I was begat from an American tourist (my mother) on a coach tour that covered all the capitals of Europe. She fell in love with the tour guide (my father). Back in those days hotels would give away labels to stick on luggage, and this page shows some of them that I scanned.
They lived in Kilburn, London, where I spent a year. After that Colindale and Dulwich, where I went to secondary school, at Alleyns College of Gods Gift (Founded 1619) (sic). No really it was a fine school; this photo is class 2A (Mr Beck) from 1970. See if you can identify which one is me ... if so, you can click to get a clearer picture.
There were games afternoons twice a week. I liked the swimming ans water-polo, I liked the idea of "Personal Survival" (see certificate). But unfortunately my memories seem to have crystallized at a cold drizzly Novemeber afternoon, getting dark at 3pm, playing soccer in muddy shorts. At one point there was a choice between this and "computing", which meant travelling to Imperial College in London (real London, not commuter suburb), carrying big boxes of cards and returning with the lineprinter output. Programs were laboriously written out on a coding form, then typed on to cards with the IBM 29 card punch. Multicoloured "job control" cards (such as this one) were put at the front and back of the deck to make it all look very advanced and obscure. There were two rather fun things that could be done with the card punch. The most obvious was to throw around the tiny chips of card, also good was to set the machine into "auto-duplicate" mode, which made a great deal of noise and would make the floor shake.
It was immensely satisfying when my first computer program ran successfully. It solved this problem: find all three-digit numbers which are equal to the sum of the cubes of the digits. Also I wrote programs for obscure astronomical/astrological calculations, and I had a 4-foot-long telescope for looking at galaxies and planets in the middle of very cold nights.
I cycled around Britain and hiked all of the "mountain ranges". Memories of camping by a lake in Wales, the rain coming down in sheets and everything smelling of wet wool. High on a chalk ridge, the lark singing in the sunshine. The last 26 miles of the Pennine Way all in one day, starting at 4am and praying for good weather. The cycling party making a gallon of gruel for breakfast and somebody left with the job of cleaning the burnt bits from the bottom of the cauldron. Riding 160 miles in 24 hours essentially a circumnavigation of the county of Kent. This is the picture from my Youth Hostel Association card.
I did O-level exams and A-level exams, and all my friends went to University, while I spent an intermediate year with Imperial Metal Industries. I lived in the shadow of the most complex motorway intersection in Britain (Spaghetti Junction), escaping by hitchhiking every weekend. I remember presenting a statistical analysis of sales patterns, with stock level recommendations, to a 50-year-old manager who knew the stock, knew his customers, knew his business. He didn't deride me in front of the others, but later his explanations in thick Birmingham accent made me realize exactly how unimportant mathematics can be compared to the real knowledge, which is human.
Then by contrast Cambridge was joy, nothing to do but learn a lot of math and learn how to drive a punt. One summer I worked a real job: graveyard shift in a styrofoam cup factory under the flight path of O'Hare airport in Chicago. Followed by a Greyhound tour of the USA and my first trip to Los Angeles. I went to a party in the Hollywood Hills, I remember looking over the vista of lights with the velvety summer night all around, the Americans bright and optimistic and forward, in contrast to so many British.
After college, I applied to Caltech, as well as some British Universities. And I was accepted!. I remembered that lovely party, I liked the avocados and oranges growing on trees, I liked the warm sunny weather, I liked that snow, surf, mountain, and desert were all close by. I studied physics for four years, wrote a thesis, married, went back to Britain. Worked on neutrons (anybody out there like neutrons?) and learned how to behave at Oxford High Table, but also remembered how cold and nasty the winter can be there. There was an opening back at Caltech, but now with the emerging field of parallel computers. This is what I have been doing ever since, along with travel, woodworking, trying to answer some of the big questions. In 1995 I shone briefly because I knew what the Internet was when nobody else did, consequently my work has directed there: using the net and its infrastructure to manage scientific data. Dreaming of Hypermaps explains the general idea of what I do now. Also take a look at VirtualSky.org, a set of representations of the night sky from 1603 to now.
Got divorced in 1999. Got remarried in 2000 to a lovely woman. The search was based on three criteria: Happy, Smart and Self-sufficient. Jessica is all of those. We had a lovely year by the beach in Santa Monica, then bought a nice house in Pasadena and produced baby Jane. Keeping my fingers crossed, all goes well right now!