e-telescope online magazine

In preparing to write my novel Tsunami, about a fictional undersea volcano on the verge of exploding and sending a monster tsunami smashing into California, I did a great deal of research into the world of natural disasters. I leaned heavily on NOAA, USGS, NASA and dozens of library and university sources for my information. One thing became clear as I dug into the research: tsunamis are not self generating. They are always the product of some other natural event.

Television has a long and interesting history. In addition, it has undergone a great number of changes in order to become the type of entertainment we know it to be today. As such, there is no one inventor that can be credited for the development of modern day television. Rather, it is the result of new inventors continually improving on old ideas.

Hard water and build-up of scale have become a multi-billion dollar worldwide problem. Scale wastes enormous amounts of energy and reduces the lifespan of any equipment that uses water. The build-up of scale has become a big issue in virtually every industry using water in its daily operations.

During the late '80s and early '90s, I had the opportunity to work with expert systems in real-time production environments. I found artificial intelligence, or AI, to be thoroughly intriguing. I even went so far as to write an expert system package, under Microsoft Windows, called WindExS. However, as I continued my work, and expanded into other areas of knowledge management and, eventually, remote viewing, I began to find some unusual inconsistencies in the AI world and the desires to create "truly intelligent" and "thinking" machines.