Dana Paxson
Dana Paxson writes science fiction, poetry, essays on science, essays on religion, and much more. His stories were published in Science Fiction Age magazine and in Scorpius Digital Publishing’s online venue. Hundreds of people follow his public Facebook postings and commentary on a wide range of topics, and often repost him.
His career spans a lifetime of computing, beginning with assembly-language code for second-generation mainframes all the way to work in a full spectrum of Web languages, including JavaScript, HTML, and Python. He is named as inventor on three corporate patents in telephony applications, he holds five of his own patents in e-book innovations, and offers several invention disclosures for e-book extensions for learning and other applications.
His science fiction novel served as the stimulus for his textual, programming, and graphic design work, in both electronic publishing and virtual worlds such as Second Life and Kitely. His novel, titled “Descending Road”, may be accessed and read directly on his Website, and he has incorporated elements of that novel in his Kitely virtual world of Tarnus, where visitors can interact with the novel itself while traversing some of its settings.
He is a member of the Baha’i Faith, and has written numerous essays on its themes, topics, and connections with science and society. He interacts often with Baha’i scholars on the themes and implications of the faith’s teachings. A copy of the existing manuscript for a book being developed for general readers has been deposited in an international Baha’i archive for scholarly study.
He holds an M.A. and a B.A. in mathematics from SUNY, and a B.S. in Design (art) from the University of Michigan. He has taught diverse online courses, including a course on Cubism, a course on J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and a course on how to think like a Leonardo da Vinci. He has worked for patent attorneys and law firms as a patent clerk, drafting patent specifications, claims, and drawings for inventors seeking patents.
His online presence in the social media besides Facebook includes his Website and his blogs. One blog addresses topics of global concern, another looks into various Baha’i themes, and the third serves as a repository for articles that extend or amplify various themes in the book being developed. Several articles already in place on this third blog offer entertaining and challenging ideas that connect with themes of the book. The book itself provides hypertext links to some of these articles.
He studies mathematics, medieval and modern poetry, astrophysics, molecular neurobiology, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and a few languages.
He has acted, sung, and danced in Gilbert and Sullivan productions, created abstract-constructionist works of art, and designed and built monster spreadsheet models of large-scale computer systems.
Watching him, his wife is never bored. Neither are his friends. Neither is anyone else.