As a young boy I would always look forward to camping with my father. Talk would fly over hundreds of topics as we walked through the forest or sat around the fire at night. He would ramble on about everything from his high blood pressure to nuclear reactions in the sun. Most of the time I never really understood all of what he said, yet I became charmed by the ideas, and thrilled when he would tell me something new. I wanted to know everything, but the more that I knew, the more I realized that I didn’t know. Occasionally, I found this to be true too late, as unintentional explosions from my lab in the garage resulted in severe reprimands from my parents.
With age came moderation and a more formal road to education. The innocence of childhood tinkering had matured into the seriousness of adult tinkering, and with it the expectations I had of myself. Although my meager laboratory of childhood was no more, my love for the unknown was alive and well. In the real world though, things seldom went as smoothly as they had in the past.