I had an invitation to come out and give a talk at Stanford and took the opportunity to take H with me. We’ve had a tremendously good time in the Bay Area for years now that mirrors my experiences growing up and spending time here. I once was accepted to Stanford as an undergraduate, but at the time tuition was approximately $25,000/year which made it absolutely unreasonable to me. I did not even know where I was going to come up with the money for state school at the time, so I ended up working two to three jobs at the time and going to the University of Utah. I am grateful for which direction my life has gone and do not regret going to Stanford as an undergraduate, but it is cool to be able to give a talk here and get a tour of the campus. The resources students have here is pretty impressive and it must be a pretty impressive place to obtain an education. In all honesty however, I gotta say that I was surprised at the ophthalmology department at Stanford however. There are some great clinical resources and amazing engineering resources, but the biology is weak. This of course is why we are arranging a collaboration with Daniel Palaniker to provide some of our resources to a project designed to make a better bionic retinal prosthetic device.
H and I had a wonderful time touring Stanford and driving South to Monterey to see the Monterey Bay Aquarium. If I could swing it, there would be some great science to be done by analyzing retinas of a variety of marine species and build an evolutionary atlas of fish retinas. In fact, if we lived anywhere near Monterey, I’d have to be volunteering in just about any capacity possible. I’d even volunteer to be a glass cleaner on the inside of the big central kelp forest aquarium.
On the way back into town, we flew past Tooele, Utah and the Tooele Army Depot where I shot the images composited into a mosaic for the introductory image.