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Alice at Plum Island and other Stories, Threads & Magic
Introduction from the book
I’ve always told stories, anecdotes about happenings, that stuck with me, either because they’re funny, or ironic, or illustrate something or other. They’re the Stories in this book.
As I got older I began to see that my life had unfolded as if choreographed, with one thing leading naturally to another, much as Joseph Campbell has pointed out in his work. These longer tales are the Threads.
Then there are events that are, in the words of Yogi Berra, just too coincidental to be coincidences. They make up the Magic.
Bullies, a story from the book
Eighth Grade, 1958 Levittown NY
I was a relatively small kid in school with a slight build, a meek disposition, and a year younger than everyone in my grade. This meant I was sometimes the target of bullies in school.
In eighth grade this tough kid, also named Dennis, who had been pushing me around for a while, got right in front of me at my desk before the teacher came in, and dared me to hit him, he said, “come on, hit me, I dare you” over and over.
So I did.
I suspect he was about to kill me then and there, except the teacher came in the room at just that moment. Dennis said to me “you got lucky, I’m going to get you after school.”
I opted to take a different exit from school than I normally did and a different route home.
The next morning he said “you escaped me yesterday, it won’t happen today.”
Looking for a way out, I said to him “Look Dennis, if we fight after school one of two things will happen. One is you beat me up, in which case everyone will look down on you for beating up a kid smaller than you. The other is, unlikely, I might beat you up, which will be really embarrassing for you. Either way, you lose.”
He said “I’m gonna get you after school.”
Around mid afternoon, still in school, he came up to me and said “I’ve been thinking it over. The way I see it is, if we fight after school one of two things will happen…” and said back everything I’d said in the morning.
I agreed he was thinking clearly, and we became, well if not friends, friendly after that.
Draper Labs
My first job was as a scientific programmer at the M.I.T. Instrumentation Lab, now called the Draper Labs. I hadn’t gone to M.I.T. or gotten a college degree higher than a bachelor’s, but had friends who got me the job there. We were working in a small group that serviced small contracts.
We’d just gotten one called the Star Occultation project. It called for the analysis of satellite data looking at images of stars as they faded behind the atmosphere before disappearing behind the earth. That analysis would let us figure out the amount of various pollutants in the air.
I was to be the programmer for the project. We had a PhD student from M.I.T. work with us as chief scientist.
He came up with a bunch of equations that determined pollutant percentages based on input star occultation image data. He gave them to me to turn into code, which I did.
Strangely, instead of generating meaningful percentages, the program produced all zeroes for output. He was a bit angry, said clearly I’d made a mistake, and to check my code.
I did, and it still came out with zeroes for output.
He was furious and walked into my boss’s office, and within earshot of everyone in the group, loudly asked how he could have assigned such an incompetent programmer to the project, one that couldn’t even code a bunch of equations. He demanded I get thrown off the project and that he be provided with someone who knew what they were doing.
It was Friday.
Well, it was eighth grade all over again, and I knew I could stand up to this bully and I knew I had coded his formulae correctly. So I went home and went over his equations. I was able to, from a pure math point of view, analyze the equations and prove that, no matter what input, they would always produce a zero as the result.
Monday morning I asked for a meeting. It was me, my boss, and a very angry and arrogant M.I.T. graduate student. I was pretty wired up and went to the white board and laid out my proof, showing that his equations were incorrect and would always produce a zero. I also showed what the correct equations should be.
Wow, was he mad! He just stormed out of the room slamming the door behind him.
With just the two of us left in the room, my boss looked at me and said, “Well I guess now you’re the chief scientist for the Star Occultation project.”
Get the book in paperback, Kindle or audio file from Amazon:
Alice at Plum Island and other Stories, Threads & Magic