by Jeanne Lanz Butterfield and Deborah Elwood and Dana Gilbert

The distinguished Global Conference on Environmental Science and Applications invited Professor Leslie M. Golden of Oak Park, Illinois, to present “The Contribution of Artificial Turf to Global Warming” on April 11, 2020. Dr. Golden is a member of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.  His agents are the Shirley Hamilton Agency in Chicago and Sonjia Warren Brandon in Los Angeles.  He showed that the annual contribution of American playing field instatlations of artificial turf contribute between 10 and 20 gigawatts directly into the atmosphere, with comparable amounts overseas.

Polymath

Professor Golden is a senior research scientist with the Center for Computational Astrophysics. 

Leslie M. Golden is a polymath, with careers as a professional astronomer and retired professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, having obtained the Ph.D in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley, and bachelors and masters degrees in Engineering Physics with Distinction from Cornell University.  There he was the multiple award-winning editor-in-chief of the Cornell Engineer magazine.  He is a professional actor with over 100 credits, an Butterfield, Deborah Elwood, and Nancy Dassoff

His editorial cartoons have been published, and he has a listing in comiclopedia, the international cartoonist database.  He is a multiply award-winning writer in fiction and non-fiction, including a winner of the prestigious Lili Fabilli-Eric Hoffer Laconic Essay Prize.  He was one of the founders of the prestigious University of California Jazz Ensembles, and is a professional trumpet player, jazz vocalist, jazz festival emcee, and band leader.  As Flash Golden, he was the play-by-play voice of the California Golden Bears basketball team, and was a jazz disk jockey at KALX-FM.  As a stand-up comic, he has performed on the college circuit, at Playboy Clubs, and in comedy clubs from Los Angeles to Boston and Chicago to Puerta Vallarta.  He was a featured regular on the Eddie Hubbard Radio Show broadcast live from Arnie’s Restaurant in Chicago as one of his comic characters, Jeffrey Clayton Maxwell, from Bhutan.  He performs as himself and as Subrahmanyan Berkowitz (“What! Another comedian from Bangladesh!”)

 He was a letterman at Oak Park and RiverForestHigh School and has managed and played third base for league-winning fast pitch baseball teams in and since college, including the Golden Rods (Cornell) and the Foul Balls (Berkeley).

He is an internationally known environmental activist and animal welfare advocate, being the leader of the eventually successful effort to save Onion the dog, leading to revision of animal control laws in western states.  He is a knowledgeable and blistering critic of zoos, singling out the notorious Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago and the Calgary Zoo (“Auschwitz for Animals”) as examples of concentration camps for imprisoned wild animals.  The literally hundreds upon hundreds of animals murdered at the hands of political-patronage zookeepers at the city-run Calgary Zoo is the subject of Golden’s dedication to the book.  He details dozens of cases by name and specie in a documentary-worthy fashion of historical value for animal rights activists.

Recent Work

In 2021 Golden had two scholarly scientific articles published in peer-reviewed journals.  “A Joint Mind Consideration of the Drake Equation in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” was published in Acta Astronautica in March and “The Contribution of Artificial Turf to Global Warming” was published in December in Sustainability and Climate Change.  In January, he executed a contract for an acting book based on his studies with the legendary Del Close of The Second City, The Scientific Approach to Creativity:  The Techniques of the Chicago School of Improvisational Theatre.  Jonathan Pitts, the founder and long-time director of the Chicago Improv Festival will write the foreword to the book.

In 2016, Golden had two papers presented at the 16th triennial Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking in June at the Mirage Casino/Hotel, “An Analysis of the Disadvantage to Players of Multiple Decks in the Game of Twenty-one” and “A New System for Roulette Based on the Physics of the Roulette Wheel.”  He also had two applied mathematics articles published in a peer-reviewed journal in recent years, one on optimization of decision making by governments in the face of scarce resources and the other on a mathematical system for the casino game of blackjack, a paper which introduced the Golden Diagram to blackjack players.

 Other Resources

Details about Les Golden’s Renaissance Man activities can be found at:

encyc.org/wiki/Les_Golden and en.wikisage.org/wiki/Les­_Golden

Les Golden’s activities as a gambling writer are profiled on his alma mater website:  http://www.cornell65.com/interest/golden.html

 His papers on the Golden Diagram (blackjack) and Magic  Circle strategy (roulette) presented at the 16th triennial International Conference  on  Gambling  and  Risk  Taking  in  June,  2016,  in Las Vegas are at https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/gaming_institute/2016/June9/

 Les’ listing on the Comiclopedia International Database appears at:

http://www.lambiek.com/artists/g/golden_les.htm

The Chicago Tribune presented a political profile of Les Golden at: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1995-10-03/    
/news/9510030038_1_wallace-gator-bradley-candidates-taxes

 Some of Les Golden’s animal welfare and environmental activism activities are described at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/07/les-golden-oak-park-dog-a_n_1497423.html en.wikisage.org/wiki/The_Horrors_of_Zoos_and_Horse_Racing.

 en.wikisage.org/wiki/CARE_Party_of_Oak_Park