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Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas, for the low price of $12.95.  Now available in Kindle e-book for $7.45.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone seeking a better job, a raise in the current job, investment funding, or just needing to persuade others. I started “public speaking” as a boy.  My debut was at church, giving a flannel-board lesson to the younger children.  Flannel is wool or cotton, milled and raised slightly to give it an overall loft.  Felt works also.  To make the flannel-board, I stretched it across a sheet of thin plywood, which I then positioned on an easel for viewing.  Using colored pencils, I painted a background on the flannel of what I supposed Israel looked like.  (I had help, of course, from my ever creative and very pushy […]

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas, for the low price of $12.95.  Now available in Kindle e-book for $7.45.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone seeking a better job, a raise in the current job, investment funding, or just needing to persuade others. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), cumulative student-loan debt now totals $848 billion.  That is billion, with a “b.”  Furthermore, over half of the students matriculating (56%) will require six years or more to graduate, sending costs skyrocketing further.  To make it all worse, the NCES points out that even after six years, these students will lack essential skills for the changing workplace. I am a member of the Board of Regents for a public university and a past chief technology officer of Raytheon, the nation’s

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas, for the low price of $12.95.  Now available in Kindle e-book for $7.45.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone seeking a better job, a raise in the current job, investment funding, or just needing to persuade others Asteroids are “rocks,” sort of, that orbit the sun.  There are hundreds of them, mostly in orbits that lie between Mars and Jupiter.  Some asteroids are the size of earth rocks, but Ceres, the largest asteroid, is 950 km (595 mi) in diameter.  Vesta is the second most massive at 530 km (331 mi) diameter.  Ceres and Vesta are more like miniplanets than rocks.  (For comparison, the diameter of the Earth is 7,925 miles). In September, 2007, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) launched the $460 million Dawn spacecraft whose mission

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas, for the low price of $12.95.  Now available in Kindle e-book for $7.45.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone seeking a better job, a raise in the current job, investment funding, or just needing to persuade others. On Monday of this week, my mother’s sister passed away, Wanda Lee (Dougherty) McClure of Electra, Texas.  She was 83 years old.  Her husband, Henry Edward McClure, asked that I perform the eulogy at her funeral.  While my blog is neither about eulogies or family, every life is precious.   Genealogists will appreciate my divergence so they might find the information if they search. Below is what I presented at her funeral. I visited with my aunt in 2007 and asked questions about her childhood.  As she answered the

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas, for the low price of $12.95.  Now available in Kindle e-book for $7.45.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone seeking a better job, a raise in the current job, investment funding, or just needing to persuade others. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is expert at garnering public favor.  With competitive budgets on high alert, Congressional approbation strides front and center.  That is why you hear so little about the International Space Station; its astronomical expenditures are so disproportionate to its accomplishments that even Congress is aghast.  At this time of the year, NASA announcements lean to the exciting, usually the exaggerated.  Some might say, the optimistic futuristic. Such is the case with NASA’s announced discovery of “earth-like planets.” The search for planets and the

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas, for the low price of $12.95.  Now available in Kindle e-book for $7.45.  The Persuasive Wizard is an excellent gift for anyone seeking a better job, a raise in their current job, investment funding, or just needing to persuade others If we collected all the insects in the world and distributed them evenly, each person on Earth would get about 15 billion crawly creatures of their very own.  Married couples would get 30 billion, of course, and parents would get an additional 15 billion for each child.  (This could reinvigorate planned parenthood.) I think I am on to something. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) conceived the idea of putting remote controls on a flying insect, attaching a miniature camera, and creating the “spy fly.”  Ha, ha, aka lesser

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas, for the low price of $12.95.  Now available in Kindle e-book for $7.45.  The Persuasive Wizard is an excellent gift for anyone seeking a better job, a raise in their current job, investment funding, or just needing to persuade others. While the name is neither apropos nor descriptive, the moniker ‘God Particle’ sells newspapers and keeps particle physicists gainfully employed.  It has not the savour faire of black hole or pulsar. The name, ‘God Particle’ was coined by 1988 Nobel physicist, Leon Lederman, current director of Chicago’s Fermilab; he wrote a book by the same title.  (I found the book neither well-written nor adequately informative, even for a lay audience.)  The correct name for the particle is the Higgs Boson, but that lacks the anti-God affectation so seemingly

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas, for the low price of $12.95.  Now available in Kindle e-book for $7.45.  The Persuasive Wizard is an excellent gift for anyone seeking a better job, a raise in their current job, investment funding, or just needing to persuade others While this is the time of the year for Christmas angels, I’m better acquainted with those earth-dwellers known as angel investors.  Angels are affluent individuals who are willing to invest their money in your idea in return for sharing the profits. Suppose you have an idea and want to make money on it.  In a later article, I will talk about developing the idea.  In my book, you can learn how to sell the idea.  Today, we discuss funding.  How do you get funding? If you question ten

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas, for the low price of $12.95.  Now available in Kindle e-book for $7.45.  The Persuasive Wizard is an excellent gift for anyone seeking a better job, a raise in their current job, investment funding, or just needing to persuade others. Since the 1970’s, the military has used drone aircraft for surveillance, targeting, and even attack.  A drone is flown by a certified pilot on the ground using a joystick.  A pilot can sometimes fly two or more vehicles at once.  Initially, these flying spies and weapons were called UAV’s, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.  Such nomenclature was anathema to the feminists, so in 2009 the politically-correct Air Force officially renamed them Remotely Piloted Vehicles (RPV). The more common name is Drone. Now, a drone is a male honey bee that

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas, for the low price of $12.95.  Now available in Kindle e-book for $7.45.  The Persuasive Wizard is an excellent gift for anyone seeking a better job, a raise in their current job, investment funding, or just needing to persuade others. At a dinner last week, someone asked if I thought there were more earthquakes now than at any time in the past and, if so, what I thought that might imply.  The correlation being that one of the signs of the end times was “earthquakes in different places.” I first read that passage (Bible, Mark 13:8) when I was a boy.  The venerable King James Version translates (from the original Greek) “earthquakes in divers places.” What was I to think?  Of course, we should look for earthquakes under