Welcome to Jerry Shifman's Home Page
I am a retired electrical engineer, living with my wife Reva Basch , two cats and one
dog in Portland, Oregon. The purpose
of this web site is to present several heretical essays I have written
over the years; "heretical"
in
the
scientific
sense,
not
the
religious
sense.
For instance, I find sleep -- and especially dreaming
sleep -- very,
very strange. What an odd behavior pattern! Don't you find
sleep puzzling? Have you ever wondered why we dream? I have. It
may be far more important than we realize. In fact,
dreaming may be the entire point of
life.
Really.
And here's one that's been with me for decades. What do
you make of
gravity? Are you able to understand what's going on with gravity? As
far as I am concerned, this is the unsolved mystery of our age.
Back in the early 70s I started working on a radically different way
of seeing the world that provided an intuitive way of understanding
the mechanism at work behind gravitation. This is at a separate website.
In 1981 I had an opportunity to address a conference of
Engineering
Managers, all of whom worked for companies involved in communications.
At that time it was just dawning on me that we were all hurtling
headlong into a new era -- and that this was not widely understood.
Here is the talk I gave. One explanatory note is needed: Some of the
numbers given in the paper for things like rate of data transfer and
capacity of an optical disk are now out of date -- but I have left the
paper as originally presented. My thesis is that the entire history
of life on earth can be viewed as a series of advances in communications.
Enough of that boring
academic stuff. FOOD is where it's at. I have always
enjoyed cooking. I think my mother probably had something to do
with that. When I was very young and I complained to my mother
that I was bored she would often reply, "Come on in the kitchen,
honey. I'll show you how to make chocolate fudge." Or
whatever.
In the early years of my marriage to Reva she did most of the cooking
-- I was her sous-chef. Then there came a time, ten or
fifteen years ago, when I was retired but Reva was still working.
Since I knew how, and had plenty of spare time, I suggested that I take
over the main cooking duties. She didn't need much
convincing. Eventually she retired, too, but somehow I have
continued as primary cook. She documents. Here is a random
sampling of dishes.
When Reva and I lived
at The Sea Ranch a new theatrical group was formed -- the Sea Ranch
Thespians. I had done a lot of acting in my college years, so I
auditioned for a role in the first production: Murder at
Rutherford House. This is a broad farce, and I particularly
wanted the role of Ruby Pinkbottom -- the maid. The script
said, "Played by a man in a dress." I got the part, and I
was just devastating, darling!
Here's Ruby!
This page built and maintained by:
Jerry Shifman (jerry@mcn.org)
Page last updated January 2010