In life, the paths we choose are influenced by our day-today experiences and the people we meet. Career choices are no different. As a pediatrician and academic, I am not infrequently asked how I became interested in working with the transgender community and doing academic work with this population. An openly gay man, many wrongfully assume that my interest and devotion stem from an identity a...

The quantization of the scalar and electromagnetic fields in the presence of a parabolic mirror is further developed in the context of a geometric optics approximation. We calculate the mean squared scalar and electric fields near the focal line of a parabolic cylindrical mirror. These quantities are found to grow as inverse powers of the distance from the focus. We give a combination of analyt...