supported by the physically largest digital computer ever built, before or since, which occupied an area the size of a football field with an additional comparable area devoted to power supplies, air conditioning and communications equipment and another such area for interactive display consoles and large screen displays. It provided nonstop operation by having a standby computer take over whenever the primary one failed or was undergoing service. It also was a gigantic military-industrial-political fraud, as soon will be discussed in The Internet's grandfather, an inventive fraudster with many descendents. Its major defects were kept secret so that it could be kept going for 25 years so as to enable the crooked contractors to make hundreds of billions of dollars and share some of it as campaign contributions (also known as legal bribes) with members of Congress for their support. Many of the same contractors are doing similarly fraudulent work today but public media continue to ignore that, apparently because the media are under control.

1957 + A significant price point was reached around this time as advances in magnetic core memories brought computer memory costs down to $1 per bit.

1958 – MIT spun off those involved with SAGE, including me, into a new nonprofit corporation called MITRE, apparently as a way of distancing themselves from that fraudulent enterprise. The work environment then changed because MIT had been in a strong enough position to argue with the Air Force and did so whereas MITRE was totally dependent on government contracts and so tried to make their funding sources happy which meant following orders, no matter how stupid, and ensuring that all funds in each project were spent by the end of the fiscal year, which ensured that more funding would become available regardless of whether anything had been accomplished, which was the way the Air Force and others operated. I continued with MITRE for eight years.

1959 + As a part-time graduate student at MIT, created the first cursive handwriting recognizer.

1959 – Headed a MITRE study group that obtained permission from Federal authorities to put nuclear warheads on ground-to-air missiles (BOMARC), an insane idea, and discovered an embarrassing shortcoming in the launch control system. See my BOMARC boners.

1960 – Began three years assisting an Air Force Colonel, who was responsible for the development of a computerized intelligence system called 438L but who knew nothing about computers. He was using IBM as prime contractor but unfortunately the IBM people were incompetent and this project turned into a multimillion dollar fiasco like most military-industrial-political programs from that era to the present.

1961 + Working evenings and weekends on the TX-2 computer at MIT Lincoln Lab, just for fun, created a spelling checker as part of the first cursive handwriting recognizer.

1961 + Initiated development of the first search engine (ROUT).

1962 + Presented a paper on “Machine recognition of cursive writing” at the IFIP Congress in Munich, Germany.

1962 – Was assigned to work for a year at CIA Headquarters in suburban Washington DC on integrating two large databases, a thoroughly ill conceived undertaking. My attempts at turning it into something useful were ignored because the project leader treated our charter as having been handed down on stone tablets.

1963 – Was assigned to work for several months in Los Angeles on Air Force Project Forecast, which was supposed to predict future technologies and recommend how to develop them. My recommendations included altering some past practices that didn't work, such as “Top Down” system design under which the needs of the Generals were considered first, then the design worked downward until it reached the basic information sources. Such projects always took years to complete and then were then found not to work at the bottom level. I advocated a “Bottom Up” approach that would start at the information collection level and, after the that layer was operational, repeatedly move up a layer and redesign the whole system until you get to the top. However my supervisor found that unacceptable because it implied that they had been doing things wrong, which we could not say, so he censored my recommendations.

1963 – Beginning in the Fall, I worked for two years for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon on plans for their World-Wide Military Command-Control System (WWMCCS), another richly endowed but ill-conceived project. Was asked to renew a certain lofty security clearance and, having been exposed to racist forms in the State of Virginia, I decided to become a Mongrel, which resulted in some bad behavior by governmental investigators.

1965 + – Gratuitously proposed that the National Park Service replace roadside signs full of text with low powered radio systems, but did not succeed.

1965 + Was offered a position in the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) managing funding for research programs in computer science but responded that my goal was to get as far from the Pentagon as possible. I was then referred to Stanford University where ARPA had been funding a research project for two years but with some administrative problems. I put my family in our car, drove there and back at my own expense and offered to take a substantial pay cut if they would hire me, which Prof. John McCarthy did, making me Executive Officer (principal bureaucrat) of the project. That provided me with a much more honest and enjoyable working environment, though not quite as honest as I would have liked, and was the best career move of my life.

1965 + – Arrived at Stanford and soon started teaching a massive course on Introduction to Computer Science, with about 300 students in each class. I had five graduate students helping as teaching assistants but it was still a heavy load and, given that I was also the principal administrator of an increasingly complicated research lab, I subsequently withdrew from teaching aside from managing some lecture series featuring assorted speakers.

1966 + Designed and oversaw the creation of a computer research facility within an existing hollow building in the foothills above the Stanford campus, which I subsequently named the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) and managed for many years. It was a very productive research group as discussed below.

1966 + Initiated the first successful robotics project at SAIL, which used a television camera to locate blocks on a table and a robot arm to stack them (Hand-Eye Project). Raj Reddy later linked his speech recognition software with it to give directions as shown in Hear! Here!

1967 + Initiated the first attempt at an autonomous road vehicle (Stanford Cart), which didn't work, though the next generation did.

1967 + Wrote “Choosing an eye for a computer” report which refuted earlier claims about visual sensors (from a bogus report paid for by SAIL) and recommended using ordinary television cameras.

1967 + Served on the start-up committee for the first general purpose computer network (ARPAnet).

1969 + A student project led by David Poole and Phil Petit initiated the design of a high performance computer they called Super Foonly using the DEC-10 instruction set. We provided the resources even though this was not in our official charter, but kept it quiet. The students started by developing a new kind of interactive digital design program called SUDS (Stanford University Drawing System), the first to provide for the concurrent drafting of logic drawings and printed circuit board designs and cross-checking them for consistency. Once a design was complete, SUDS produced artwork for printed circuit boards and digital instructions for back panel wiring machines so that fabrication was semi-automatic. SUDS was subsequently used by a number of organizations (at no cost to them) to design their products, including Digital Equipment Corporation (which used it for over a decade), Information International Incorporated (III), Foonly Inc., Hewlett Packard, Lawrence Livermore Labs, Valid Logic Inc., Sun Microsystems, etc. In fact all Sun workstations were designed on the SAIL computer through 1987.

1970 + Designed the SAIL keyboard, which allowed users to touch type rich text and perform special operations without moving their hands from the keyboard. This keyboard design was subsequently adopted by groups at CMU and MIT and some of its features are found in the keyboards of modern personal computers.

1970 + With Larry Tesler, developed the PUB document compiler, which was the first to provide spreadsheets, automatic enumeration of sections and subsections, compilation of tables of contents and keyword indexes, as well as handling of internal and external references.

1971 + Distributed an improved spelling corrector, written by Ralph Gorin, around the world via the blossoming ARPAnet (Spell).

1971 + I used SUDS to design and build what was apparently the first computer-controlled video switch and added an audio switch that enabled us to put computer terminals with bitmap graphics on everyone's desk, the first such facility in the World. It allowed sports fans to work on programming or writing while listening to an event and get back to live action with two keystrokes. While this initially depended on manual selection of television channels, Ted Selker later added tunable television receivers operating under computer control. Around the mid-1970s nearby Xerox PARC started putting bitmap graphics terminals on everyone's desk but whereas SAIL terminals cost about $500 each, including the video and audio switches, the PARC terminals, which each came with a small computer, cost over $30,000 each and didn't offer television services.

1972 + – Having been a cyclist all my life, I was drawn into bike racing by my two sons, then began officiating at thousands of bicycle races—local, national, and international—then became a bureaucrat attempting to reform this somewhat corrupt sport, with some success and some massive failures. I'm still working on that now.

1973 + Started online restaurant reviews (California YUMYUM).

1973 + Handled local arrangements for the third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and somehow made so much money that the organization had to incorporate. Also gave this organization its logo and served as an officer for a few years.

1973 + See How a nosy bureaucrat accidentally created the first social networking and blogging service. I hope that modern social networks that mine and sell personal data, such as Facebook, get destroyed by upcoming decentralized social networks.

1974 + Created the first computer-controlled vending machine, which sold on credit, offered gamblers “double or nothing,” and billed via email ().

1974 + With Martin Frost and John McCarthy, developed a Network News Service (NS) that processed incoming stories from the Associated Press and New York Times news wires in real time and provided automatic notification to individuals of new stories matching their search prescriptions as well as allowing later retrieval. It was used by emergency response teams dealing with the Three Mile Island nuclear malfunction and by many Chinese students during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

1974 + Became Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART) for a couple of years.

1975 + With John McCarthy and Mark Crispin, developed a computer networking scheme called DIALNET that used switched telephone lines and modems to provide the same kinds of data and email services as ARPAnet at much lower entry cost. However it never caught on.

1978 + Rewrote all U.S. bicycling racing rules so as to make them more compatible with international rules and added standardized penalties for infractions (USCF Rulebook).

1979 + Initiated a desktop publishing system using laser printers (Canon prototype).

1979 + – Moved SAIL into the newly constructed Margaret Jacks Hall, which I had helped design, in the Stanford main campus. I hoped it would reduce tension between SAIL, which had most of the Computer Science Department's sponsored research funding, and the rest of the Department. However in 1980 I learned that John McCarthy had a different motive for making that move, namely avoiding the small amount of administrative responsibility that I had been unable to protect him from. Toward that end in 1980 he shut down SAIL and fired me.

1980 + – After a failed attempt by President Jimmy Carter to rescue U.S. government representatives who were trapped in Iran by using a military raid, he tried to divert attention from this failure by calling for a boycott of the Summer Olympics in Russia that year based on their invasion of Afghanistan. I and others concluded that this was an inappropriate response and, since he would have to get the approval of the U.S. Olympic Committee's governing body to do that, we put together a project to put a full page ad in the Colorado Springs newspaper opposing such an action on the day they would meet and we each donated funds to do it. However President Carter offered a bribe to get his misguided proposal approved. Even though the U.S. Government normally provided no financial support for the Olympics he somehow allocated enough money to invite and pay for a visit to the White House by all athletes who had qualified for the team but would not be permitted to participate. Unfortunately Carter got away with it.

1980 + – Late that year I became founding President of Imagen Corp., which made the first commercial desktop publishing systems using laser printers. We succeeded in spite of the fact that no venture capitalists would fund us, which forced us into a very painful bootstrap operation during which we went on zero salaries for months. After observing our subsequent success a few venture capitalists agreed to fund our expansion provided that we hire a “Real Manager” to run it, to which we agreed. They then put in money and took majority control of the Board of Directors. The new President, who was hired away from Hewlett-Packard (HP), then fired me and, a short time later, signed a contract with HP, without showing it to anyone, not even the corporate attorney. That contract committed Imagen to developing a product that HP could sell but with a major penalty if it was not available on schedule, one yer later, but with no penalty to HP if they chose not to use it. Guess what happened? That clearly crooked contract was clearly set up to curtail further improvements in Imagen products in preparation for HP entering the laser printer business. One interesting question is whether the new President was put there by HP to torpedo the competition or whether he was amazingly stupid. My impression was that he was not too stupid. Another question is how far up in HP management did knowledge of this thoroughly crooked contract extend. The result was that Imagen had to be sold to a competitor but I still made a lot of money on that deal.

1984 + Developed a way to freely distribute encrypted software and sell digital keys to unlock it for a particular computer (U.S. Patent No. 4,888,798, now lapsed).

1984 + Wrote the first medical control regulations specifying how to test for prohibited drug use for the U.S. Cycling Federation (USCF) and got them adopted.

1984 + Was appointed the “Director of the Road” for the Los Angeles Olympic Games and officiated at the cycling events. After the Olympics, I led the investigation of blood doping by American cyclists and concluded they were legal, contrary to claims by the U.S. Olympic Committee, but unethical. I then persuaded USCF to adopt a rule prohibiting that practice, which was the first athletic organization in the world to do so. Similar rules were subsequently adopted in most sports around the world and recently caught Lance Armstrong and his colleagues.

1985 + Having pushed for years for the adoption of a rule requiring strong helmets to be used in bike racing to reduce serious head injuries, the unpopularity of this break with tradition led my own bike club to expel me and to oppose my reelection to the national Board of Directors, so I lost that seat.

As a parting shot I wrote a report refuting all arguments against the strong helmet rule and, with unintentional help from another cyclist who died from head injuries in a race held near the time and place of the next Board meeting, that rule was finally adopted effective the next year. After U.S. cyclists then figured out that this was a good idea, it then spread around the world, saving hundreds of lives and avoiding thousands of serious injuries in racing, then was picked up by recreational cyclists. See The brain bucket bash.

1985 + – Returned to Stanford to help John McCarthy manage an attempt at creating a multiprocessor LISP system and to serve half time as Associate Chair of the Computer Science Department. However I then came down with a physical disability, apparently a result of stress from doing the start-up with serious funding problems, but was misdiagnosed by my doctor, leaving me chronically drowsy and somewhat depressed for the next 14 years.

1986 – Having been made responsible for computer support operations in the Computer Science Department, I soon detected a crooked operation going on in the basement and set out to fix it. See the Cisco fiasco.

1988 + Being partly disabled but having accumulated enough assets that I would not need to work any more, I retired to focus on world travels, reforming bicycle racing, and writing a bit.

1989 + Published an article in the CACM journal addressing persistent racism in our society and describing a way to put racial classification on a scientific basis for the first time while recommending against doing that. Unfortunately public media and the courts have continued to pretend that racial classification has a scientific basis even though that is a myth.

1989 + As a member of ANSI Z90 and ASTM International F08.53 helmet standards committees, co-authored several helmet standards for bicycling and roller skating.

1993 + – Initiated the creation of a new national bicycle racing organization that came to be called USA Cycling but, through crooked manipulations by certain commercial interests, the bylaws were perverted into a grossly undemocratic form that put them in charge, a problem that I'm still trying to fix.

1999 + Published an online article pointing out that predictions of massive software failures on January 1, 2000 were bogus and revealing the silly origin of the term “Command and Control.” I later got it published in the CACM journal.

1999 + – I finally insisted on being tested for sleep apnea, which had been my self-diagnosis 14 years earlier, and confirmed that I had a severe case. Under treatment I recovered and, having reawakened, began suing the crooks who had illegally put the control of USA Cycling in the hands of commercial interests. Those lawsuits produced a good financial return but unfortunately did not displace the crooks.

2001 – On September 11, while writing the fourth in a series of articles on how to reform U.S. bicycle racing, news came in about planes being hijacked by terrorists, and rammed into buildings so I switched topics and predicted the effects this would have on civil liberties. Unfortunately my predictions came true.

2002 + Wrote the first helmet standard covering both bicycling and roller skating (ASTM Standard F1447), which the manufacturers had resisted because they wanted to sell different helmets for each sport.

2012 + – I initiated a project to preserve the former writing study of author Wallace Stegner and gathered thousands of dollars to do it but was blocked by city officials who ignored their own General Plan on historical preservation and lied about Stegner's earlier role in getting the Town incorporated.

2013 + World travels had taken me to all 50 states and 64 countries around the world and my cumulative distance covered in cycling was equivalent to about five times around the Earth at the Equator with more to come, though I'm slowing down.

2014 + Planning to launch another attempt at athletic reforms, this time aimed at the entire U.S. Olympic Committee and its National Governing Bodies that have come under the corrupt control of commercial interests.

+ SAIL accomplishments +

The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) was set up primarily for computer science graduate students working on PhDs but covered much more territory and launched many people on academic or corporate careers. One measure of success is the number of people who received ACM Turing Awards, which are widely viewed as the Nobel Prizes of Computer Science. Sixteen people who were earlier affiliated with SAIL have received that award so far.

Another measure is the number of successful corporate spinoffs. There have been literally dozens co-founded by SAIL people including some fairly well known ones such as Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, D.E. Shaw & Co., iRobot, Rambus, and Rethink Robotics, though Cisco was more of a ripoff than a spinoff. Indirect spinoffs (spinoffs of spinoffs) include Microsoft and Amazon.

Raj Reddy and his students did pioneering work on speech recognition, the modern versions of which are found in many mobile devices and robotic telephone applications. When a start-up called Xerox PARC appeared nearby, Alan Kay, Larry Tesler and others moved there and brought some of the SAIL culture with them.

In the 1970s a SAIL group led by Lynn Quam worked with astronomer Carl Sagan on indexing and reviewing satellite photos of Mars to find surface features that changed over time. Sagan visited every few weeks and later appeared in the Cosmos television series.

The student-developed Stanford University Drawing System (SUDS) revolutionized digital equipment design in the 1970s. Various SAIL people created early programs that played Chess, Checkers and Go and another spinoff was the first commercial video game, called Galaxy Game, which was soon overrun by Pong. Other technologies initiated by people from SAIL include public key cryptography (initiated by Whitfield Diffie and brought to market by RSA, where the “R” came from Ron Rivest, a SAIL PhD). Still others were Apple's Macintosh and Newton Tablet computers, Yamaha's music synthesizers (based on an invention by John Chowning), and desktop publishing using laser printers (developed by Luis Trabb Pardo).

Donald Knuth developed his TeX documentation system on the SAIL computer, which greatly facilitated the depiction of mathematical formulas and led to some modern software descendants. He used TeX to write his remarkable books on on The Art of Computer Programming.

– Evildoers –

Over the years I have witnessed a number of entities, listed below, that have engaged in corrupt acts, either illegal or grossly unethical. I plan to add links below to stories in which I badmouth them, which will be handy for lawyers who are planning to sue me. However those contemplating such actions should keep in mind the following facts.


Apple Computers

Armstrong, Lance (cyclist and blood doper)

AT&T

Bechtolsheim, Andreas (co-founder of Sun Microsystems, etc.)

Boeing Aircraft

Borisewicz, Eddie (long time cycling coach)

Bosack, Leonard (founder of Cisco Systems)

Bush, George W. (U.S. President)

Carter, Jimmy (former U.S. President)

Cisco Systems

City Council 2013, Town of Los Altos Hills, California

Convair Aircraft

Dell Computers

Earnest, Lester (general troublemaker)

Facebook

Fava, Florence (former Town Historian of Los Altos Hills, California; a fiction writer who pretended to be a historian)

Feinstein, Dianne (U.S. Senator from California & fake Democrat)

Figtree, Prof. (creator of the term “expert systems”)

Google+

Hewlett-Packard (HP)

IBM

Information International Incorporated (III)

International Cycling Union (UCI in French)

International Olympic Committee (IOC)

Johnson, Lyndon B. (former U.S. President)

Johnson, Steve (President of USA Cycling)

Lerner, Sandy (co-founder of Cisco Systems)

Lockheed Aircraft

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

McCarthy, John (creator of the term “artificial intelligence”, computer timesharing, the LISP programming language, etc.)

Mitre Corp.

Nixon, Richard (former U.S. President)

Ochowicz, James (Olympic cyclist, Manager of BMC racing team, and crooked co-conspirator of Thomas Weisel)

Obama, Barack H. (U.S. President)

Plant, Mike (Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) executive)

Reagan, Ronald (former U.S. President)

Roosevelt, Franklin D. (former U.S. President)

Stevens, Ted (deceased Alaska Senator)

Sun Microsystems

System Development Corporation (SDC)

Truman, Harry S. (former U.S. President)

U.S. Air Force

U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

U.S. Cycling Federation (USCF)

U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)

U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC)

U.S. Professional Racing Association (USPRO)

USA Cycling

Warren, Earl (former Governor of California & Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court)

Weisel, Thomas (San Francisco investment banker, boss of USA Cycling, former boss of Lance Armstrong)

Welch, Patrick (former President of Imagen Corp.)

Western Electric

Zuckerberg, Mark (founder of Facebook & exploiter of human delusions)