Growing up in New Mexico I had an unusual collection of childhood experiences. My father was a professor of engineering at New Mexico State but had done post-docs in astrophysics at the Naval Observatory in Washington D.C. after a doctorate at University of Wisconsin at Madison. I rode along to cosmic ray observatories high in the mountains and joined him at Los Alamos National Laboratory during summer consulting gigs. He introduced an exotic young fellow professor and his wife to me after I became fascinated by insect vision and ideas for simulating how bugs see the world. That, in turn, led to me living with the couple (he with a doctorate in EE and graduate students in evolutionary biology; her with a doctorate in plant physiology doing cancer research) after my father died young. I slept under a workbench while they started a business and built early word processor systems, pivoted to commercial time sharing, then to consulting on weather monitoring systems for White Sands Missile Range.

I was always in special programs and doing science fairs, taking art classes at the university, and whatnot until it became uncool for me for some reason. In a perhaps not unexpected series of intersections by high school I had a collection of friends who were bright and precocious in their interests in a way that I thought perfectly normal at the time. They graduated early, investigated radical ideas and movements in the special collections of the college library, and we variously started university while still in high school. Later, in grad school, an equally creative collection of souls poured themselves into performance art projects and shows that were poorly attended but perhaps only because they were so radical and innovative that even the arts community felt at sea with all the new media forms we were inventing.… Read the rest