User:R Dean Brock
The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022.
R. Dean Brock began his course of formal study at Whatcom Community College in 1987, where he was nominated for membership in Phi Theta Kappa, the national society for honors students in junior colleges. In 1989 he transferred to Western Washington University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree (1992) in physical geography, with a natural resources concentration. His training includes cartography, geographic field-techniques, remote-sensing, satellite imagery interpretation, areal analysis (geostatistics), water resource technologies, ecology and conservation, soil science, and climatology. While at university, Mr. Brock also embarked upon and completed a program of professor-supervised independent study and assessment of volcanic hazards associated with the northernmost volcano in the U.S. Cascade range, Mount Baker - a landform which dominates the eastern skyline of the city in which he was raised, in northwestern Washington State.
Among the subjects of his liberal arts university education are the philosophy of science, courses in the political and social sciences, the humanities, and general physical science courses.
Professionally, Mr. Brock has worked at number of occupations in his adult life. After graduating university, he worked as a horticultural specialist with a community parks commission. He then moved into the area of information technologies, working first as a database specialist and later as a network technician for a large insurance company, where he also put his map-making skills to use, making service-area maps for the firm utilizing Arcview software and various adjunct database software. Mr. Brock later worked in training and supporting end users, at various companies across the United States, in server and software applications.
Mr. Brock has long been alarmed about the increasing popularity of pseudo-science and the paranormal in the U.S.. From 1997-1999 he was invited to serve as "Science Section Leader" for the Microsoft Network UFO Forum, where his official function was to balance-out the extraordinary claims of those within the paranormal community with conventional hard-science ideas. Since then, he has become increasingly involved in critiquing the paranormal community, particularly the ufo-subculture.
Prominent among Mr. Brock's many interests are his lifelong hobby of amateur astronomy, playing guitar, gardening and landscaping, photography, attending concerts, country fairs and airshows, and recreating in various natural settings. Recently the hobby of digital artwork and the creation of "economical, yet interesting and useful" moving .GIF and flash files has been added to this list.
Regarding future educational plans, Mr. Brock was poised to enter a program of graduate study in 1992, but was compelled to abandon these plans for personal reasons. In line with the philosophy that one is "never too young to learn," Mr. Brock has not entirely given up the idea of returning to university to take his Masters degree.
Mr. Brock is currently working full-time on a book which critiques the "paranormal disciplines," utilizing both good-natured humor and critical-thinking.