Guided Entrepreneurship

  My year-long industrial leave from UC Berkeley to Teknekron in 1969-70, which I described last month, whetted my appetite for a continuous liaison with industry.  It was largely sated by my quarter-century relationship with that company. 

  Shortly after its founding and my involvement with its first project, Teknekron became a unique platform for entrepreneurship.  The concept, as envisioned by its CEO, was to find young would-be entrepreneurs who needed more than just capital, those who could also benefit from the entrepreneurial training the company had to offer and from its connections to the market and to research institutions.  The process, as it unfolded, became known as guided entrepreneurship.  That may seem like an oxymoron, since entrepreneurs are not thought to be easily guided.  Teknekron showed otherwise.  Although the company is now inactive (all of its principals retired in 1995), its methodology is still worth chronicling, for it increases the chance of entrepreneurial success.

  Guided entrepreneurship is very different from other start-up strategies.  Venture capital concentrates on discovering inventors who already have a product in mind and primarily need capital to develop it and bring it to market.  Corporate spin-outs attempt to enhance and market products invented within an existing company through a newly formed enterprise.  Incubators provide a bevy of facilities to entrepreneurs: space; infrastructure such as communication and computer equipment; legal, accounting and other support; and often a modicum of capital, business advice and market access. 

  Teknekron's methodology differed markedly by concentrating not on products but on entrepreneurial minds.  It sought smart young people who weren't bent on retreating to a back room to develop a product from an idea, or—if they were—could be persuaded to drop that focus.  Those it brought into the company after careful screening were go-getters who at the very outset would be willing, with the company's guidance, to address prospective clients in the marketplace—in our case, large corporations—to find needs that could be filled by the broad knowledge they had.

  The novelty in Teknekron's "market first" approach is encapsulated in the difference between the motifs "Sell, Design, Build" (SDB) and "Design, Build, Sell" (DBS).  All other start-up models take the DBS path—money and other resources are poured into turning an idea into a finished product and then trying to sell it into a preconceived market, which might not have been there after all.  Teknekron's SDB approach instead insisted that if an idea has enough worth, that worth could be established by finding a client which would be willing to fund its development for the client's business.  Its entrepreneurs weren't allowed to develop products in a vacuum, assuming that a market for them would somehow be forthcoming

  Teknekron's program hence trained entrepreneurs to go first to the market in search of problems that needed solving; sell a proposed solution to a problem thus discovered; develop that solution into client-specific hardware, software, and operational procedures; and only then consider generalizing the technology into a more broadly applicable product.  The company brought value to the process not only by providing financial,  marketing, infrastructure and professional support to the entrepreneurs, but most importantly by enforcing a market-oriented and profit discipline.. 

  Knowing the general area of expertise of new entrepreneurs, Teknekron would introduce them to prospective clients and teach them above all to listen for needs, not to advocate technologies.  They might play an opening gambit like "I have an idea for a better mousetrap," but if the response was, "I have no mice, but I do have foxes that are invading my henhouses," Teknekron's training would lead them to segue seamlessly into attacking the fox problem.  The immediate effort—with Teknekron's negotiating and legal help—would be to sell a contract for solving that problem (usually series of phases, starting with a feasibility study).  It was expected that, in solving the particular problem, a more-generic technology for solving other problems would emerge.  Teknekron always insisted that its contracts reserve to itself the rights for those other applications of the developed technology, giving the client royalties from other sales of the original application.

  The new entrepreneurs were initially employees of Teknekron.  Once they had built up sufficient revenues and profitability, they got their own corporation, which would be a subsidiary of Teknekron in which they and their colleagues owned shares.  After a subsequent stage of growth to another benchmark of revenues and profitability, the new corporation would be spun out by public or private sale, yielding the payout that both Teknekron and the entrepreneurs sought.  When successful, the time from a one- or two-person start-up to its public or private sale averaged about ten years.  Teknekron's profit discipline was strict: if a new venture did not reach the first benchmark of sales and profitability within a year or at most two, it was terminated; most reaching that benchmark subsequently achieved the second. 

  All of Teknekron's start-up companies addressed information-technology issues, in such varied industries as energy utilities, commercial and investment banking, transportation, communications and insurance.  It is hard to precisely assess the success rate the company had, since one tends to forget the businesses that were shut down early, but my educated guess is that some 35-40% of start-ups jumped both hurdles, reaching the sale stage.  The success rate was thus a significant multiple of that expected of venture capital, although the time to final payout was longer.  Teknekron considered itself more of a marathon runner than a sprinter.

  I was privileged to participate in many roles in the guided-entrepreneurship program for a quarter century, mostly while I was on the faculty at UC.  I brought a number of my academic colleagues into new ventures as technical advisors; I was able to bring some of the brightest students in my department into those ventures upon their graduation; I participated both in the work of technology development and in the process of guiding the entrepreneurs; and I continued consulting for companies that had spun out of Teknekron by public or private sale.  After I retired from the University, I spent the final seven years of my career full time at the company.

  As I said in describing that first year of industrial leave, the tripartite relationship I maintained with Teknekron and the university became indispensable to my professional career, for it enabled me to keep one foot in research and one in market applications.  I like to think that the interplay between those complementary roles brought value to the economy as a whole by helping the process of technology transfer from universities and other research institutions.  I believe that engaging in that interplay is a valuable model for engineering and science faculty members.

The Higgs Boson

  As an electrical engineer, I'm the closest thing to a physicist some of my friends know.  A few of them therefore asked me for an explanation of the Higgs boson when its discovery was recently announced by the pan-European nuclear research organization CERN.  I had to admit that I hadn't a clue.  I've since sought that clue.

  In exculpation of my ignorance, I should mention that quantum physics—physics at the atomic level—only slowly percolated into the curriculum during my formal education.  In the mid-1940s, when I was in high school, atoms were described very simply: they were like tiny planetary systems.  Electron "planets" circled about a "sun" consisting of protons and neutrons, each of the latter being a proton bound to an electron.  Not so hard to understand.

  In my undergraduate days I was introduced to more complexity: electrons and protons are not solid orbs, but fuzzy entities instead, with dual natures that allow them to act also as waves.  Conversely, light—which I'd always thought of as a wave—has a dual nature as a fuzzy particle: the photon.  My understanding was getting as fuzzy as the particles.

  In graduate school, spooked by the strangeness of the quantum world, I tried to avoid it altogether.  Alas! that was not to be.  During the oral exam in which I was to defend my doctoral thesis and exhibit sufficient knowledge of the science and mathematics underlying it, a perverse examiner asked me a question about quantum mechanics, which had nothing whatsoever to do with my thesis.  I was flabbergasted, unable even to start answering.  My nemesis insisted that I take a graduate course on the subject.

  I thus found out that those fuzzy particles are neither here nor there, but can be everywhere simultaneously, described only by probability distributions of their locations; that trying to pin them down with any precision is a fool's effort, prohibited by quantum laws; and I learned how to derive their probability distributions.  More befuddled than ever, I absorbed enough of this hodgepodge to pass the course and get my degree.  My formal quantum-physics education thus ended in 1956 on a note of heightened incomprehension.

  The field continued to develop rapidly and ever more impenetrably.  New elementary particles were discovered at an astounding rate.  Protons turned out not to be elementary, but made up of quarks.  Two fundamental forces beyond electromagnetism and gravitation were confirmed: the strong nuclear force that binds quarks inside the proton, and the weak nuclear force that accounts for radioactive decay.  These forces were shown to be carried by particles like the photon, which conveys the electromagnetic force. 

  A Standard Model of particle physics was completed by the 1980s, although it took until 2000 for the last hypothesized particle to be verified experimentally.  I show below a  diagram of the Model, which reveals its astounding complexity.  In it, all the matter and force particles are elementary; the only ones of them included in my formal education had been the electron e^- and the photon γ.

The Standard Model of Particle Physics.

[Source: Baggott book referenced below.]

  You might have heard of the other leptons in the Model (besides e^-)—they are neutrinos and muons.  The quarks come in six "flavors" and three "colors."  And not shown are antiparticles, rarely seen in our present universe: every matter particle has one, the positron e⁺ for example being the antiparticle of the electron e^-.  A crazy quilt!  I've continually been puzzled that quantum physics doesn't seem to follow the principle of parsimony, which argues that explanations of nature should be simple.

  Also not shown in the figure is the Higgs boson, another force particle, about which CERN's discovery now forced me to educate myself.  I accordingly read Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the 'God Particle' by Jim Baggott.  It's a well written book, given the cryptic subject it addresses, yet I stayed bemused throughout, I think not without reason.

  Here's the story as I understand it:  In the early 1960s, Peter Higgs and others independently tried to resolve a contradiction: recent theoretical results seemed to say that certain particles should be massless and therefore should move at the speed of light, but that was known not to be true.  They conjectured the existence of a field, now called the Higgs field, uniformly permeating all of space with inherent energy, which imparts mass to those particles as they move through it, thereby slowing them down; and they speculated that a force particle, now called the Higgs boson, could arise from this field and would be the only direct evidence for it.  In the 1970s, the same conjectures were carried over to the Standard Model as it developed, to explain why all its matter and weak-force particles have mass (the photon and strong-force particles have none).  The Higgs field thus became a linchpin of the Standard Model.  More patchwork on the crazy quilt!

  A folksy tale was contrived by a British physicist in response to a request from a UK minister in charge of appropriating funds to CERN, who had asked for a one-page description of the Higgs mechanism that he could understand.  I transpose the answer to an American setting.

  Suppose you are watching the President enter the House of Representatives chamber to give a State of the Union address.  If the chamber is otherwise empty of people, he would move down the aisle to the Speaker's desk in a trice—the equivalent of a massless particle moving at the speed of light.  However, with a chamber packed with politicians and other officials, the President is enveloped by well-wishers who speak to him and shake his hand, substantially slowing his progress.  Looking from far above, one would see only a bulge of people moving as a wave down the aisle toward the front of the chamber; importantly, no one except the president would actually be moving, the wavelike bulge surrounding him only seeming to do so.  That bulge gives the President a mass he didn't have before, just as the Higgs field imparts mass to a particle moving through it.  Don't ask me how the Higgs field recognizes the type of particle traversing it, thus knowing how much mass to impart; perhaps just as politicians know the importance of someone moving in their midst, thus determining how many cluster about him or her.

  Now suppose the President does not enter the chamber; instead, a rumor starts at the entry door, saying that he is delayed.  Successive groups of different people cluster to hear the rumor as it spreads down the aisle, creating a wavelike bulge appearing to move with it.  It is now not a "presidential particle" moving toward the Speaker's desk—it is a "rumor particle," which could not exist without the field of politicians.  It is analogous to a Higgs boson arising from the Higgs field, which cannot exist without that field. 

  The elation about having seen Higgs bosons stems from knowing that the Standard Model, with all of its intricacies, is further validated; if they had not been seen, the Model would have been seriously undermined.  The observation was a stunning verification of a theoretical conjecture made a half century earlier. 

  I'm pleased that I, as well as quantum physics, have made some progress: the next time I'm asked for an explanation of the Higgs boson, I will be able to say that I have a wisp of a glimmer of a clue.

Constructivitis

  "One of the stove burners isn't working."  With that innocuous statement, my wife Helen launched us on a three-and-a-half year trip to hell and back. 

  I didn't realize at the time that she was coming down with a serious case of  constructivitis.  It is a virus-borne illness, usually caught from an aging house.  The symptoms: abnormal ingenuousness and optimism, often crossing into euphoria, stoked by the exuberant visions of architects and contractors.  I should have recognized it: friends of mine had had the affliction, none having had the slightest initial understanding of its virulence.

  Helen and I were living in the only house we ever owned, of mid-1950s vintage, which we bought in the mid-1960s.   It was at this time about 30 years old.  My natural reaction to Helen's announcement was to tell her that I would replace the burner—nothing could be simpler.

  Unfortunately, the virus had already infected her, although she was then showing only minimal symptoms.  It caused her to speculate that, since the kitchen appliances were all three decades old, it might be worth while to replace them.  Because they were built in, removing them would be so destructive that we should probably consider renovating the kitchen altogether.

  My own immune system was still in perfectly good working order.  I suggested that her idea might be a bit of overkill in the face of the failure of a single burner.  She persisted, so in one of those weak moments that make us susceptible to disease, I agreed to hire an architect to advise us on the incipient project

  Those of you who have yourselves succumbed to constructivitis will know what is coming.  The architect pointed out that some of the appliances took up valuable exterior-wall space, blocking a full view of the rear garden—that wall should more naturally be all glass.  Moving the appliances to an interior wall would require closing off the kitchen's door to the living room and redoing its entry to the dining room—that would mean reworking some of both those rooms.  The virus was already establishing its presence outside the kitchen.

  By this point, Helen was feverish.  "Of course!" she said.  "I've never liked the walnut-veneered walls in those other rooms—I'd love plain white walls to display our art on.  And I hate that their doors and windows are framed in aluminum, not wood, and that the floors have rustic planks."  I estimated her temperature to be at 105° and rising.

  Hearing this was a booster shot for my own immune system.  I frenziedly protested that a $25 burner replacement had already escalated in cost by more than a thousand-fold.  (Another symptom of the disease: a great underestimation of potential costs.)  And, I objected, the veneered walls and planked floor ran into the entry foyer, the floor extending beyond that into the hallway to the bathrooms and bedrooms.  The virus, I realized, was being given yet another beachhead.  Unfortunately, Helen was now in delirium, so there was little I could do to stanch the infection.

  We chose one of the architect's plans to renovate the kitchen, living room, dining room and foyer, and to replace the hallway floor, and hired a contractor.  Soon the whole rear of the house was terre interdite; we were reduced to cooking in an electric wok in the downstairs laundry room and using the adjoining family room as a temporary living/dining room.  According to the contractor it was to be for no more than six months, so it seemed not too much of an inconvenience.  (Yet another symptom: a naïve acceptance of contractors' time estimates.)

  By now the virus had indeed spread to rooms abutting the hallway: the aluminum-framed windows in them—in fact those rooms in general—would look very shabby when compared with the rooms under renovation.  A little sprucing up wouldn't hurt them, would it?  And shouldn't my upstairs office and the downstairs family room also be brought up to the new standard?  By then I was frantically searching for a powerful anti-viral spray with which to douse the house, and Helen too.  None was available, so the virus kept efflorescing before my horrified eyes.

  I'll spare you further Dante-esque details of our time in purgatory.  Enough to say that the virus, in successive stages of outbreak, eventually invaded every nook of the house's interior and most of its exterior, including the gardens.  Even I succumbed to it, abetting its spread.   During pretty much all of my daughter's high-school career she rarely had a home not torn up somewhere in which to entertain her friends.

  When the virus eventually played itself out after three-and-a-half years, voila! we had our thoroughly renovated castle—at three to four times the original cost of the house when we bought it.  Helen and I were happy with the result, although much chastened by the purgatorial and fiscal torture.  Fortunately, memories of our trip to the underworld receded into the dim past.  Unlike Persephone, we had eaten no pomegranate seeds whilst there. 

  I still live in that house and love its embrace and the memories of Helen that live with me in it.  I am a bit concerned lately, however, because my architect daughter has been suggesting that, after an additional 25 years, the house needs just a wee bit of grooming.  As an aside, she mentions that I might want to consider installing an elevator to carry me up from the street level to the main living area.

  I am not sure if once having had the virus bestows lifelong immunity.  To be safe, I have been stockpiling modern anti-viral medications and sprays.

Sources of Values

  Once again I've found myself trying to decode a philosophical writing, this time an article in The New York Review of Books, excerpted from Ronald Dworkin's forthcoming book Religion Without God.  It has more than a touch of metaphysics, so I probably wouldn't have finished reading it had I not been spurred on by my cousin G.  He is ever so much more into philosophy than I.

  Dworkin makes a case, already appreciated by some religions of the East but not sufficiently in the West, that being religious doesn't require belief in a deity.  He starts by defining "religious attitude"—in essence the conjoining of awe at the beauty of the universe with a faith that an objective set of values exists.  (As we shall see, the crux of this definition is the word objective.)  To Dworkin, being religious simply means having such a religious attitude, which can be theistic or atheistic.

  Abrahamic theists, for example, may be awed by God's creation of the cosmos from the void; atheists may be awed by creation from the Big Bang.  Theists might believe that cruelty is wrong because God says so from on high; atheists because they "cannot [have a conviction that cruelty is really wrong] without thinking that it is objectively true."  (There's circular reasoning here, which Dworkin later defends—see below.)  In thus virtually equating the nature of religious attitudes that theists and atheists may have, Dworkin makes the inclusion of God by the former and not the latter seem of little import.  History, of course, says otherwise. 

  Let's leave that contentious issue aside and go to the crux: the meaning of "objectivity." By objective values, Dworkin has in mind Platonic ideals that are independent of the mundane world.  They may be endowed by a transcendental deity; but he denies that they can originate from naturalism—the belief "that nothing is real except what can be studied by the natural sciences."  Values, he maintains, "are real and fundamental … as real as trees and pain," and there is no way of discovering them by naturalistic inquiry.

  In thus rejecting naturalism, Dworkin a priori takes evolution out of the picture as a source of values.  He says, "Suppose we find undeniable evidence that we hold the moral convictions we do only because they were evolutionarily adaptive, which certainly did not require them to be true.  Then, in this view, we would have no reason to think that cruelty is really wrong."  (My italics, emphasizing Dworkin's insistence that objective moral truth cannot be grounded in natural inquiry.) 

  Instead, Dworkin relies on "ungrounded realism" to be in touch with moral truth.  He says that "the world of value is self-contained and self-certifying," which we accept as a matter of faith.  He admits to circularity here, but claims it is not much different from physical science, which ultimately depends on faith in assumptions such as causation.  "In each domain we accept felt, inescapable conviction rather than the benediction of some independent means of verification as the final arbiter of what we are entitled responsibly to believe."  (This is a misleading comparison, because scientific assumptions are always tentative and subject to invalidation; Dworkin's objective values, being self-certifying, are not.)

  Dworkin is of course entitled to define "religious attitude" as he wishes, including a definition that excludes naturalists from being capable of it.  Yet, materialist that I am and philosopher that I am not, I don't understand why he would insist on doing so.  Why can it not be that cruelty is considered wrong just because it tends to be deselected by the evolutionary process?  Recall from E. O. Wilson's book The Social Conquest of the Earth, which I discussed in a previous posting, the contention that human evolution proceeds by competition among groups as well as among individuals, the former trumping the latter in conformity with an "iron rule": selfish individuals beat altruistic ones, yet groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals.  According to Wilson, different groups choose different sets of values with which to compete.  Some values, however, have become universal among groups and societies at large, which is not evidence that they are transcendentally objective truths, only that they have become pragmatically necessary for the competitive survival of a society in a given era. 

  A core set of universally accepted values therefore might well have arisen through the evolutionary process.  Philosopher Philip Kitcher, in his book The Ethical Project, looks on this evolution as a collective enterprise taken on by the species over tens of thousands of years as it sought ways to live successfully in larger and larger groups.  In this light, for example, the natural rights proclaimed during the Enlightenment are not a human discernment of objective values "endowed by their Creator"; rather they represent a stage in the evolution of values achieved by humankind during the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

  My response to Dworkin's article is twofold.  First, I think he has unnecessarily conflated two concepts: "religion," which in both common parlance and Dworkin's lexicon has preternatural elements; and "religious attitude," which—despite Dworkin's strange definition of it—need not have that tinge.  A naturalist, following Einstein, can have a religious attitude by simply being in awe of the sublimity of the universe, without also subscribing to a preternaturalness of values.

  Second, while again I am assuredly no philosopher, in my estimation a blending of Dworkin's and Kitcher's value constructs is possible, by replacing objectivity with universality.  Instead of demanding that values be "self-contained and self-certifying," beyond human jurisdiction, think of them as continuing reformulations by the species itself, under evolutionary pressure as it climbed out of savagery.  As Wilson points out, for example, proscription of incest is now universal among societies, initially dating well into pre-historic times.  Proscription of murder is more recent, dating at least to the Judaic commandment.  Proscriptions of slavery and cruelty are very much more recent still.  In this merged construct, Dworkin's "felt, inescapable conviction" that these values are true would itself stem from the same evolutionary forces as the values themselves.

  Thus, one can conceive of quasi-objective (in the sense of universal) core values that are evolutionarily modified with time.  As with objective values, they are ideals that humanity strives for in a given era, usually without total success.  They are the forward-looking what-should-be of value as opposed to what-is.  They are the substance of Kitcher's ethical project, which—as he points out—is a work in progress.  

  I'll end by apologizing for what may appear an unseemly posthumous quarrel with Professor Dworkin.  (Sadly, he died in February prior to the publication of both his NYRB article and the book from which it was drawn.)  He was an eminent philosopher and scholar of law, and I am a less than a novice in both those fields.  Yet I feel that a response to him is warranted from a materialist, someone whose awe at the universe's majesty is matched with a belief in evolutionarily rather than preternaturally derived values.

The Thickness of Blood

  My first cousin G and I, born two years apart, were named after the same great-grandfather.  Except for that, we had very little in common as children; at the time I thought we couldn't be more unlike.  What a difference sixty years can make!

  I remember the young G mostly as a baseball aficionado who could quote every imaginable statistic about players, particularly those on his team, the New York Yankees. I wasn't all that much into baseball, but perversely didn't root for the same team as he.  There were then three teams in New York City: the Yankees, the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers.  I was a Dodgers fan. 

  I particularly recall one of the infrequent instances when we were together—probably at some family holiday function—lying on the floor in G's living room listening to a radio broadcast of a game in the 1941 Yankees-Dodgers World Series, each rooting for his own team.  It had an ending for the books.  The Yankees—ahead 2-1 in the Series—were behind by one run in the ninth and at bat with two outs and two strikes.  One more strike would tie the Series.  A swing and a miss, which should have ended the game; but the ball got away from the Dodgers' catcher, Mickey Owen, allowing the batter to reach first base.  To my outrage, the Yankees went on to win the game (and later the Series).

  (In those days, real-time commentary on a game was distributed nationally by teletype, which announcers at each station used as they simulated the excitement of the actual play with exuberant voices—not against a background of roaring fans, only of a clacking teletypewriter.  In a game like the one I just described, it could still be electrifying; I can even now hear the announcer screamingly reporting Owen's error.)

  I'm sure G remembers the young me mostly hunched over the radio equipment I was constantly constructing, particularly after the War, when amateur radio was again allowed and I built and rebuilt my station, W2QKU.  I was more concerned with contacting at least one amateur in each of the then-48 states and in as many countries as I could, than in conversing with anyone nearby.  Morse code was my preferred medium of communication.  I think the word "nerd" was coined with me in mind.

  The last time G and I saw each other as youngsters was when I was going off to college in 1947.  He was finishing high school.

  Now fast-forward to early 2011, about a year before I started blogging.  G and I were brought back into contact in connection with a long-standing family matter which required a decision.  By then, mirabile dictu! the two of us were professors emeriti, limping into our eighties.  I had retired from UC Berkeley as a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.  G had retired from a prestigious eastern university as a professor of English.  I soon discovered that he is a world-renowned scholar of the culture of Victorian England—not only of its literature per se but how its literati and scientists interacted and the effect their interaction had on literature, science, philosophy and society at large.  Still vastly apart in interests, I thought.

  Never the less, when I started this blog I included G in an email notice to friends and relatives, linking to my first posting and asking whether they wanted to receive further notices.  G opted in, which started a voluminous, wide-ranging email correspondence between us, often triggered by one of my postings.  At some length, we discussed religion, cosmology, philosophy, metaphysics, evolution, free will and consciousness, politics, education, the internet and its effect on society, and also our family circle when we were young and what we each had learned from it.  Being academics, our tone was usually abstract; yet when writing about our common family it was very nostalgic and personal.

  Our correspondence was of course touched by the vast difference in our careers.  G is an expert on literature and on how science has influenced it and society; I am an engineer, with a dilettantish passion for expounding on anything and everything, as those who follow this blog know.  As might be expected, we have divergent views on some matters, but surprisingly few.  I'm impatient with abstract philosophy, particularly when tinged with metaphysics; philosophy is part of his professional bag of tricks.  He was atheistic a lifetime before I was, though neither of us is militantly so.  He has a niggling yearning for a secular understanding of a First Cause; I am content with an emerging model of a multiverse that has forever been spawning new universes in big bangs, which for me obviates a need for a first instant or First Cause.  And our mental data banks must be vastly dissimilar.

  Still, here's what G and I find most astonishing: Despite having had little to do with each other as youths, having spent more than 60 years out of touch, having had such different careers, and not having precisely the same stance on such minutiae as First Cause, our mind sets are so alike that we now think of ourselves as intellectual twins.  There is almost no disagreement on the very broad array of topics about which we corresponded.  So, very strangely, we arrived at nearly identical world views via enormously different paths.  It must be that genes and a common early family experience trumped our disparate professional careers. 

  Not many unexpected bonuses crop up for an octogenarian.  This was one for me: finding a long-lost cousin with whom I can carry on extensive correspondence.  It is a windfall that has exhilarated me beyond all expectation.

  They say blood is thicker than water.  If so, G's and mine must be as good as coagulated.