James Batek, A Biography

copyright 2009 James R. Batek

James Batek (1951-)

American blogger and scientist. Becoming mentally ill in 1974 and homeless,
1981-1988, he used the eight years of homelessness as a sabbatical, despite
rigors of cold, hunger, and violent Homo sapiens, and invented Batek Binary, a
system of encoding numbers in binary without convention and used this system to
establish commerce in information with a large number of species in class aves,
birds, whose superiority to Homo sapiens in terms of survival and longevity is a
key point of divergence between Batek and many other Homo sapiens critics.

Born in 1951 in Berwyn, Illinois, USA, and raised in Elmhurst, Illinois and Glen
Ellyn, Illinois, Batek got his first B.A. in economics from Yale University in 1973 and
his second B.A. in physics from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1982.
Before completing his physics degree requirements he entered Yale University's
Ph.D. program in astronomy but because of his discontent with the state of
psychotrophic medication at the time he discontinued taking it and relapsed
within a few months, causing his departure from the program at Yale.
Homelessness followed shortly thereafter.

Batek has held many positions as a summer student in the field of physics,
including Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, NASA in Mountain View, CA, The Carnegie
Institution in Pasadena, CA., and the California Institute of Technology radio
astronomy department.

As a freshman at Yale, Batek spent a week in New York City as a guest of his Yale
roommate and devoted the time to exploring the city's art museums, gaining an
excitement about monumental scale artworks, and planting the seed of an
interest in art parallel to his interest in science. When economics, for which he
completed the bachelor's degree, failed to prove its merits for his abilities he
turned to architecture and upon graduation from Yale took up an apprenticeship at
then deceased Walter Gropius's firm in Cambridge, MA. Ambition did not match
preparation, however, and Batek became mentally ill within a year of graduation
from Yale.

A year of painful illness went by and he gave up on Gropius's firm to move in with
his father in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida in 1975. During three months of
hospitalization at G. Pierce Woods Memorial Psychiatric Hospital he realized better
medication than Thorazine in Mellaril and this brought a more stable adaptation to
the illness. He formed a recovery plan to get a second bachelor's degree in
mathematics, on then to a Ph.D. in math, and an academic career.

The math transformed into physics with the intent of getting a Ph.D. in astronomy
once Batek entered the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL. Fermilab, where
he had worked each summer of his Yale undergraduate years, took him back for
another two summers, but NASA picked him up and he went out to Moffett Field
on the coast of California as a summer student in 1978. This brought transfer to
the University of California at Santa Cruz, later site of the discovery by Batek,
while homeless, of avian communicative superiority to Homo sapiens.

Eventually returning to the Chicago area in 1987, Batek entered the Illinois
Institute of Technology seeking a master's degree in architecture in 1988. In his
second year he began to openly use his code system, Batek Binary, as a way to
transform English into binary, with three digits of base three standing in for base
twenty seven, in its guise as 26 letters plus the space. This work got him the
reputation, undeserved since Batek Binary is not a different language, of having
created his own language. For reasons still unknown Batek's financial aide
package was sabataged in his third year and he was forced to leave without a
degree at the end of that year.

Eventually, more homelessness followed. This time it was short--just a week or so.
During the last night of this stint, Batek walked shirtless through Chicago--it was
summer, 1992--intending to leave the city. On a moment's impulse, he stopped,
turned to the other side of the street--it was shortly before dawn--and sighted
along his outstretched arm at the building across the street. There on the building
appeared emerging from the wall a fire that immediately reminded him of the fire
that Moses saw on a bush. After dancing around the windows of the building for a
while, it disappeared into the building.

Within the next day, Batek was admitted to Madden Mental Health Center in
Hines, IL. From there he was admitted as a resident at Bryn Mawr Care in Chicago
where he is currently a resident.

Batek was the Republican candidate for Illinois State Representative in district 14
in Chicago in 2006, losing by about 20,000 to 2000. He is currently a Democrat.

In 2008 Batek began writing the blog, http://gettingyourbusiness.blogspot.com. In

July of 2009 he began selling on the blog art based on the code system of Batek
Binary. His usual Internet social networking user id is glenellynboy.