Mountain Range

Surviving Spring Break on the Mountain: The Power of Experiential Education blends high‑stakes mountaineering, military SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) lessons, ethical challenges in Big Tech, and the craft of software development into a single, practical framework for navigating power imbalance. Through vivid stories, from POW training to winter ascents of Mount Rainier to the legacy of Nathaniel Bowditch, you learn how to develop judgment, resist disinformation, remain intact under pressure, and grow into a trustworthy practitioner who helps others rise with you. This is a book about skill, ethics, resilience, and mastering your craft through experience, clarity, and courage.

I discovered the birth of modern computing has a surprising origin: radio. That is not well known because facts remained classified for a long time. Modern computing systems emerged from interconnected problems of crime, law enforcement, intelligence, and national defense during the twentieth century.

Beginning with Prohibition‑era smuggling and early cryptanalysis, we follow institutional and technical developments through World War II, Cold War air defense, and the rise of large‑scale commercial computing. This narrative is grounded in documented events, organizations, and machines, with occasional personal recollection used for historical context.

The book is written as retrospective nonfiction and can be read as a series of connected historical episodes rather than as a technical or instructional work.

You will be wondering about the rubber duck atop a CRAY-1 being hand assembled in Chippewa Falls. Our passive-aggressive employee dissent became the Ducky Day annual celebration. This book brings you the unusual company culture that kept us in first place when second place did not count. Wizardry came from engineering not magic. We viewed constraints as points of leverage, identifying capabilities before suggesting solutions.

This book is a first‑person historical account of working inside and alongside high‑end computing environments from the late twentieth century.

Through personal anecdotes and technical reminiscence, it documents how software, hardware, and organizations operated in practice, including legacy systems, supercomputing culture, and professional life inside institutions such as Cray Research and related organizations. The focus remains on what existed and how work was experienced at the time.

The material is presented as reflective nonfiction, combining workplace memoir with computing history, rather than as instruction or professional guidance.

How do you teach mastery in a classroom, not as information, but as a way of thinking?  

This short book answers that question through a vivid analogy drawn from a single location on the Kentucky-Virginia border: the Stateline Overlook. By examining its railroad, river, and highway from both ground level and mapmaker’s view, the entire attention mechanism of modern Large Language Models becomes visible. The terrain is fixed. What flows through it changes. That is the core of how LLMs “think.”

From that insight, the book extends into a practical method for teaching mastery. It shows how experts form mental models, make their thinking visible, and guide students through the “question behind the question.” It explains how metacognition, recursive reasoning, and systems thinking, skills once common in Cold War-era computing, create intuitive AI literacy today.

Designed for teachers, computer science educators, mentors, and anyone trying to make AI understandable, this book offers a clear, accessible, and transformational approach: teach students how to think about thinking, and you teach the foundations of both mastery and modern AI.