My freshman year of high school I joined the chess and math clubs.

Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic.

There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser.

Just before my final year of high school, my brother, sister and I moved with my mother to San Francisco.

Keep everything in perspective if you wish to be happy. For example... Losing an arm is more an inconvenience than a catastrophe. Things could be a lot worse so why not be grateful they aren't and thereby happy rather than sad?

I certainly remember building model rockets. It was fun to watch the rocket blast into the air, suspenseful to wonder if the parachute would open to bring the rocket safely back.

My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English.