Science &
Technology

This is the doorway into the whole story: why science matters to me, why I created CapeCodScience.com, and how the site brings together resources, subjects, organizations, ideas, and opportunities for people who want to keep learning.

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By almost any definition, I was a pretty perfect science nerd—and I fit the description to a tee. Growing up, while many of the kids around me were collecting and reading Sports Illustrated—although I have to admit I always appreciated the swimsuit issue—I was eagerly waiting for my next issue of Science News, the publication that had originally been known as Science News Letter. I looked forward to it every week.

Science wasn't just something I read about. It shaped the way I thought about the world. Even as a kid, I often felt that my mind worked differently from those of many of the other kids in my neighborhood. At one point I even wondered whether I might have been visited by space aliens, because I sometimes felt as though I knew things—or imagined possibilities—that no one around me seemed to be thinking about.

Whether that was childhood imagination, an unusually curious mind, or simply the influence of all the science and science fiction I was absorbing, I was constantly trying to create explanations for things. By the time I was about thirteen years old, around 1970, I had already developed two projects of my own: The Logical Alphabet and Gerard's Möbius Time Strip Continuum Theory.

Why “Gerard”? At thirteen, I simply thought Gerard sounded cooler than Jerry.

Looking back, I don't think the important part is whether the ideas of a thirteen-year-old were scientifically correct. What matters to me is that I was already trying to invent systems, challenge assumptions, and find my own way of explaining language, time, space, and reality. That instinct—to ask “Could there be another way to understand this?”—has stayed with me ever since.

This chapter looks back at my time in the Gifted Students Program and at the role science played in my school years. It is a part of the story I want to tell carefully—through the teachers, challenges, opportunities, and moments that helped shape the way I learned.

Radio Shack deserves more than a passing mention, so I have divided this chapter into three parts. That gives me room to show how the experience evolved instead of compressing an important period into a few paragraphs.

There is much more to this period than job titles and products. The people, machines, changes, and unexpected turns are what make it part of my larger technology story.

Autosoft belongs to my Hawai'i years, at an intersection of computers, ambition, experimentation, and a place that became a major part of my life. The phrase “Almost Microsoft” is a little playful, but there is a real story behind it—what I was trying to create, why the idea seemed possible, and what happened next.

My years at Cape Cod Community College brought computer systems, programming, reports, and day-to-day problem-solving into the practical side of my technology life. This chapter is where I can preserve the work itself—and what years of watching computers change taught me along the way.

A bridge between biology and computing · 1989 The Wobble Effect For a Biology II paper, I took something I already understood—a computer clock—and used it as a model for asking how a biological clock might work. The paper connects water molecules, DNA, oscillation, and computer timing architecture. I have now preserved the original paper and recreated its diagrams for the web. Read the article and original paper →

Not everything fits neatly into a job title. This chapter is a home for the smaller projects and experiments that appeared along the way—the things I built because I was curious, saw a need, or simply wanted to see whether an idea could work.

This is the living chapter—my exploration of artificial intelligence and the many things that interest me today. It can grow with the work: AI, robotics, creativity, knowledge, websites, human possibility, and the question of how emerging technology can serve people rather than diminish them.

This chapter is intentionally open-ended. Artificial intelligence is changing too quickly for a final paragraph, and I expect the questions, experiments, and projects here to keep evolving with it.