Gary North

Old age: when people who are attractive to the opposite sex, and people who are unattractive to the opposite sex, become equally unattractive to the opposite sex.

In 1958/59, MiCoHi took CIF 3-A championships in cross country and wrestling. Had you forgotten that? Did you ever know?

Back then, MiCoHi was an undistinguished place academically. Today, it is rated in the top 2%. Newsweek ranks it #277. There are 27,468 high schools in the U.S.. At #277, MiCoHi was close to the top of the 2 percenters in 2008. (It was #206 in 2003.)

How would you have done at today's MiCoHi?

If you don't think that money talks, think of the price of housing in Manhattan Beach today, the kinds of people who can afford to buy and who also have teenagers, and the brains necessary to make that kind of money. Smart, ambitious parents have smart, ambitious children.

Speaking of money, you should see the administration building. I did, in 2007. A student referred to it as the Taj Mahal.

Here are the senior class photos from Hoofprints (1959).

Here are the photos from the 1969 class reunion. Not too much change. Some people actually looked better than in 1959.

Here is what I regard as the most interesting question that will face our grandkids: What will the world be like in 2030, when computer chips double in capacity every 12 months (today's rate)? How about 2031 -- twice what 2030 chips were? Then in 2032 -- four times? Raymond Kurzweil, who developed the first computer program that could read words on a page and convert them to voice, so that the blind could read, has offered this estimate.

In line with my earlier predictions, supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by around 2020. By 2030, it will take a village of human brains (around a thousand) to match $1000 of computing. By 2050, $1000 of computing will equal the processing power of all human brains on Earth.

For more on this, begin here:

People won't change, but the job market surely will. What will be the basis of economic success? This? "My computer program is smarter than yours!"

Did you ever see Forbidden Planet (1956)? Are we the Krel? Are there monsters in our Ids?

Snoop Around My Site

After you have scrolled down memory lane, visit the free section of my site. You will find these two departments especially grim, retirement income-wise.

As for me, I don't intend on retiring. I research and write 12 to 15 hours a day, six days a week.

I have posted 600 of my free articles here

700+ more are here. At least try out this one: a portfolio of my favorite YouTube guitar performances.

Here is the Mira Costa graduation night speech I never was invited to deliver. It's about the relentless ticking of the clock.

Download (free) any of 45 of my books here.

Kris Kristofferson Sums It Up

Kristofferson is five or six years older than we are. He recorded this video in 2006, when he was 69. It begins with a 2-page photo of Kristofferson from an old tabloid. Then the top corner of the left-hand page blows down. On the page behind is Lon Chaney in his Phantom of the Opera makeup. That says it pretty well. Then the song begins: "Look at that old photograph. Is it really you?" Yep. It is.

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