Stevie Wonder Opening Act For Bill Clinton

San Francisco (Dec. 8, 2010). Bill Clinton gave the keynote speech at the Salesforce.com's DreamForce conference this evening. Due to the inclement weather President Clinton's plane was delayed. Consequently, Stevie Wonder and Mark Benioff had about a one hour discussion on Stevie Wonder's life and inspirations for his music.

At the conclusion of the discussion Stevie Wonder introduced the President. Clinton, upon taking to the podium Clinton said "never thought that a mediocre musician like myself would have Stevie Wonder as an opening act."

Clinton then got down to more serious topics including the disparity in wealth that has become woven into the American society. He cited statistics that there is more disparity in the US now than there ever was in Latin America and other developing nations. He referred to the need for Americans to think for the future.

Stevie Wonder and President Bill Clinton

Another Historic Milestone in Human Civilization is Crossed

It was reported in the media on March 13, 2012 that the last printed edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica has been printed. A milestone to be recorded along side that of the ending of the publication of the logarithmic tables in the CRC Handbook and the use of the slide rule, to mention a few of the other milestones of civilization. The Encyclopaedia Britannica has been printed continuously since it was first published in Edinburgh Scottland in 1768.

I remember, sometime in the early '70s when you could finally purchase a calculator to compute a logarithm with a device of smaller volume than the section of tables consumed within the CRC Handbook.

Other milestones that have been passed:

Dialing a rotary telephone

Using a floppy disc

Use of the typewriter or carbon paper

Photography based upon developing silver emulsion film

Elimination of ice to cool refrigerators

The elimination of the telephone book as a means of finding a residential phone number.

Elimination of the cord on a residential telephone line

Other looming milestones are:

elimination of the phone booth

the ebook replacement of the paper book

the mobil phone replacement of the residential phone line.

If you have some others you would like to add to this list please add some of your own.

Space Shuttle ENDEAVOUR Over San Francisco Skies

I watched with awe yesterday as the space shuttle Endeavour passed overhead on its final trip to its resting place in the Los Angeles area.  Here was the symbol of an era being carried on the back of a Boeing 747 on its funeral march going to its final resting place. It reminded me of the funeral procession for President Kennedy after his assassination in 1963, as his flag-draped coffin was carried on a horse-drawn caisson to the Capitol building to lie in state.  In a strange way, these two events are tied to each other as the two anchor points on an era of manned space flight: Kennedy having been the President when Glenn first made his orbit of the Earth and also putting the stake in the ground challenging the nation to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, and the shuttle funeral march signaling the end.  This was one of the most memorable events I have seen in years. 

The NASA space age Odyssey of human space exploration spans my entire adult life. 
I was a high school senior when John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, entered his Mercury capsule to be hurled into space on February 20, 1962.
I was a college junior and senior when the Gemini program was launching space capsules.
I was in grad school and just married the month before Niel Armstrong set foot on the Moon in July 1969.
My first son was born a few months before the Apollo 13 mission in April, 1970
Apollo 17,  the eleventh and final  mission to the moon in December, 1972, was completed shortly before I completed my doctorate and the birth of my second son. 
The Apollo Soyuz space hook up was in 1975, just as I took my position at Columbia University.
The first space shuttle mission occurred in April, 1981, just as we launched our first PC software product. The events continued on through the decades, some good, some bad:
--the space shuttle Challenger disaster which occurred in January, 1986
--the Hubble space telescope launch in April, 1990
--the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia February, 2003
are all marked by corresponding events in my life.