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I wrote previously:
"When I was in college back in the 1980s, there was a weird old man who worked as a professional astrologer"

And Gary, you wrote:
"Where did you go to college?"

Why? Do you think you might have known that weird old man?! ;)

I went to the same university as Hewitt Schlereth, as we discovered last year. But while they were the same place physically, they were very different experiences with one generation between us. That's Wesleyan University, usually counted as one of the "Little Ivys" (usually by people envious of the "Big Ivys" I would guess). When Hewitt went there, if I remember what he said about the years, it was an all-male school with mandatory chapel on Sundays. But then they decided to modernize. They went co-ed and by the mid-70s, it was the 1960s all over again at Wesleyan. Wesleyan became the ultimate hippie school. The expression "p.c." meant "politically correct" at Wesleyan years before it was known more widely. I remember some people asking a computer-geek pal of mine what "PC" stood for, and he happily replied "personal computer". They laughed and laughed, but they're not laughing now... As for me at the age of 17, I knew nothing about college and the college selection process, but it was the nearest place we could afford that had great big telescope domes on a hill. So that's where I went. The physics department was quite high-end at the time, and I got various accolades and prizes for my oh-so-fascinating thesis on the quantum behavior of hydrogen atoms in the highly curved space-time near small black holes (ya see, it's high tide on the end of the hydrogen atom facing the black hole, and also high tide on the side facing away with low tide in between, so the hydrogen atom gets stretched out and that changes the energy levels and the spectrum --I leave the rest as an exercise for the reader). No doubt, in some thousands of years, my analysis will be confirmed by observation and experiment. :)

-FER

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