Lamont Weekly Report – January 30, 2004

OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR
P.O. Box 1000, 61 Route 9W Palisades, New York 10964

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– Letter from the Director –
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<> LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR

I have to be down in DC again for three days next week, so unfortunately I shall miss Paul Richards' talk in the Earth institute Science Lecture series. It is on Tuesday, February 3, at 4:00 p.m. in the Schapiro Center, Davis Auditorium. The title is Monitoring Nuclear Explosions: Why, How, and What is Learned? Check out the web site at http://www.earth.columbia.edu/events/2004/richards.html

I had a very pleasant surprise on Monday afternoon. At 4:30pm Arnold Finck, the original administrator at Lamont stopped by my office an handed me a check for a substantial sum - there were six digits after the dollar sign and before the decimal point, and the first digit was an odd number greater than three. This is a tremendous gift for our endowment from the Board of Palisades Geophysical Institute - a company that spun off from Lamont many decades ago to carry out fundamentally important work for the US Navy. The company dissolved and decided to donate their residual funds to Lamont. The most legendary of living Lamonters, Joe Worzel, led PGI and we owe Joe a great debt of gratitude for securing this gift for us. PGI has a great history - it played a crucial role in US national security during the cold war years. Joe has written a short history that we will load up on the web site sometime soon.

We are working on securing a dollar for dollar match for this gift - when we achieve this goal we will have an appropriate celebration.

Speaking of big parties... a week today - Friday, February 6th, 3:30pm Monell Auditorium - a celebration of Taro Takahashi's more than two decades as an Associate Director of LDEO. There will be a couple of assuredly inappropriate speeches, followed by a scholarly presentation by Taro entitled 'Changes in Surface Ocean CO2 Chemistry in the Equatorial Pacific and Subpolar Oceans', followed by the all-important reception, to which all are invited. Please come - we all owe Taro a big thank you.

Like everyone, I have grown the habit of speedily deleting large numbers of odd-looking emails from my Inbox, to avoid the time they waste, and the offense they bring. But one gave me pause this week - no subject line – but the sender was "Jesus" - I never had an email from Jesus before. I hesitated just a few seconds before deleting it. So now, I will never know...

Have a great weekend - I will be here Monday, but down to DC in the evening.

– Mike
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