WELCOME GRANDSON!

This beautiful little boy, Leif, joined our family in the early morning today, July 24, 2009. He joins his mom and dad and two-year-old big brother, James; and whole host of uncles and aunts and grandparents, as well as cousin Luca, exactly one year and one day older.

Help Find a Missing Child

This came into my inbox tonight:

"Lindsey Baum was walking home in McCleary, Washington from a friend's house on Friday, June 26th and never made it home. She was 10 years old at the time, but has since had a birthday while she has been missing. Police are pretty sure she was abducted but have found no proof of this. Please help spread the word about her and please keep her and her family in your prayers."

So far, the national media and the major social media sites do not appear to have gotten involved. My purpose tonight is to alert the Twitter community in the hope that this child can be found and returned safely to her family.

-30-

Not the Moon...

...or a Moon Lake but the San Luis Reservoir in central California, southeast of San Jose and way north of the L.A. basin.






This almost treeless environment in the searing heat challenges your eyes. It is difficult to look at; its austere beauty seems surreal.









This state is like that; it has so many places unlike anywhere else on the continent.









Some of them are familiar from Hollywood movies, so they resemble sets more than any type of real life place.









Others, like the San Luis, just make you feel as if you have stumbled into outer space somehow.












Days later, as you look over your photos, you still can't quite believe what you've seen.












It's just too strange and strangely lovely.

-30-

GOP DimWit Hopes to Destroy American Families

PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE

My ongoing attempts to keep my family insured were dealt another setback yesterday when the company (Predictify) that laid me off last January folded its operations. Thus, five months' work to obtain coverage under Cal-Cobra came to naught. We no longer qualify.

In this context, the comments of Republican Senator Jim DeMint about President Barack Obama's attempts to reform our dysfunctional health care system literally sickened me. This is what DimWit had to say:"If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

You know, DimWit, you and your ilk are what's broken in this country. You have nothing constructive to offer the national debate that is occurring over how to reform such a broken, wasteful, illogical system. But that is no surprise because all you and your kind care about is the game of politics -- attack politics at that.

You clearly not only lack a functional brain, you have an empty spot where your heart should be. You are therefore public enemy No. 1 of my family and families all across this land. I now favor a national health plan that covers everyone in the country except Jim DeMint and his family.

May they end up roaming the streets endlessly, begging for care, but receiving only the scorn of Hell they so richly deserve.

-30-

California Roadtrip Album

Tomatoes


Sunset


Skyline


Onions


San Gabriel Mountains


L.A.


I-5


CalTech campus


Pasadena


Santa Monica Beach


Pyramid Lake

The Home of Knowledge

Pasadena, CA.



Here at the California Institute of Technology, one of the top universities in the world, the list of Nobel laureates is long (over 30); even longer is the list of scientific discoveries that have benefited humankind.

Roughly eighty years ago, for example, a team led by Thomas Hunt Morgan, the most distinguished biologist in the United States of his time, discovered the role of genes and chromosomes in heredity.

This is also where the different roles played by the two hemispheres of the brain were determined.

It is a small campus. There are roughly 900 undergraduates and 1200 graduate students here, and they are all extremely bright. The entering students have consistently higher average test scores (on the SAT 1 and 2) than any other university or college in the U.S.



My son Peter is doing his Phd here, researching the behavior of Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly.



Here's a whiteboard where he presented a series of algebraic calculations to a group of visiting students last Friday.

You may recall that Sarah Palin made fun of this kind of research during last year's campaign. Of course, Palin is well-known for having a brain smaller than a fruit fly's, which is why she didn't know that, according to the National Institutes of Health, "The tiny insects, which bear little resemblance to people, nevertheless share much of our genetic heritage. Fruit flies possess strikingly similar versions of the genes that promote normal human development and, when altered, contribute to disease."



We toured the lab where Peter works today, and saw the cooler where flies are cultivated.



They are subjected to a type of virtual reality that allows Peter and the other researchers to monitor their behavior under ever-changing conditions that simulate their real-world environments.



Seen up close in enlarged photos, these red-eyed creatures seem strangely familiar -- not unlike what science fiction film-makers often imagine aliens from outer space to look like.

Of course, if life has evolved elsewhere, it probably is made of the same building blocks as we are, and therefore could easily look like fruit flies.

-30-

Kindness of Strangers

My friend called me in distress; she was stranded with a flat tire in a rural part of the peninsula. I left a business lunch in Palo Alto to head north to help her, but the traffic was awful, and it took much longer than it should have to get there.

By the time I did, two young guys had stopped and changed the tire for her. "Neither of us had ever changed a tire before," one told me.

"Thank you, thank you," she kept saying, reverting to her Japanese upbringing by bowing as well.

"These angels have helped me,"she said.

The boys went on their way, riding bicycles near the Crystal Springs Reservoir. As we bid them ado, I gave her a hug. I felt wetness on her cheek.

It's hard to fathom the courage it takes for a single person in her mid-40s to leave Japan with all of its deep-rooted cultural restrictions and expectations, its "culture of dependence," and immigrate to the U.S.

Everything seems the opposite of what she knew in the past. Much of the time, cultural misunderstandings and language barriers confine her attempts to assimilate to confusing sidesteps and unpleasant encounters.

But then events like the flat tire enable her to experience the kindness of strangers that is one key element of American culture at its very best. It's enough to make her shed tears of gratitude.

And for me to be proud of my people.

-30-