Where I Have Been
While growing up we all have experiences, experiences that shape the way we view the world. In this chapter I am going to present a few of mine.
Kennolyn Camp
I had my first religious experience at Kennolyn Camp near Santa Cruz in August of 1949. It was a very bad summer, a summer of death, terror, and shame. The high point of my time at the camp was sitting on a split log bench in a beautiful meadow on Sunday morning and listening to a minister talking about the most monstrous god you can imagine. The minister talked about a place called Hell, and I recognized it at once!
Suddenly there was another god in the trees by the meadow. And this one was a lot friendlier.
On my birthday I escaped into the woods to spend time with this other god. There isn’t much I remember about the experience, and what I do remember is surely a delusion. But it did start me on a search that has lasted all my life.
Ham Radio convention
In 1956 at the Ham Radio Convention in San Francisco I saw something, I saw a pattern. On a large oscilloscope there was something that looked like a square wave, but I didn’t see it. I saw a filter and said “man dig them crazy skirts!” My dad said I was wrong, it was a square wave. The salesman said “the boy is right, the base is frequency not time”. Then my father saw it too.
What you see depends on your view. I said skirts because of the poetic phrase. I didn’t know the base was frequency.
The middle way search
I remember my search for the “Middle Way” at Cal Poly: it never gets there. I was learning about synchronization. As a regulated value gets closer to the setting, the more it is pushed away. As the value gets farther from the setting, the more it is pulled back. It never reaches the setting, it never gets there!
The electric motor
One day in an electrical engineering lab I was experimenting with a motor lifing a weight. When I pushed down on the weight, the armature moved away. When I lifted the weight, the armature moved closer. I felt it, I felt the magnetic field pulling on the armature.
Crazy Cal Poly student
One evening, while sitting and reading in the student union I was approached by another student. He asked me “Where is the green?” So I pointed out the window to the grass and said it was there. Then he said “What is the equation for man?” So I said I didn’t know, but I think it has two exponentials. Later that evening he went insane and was taken to a psychiatric hospital.