I was a bit of a bookworm growing up. Oh sure I played outside and excelled at sports and was an all around active lad who spent hours outside on any average day, but I loved me some books. You see, I was the kind of 8 year old boy who found the idea of reading an Encyclopedia to be just as exciting and fun as watching your average Transformers episode. But since we didn’t have cable I spent far more time reading then I did watching the heroic Autobots defeating the evil Decepticons.

It didn’t take me long to discover I loved science, all shapes and sizes of science. I started reading books on homemade experiments one could try. I took computer classes and self-taught myself BASIC so I could write my own computer games. I used my microscope and a neighbors stagnant pond as an excuse to introduce myself to the wonderful universe populated with paramecium and amoebas. My mother even tells a tale of my exploits during a family vacation to The Smithsonian. It seems I happened to explain to my older sister why a Blue Whale was also a baleen whale. I was six years old at the time of this incident.

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