I’ve long had the view that there are three main functions of a committee:

(1) Generate good decisions;
(2) Spread responsibility for decisions;
(3) Groom participants for future leadership roles.

[16 September 2019]

I remember when Kennedy was shot. I was home after school watching Queen for a Day with Mrs. Arnott. The show was interrupted with the news, and I called my mother to tell her. It’s possible the Tufts University English Department first learned that Kennedy had been shot thanks to a phone call from an 8-year old.

More remarkably, I believe I remember Sputnik. One evening — I would have been just 2.1 years old — my father called me to the back door in the dining room. Look, he said, see that moving light in the sky? That’s the Russians’ new satellite, Sputnik!

I can’t be sure it’s valid, but I’ve long had this memory.* To be visible to the naked eye, the moving light would presumably have been not Sputnik itself but its larger rocket booster, which also went into orbit. If this memory was burned into me at such an early age, it must be because I sensed how important the occasion was to my father.

So here’s my Sputnik ambition. I’d like to be the last person alive to remember having seen it.

[11 September 2019]

*Confirmation!  My sister, who was 4.4 at the time, says she remembers this too. So now for a start I’ll need to outlive Gwyned.

At the computer just now, I am ashamed to admit, I checked Google Scholar to see how my citations are doing. Pretty well, thank goodness.

This got me thinking about our President, who famously spends half his time monitoring what people are saying about him. It occurred to me that my April 2011 note “Square root of the population” implicitly makes a quantitative prediction. Trump should be 100,000 times as self-absorbed as I am.

Assessed on this relative basis, he doesn’t look so bad.

[8 September 2019]