What do you do?
I never know what to say when people ask what I do. When I was an Air Traffic Controller, the answer was straightforward but incomplete. It rarely touched upon my passion for creation, disassembly, innovation, and more. If you’re following my journey here, I suspect you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Career
My career trajectory took shape around significant commitments to public service, initially through the Air Force’s Air Traffic Control program and later with the FAA, dedicating years to the complex air traffic control field. I served a total of 17 years in seven airports across four countries. My role extended from the Air Force to SRC/SPAWAR in Antarctica and then to the FAA, where I worked for 11 years before medically retiring.
This path laid a robust foundation in both military and government sectors, where I continually explored and innovated, often around computers. These roles, demanding as they were, limited my ability to pursue traditional academic paths in science and technology. Yet, they provided me with unique perspectives and skills, setting the stage for my later ventures.
Side note: Throughout my career journey, I attended night school at every base and airport where I was stationed. After many years, I was able to pull it all together around the time internet colleges started to become a thing, and I achieved a Bachelor of Science in Business at the University of Phoenix. Today, I am seriously considering law school, I will write about that decision as it develops.
Post Career
Post-retirement, I ventured into entrepreneurship, leveraging my skills and interests in diverse fields. Several projects I was already working on had taught me enough to start a massive (for me) research and development project that lasted about 3 years. This R&D project aimed to study the power, heat transfer properties, and airflow of a Bitcoin mine that I started in my garage but ended up on an abandoned floor in a shipyard building, a bold step that taught me about success and failure.
The Bitcoin mining R&D experience evolved into my first service-side business: to repair the specialized equipment and consult on the many issues that were and are presently found in that industry.This business fared well and even thrived for two+ years until I decided to pass the torch.
Today, I am preparing for government contracts in research and development while diving into a major solar and off-grid living project.
I Use The Scientific Method
Despite not holding formal scientific qualifications, I am willing to share that the cost of my extensive self-directed experimentation has exceeded $300,000 to date. I hypothesize my investments are somewhat akin to the total tuition one would pay to be awarded a PhD.
I do not consider myself to be equal to a PhD. Respectfully, I missed out on quite a bit of excellent knowledge. I have an awareness of the techniques and methods that formal education could have offered me. There is a universe of knowledge in academic settings that I haven’t experienced firsthand—structured debates, guided experiments, and peer collaborations that could have enriched my understanding further.
Yet, I’ve tried to mitigate these gaps through rigorous application of the scientific method and continuous learning. Regardless, I use my knowledge of the scientific method for most of what I do, affirming my claim to be a lay scientist in practice, if not in the title.
- Ask a question and take a guess at an answer (hypothesize)
- Test the answer (experiment)
- Observe and Record (I love spreadsheets and now, in part, this blog)
- Try to poke holes in the documentation (Analyze)
- Settle on the best explaination (conclude)
- Rinse and repeat if you can’t settle on said conclusion.
The Future
Certainly not unique, my curiosity and inclination to build emerged early. At nine, I designed a match stick shooter on graph paper— then, I built it into reality over a week …not exactly a novel invention, but a significant personal discovery at the time. Early experiences with design and iteration have permeated my endeavors, from music to mechanics.
Looking to the future, my interests range from going to law school to on-demand manufacturing and establishing complete in-house supply chains –to developing websites, designing clothing and art –to exploring digital realms like Roblox game development and podcasting.
Doing all of this is the natural evolution of things for a guy like me. The World now has AI and much like other time-saving technologies, people like me soak it up and are trying force their way into new areas that simply weren’t possible for him or her before.
This new era has been transformative for me; AI has been acting as an on-call assistant, enhancing my creative output and my capacity to manage multiple interests. Even now, I am using an app called “Grammarly” to fix this article’s grammar and spelling mistakes.
This blog will document all of these projects, exploring hypotheses and documenting the journey through the lens of the scientific method. Plus, I plan on writing down some other observations along the way, like the best place to get a sandwich is in Charleston.
The Notes of B.D. Garman
I will aim to chronicle not just the outcomes but also the process of my diverse projects. Whether you’re interested in technology, sustainability, or innovation intertwined with multiple fields, I invite you to join me as an observer and perhaps a collaborator in some instances.