A couple of days ago, Jacqui and I attended a dinner for the announcement of the Prime Minister’s Science Prizes in Canberra. We were surprised to bump into the mother of one of Jacqui’s former PhD students (Janet Deane). As it turned out, her father was part of a team at CSIRO that pioneered the technology that became wireless networking (wiLAN). The leader of that team, John O’Sullivan won the prestigious Prime Minister’s Price for Science as a result of that team’s work. It turned out that they were all radio astronomers that were trying to come up with practical applications of algorithms they had developed for noise reduction etc in radio signals from space. It was only then that I clicked, remembering the fabulous photograph in the lab of Janet and her sister as small children meeting their dad on his way home from work in Parkes…