I spent 27 years in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I helped build a state of the art automated manufacturing system for bent sheet metal parts. (Sort of origami in metal.)
For many years I was an elected member of CMU's Staff Council and was appointed to serve on the University's Human Relations Commission. I played a significant role in winning domestic partner healthcare benefits for staff and faculty. I was unsuccessful in trying to get the university to care about light pollution. They lit a large, silly outdoor sculpture from the ground. In October 2007 I moved back to Texas.
I grew up in Port Arthur, Tx, and graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in 1965. Until the end of 1968 I attended Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, majoring in Mathematics and Physics. I was at the University of Houston 1968-71. I got my B.A. in Philosophy in '69 and stayed to do graduate study for a couple of years. I was in the Ph.D. program in Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia from 1971 until I left to become a research computer programmer in CMU's Robotics Institute in 1980.
The U.S. has been holding a guy for six years at Guantánamo with no evidence he has done anything wrong, except for a confession extracted via torture and threats his family would be killed if he did not confess. He may have been as young as 12 when first detained. Why is the Obama administration still holding this guy?
