Influences

Why are we the way we are?

When I was a teenager I belonged to a firefighter “Explorer” program in the California high desert where young people could ride along on official calls and gain hands-on training. One day we went on a call to a fringe part of a desert town where a mobile home had already burned down and our job was to make sure that no hot embers remained.

Across the floor you could see half-burned pages of advanced science books. Pages and pages of complex chemistry models.

I thought, “How inspiring is this that some hermit-like intellectual, on the edge of obscurity, would devout him or herself to deep learning seemingly for the mere joy of probing the fabric of this universe.”

That experience influenced me to seek a cloistered life of deep learning and polymath exploration. In recent years, however, I realize… they were probably cooking meth.