For more information on the wide variety of areas concerning science and technology where I have involvement, visit the Futurescience home page.

For nearly 8 years after receiving my degree in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado, I worked for the Ampex Corporation, the company that invented the video tape recorder.   During most of that time I was a test engineer, developing test procedures and designing test interface equipment for their professional audio products.   I wrote all of the test procedures for the electronic sub-assemblies, as well as the final system test, for the ATR-100, which was the last major innovation in analog audio tape recorders.   I also did some work on the production testing of Ampex professional video recording equipment.

From August, 1978 until January, 2008, I worked as a radio and television transmitter engineer, most of that time as Transmitter Supervisor, for the ABC affiliate in Colorado Springs.   I worked atop Cheyenne Mountain, just outside of Colorado Springs.  (I never worked inside of this famous mountain, but I have been inside of it on two different occasions.)   I have driven to the summit of Cheyenne Mountain more than 4,000 times.

My main goal as transmitter supervisor was to never go off the air (and I remember nearly every minute of those rare times when we were off the air).  In spite of constant severe lightning strikes to the towers on top of the mountain, we were on the air almost continuously during the decades that I worked there.   When we had only an old 1959 model RCA transmitter (and no backup transmitter) there were some problems with the old transmitter in the summer of 1980 due to volcanic ash from the May, 1980 eruption of Mt. Saint Helens.   The volcanic ash caused high voltage breakdowns across the old porcelain high-voltage insulators.   The only other "off-the-air" times were an hour of down time due to a severe lightning storm in 1981, (before I got the extensive lightning protection and grounding systems installed) and on Christmas day of 1982, due to a generator failure.   After that, there were only two outages of less than an hour due to a "baseball switch" getting jammed.

I now have a multi-faceted career operating two separate one-person businesses.   I am a science writer for my company called Futurescience, LLC. which is now primarily devoted to distributing advanced information related to preventive medicine and healthy life extension.   I am considering the formation of a subscription-based forum for discussing topics related to life extension (and trying to figure out how to manage the great volume of email questions that I already receive).

Futurescience, LLC also provides a limited amount of support for the hundreds of superconductor kits that were produced from 1991 to 2006 by the old company Futurescience, Inc.  These superconductor kits are still in use in universities around the world.

From 1999 through 2004, I co-authored the information in the nationally-distributed page-a-day Easy Answer Science Calendar.   Many of my entries were also in subsequent calendars.   Those calendars were produced and distributed by Accord Publishing, which is now a division of Andrews-McMeel (and their products are distributed through Simon and Schuster).   I was also the original webmaster for Accord Publishing when they first started their web site, and continued as webmaster for the first years of the web site's operation.

I also developed the Storm Watch weather forecasting unit, which was sold nationally by Accord Publishing for many years (along with a story book, which I did not write).   The product went on the market in about 1990.   There were originally a large range of science experiments that were designed to be performed with the manometer in the device that I called the "Air Balance;" but cost constraints forced Accord to eliminate most of those very educational science experiments (along with capabilities that were actually built in to the device as sold, but never revealed to the user, such as the ability to function as a sensitive altimeter).

I have a considerable amount of information on needle phobia, which is a major medical problem, on the Needle Phobia Page at needlephobia.com, which I started in 1997.

I am a Wikipedia editor who has made more than 500 edits on at least 50 different articles on Wikipedia.  I have also started several new articles on Wikipedia over the past few years.

I also do some electronics consulting through company created in 2008 called Transmitter Maintenance, LLC.   There has been very little work to be done in this area in recent months because most smaller and mid-sized broadcast stations in the United States are just letting their transmission equipment deteriorate and become quite fragile.   This situation was forced on the broadcasters because of the severe expense mandated by the Federal Communications Commission in requiring television stations to operate both analog and digital television stations simultaneously for many years, while having only a single revenue stream for both costly operations.

As a college student, I successfully predicted, 43 years ago, in an article in an economics journal, the chaos and inefficiency that would be caused by the continued control of the broadcast spectrum by the Federal Communications Commission.   See The Freeman, Ideas on Liberty, Vol. 19, No. 10, October 1969.   I would phrase the problem using different words if I were writing the article today (especially the title), but the basic principles that I discussed in the article remain the same.

In May 2008, I had more than one million points on my DNA decoded by a division of Decode Genetics in Iceland.  In November 2008, I had another scan of nearly 600,000 points done by a company called 23andMe.

You can see many of the results of that DNA scan linked from the Preface to my Life Extension Manual.   The information that I have online includes a detailed outline of health risks using Promethease software.   These DNA scans (technically known as single nucleotide polymorphism scans) may not be very useful to most people, but I have already found the information enormously valuable to me.

My experiences as a genomic early adopter have been used in at least three medical journal articles:

McGowan, et al., Department of Bioethics, Case Western Reserve University.  Personal genomics and individual identities: motivations and moral imperatives of early users.  New Genetics and Society.  September 1, 2010; 29(3): pp. 261-290.  (I am quoted three times in this article, but only identified as User 17.)

Do, et al., Web-Based Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies Two Novel Loci and a Substantial Genetic Component for Parkinson's Disease.  PLoS Genetics.  June 23, 2011.  7(6): e1002141. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1002141  (My genome is not specifically mentioned in this article, but was used in the genomic data.  My paternal grandmother had Parkinson's Disease in her 80s, and it was presumed to be the cause of her death.)

I was one of more than 20,000 customers of 23andMe who participated in the self-reported data used in the medical journal article in the Public Library of Science:   See:   Tung, J.Y., et al., Efficient Replication of over 180 Genetic Associations with Self-Reported Medical Data.  PLoS Genetics.  August 17, 2011.  6(8): e23473. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0023473

More about my personal DNA information can be found at http://www.futurescience.com/dna.html.

Life Extension: I've been an experiment-in-progress in life extension and anti-aging medicine for most of my life.  Many advanced techniques in preventive medicine have a good scientific basis, but are seldom used.  By the time I was 20, I had decided that it was time to make a real effort to prevent the deterioration of the aging process.  I also realized then that I was living in a time when such an effort might really pay off -- and it has.

In 1981, I stepped up my personal life extension to a point that requires regular medical supervision.   An important method of life extension is maintaining one's hormone and enzyme levels at what would be normal levels for a healthy person in his twenties.   I've been taking things like DHEA, melatonin, deprenyl, testosterone, human growth hormone and pregnenolone long before most people had ever heard of them.   I've recently had to scale back my life extension program for financial reasons.  (Before I make use of any potentially life-extending substance or technique, I actually read the more important research reports on the subject in legitimate medical journals -- and I get frequent medical testing).   It is important to read the research at the source.   Medical reporting, like all forms of science reporting in the popular media, is frighteningly awful.   Even the practice of medicine, all too often, is not based on scientific evidence.

Anti-aging medicine has finally matured to the point where it is a legitimate medical specialty.  Physicians who take a rigorous exam can become board-certified in anti-aging medicine.

For more information on Life Extension and anti-aging medicine, I have written a free on-line Life Extension Manual.

Superconductors:   In the image on the right, a magnet levitates above a black ceramic superconducting disk partially immersed in liquid nitrogen.  From 1987 until 2006, I made hundreds of these ceramic superconductors in two bench-top lab furnaces in my little ceramics lab.

Most of these superconductors were sold to schools and universities for demonstrations of the basic concepts of superconductivity.   Nearly all of my superconductor business has been phased out.

My favorite book is How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne, a book that almost perfectly reflects my own worldview.   Everything in this book just seems to me to be very simple and logical, but it is very different from how most people think.   This book was originally published in 1973 and was been out-of-print for some time; but it was re-released in 1997 in a new hardcover edition with a new foreword and afterword by the author.   In the afterword, he explains how his thinking has changed on some subjects in the years since the book was originally published.   (Yes, this is the same Harry Browne who ran for U.S. president in an attempt to experience freedom in a free country.)   Harry Browne died of ALS in March, 2006.

My favorite book on science and technology is Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler, which I also believe to be the most important book of the 20th century.   The entire text of the book is on the Web.

My favorite television program is Jacob Bronowski's Knowledge or Certainty episode from his Ascent of Man television series that was shown during the early 1970s on PBS.

My favorite regularly-scheduled entertainment program was Dark Angel, another one of those science fiction shows that became more popular after it was cancelled.  Since it was cancelled in 2002, it has since been often shown in reruns on the cable/satellite channels, and all of the shows are available on DVD.   The setting of the show is the United States in the aftermath of a terrorist EMP (nuclear electromagnetic pulse) attack, which is a very likely form of attack that is being almost completely ignored (and plagued by huge amounts of misinformation).   Dark Angel is about what happens to kids who have been genetically engineered to be soldiers who have escaped from the government, and who just want to live free in this post-EMP environment.

Dark Angel deals with all of the issues that are likely to affect us most during the first half of the 21st century, including EMP attacks, genetic engineering, stem cells, nano-medicine, and bigotry against people who have been genetically or technologically modified.   My favorite episode of Dark Angel was Freak Nation, a special extended episode directed by James Cameron, which turned out to be the final episode of the series.

Nearly everything in Dark Angel, including the cometary viral plague that was supposed to be the focus of the third season, is based on serious scientific possibilities.   See my Dark Angel Science page.

Another of my favorite television shows was Venevision's El Club de los Tigritos, which has been out of production for many years.  This show was supposedly a "children's show." but when I was growing up, this show would not have been called a "children's show."   The idea that shows with mainly teenage performers and actors are only for children is a strange phenomenon that did not occur until about 1980.

My favorite science fiction book is The Great Explosion by Eric Frank Russell.  This is the story of the attempt by the Terran bureaucracy to establish "official relations" with various nonconformist societies across the galaxy.  Most of the book, which is now out-of-print, is a build-up to the last section (which was originally published separately as a novella entitled And Then There Were None) on the hilarious ultimate cultural clash between an authoritarian bureaucracy and a free society.

As a last resort, in case I ever need an ambulance to the future, I'm signed up for cryonic suspension with the Alcor Foundation.   With current freezing techniques, reviving someone in cryonic suspension would probably only be possible with molecular nanotechnology.   Fortunately, unless some catastrophe happens that stops technological progress, the development of molecular nanotechnology seems inevitable in the middle of the 21st century.   (See the reference above to Engines of Creation.)

Cryonics isn't really all that expensive.   It's usually paid for with life insurance.

Here is my sister Brenda's eulogy for my father.

Favorite quotes:

A scientist is a magician who shows you how every trick is done.   -- Sandy Shaw