Family

In 2015 I got engaged, and subsequently married.

In 2006 I lost my brother Robert.

My 12-years-younger brother Robert and I are both members of the 100-Club , and only mildly ashamed of it. Ah! Now our father is a member, too! (I used some code and text to learn pi.)

I have a beautiful family. and a small PHOTO ALBUM online.

My big sister Rosalind  finished a Master's degree in entomology, studying invertebrate parasitology (and a fair bit of ice hockey and track and field on the U of A varsity teams), at the University of Alberta.  She also plays violin, and does lots of other amazing things! She no longer has a web page, but she got married to John, lived in London, England, and worked for Friends of the Earth. In 2003 they moved to Vancouver and had children, Clara and Thomas.

I have two younger brothers, Robert and Stephen.

My father, John, worked for many years in the Technology Licensing Office at the University of Alberta. Some of his early publications were in X-ray diffraction using a synchotron source.

My uncles Mark , Peter , and Anthony (sons of Hanni and Egon Bretscher), are all researchers in cell biology / immunology! Two of them, and my aunt Scilla, were with Hanni and Egon at Los Alamos at the dawn of the nuclear age.

Egon proposed in 1940 that a new element, plutonium, could be produced by neutron capture from U-238 and could sustain a nuclear chain reaction. He went on to help to realize this possibility as part of the Manhattan project during World War II. At 11:02 local time on 9 August 1945, 5 kg of plutonium in an implosion bomb was detonated a few km from Nagasaki, Japan, killing tens of thousands but also marking an end to the use of nuclear bombs on humans ever since, and leading to the end of World War II within a week. In 1946 in making the first measurements of deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion cross-sections, Egon and Anthony French discovered a resonance in ²H(t,n)⁴He reaction. This resonance makes the D-T recipe for fusion a lower energy option than D-D by a factor of approximately 100, pointing the way to a feasible hydrogen bomb, and towards modern fusion energy reactors. This history all seems unfathomable to me. Egon took possibly the only Kodachromes (ie, colour photos) at Los Alamos during the period 1945-1946. He died the year I was born.

A large fraction of marriages do not last a life time. Why is everyone hung up on marrying? I suggest  thinking more broadly, and considering a planned (default) end-date to your partnership! [Update, 15 years after I wrote that web page: in Mexico, you can now enter a limited-term marriage!]