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Bruce Beach

Greetings, my name is Bruce Beach and I am adding this page so that anyone desiring to do so may get to know me more personally. I am the coordinator, founder and initial vision holder of the World Language Program. I am a former professor of computer science and have been a student of the world language problem for over thirty years.

I now live in a little village of 200 people, called Horning's Mills, that is about 90 miles northwest of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. My wife was born in this village (and her mother also, in the 19th century). We have many relations that live in the village and I have a son and daughter and grandchildren nearby.

I was born in Winfield, Kansas and raised mostly in Wellington, Kansas where a number of my offspring (children, grandchildren, and great grandchild) still live. I moved to Canada in 1970 to teach in the Northern College System (in Sault Ste. Marie, Kirkland Lake and Kapuskasing) after having previously taught in black colleges in the U.S. (Morgan State and Jarvis Christian College in Hawkins Texas).

Years ago I spent a year in the Arctic as a control tower operator, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force. I have made a couple of trips to China and have travelled somewhat extensively in South America and less so to Europe and elsewhere. I have a total of over 20 children, grandchildren, and a great grandchild, several of which live in Taiwan and the rest in the U.S. and Canada.

At one time I owned a very large research ship called Canada's Tomorrow and one third of the company that built the robotic arm that recovered the space shuttle Challenger. One of the company's robotic arms is in the Smithsonian. I have also written a number of books in the computer sciences, the latest being on the programming language 'C'.

ship bow

ship side

My strongest interests, outside of the World Language Program, lie in the areas of religion, astronomy and the social sciences. I have no musical or sports talents but was once upon a time an exceptional speed reader, reading as many as five books a day. Now I read only about that many a month. I used to play a little chess and hold patents on a chess teaching machine that was manufactured some years ago and sold in several countries.

I am somewhat notorious as a survivalist having built two dozen shelters for myself and others, and I have consulted on many dozens more. I maintain a web page on this subject also, and you can click on the link in the unlikely case that this is something that interests you.

cover

I am an optimist about the long term future of mankind but a pessimist about the immediate future, particularly at this millennialist point. As I have said, I am greatly interested in religion, being a class taught student of Christian Science and a persistent student of the writings of Emannuel Swedenborg for almost forty years. At one time I termed myself a Zen Buddhist and have read many translations of both the Bhagavad Gita and the Koran. I have also thoroughly studied the Mormon religion (I did some practice teaching at BYU) and the Jehovah's Witness religion. I truly appreciate them all and have been a Baha'i for thirty-five years. You can link to my essays if you are interested to know where my understanding of the Baha'i Writings has led me. I met my wife at the Baha'i Temple in Wilmette, Illinois which is just outside Chicago. She was guiding at the front door.

temple

temple door

My reading interest, in addition to Swedenborg, Computer Magazines, Sky and Telescope and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is completely eclectic. My favorite books of all time, aside from religious books, have been "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", "The Flatland", "Godel, Escher and Bach", "Varieties of Religious Experience", and many works by J.S. Mills. I have also in the past read gobs in psychology and economics (having a master's degree in the latter). There are times in my life when I have been a science fiction and movie hound but my greatest pleasure now is my children and grandchildren.

This should be about enough to bore you about any one person. I lead a very active life working fourteen to sixteen hours a day. A stroke some years ago blinded me in one eye but I have since reprogrammed myself to type on a Dvorak keyboard. I have loving children who look after me and a wife that everyone, including myself, says is a saint. I am truly a happy and joyful person, a claim that I wish that more people could make in this technologically illustrious and spiritually dark age.

I can be reached personally at:

language@webpal.org

My hope, of course, is that we can find a mutual interest in furthering the

World Language Program,

which you can click on and link to if you have come to this page by a different path.

Regards,

Bruce M. Beach

The old man himself!

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