To Begin With...

My name, given to me at birth by my parents, is Paul Calvin Maybury Jr. From this you may conclude that I was named after my father, so in reality, it was picked by my grandfather back in 1920. He was an admirer of President Calvin Coolidge, although he never told me why. Calvin actually means bald, and Paul means small, so Paul Calvin is entirely appropriate as a name for any small bald person, which most babies are. To continue the mini tradition, I named my own son, in 1982, as Paul Calvin Maybury III. He is living proof of many truisms, such as 'third time's the charm', or 'if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.', and so on. His success has dragged me on to the first page of google searches for Paul Maybury, and I unashamedly link my page to his. I did this originally to help out all the people trying to find him, but it has turned out that it just helps me to be found. Oh well, I have always loved serendipity, a word introduced to me by Miss Tedricks, my seventh grade Biology teacher.
My grandfather, Byron Harris Maybury, was a minister in the Church of the Nazarene, what you would have to call a fundamentalist. When I was in first grade I made a hit with him by informing him in my piping little voice that 'we all come from frogs.' this inspired him to give me the first of many tracts. This one was titled '50 Reasons that Evolution is Wrong.' I derived great pleasure over the years picking apart the 50 arguments, and it confirmed my belief in evolutionary theory at an early age.
My father was one of those distant kind of fathers. He was a chemist in the field of Physical Chemistry, and he gave me a lot of science toys for which I must thank him. I had a subscription to Things of Science, which was a little kit in a blue cardboard box which came once a month, filled with little things like magnets, prisms, surplus pieces of plastic, and other items which were accompanied with a little booklet of experiments which could be performed with them to demostrate different scientific principles. I loved them and probably learned more from them than anything I was given in school. For many years now I have been a subscriber to the weekly magazine called Science News, and I was surprised and pleased to learn a couple of years ago that Science Service, the publisher of this excellent magazine, also put out Things of Science. I highly recommend Science News to anyone with an interest in science, or anyone with children.
Well, that's a little about me, just posted to give you a reference for what might come later. I love to talk about science, philosophy, the past and the future of mankind. I hope having a blog will give me a chance to meet you, or at least exchange some views. Till then...