User:Tom Cool

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Tom Cool is a true name. (Or, true enough: "Thomas Clark Cool" is the absolute truth.)

In Brief

Short bio

I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1954, when the Earth had only one satellite. I grew up in Rennerdale, a small, peaceful town nestled in an Appalachian valley. It was an anarchic paradise, with no crime, police, traffic lights or any apparent government, although there was a volunteer fire department down by the pond.

That, and a huge Nike missile site that loomed on the western ridge. Its giant radar rotated above the town for most of my childhood. The Nike site's mission was to shoot down Soviet bombers before they could nuke Pittsburgh.

At the age of fifteen, I wrote my first science fiction novel, SENTINELS, which has since been lost in fire.

In 1976, I graduated from Penn State's creative writing program with honors, in the honors program of English. Thus prepared for life, for the next few years, I worked as a hod carrier in northern Ohio and backpacked throughout north and central America, eventually ending up in the Guatemalan jungle with no money and no official papers. How I got home from there is another story.

In 1979, for a variety of reasons, I joined the United States Navy. During my naval career, I served at stations in Denver, Norfolk, Panama City, Monterey, Pearl Harbor, Alameda, Washington D.C. and Miami. I made four deployments in aircraft carrier battle groups to the Mediterranean, the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Gulf.

The Navy treated me well, sending me to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where in 1987, I earned a Master of Science in Computer Science. Later I worked as an agent of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Office of Naval Intelligence, developing software in support of military intelligence analysis. My final tour of duty was as the Deputy Director of Intelligence for Plans and Programs, United States Southern Command. I retired a commander in 1999.

After taking a year off, I began working as a computer engineer for The MITRE Corporation, a not-for-profit company.

Academic background

Work history

Areas of expertise

Publications

  • Science Fiction novels:
    • INFECTRESS, Baen, 1997
    • SECRET REALMS, Tor, 1998
    • SOLDIER OF LIGHT (with John de Lancie), Baen, 1999
  • Technical:
    • Co-Authored MITRE Technical Letters:
      • "eXtensible Markup Language (XML) Exports from Relational Databases," 2005
      • "Data Model Issues in a Database of Note," 2005
      • "Analytical Tools and Data Sources Survey," 2006
      • "Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Cross-Wiki Replication," 2007
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