In this world of concrete objects and reliable causality, I am a seventy year old classical philologist with a keen interest in the evolution of early urban metaphors in Homeric Greek; since 1972, the founder and president of three software companies specializing in the application of machine intelligence (such as fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms) to a wide spectrum of optimization problems and behavior models; a columnist for technology magazines, and the author of several books (including the multiple award-winning Beyond Humanity – Cyberevolution and Future Minds which I co-authored with Greg Paul, who was the dinosaur advisor on the original Jurassic Park movie). In my younger days I was a caver, a rock climber, an explorer of the great Smoky Mountains and the vast Shenandoah Valley, a Captain in the Army Corps of Engineers, a collector of ancient Roman coins, medieval manuscripts, nineteenth century microscopes, and several ex-wives.