John Martellaro

Don Melton is probably best known as the person who started the Safari and WebKit projects at Apple and his rise to Apple Engineering Director of Internet Technologies. These days he’s an aspiring writer, podcaster and recovering programmer.

Don walks us through his early career starting with his aspiration to become a comic strip or comic book artist. His artistic talent led to a newspaper job which led to information graphics which led to work with Macs. His tinkering with the Mac revealed that he had a special talent for programming, and that ultimately led to his job at Netscape developing the Navigator browser. Later, a relationship with Andy Hertzfeld and Bud Tribble led to his job at Apple in 2001, chartered by Scott Forstall, to write a web browser. Don tells a fascinating story about the development of Safari for Mac OS X and the race to replace Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

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Dr. Brian Keating is an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. His specialty is cosmology, and he is the father of the original BICEP project (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization). Last year, Brian published a terrific, courageous book about his team’s research, some life lessons, and the challenges of scientific research: Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor. It’s now out in paperback.

This time, we expanded on the discussion in his book about his quest for the Nobel prize. At the core: what the polarization of the cosmic background radiation tells us about the Big Bang. We also delved into the theory of the multiverse and its relationship to the anthropic principle. Finally, find out how you could win a piece of a 4.5 billion year old asteroid.

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Carter Wilson is the USA Today and #1 Denver Post bestselling author of six critically acclaimed, standalone psychological thrillers, as well as numerous short stories. He is an ITW Thriller Award finalist, a three-time winner of the Colorado Book Award, and his novels have received multiple starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal. His latest novel, The Dead Girl in 2A, was released in July 2019.

Carter didn’t plan to become a novelist. It was really quite by accident. He got his bachelor’s degree from Cornell and planned to work in hotel services. Then, on a spring day in 2003, an exercise to ward off boredom during a continuing-education class evolved into a 400-page manuscript. Since that day, Carter has been constantly writing. We chatted about the craft of thrillers, his writing technique, killing off characters, and how he plans his storylines. It’s been an amazing journey.

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Dr. Clay Sherrod’s astronomical studies began, soon after his Ph.D. work, in 1970 with the Arkansas Sky, Inc., his private non-profit and educational research and educational program. Although now retired, the work, publications and outreach from him via the Arkansas Sky Observatory ranks among the top in private non-profit facilities.

In his second appearance on the show, Clay and I talked about his latest book which covers the entire spectrum of the change in the Earth’s climate. We noted that climate science has deep roots into the planet’s history and is based on the scientific method. Not everyone speaks the language of science, and so it’s important to identify authoritative sources that can be trusted. We tried to cover as many aspects as we could to deliver a broad picture of the perils facing the Earth.

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Dr. Sarah Parcak is an archaeologist, anthropologist, Egyptologist, and remote sensing expert who has used satellite imaging to identify potential archaeological sites in Egypt, Rome, and elsewhere. She’s written the first textbook in the field of satellite archaeology, called Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology. She holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in Egyptian Archaeology and is currently at the Univ. of Alabama, Birmingham.

Sarah told me how she became fascinated by Egyptology at an early age. And, yes, she was influenced by Indiana Jones. In college, inspired by her father’s aerial photogrammetry work, she took a remote sensing class, and that gave her the idea years later, to use NASA satellite photos to identify prospective archaeological sites. These satellite photos can also reveal signs of looting. Sarah described how climate change and poor funding is adversely affecting the science of archaeology.

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