Not only is the world warming, gravity is getting stronger! It used to take me 27 minutes to ride my bike from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey CA, where I work as a Research Professor teaching engineering courses and studying super dielectric materials, to my home, about 500 feet higher. Now it is taking me, on a good day, 28 minutes. Or perhaps the ‘steady ocean breeze’ of this land of eternal spring, is getting stronger…
Before moving to CA we lived in Rio Rancho, NM. I commuted north, 4 days/wk, 90 minutes each way, to work at Los Alamos Nat’l lab. One day/wk I commuted the other way to the Univ. of New MX, where I was a National Lab Professor, working with post-docs (10 total!). Absolutely love NM, but the job and the commute?? My wife Claudia was offered a position as a Prof. of Mechanical Engr. at NPS, and that seemed like an invitation to a more rational existence. The move worked! Both of us prefer our new jobs, particularly the tiny commute along the ocean, and all four sons agree CA is ‘cooler’ than NM. The youngest, Carlos, dreams of being a soccer player, but being practical, is preparing to study math in college. Bernardo, 17, wants to be a journalist, like his older brother Ari Phillips who works in Brooklyn as a senior editor for environmental coverage for ‘Fusion’. Finally, Zach, who is in graduate school studying ecology/entomology at UT Austin has been a fan of CA since his days as an undergraduate student, along with brother Ari, at UC-Santa Barbara.
Other mentionables: After five frigid and wonderful years in Madison, WI, which included three long canoe trips to the Canadian wilderness west of Duluth, I received a PhD in Materials Science. Left to be a post-doc at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, and got there just in time to observe ‘Operation Peace in Galilee’ from my office window. A PhD in Materials Science led to a job teaching Chemical Engineering at Penn State University. I left there as a full Prof. after 17 years, two sabbaticals (Institut de Recherche sur La Catalyse, Villeurbanne, France- another war- first Gulf War, and Ben Gurion Univ, Israel as a Fulbright Fellow- a period of remarkable calm), 10 PhD students, ~20 MS students, etc. to move to New Mexico. Along the way I have accumulated 26 issued patents and about 140 reviewed journal articles. Oh, and please ask about Classical Quantum Mechanics….
Midd76 