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.

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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.

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Pre-Digital History Washes Away in Flood

My return home from the desert was not stress-free. Somehow I managed to lose two credit cards, after some 20 years of never having lost anything of value -- with the costly exception of several relationships. I'd even memorized those 16-digit account numbers!

Any sequence of numbers eventually becomes like an old friend. But after searching my luggage, and checking with the resort, I concluded that they had vaporized or had been hijacked by aliens, so I canceled both accounts.

Out with the old; in with the new. Change is good. I'll just get cozy with two new 16-digit sequences.

At the house, the carpet in my laundry room was saturated with water. Turned out an ancient cast-iron pipe had fractured in an inside-out, rust-driven, jagged line north to south.

Rich came over today, cut the pipe high and low, and mounted a new PVC "band-aid" and tightened it over the remaining cast-iron original sections. Good as new, at least for now.

Anyway, the point of this story is that many of my old magazine stories and clippings were in cardboard boxes in that laundry room, along with various tax records, journals, and letters. Some of them were ruined beyond repair. As I tossed them into the garbage, I figured this is a good thing.

There is a major dilemma for those of us pack-rats whose lives and careers span the decades before the Internet era and today's world. Now, every bit of information is digital and theoretically able to be saved indefinitely -- or at least as long as the servers hosting this content remain viable.

What to do with all the old stories? They need to be scanned and digitized. The paper versions are rotting away anyway. I doubt anyone will ever want to sort through my old articles. There are literally hundreds of them, barely if at all indexed or even listed anywhere I'm aware of.

I can't help wishing I had a library intern volunteer, or somebody like that, who could scan in all of this stuff before it disappears form history. The flooding of my laundry room woke me up to the fact that being a pack-rat is not a wise strategy going forward.

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Desert Images

These grainy photos, I hope, speak for themselves. They were shot over the past few days outside of Tucson. We saw bunnies, coyotes, deer, and road-runners.

Who the hell would have imagined road-runners outside of an animated cartoon? It turns out they live in the southwestern U.S. and Mexico and a bit into Central America. I've simply led too sheltered a life to have known that -- until now.

I did not actually see one myself but one of my colleagues did, in fact he saw three. Apparently they can grow to two feet in height, and although they are capable of flight, they usually act much as they do in cartoons, simply outrunning any predators who show up in the open desert air.

Anyone who has ever watched a cowboy movie (which is everyone alive on earth by now, except perhaps the pathetic victims of North Korea's absurd dictatorship), would instantly recognize the scenes of the countryside where I have been since the middle of last week.

Movie studios in fact share a facility near here from which to shoot their flicks. Perception. Reality. This is the background for so many fantasies.

But the cacti don't know, the coyotes don't know, the road-runners are clueless. Only you and I, fellow humans, know how we have used their ecological niche as a set. I wonder whether the creatures who survive the coming global climate calamity will get a hold of the images we leave behind?

Somehow it comforts me to imagine an audience of road-runners, pausing for a moment at an outdoor theater, as a desert butterfly pushes the button, releasing the soundtrack and the moving image on the big screen -- yes, the show must go on.

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One girl's canvas...

...is our front yard.

This depicts a place "like Alcatraz" on one side of the stairs connected by water to a place "like San Francisco" with the sun shining brightly.

Back before cable TV, the Internet, and smart phones, chalk and a sidewalk were pretty much all a girl needed to stay amused, especially if a friend was available.

You still see a game of hopscotch played here and there around town, but it is a rare occurrence.

Drawing outside with chalk also means its summer vacation. Today's kids do not have enough time during the school year for that kind of leisure activity. They are scheduled.

A little kid's social life and appointment calendar can be much busier and more complicated than her father's. At some point in recent years my youngest found a pile of those old paper appointment books (that displayed a week at a time) from a much busier stage of my life.

They are crammed with ink and pencil notations indicating numerous appointments every weekday and many weekend days as well. She put them in a purse, along with a calculator, a small portable phone, and several other objects, and invented an imaginary game.

From time to time she still plays it. Out come the calendar books, the small phone, the calculator and she moves between one room and another, busily doing -- something. I've never asked her what the game is about, although I know she also plays it with a friend when one is over for a playdate.

She'll tell me about the game on her own time. She'd tell me if I asked -- for sure -- but it simply has not occurred to her talk about it yet. That's how it goes with flights of imagination. You don't talk about them because they are imaginary.

I get it. And I don't want to break into her magic world until she invites me in...

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Bent by the Sun

It all depends what you're made of. Some of the plants in our backyard, including the trees, can become permanently bent by the predominant winds that sweep in from the Pacific to our west.

Flowering stems bend toward the sun, regardless of the wind, seeking their maximum exposure to the solar power that is such a key component of their growth strategy.

Birds and butterflies ride the winds in and out of the neighborhood. A certain species of flies hover; they occupy only a certain band of the atmosphere, as if any elevation higher or lower would be unsustainable.

Hummingbirds dart in and out of the trees to flowers that please them, landing occasionally. Honeybees land for a while on lily pads. The fish swim gracefully throughout the big pond peacefully until one of us approaches. Then they race to the surface, expecting to be fed.

A spire of red wax from a lighted candle ran down the edge of a can on the back porch. Once detached from the can, it stood proudly on its own. Then, as out temperatures increased one recent afternoon, the spire began to bend back onto itself.

Everything adapts; bends but does not break.

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Different Window, Different View

Sonora

On a ridge far outside of Tucson in a conference center, I first glanced, then stared, open-mouthed, at the morning view. Arriving after dark, in a cab, I was unaware of the natural surroundings.

But this is the kind of place that transforms you to suit its own needs. As when I visited Death Valley earlier this year, I'm transfixed. The plants that thrive here thrive only here.

An ecosystem uniquely spare and lovely stretching as far as the ridges and mountains permit. In your imagination, it never ends.

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