Dreams, Moments, Travels
Caroline and I attended Tonopah Rob’s farm dinner fundraiser which was catered by a local chef focusing tonight’s menu on food from the farm. Live entertainment and a slightly cantankerous John were on hand. Why the tension, John? I’m a workaholic and find it nearly impossible to pull away from work. It’s a bad habit, but I don’t know of any other way.
This evening, Caroline and I attended a talk from Donald Johanson. Back in 1974, he discovered fossilized bones from a theretofore unknown hominid and named it Lucy after the famous Beatles song, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” His discovery of Australopithecus afarensis put him in the record books and placed him high on the list of nerd achievement levels Caroline and I have now accumulated by meeting the man face-to-face.
We are at Gammage Theater on ASU’s campus for another Origins talk hosted by Lawrence Krauss. On the bill are Diane Ackerman (naturalist), Ian Tattersall (paleoanthropologist), Michael Crow (president of ASU), Lindy Elkins-Tanton (planetary scientist), Neil Gershenfeld (computer scientist), and the star of the evening Svante Pääbo who deciphered the Neanderthal genome.
Started the year with a photo of snowy mountains and here I am with another rare weather phenomenon in the desert: it’s called fog.
We are moving out of our first office here on Greenway-Hayden Loop in Scottsdale to a new location in South Scottsdale. It is the extraordinary amount of time I’m giving to this virtual reality development environment that stops me from posting here on my own blog more frequently. The woman on the right is Ariana Alexander who might be one of the happiest people I’ve ever met; she’s a 3D artist.
Sure, it’s a poor-quality photo taken from my phone but it’s the rarity of seeing the McDowell Mountains covered in snow that was worth remembering. Happy New Year from sunny Arizona.