Ben and Cathy Fulton

Ben is a software developer living in Bloomington, Indiana, currently working for Envisage Technologies, a training and schedule management company.

Cathy is a doctoral student in the Indiana University School of Nursing. She stayed at home with our son until he turned four, and she now works at the Indiana University Health Center.

Jesse is a fourth-grader in the Advanced Learning class at University Elementary. He plays guitar and piano, as well as football and baseball.

What we do

Ben reads a lot. Read a book review below. Cathy reads a lot too, but she's not so noisy about it. She likes mysteries, particularly of the Agatha Christie variety. Jesse takes swimming classes and plays a mean piano. His latest song is called "I Remember". Ben also spends a lot of time on Bloomingpedia writing articles about local history.

A book review from Ben

Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham

Extremely dated. It reminds me a lot of books about robots from the 30's, where the robots have no trouble understanding what's said to them, BUT... CAN... ONLY... TALK... VERY... SLOWLY... AND... PAINFULLY. The problems people thought were difficult then turned out not to be problems at all, and the real problems were things that people didn't even realize were problems. This book is exactly that, on two different levels. First is the aging problem. The premise of the book is that a scientific version of the Fountain of Youth is discovered. We know now that many deaths that used to be put down to old age are the result of cancers, blockages, or other individual causes that can be isolated and cured, or at least retarded, and that this is bringing us closer to the fountain of youth all the time. So the premise that a new drug can simply retard the aging problem doesn't really work any more. But more interestingly, the reactions to the discovery are tightly related to the context of the book, written in 1960 during the height of the Cold War. The attitudes of the discoverers are an allegory of Communism; they wish, basically, to keep the benefits of the discovery for themselves, assuming that the rest of mankind isn't quite "ready"; precisely as the leaders of Russia did at that time. Had the discoverers done the correct things, like publish their results in a peer-reviewed journal, the compound would have been determined and duplicated quickly, no doubt. Was the allegory intentional on the part of the author, or a subconscious reaction to his times? I don't know the answer, but the much better book on the topic of longevity was written by that noted capitalist Robert Heinlein, Methuselah's Children". Read that instead.

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