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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Robert came to visit in 2002. He was tired from travelling from the east coast, so we didn’t stay up much that first evening. We talked about MBrains, and I worked out the orbit mechanics and so forth. Robert was an idea-hamster, spinning them out wildly, as was his custom, never slowing, churning out ideas like a hamster on an exercise wheel. I could scarcely calculate BOTECs fast enough to keep up with that brain. He didn’t know how to do the orbit mechanics calculations, but that actually freed his imagination to roam throughout the cosmos.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>We retired early that evening. I was awakened by a sudden BOOOM which caused me to leap from my bed. My immediate thought was Oh dear, Robert has shot himself! I didn’t even know he had firearms. I ran down, opened the guest room door, heard a soft zzzzzzzz snooorrrrrk zzzzzzz... I looked at the clock: midnight. Right then I heard what sounded like ragged gunfire and shouting voices from the street out front. It occurred to me that it was Chinese New Year and the neighbors were out there playing with firecrackers. Nearly everyone in my neighborhood is Vietnamese or Chinese. Some reveling yahoo had hurled an M80 down the storm drain, which caused the sound to reverberate into the homes. Robert slept through it all.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>There was a project Robert was doing back in 2001 and 2002, where he was collecting a bunch of early proto-transhumanist material and computer development stuff from before the internet, much of it existing only in hard copy. He had me order a bunch of stuff from the Santa Clara county public library system, and was constantly cracking the whip to get me to move my ass on this, my enthusiasm being far less than his. His sense of urgency was much greater than mine. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>This is a quote from one of his emails to me where he was urging me to contact some local visionaries and collect archive materials:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify'>DAVAI! DAVAI! DAVAI!<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify'>(... the Russian equivalent of Nike's "Just do it" exhortation but<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify'>expressed with feelings that only Russian's may be able to properly<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify'>emote... I expect it was used alot by Marshal Zhukov in the battle for<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify'>Seelow Heights.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>He pointed out that many of the early computer science visionaries were still living, many of them in the neighborhood here, but that they wouldn’t be if we didn’t move our asses on this. I collected materials, he scanned them while he was here in January 2002. On that trip he met with the Foresight crowd, collected a bunch of materials from K. Eric Drexler and Christine Petersen, among others, Ralph Merkel and Doug Engelbart I think and that crowd, much of it hard copy of stuff from the 1970s and 1980s. We OCRed materials here on my scanner, then he took the files on his laptop and all the hard copy with him. He had collected some floppy discs too, some of them being the old flexible 5.25 inch discs from which the name “floppy disc” was derived because they were actually floppy. He took those with him, for I had no way to read them in 2002.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Oy vey! Now I realize I never did keep a soft copy of any of those archives he was compiling, no copies of anything he and I collected. I don’t know what has become of those materials! Damn, I never did ask about it, and a lot of it was original documentation from people he knew but I didn’t. I was just the messenger boy, collecting the stuff from local players he had already contacted. Damn.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Does anyone here know Robert’s family? Is there any tactful way to ask them to not throw away any of his papers? Or not erase any of his old files? Who knows what historical documents we might find in there, some of them perhaps dating back to the dawn of time, or at least the time that matters. Damien? David? Anyone else we might contact?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>spike<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'> <o:p></o:p></span></p></div></body></html>