I have three kids. All of them like to climb. Margot seems unnaturally compelled to climb things — no matter how imprudent. (She broke her clavicle at age 2 after climbing up to, and falling off of, the kitchen table.) Unfortunately, our San Francisco postage stamp yard has no good places to climb. Since I spent most of my childhood in a tree, the lack of climbable structures for my kids disturbed me. So, during a recent break between jobs, I built a climbing wall in our house. The kids love it and it was a hit at our recent holiday cookie party.

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As many of you know by now, I left Genentech in September to join UC Berkeley as the Chief Scientist of the Genome Commons. I’m part of QB3, the California Institute for Quantitative Biology (no I don’t understand the abbreviation either).

I’m collaborating with Steven Brenner, Jasper Rine, and Lior Pachter at Berkeley, and Robert Nussbaum and Bernie Lo at UCSF, to address the technical, scientific, clinical, and ethical opportunities associated with interpreting genomic data. It’s an exciting time and an exciting place.

To be sure, I’ll be posting a lot more about that here.

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How is it that someone like me, i.e. with substantial geek tendencies, goes this long without blogging? At one time, I surely thought that the young whippersnappers were wasting their time with this blogging thing. I mean, get real, who’s gonna read this crap? It turns out lots of people do.

The real surprise to me, though, was not that people write and read blogs. The surprise is the community that blogging builds around ideas and projects. I completely missed that, and it’s *the* thing.

So, I have a confession: I really do want to blog. I’ve wanted to for a while from the depths of my virtual data closet. I have a deep yearning to say something important, profound, consequential, insightful. But what?

At cathartic times like this, I turn to two people. First, there’s Curly, my erstwhile Wonder Bread Zen master and hero, who exclaimed ”I keep trying to think but nothing happens.” Exactly — too much thinking.

Then there’s Dr. Jack Pribnow, my high-school honors calculus teacher. He was the one who told me to not think too hard about a calculus proof before diving in. I was actually quite good at calculus proofs, but every once in a while one would stump me. Dr. Pribnow insightfully told me that my problem was that I wanted to see the whole thing done before I started. He was right: I hated “mistakes” so much that I didn’t start down the path.

So, this first post is for Curly and Jack (er, respectfully, Dr. Pribnow) and for their lessons that I repeat to myself often. Here’s to leaping before I look and not thinking too hard about it.

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