Lately, I do not watch any television except France24, but a few years ago I watched the TV series for Indiana Jones. My initial reaction; "This is SO unrealistic. How can one person, working at a middle level of a complicated bureaucracy, have so much intense, important and fundamental interaction with so many of the leaders of the world at that time." But then I realized; my OWN life was very much like that, even more impossible. I immediately thought of my long conversations with Oppenheimer, with ed Teller, with Julian Schwinger, with Marvin Minsky (from whom I took an independent study in the 1960s, when I wrote a paper on the levels of intelligence in vertebrates), with Steve Grossberg, with Warren McCullough (in the dorm room of Dan Levine and the Commons of Adams House, Harvard), and with B.F. Skinner.
On my latest cruise to the Bermuda Triangle (arranged by my wife, an incredible person in her own right), the captain came to our table and
described how many nations he had visited, aspiring to be a real life Indiana Jones. I just smiled and sadly wondered what I could tell him about what it would be like to be the real thing.
Just before my 21st birthday, in 1968, I was on an airplane from the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica to the Pentagon, where I met with the number three (Einthoven) and number 6 (Thayer)
people in DOD running the Vietnam war. I was there to give them a classified briefing on what I learned in my new data analysis of what was really happening there. (I had programmed a simplified approximate version of backpropagation, slightly beyond what I had published as an undergraduate in the journal Cybernetica (Namur); I have scanned many, many of the old papers into my digital files, including letters to me from De Broglie. The letter from Betrand Russell in 1964 had a big effect on my life, but I probably lost it.)
But in my second university job, in the summer of 1969, there were two major very competent efforts to kill me, as part of incidents recorded in the Ann Arbor newspapers.
The first was by a Black Panther, who was later captured when he spoke too much in bars about how "murder on Main Street" did not work out as they planned.
The second was incredibly lurid , in front of University Towers, where the attacking motorcycle gang did kill one person with their molotov cocktails, but I was protected by a ring of
tough local police with machine guns checking IDs for anyone trying to enter. Years later, at a political science convention, I had a chance to safely confront the guy who ordered the hit:
"WHY? I was not doing anything to attack you. I am visibly just working for peace in my own way." I will never forget his brief response: "You knew too much."
By the way, my high school, Lawrenceville, says they included a condensed version of that story in the class of 1964 folder somehow in Harvard archives.
In fact, in 1969, I had already decided I had watched too many James Bond movies. "No, I will not get rid of the good parts. Tropical places like RAND Santa Monica and high tech and beautiful Russian women... I only want MORE of that. But no more proximity to guns or lies or excess newspaper appearances." And so it was.
Quiet, compartmentalized, maximum benevolent impact ... but no more risks to my life. Or not many.
In truth, the scariest risk to my life was later, in Kathmandu, in a conference on Science and Spirit. Machine guns again, this time pointed at me by a pro-Chinese red army faction keeping a few us from crossing their red lines before the Temple of Shiva. I wondered. Have I graduated from James Bond to Dr. Strange? THAT week was unbelievable.
I HAVE discussed bits and pieces of my life with science fiction writers, like Nathan, who filed my latest patent. (The summary looks innocuous but the contents go beyond what most science fiction writers imagine.) One was Philip K. Dick, whose final collection includes a letter or two from/to me, as Dick encountered things in the desert rather mild compared to what
I connected to in Nepal and In India.
BUT: as improbable and important as the past seemed to be, it is as nothing compared to what is happening and coming now. For me, this email
is basically just a way to calm down and relax, compared to what we may see and connect to (as quietly as I can manage) as Virginia election officials tomorrow,
with long-standing connections to Pennsylvania, whose Senator I worked for in 2009 (the year of climate legislation).
Next I review election laws, check news, and pack.
Advanced search in
scholar.google.com shows about 500 published papers, across many fields, but there are many more not published in other important areas,
which I hope might get archived someday in a relatively open, accessible organized way. Since my retirement from NSF in 2015, I have tried to focus on the short list of challenges, attached... and on staying alive in general, living as normal a life as I can manage.
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