“I never dared to be radical when young
For fear it would make me conservative when old.”
Quote by Robert Frost
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/3219.html
Fortunately for me, I did not follow Frost’s sometimes sage advice. I was radical in youth and I have remained true to a modification of my 1984 variant self.
If you knew me before 1984 or even 1994, I was an insane mess of an individual. I was a strange misfit of a character in the 8th to 12th grades of middle school and high school. I started emulating my father by imbibing ethanol when I was 11 years old at my sister Susan Williams Harrison’s high school graduation party in the spring of 1965. I also started smoking cigarettes at the youthful age of 14 in 1967 and I kept up that filthy and unhealthy addiction until June 1994. My father also smoked cigarettes while I was growing up and then in his old age a pipe.
I distinctly recall scribbling Albert Einstein’s tensor equations from his little but germinal and profound book “The Meaning of Relativity” on the blackboard of my 9th grade homeroom. Although I did not have a complete grasp of Riemannian geometry and tensor calculus, I understood that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and its gravitational field equations (Einstein’s replacement theory of gravitation that took the place of the classical theory of gravitation by Sir Isaac Newton ) admitted essentially two cosmologies: cyclic universe that expanded and then contracted or a static universe. I treated the equations back in those halcyon days of my youth as a form of art or graffiti.
I was an off the chain psycho-sociopathic individual until I underwent my first true phase transition in approximately 1984. From the ages of 17 until 31 I was in a Drug Induced Psychosis (DIP) and self-medicating for an inherited and environmentally caused different brain chemistry aberration.
During high school to keep my disruption of my classrooms to a minimum, my teachers would send me to either the chemistry or physics laboratories and the teachers hoped I would entertain myself without blowing up the school or poisoning adjacent classes with gases emanating from improperly conducted experiments. I recall an iodine gas creating chemical reaction that I should have performed under the hood being made without proper ventilation. An eerie and relatively toxic cloud of purple iodine gas resulted, and the chemistry teacher and I rushed to contain the reaction under a hood.
Well so much for my somewhat wasted in more ways than one high school years. Things got worse rather than better in the era of my youth 1971 until Spring 1978. I did the whole spectrum (gamut) of illicit and legal drugs with a special penchant for hallucinogens and hard narcotics. However, in the summer of 1978 I met my calling which was and always is open source development of computer software. I have not met a computer programming language that I did not love.
I hope my beloved hometown of LaGrange, Georgia, and its currently rather diverse population has empathy for my insane and sane diametrically opposed selves.
Numerical Explorations 