Conversely, I came to realize that being good at something is hardly a reason to avoid doing it.

The postdoc explained to me how to distinguish different sorts of particles on the basis of the amounts of energy they deposited in various sorts of detectors, spark chambers, calorimeters, what have you.

After a semester or so, my infatuation with computers burnt out as quickly as it had begun.

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

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

I was born in Palo Alto, California in 1961.

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.