He really is!! He taught me so much science, chemistry, radio, technology, just sort of whispering facts in my ear. It was the gentlest way to learn really amazing stuff when I was extremely too young and shouldn't have understood any of it. I was into space flight and computers by 3rd grade (1980).

What's amazing is how badly I fared in my systematic science classes beginning in high school. I started taking them over summertime, figuring I could handle a relaxed, accelerated schedule, but was far too social and flirting with girls to pay any attention. I didn't really expect to use hard natural sciences in an IT career anyway. I don't even use Calculus!

The scope was there had you wanted to pursue that path; in 1980 I started working on very large scale mapping software, building custom real time OS's and instruments, and ended up in exploration geophysics which included just a little calculus (upward and downward continuations of magnetic fields, a thousand and one Kalman filter applications, FFT's and wavelets, all manner of fancy math).