*) His wife, Andrea Silverman
*) Their son, Isaac
*) Their son, Elijah
*) My son, John Racus
*) His ex-wife, Sarah Jane McPherson
*) Their daughter, Jane Racus
*) Their son, Randall Racus
*) My son, Chris Racus
*) His fiance, Nikki Farrar
*) Their son, Dillon Racus
*) Their son, Devin Racus
*) My father, Donald Silverman
*) My Mother, Goldie Silverman
*) My brother, John Silverman
*) His wife, Marisa
*) Their son, Byron
*) Their daughter, Nina
*) My sister, Judy Silverman
*) Her boyfriend, Erik Cords
*) My grandfather, Abe Gendler, may he rest in peace
*) My grandmother, Freida Gendler, may she rest in peace
*) My grandmother, Bess Silverman, may she rest in peace
*) Judith's brother, Bill Lynch
*) Bill's wife, Cindy Osborn
*) Their children: Chara, Joanna, and Michael
*) Judith's sister, Marilyn Hicks
*) Her husband, Gary Hicks
*) Their daughters: Caroline, Jenny, and Betsy
*) Gary's sister Nancy Hicks
*) Her daughter Amy Erken. Amy has a twin sister Emily, but I have not met her very often. Amy, by way of contrast, lived with Judith and me for several months. She is an impressive young woman.
*) Julie and Steve Winchel. Julie is Judith's cousin.
*) Katherine Winchel. Katherine is Julie's daughter An extraordinary young woman.
BTW: the best parenting advice they gave me was that if your kid calls you at 2 AM and wants a ride home, then swear and curse and complain while you are driving to where you are going to pick up the kid, and bring be quiet while you drive them home.
*) Rabbi Norman Hirsh. Rabbi Hirsh was MY rabbi for as long as I could remember. We still correspond by US mail.
*) Fred Townsend. Fred was my Sunday School teacher when I was 15 and at the height of my adolescent rebelliousness. He taught me how to deal with missionaries which was perfect for an argumentative teenager.
*) Bill Lynch, who I mentioned yesterday, taught me a better way to deal with missionaries, because when I met him, he was one. Bill is also one of my greatest religious teachers.
*) Cantor Victor Frankl, may he rest in peace. He taught a class in the Holocaust when I was in the Seattle High School of Jewish Studies.
*) Rabbi Jonathan Singer. Formerly the senior rabbi at Temple Beth Am
*) Rabbi Beth Singer. Formerly the associate rabbi at Temple Beth Am
*) Rabbi Ruth Zlotnick. Currently, the senior rabbi at Temple Beth Am
*) Rabbi Jason Levine. Currently, the associate rabbi at Temple Beth Am. One day, while in Torah study, a question came up while we were in Exodus. The answer to the question was in Deuteronomy. Rabbi Levine was able to find the answer in only a couple of minutes, searching through a book roughly 1500 pages long. A staggering feat of scholarship.
*) Professor Bea Wallins. Despite what she says, she is a biblical scholar of highest rank, and should be addressed as "Professor".
*) My Torah study class at Temple Beth Am. We have been going over the Torah, verse by verse and in some cases word by word, almost every Saturday morning since at least October 2009 and perhaps earlier.
*) Jim Black, may he rest in peace. A gifted public speaker.
Blessed are You, Adoni our God, Ruler of the Universe, Who formed humans with wisdom and created many openings and cavities within them. It is obvious and known before Your throne of glory that if any one of them [the openings and cavities] were closed or if one of any one them were opened, it would be impossible to exist for even an hour [i.e., a short while]. Blessed are You, Adoni who heals all flesh and does wondrous things.
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהוָֹה אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, אֲשֶׁר יָצַר אֶת הָאָדָם בְּחָכְמָה, וּבָרָא בוֹ נְקָבִים נְקָבִים, חֲלוּלִים חֲלוּלִים. גָּלוּי וְיָדוּעַ לִפְנֵי כִסֵּא כְבוֹדֶךָ, שֶׁאִם יִסָּתֵם אֶחָד מֵהֶם, אוֹ אִם יִפָּתֵח אֶחָד מֵהֶם, אִי אֶפְשַׁר לְהִתְקַיֵּם אַפִלּוּ שָׁעָה אֶחָת. בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה, רוֹפֵא כָל בָּשָׂר וּמַפְלִיא לַעֲשׂוֹת:
This is a good blessing to recite when one farts.
There are somewhere between 1072 to 1082 atoms in the universe. About 1030 of those atoms are mine. God is HUGE.
*) Bar Mitzvah
*) Putting out a fire in a classroom at Overlake
*) Getting elected student body president at Overlake
*) Accepted at Harvey Mudd College
*) Learning how to program in FORTRAN, which was my bread and butter from 1977 to 1995.
*) Getting my first job at Boeing
*) Graduating from Harvey Mudd College
*) Saving some guy's life using CPR.
*) Getting a patent 5,296,853, for a laser ice detector that has no moving parts. It doesn't work.
*) Digicomp 1 (3 bits, clock speed 1 Hz)
*) Wang 2200 Calculator ( 16 KBytes RAM, BASIC in ROM)
*) DECsystem-10 (At Harvey Mudd College)
*) DEC PDP-11/70, PDP-11/34 (Boeing Microprocessor Development Support Center, MDSC)
*) DEC VAX-11/780 (At Harvey Mudd College)
*) HP MX-21 (Air Launched Cruise Missile at Boeing)
*) DEC VAX-11/780 (Numerous assignments at Boeing)
*) DEC VAX-11/730 (The first VAX that was "mine" Minuteman Software Development Lab (MSDL) at Boeing)
*) DEC VAX-11/785 (MSDL at Boeing)
*) DEC VAX-8800 (A VAXcluster for Ballistic Systems Division at Boeing)
*) A VAXcluster of MicroVAXes (Flight Test Engineering instrumentation lab at Boeing)
*) DEC Alpha running OSF/1 (Mathsoft)
Since I left Mathsoft in December 1999, I have not used a DEC computer. DEC was bought out by Compaq, and Compaq was bought out by HP. OpenVMS, the operating system for VAX and Alpha, is still maintained by HP, although I don't know why. The VAX was, I think, the ultimate Complicated Instruction Set Computer (CISC). The Intel Pentium is complicated, but it is complicated because it is based on the 8080 microprocessor. However, modern transistor technology is such that it really doesn't matter. Only assembly language programmers see how rotten the Pentium really is, nobody else notices.
*) Erica Mong
*) Elisa Cohen
*) Shelley Skinner
*) Abby Grossman, wife of my friend Glen Dayton (Glen, Abby, and I went to dinner together in January 2016. They seem very happy together. I'm glad.)(I have since met the two of them for dinner twice)
*) Alisa Klein (I joined her for lunch in January 2016)(Yes, Elisa and Alisa are eponymous - that coincidence has always fascinated me, but I assure you that it was merely a remarkable coincidence)
*) Joy Harwood
I hope that if these women find me, they will not be angry and will accept my apology. I have discovered that I am really not much of a people person. I've been married for 35 years (To my astonishment: Judith is a remarkable woman), so these relationships happened long ago. But still, they happened. I hope whatever happened to these women, they are happy. I cared about them.
*) Mrs. Baker. Ravenna elementary school. 1964-1965. Kindergarten. Sharing. Put away your toys (didn't stick). Take a nap after lunch. Play fair. Take your turn. Raise your hand and wait to be called on before speaking. In the event of a nuclear attack, duck and cover.
*) Leonard Good. Evergreen school for gifted children. 1969-1970. My science teacher in 6th grade.
*) Denver Ulery. Overlake, 1970-1976. My math teacher in 7th grade. Science teacher in 8th grade. Physics teacher in 9, 11th, and 12th grade. Carpentry. How to wire a 3 phase motor. May he rest in peace.
*) Dean Palmer. Overlake, 1970-1976. Headmaster. History, Economics, Mathematics. Soccer coach. May he rest in peace.
*) Carol Anne Castell. Overlake, 1974-1976. Chemistry in 11th and 12th grades.
*) Jack Newton. Overlake, 1970, 1973. Biology, sex.
*) Bill Armstrong. Overlake, 1971-1976 Home room, English (including sentence diagramming, critical for Natural Language Processing - who knew?) typing.
*) Myra Geotz. Overlake. English, poetry, Drama.
*) Jill Anthony Overlake, 1975. Decisions and Outcomes.
*) David Cotlove. Overlake. 1974-1975. Mathematics. Beta Computing, 1975. Introduction to computing programming using BASIC
*) Trevor Culley. Overlake, 1974, 1975. Mathematics. Algebra. Functions. Trigonometry. Soccer coach. Another way of pronouncing the letter "Zed"
*) Prof. Alvin White. Harvey Mudd College. 1976,1977. Calculus, linear algebra.
*) Dr. Gene Clough. Harvey Mudd College. 1979, 1970. Solid State Physics
*) Prof. David Beeman. Harvey Mudd College. 1978-1980. Physics: statistical mechanics. Numerical methods in physics.
*) Randy Saunders, HMC 1979. Harvey Mudd College. FORTRAN.
*) Fred Struck. Boeing, 1980-1981. ATLAS, the Abbreviated Test Language for Any System.
*) Larry Flesher. Boeing. 1982-1990. The finest manager I ever worked for, and the standard that I measure managers against. Larry, if you get this message, I'd like to take you to lunch.
*) Glen Dayton, HMC 1981. Boeing. Ethernet. DECnet.
*) Bill Jones. Boeing. Radar. Another person I would like to take to lunch.
*) Prof. David Peterson. United States Department of Agriculture, National Forest Service. Ecology and how ecology (a science) is different from environmentalism (a political movement).
*) Dr. Susan Olsen. United States Department of Agriculture, National Forest Service. Atmospheric Science. Adiabatic expansion.
*) Prof. Jonathan Jacky. University of Washington, Professional and Continuing Education. Python.
*) Dr. Don McKenzie, United States Department of Agriculture, National Forest Service. Data science, machine learning (although we didn't know that at the time).
*) Mark Tapper, Real Networks. 2005-2007. Load balancers. SQL. perl. May he rest in peace.
*) David Holmes. F5 Networks. How to write software using SSL in "C"
*) Daniel Brogan. F5 Networks. IPv6.
*) Mark Rider. F5 Networks. How to do customer support. Never say "I can't do that". Say "I can't do that, but what I can do is this".
*) Rachel Levine. Temple Beth Am. The most consistently liberal liberal I've ever met. I'm not sure if she is a religious teacher or a secular teacher, but I don't think she will mind being listed here.
*) Dr. Zachary Voulgaris. Prosoft. 2016-2017. Data science.
I do not do anything. I never did anything. Rather, I was incredibly fortunate, incredibly fortunate, to have good teachers who helped me along the way.
*) Bar Mitzvah. If I can study the laws of Leprosy (Leviticus 13), I can do anything.
*) Marrying Judith. They say that the shortest sentence in the English language is "I am". The longest sentence in the English language is "I do".
*) Birth of Sarah. If you will recall what I wrote the other day, Judith actually did most of the work. She seems to have found her niche running Schilling Cider house in Fremont (https://www.schillingcider.com/)
*) Birth of Daniel. If you will recall what I wrote the other day, again Judith actually did most of the work. He seems to have found his niche at Expediters International.
*) Sarah's Bat Mitzvah
*) Births of Randall, Janie, Dillon, Devin, Isaac, Elijah. Dillon especially, when I met him, he was so small! Now, ask him about Pluto, but only if you have some time: once he starts talking about Pluto, he can talk about it for 45 minutes. Further, Devin, as a 9 10 year old, of all my grandchildren, I think he cares about me the most. Of all of them, he is the most likely to criticize me, speak truth to power, and what really hurts is that usually, he is right. My worst critic is also my most powerful asset.
I am also grateful that the Universe can be explained (except for gravity) in terms of equations. Think about that for a moment. There is no reason why the Universe should be predictable using mathematics. Mathematics is rather abstract. The square root of 2 is an irrational number, that is, there is no faction which, when squared, is 2. The square roots of all of the integers either integers (such as 4) or irrational. This is true regardless of whether the Universe exists or not, and there is nothing that God can do about it. So why should this incredibly abstract theory actually be applicable to something real, something useful? Physicists routinely use their systems of equations to do all kinds of things. We flew a spacecraft to Pluto, 5 Billion Km distant, and passed within 12,500 Km of it. A precision of 1 part in 2.4x106 . A hunter shooting at a target 100m away would have to hit the target with a precision of a micrometer, smaller than the thickness of a human hair, to do as well. Electrical engineers design computers, secure in the knowledge that Ohm's law, V=IR, is going to work. Auto mechanics use torque wrenches. Air planes fly, and do so economically. All of these things work due to designers using mathenatics. By way of contrast, my daughter's dog, Indy, can catch a ball in mid air, and does not use mathematics to do it. So it is clear to me that the Universe also can be understood without math - the dog is an existence case.
When I observe the Universe, I seized with a tremendous sense of
awe. It is estimated that there are 1072 to 1082
atoms in the observable universe. That is a staggering
number. I have about 8.6*1010 neurons in my head, and
I cannot comprehend such a number. This is why, for all of the
scientific bullshit that I have bullshitted for the past couple of
weeks, I believe in God.
Katherine Winchell: I hope you get a job soon. The world needs you, desperately. The world just doesn't know it yet. Katherine Winchell has the coolest job: she is driving the world's Solar System's most expensive radio controlled car. It's a Mars rover. Sometimes, it gets to -80 ℃ there. That's cool.
When you read about the first Thanksgiving feast, you will read that the pilgrims invited the native Americans to a feast that they had never seen before. In fact, it was the pilgrims that had never seen such a feast before.
. Today, I can
send E-mails to my friend, Prof. Sarah Stroup, while she is on a dig in
Israel, on the other side of the planet. The only delay is due to
the fact that she sleeps when I am awake, and vice versa. But if I
wanted to wake up early, and she was willing to stay up late, we could
communicate virtually instantaneously. My friend Riccardo Carlesso
is in Europe somewhere, and we E-mail frequently. Unfortunately, despite how wonderful the internet is, 17% of the
traffic on the internet are pictures of cats,
and 22% of the statistics
quoted on the internet are made up.
So after utterly blowing that test, and realizing that perhaps my career has all been a lie, I did something very uncharacteristic of me: I went and got drunk. I have not gotten drunk since the mid-1970s, when I was an undergraduate at Harvey Mudd College (HMC). To make matters worse, I had skipped lunch and dinner, so I was drinking on an empty stomach. To make matters worse, I am taking Metformin for hyperglycemia, and that interacts with alcohol. Fortunately, between diet and exercise, my hemoglobin A1C is 5.6, below the level considered hazardous, which is 6.0.
After consuming 64 Oz (946 ml) of 3.5 ABV beer, I had consumed 33 ml of alcohol. I weigh 160.4 lbs (72 Kg). I went to the Cleveland Clinic, and figured out that my Blood Alcohol Concentration was 0.075 . The threshold of intoxication for legal purposes in Washington State is 0.08, which given my personal experience, is too high. To my astonishment, I was able to walk to Sarah's house. Robert, who is a pretty big guy, wrestled me into a chair. Indy was affectionate, as usual. Sarah called Judith, who came to pick me. I'm not sure how I got to the car, and I am pretty certain I made it up the stairs at my house and into my recliner.
I'm kind of stupid. I have a whole support network of people who care about me, not because of what I do, but because of who I am. I have trouble remembering that.
I think I have to find a new career, what doing, I don't know.
I am grateful for my family and friends who rallied around me in what was one of my darker hours.