Ray Van De Walker is very proud to have contributed to articles selected for the brilliant prose section four times:
- Earth- he wrote "Why Earth is wet",
- Nuclear weapon (he originated the theory of operation, then edited some technically-accurate, but verbose prose that replaced it),
- Telephone switch- described the guts and algorithms (He's actually implemented a video switch using the same algorithms as a nonblocking minimal spanning telephone switch).
- spacecraft propulsion- he refactored it into a list of technologies with figures of merit, added many technologies, and is immensely grateful to the hero who put the list into a table, and the other hero who realized that this wanted to be a set of articles.
He refactored: Weapon, radio, Satellite navigation system, International Geophysical Year and these have been generally accepted and extended by the community.
He wrote or improved articles about
- electricity meter
- single wire earth return power distribution
- digital logic
- music radio (much revised)
- education reform (much revised)
- first aid (extensively revised by others), triage,
- community emergency response team, civil defense, fallout shelter,
- autonomous building, (also popular; much revised)
- Originated Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor, (now much improved by other editors)
- nuclear pulse propulsion, magnetic sail and solar sail
- flute
- Taxation in the United States (because he's run a small corporation),
- california (extensively revised by others),
- Classical Education,
- pendulum clock, quartz clock, atomic clock,
- navigation, celestial navigation, sextant, Transit (satellite),
- control unit (of a computer), microcode,
- telegraph (he added the sections on semaphores, telex and the internet)
- emergency position indicating rescue beacon,
- ionosphere, magnetosphere, magnetopause, heliopause,
- Sail-plan,
- Huntington Beach,
- systems engineering,
- safety engineering,
- home schooling,
- Lutheran church,
- sling, slingshot, assault rifle, m16, and sniper
- RISC-V, 68000, PDP-11, code optimization and some in electronics,
He documented the bio and filmography of Steven Segal.
He has degrees in Computer Science and Philosophy from the University of California at Irvine.
He abandoned academia because it paid badly, and currently writes embedded real-time software, primarily for mechanism control in systems that require extremely high reliability, such as medical, avionic (aircraft) systems, and oddly electric power meters.
He also wrote the second revision of "The polyForth II Reference Manual," the first successful edition (it reduced hotline calls by 30%!) of the reference manual for Forth Inc.'s version of the FORTH language. This means he is a world authority on the FORTH language and porting techniques. Which makes him a large frog in a tiny puddle, indeed.
He has a number of unpublished science-fiction novels, which some insist are worthy of print.
He has a published book about philosophical Ethics, "How to be Good" which is far more interesting, (to him, at least) but even less salable.
He also juggles badly, is an indifferent thespian, fixes cars, houses and motorcycles, designs houses, is married with children, ran a small corporation, and taught sunday school, none of which pay at all.