For the next two weeks, Times and Seasons will be delighted to play host to the rigorous questions and thoughtful musings of one Carl Glen Henshaw, an old friend and a bona fide science geek. I met Glen the day after I moved into my freshman dorm at Deseret Towers at BYU. Glen’s rich sense of humor was on display from the very beginning, when we decided to enter some sort of “welcome useless cannon fodder freshman” contest at the old Varsity Theater dressed as the Blues Brothers. (Despicably, we were beat by some loser wearing a beret. Loser.) But Glen had a serious (not to say “obsessed”) side to him as well. He introduced me to e-mail (though there were only about fifty people worldwide you could talk to at the time), to Usenet, to Star Trek: The Next Generation. He took apart my ridiculous ancient Kaypro computer (powered by a couple of well-oiled squirrels running around a treadmill) with the care and respect due any fossil. And with the old Lost in Space theme song playing on eternal repeat on their cd player (note: this was the first such machine I’d ever seen), he and his roommate sacrificed sleep, grades, and their social life (the soldering really kind of stunk the place up) to build a working robot out of scrap metal right there on the floor of their dorm room. It worked to. (Of course, we foolishly let it watch Blade Runner one night, and then it went crazy and killed a guy, buy hey, progress has its price.)
Glen went on and completed his Ph.D. in areospace engineering at the University of Maryland in 2003; while there, he worked at the Space Systems Laboratory, one of the premier robotics labs in the world. He currently works at the Naval Center for Space Technology, Naval Research Laboratory, in Washington D.C. Originally from Buckingham County, Virginia, Glen grew up on 320 acre beef cattle farm. He and his wife, Angela Black (D.V.M., Ph.D., horse woman extraordinaire), live in Calvert Country, Maryland, close enough to the Chesapeake Bay to take his daughter Olivia, who is 4, fishing regularly. Son Sam is 16 months and too young to fish (yet). Welcome Glen!
Sounds like fun. I’m looking forward to your posts.
Welcome Glen and congratulations as a guest on the hub of the bloggernacle. It’s good to hear you are doing so well after I last saw you at the University Park ward.
Blogs are likely not the place for the grammar police, although I think Richard Mitchell would have a heyday in the blogosphere–and not wishing to point fingers of scorn or otherwise at Brer Fox, but what on earth has happened to “beaten”??
Back when I was a lad, and grammar was still taught as if it were prescriptive, not simply descriptive of a foul stream on its way headlong to anarchy, we learned the tenses of “to beat”:
today I beat
yesterday I beat
of course I have beaten
and they were beaten too
Now, has “beaten” got beat to death?
Hi Dave! How (and where) are you?