I remember seeing the episode entitled "Knowledge or Certainty" from Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man series. At the end of the episode, Bronowski stands at the edge of a pond within the concentration camp at Auschwitz, and says "into this pond were flushed the ashes of some 4 million people..." He then dramatically reiterates the series' recurring theme: Science touches people. This movie made a deep impact on us; I remember that after the film ended, we all just sat there in the dark, with the only sound being the tap-tap-tap of the loose end of the film spinning on its reel. I now show this episode in the classes I teach. Despite being more than 30 years old, it hasn't lost its impact.

I remember my roommate, Charlie Labiner, doing a fantastic impersonation of Bronowski. Charlie always had me laughing. I suspect he is still putting smiles on the faces of people around him.

We used desktop calculators back then to compute the orbital parameters. In my team we had three different brands of calculator among the three of us. We each did the calculations independently, to make sure we weren't making any mistakes. In comparing our answers, we kept finding discrepancies. We kept working our way back to smaller and smaller components of the chain of calculations, and finally diagnosed the problem: Our calculators did not give the same answers for even simple functions such as sin(45)! From then on, we laboriously averaged our three independent values, every step of the way, including several digits beyond the 8-digit display (obtained by subtracting off the first eight significant digits and then multiplying by 10,000,000). I'm pretty sure that our reward was that our orbital parameter values best agreed with the Russian ephemeris.

I remember that SSP78 gave me my first experience with... unisex bathrooms! (If I recall correctly, in 1978 Thacher was still in the process of converting its buildings from a boys-only to a co-ed school?) During a late night crunching celestial numbers on the desktop calculators, terrestial requirements caused me to venture downstairs to the bathroom. While I was standing in front of the urinal, a female classmate walked past behind me, said hello, and then stepped into a stall and boldly went where not many females had gone before. This was unnerving at first, but in retrospect was very educational because it provoked me into thinking about gender issues such as Why are there segregated bathrooms? (which is not to presume an answer).

One Sunday I needed a break, just some time to myself. So I found a secluded corner of the Thacher School Library and read a book that I randomly pulled off the library shelf. I had never read this book before. The book happened to be Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. I have re-read it many times since. "The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one" (p. 244).

I remember tapioca pudding served at the cafeteria. If I'm not mistaken, Tim called it "frog's eyes."

George Abell got down on his hands and knees during lecture and begged the class, "Please memorize your derivatives!" I did go on to memorize derivatives with a major in mathematics, but now I study mathematical models of learning, which means that I derive memories!

Was one of the hit songs on the radio Eddie Monie's "Two Tickets to Paradise"?

Can you name all the people in this picture?