Howard Davidson was captured by a Heinlein book in second grade, and hasn't been seen much since. Inspired to do science fiction by reading it, he went off and got a Ph.D. in physics, the best training availabe for a crackpot inventor. He is an Industrial Physicist in Silicon Valley. He holds 52 patents. He has published and presented numerous technical papers and one technical book chapter, has taught Computer Engineering at Stanford, and has done professional biology on the side. He worked on things he can't talk about at LLNL, though he will admit that some hardware he touched made it to the moon. He gets to write science fiction for the annual budget cycle, and fantasy for the planning cycle.