Cynbe ru Taren
Jeffrey Prothero is an American computer programmer. He is the author of Citadel, arguably the firstvirtual world system and one of the longest-runningopen source projects; the Digital Anatomist software, better known as the Visible Human Project; the original Pascal strek.pas Star Trek game program; the first Loglan parsers; and Mythryl, a production-grade port of SML/NJ.
Prothero uses the screenname "Cynbe ru Taren" online. Cynbe ru Taren is the name of a fictional alien in Poul Anderson's 1964 science fiction novel "The Star Fox". SBN 425-03772-X. In the novel Cynbe ru Taren is an "Aleriona Intellect Master of the Garden of War, fleet admiral, and military strategist of the Grand Commission of Negotiators".
Prothero was born on March 15, 1956 in London, Ontario to academic parents. He attended kindergarten in Ontario; first form in London, England; second form in Cambridge, England; third grade in Boston, Massachusetts; and fourth through twelfth in Seattle, Washington.
Prothero lived in Seattle, programming and designing virtual worlds, until 1997, when he moved to Austin, Texas to live with his now-wife Allucquere Rosanne Stone, who is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Beginning in 1998, Prothero and Stone divided their time between Santa Cruz and Tahoe City, California while maintaining a residence in Austin during school sessions.
Prothero enrolled at the University of Washington in 1974, spending most of his time at the Campus Computer Center. He learned his craft at the Visual Techniques Laboratory, using a PDP10 and a Mohawk Data 600LPM printer. Before long he was working as a full-time programmer for the department of Biological Structure, headed by John W. Sundsten and John Prothero. He wrote the Skandha visualization system, which assembled microscopic sections of biological material into three-dimensional images which could be manipulated minutely to reveal details of the interior of such objects as the human body. The Biological Structure department named this effort the Digital Anatomist project. Its image database was supplied with raw digital material by Wolfgang Rauschning, a Swedish researcher in microtomy and microscopy who specialized in producing ultrathin tissue cross-sections. Rauschning's method was subtractive, ablating a layer of carefully frozen tissue only a few thousand molecules thick, coating the exposed surface with a glycerol mixture which Rauschning adapted to the specific tissue, photographing the surface at high resolution, and repeating until the tissue was completely sectioned. Rauschning sent each image via Internet to the Digital Anatomist database at the University of Washington in Seattle. His method produced extremely high resolution digital images in vivid color with almost none of the distortion which would normally be caused by the displacement forces generated by the action of a conventional microtome at extreme thinness settings. Sundsten, Jeffrey Prothero and John Prothero asked Rauschning to include fiduciaries in his sections, which enabled Prothero's Skandha 3D visualization software to assemble the huge digital database into three-dimensional flythrough-capable anatomical images with extremely fine grain. The group made Prothero's tapes of the 3D reconstructions freely available on their website. Hearing of this work, the National Library of Medicine issued a Call for Proposals for a national 3D anatomical reconstruction database which would later become the Visible Human project. To the astonishment of the Digital Anatomist group, they found that the University of Colorado had made a strong bid for the contract using Prothero’s data tapes as examples of its own work. Technically there was nothing illegal about doing so, since the tapes were freely available, but Colorado's bid did not mention their provenance. Colorado won the contract, and continued to display Prothero’s work without attribution for the first three years of the contract, although its later work was not based on the methodology developed by the Digital Anatomist project (Colorado's specimen sectioning system involved something rather like a bandsaw), and produced considerably coarser-grained reconstructions. Shortly afterward, the chief scientists of the UW Digital Anatomist project resigned in frustration.
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