When putting the finishing touches on the SDI project so it would be ready for US government consideration, I also introduced at that time the concept of Upward Lightning. Proposing that research would be needed to examine this possibility to see what methods of protection or hardening might be needed for the SDI satellites, planes, launch vehicles, or other systems; the effects on the sensors or possible false readings, etc.

This idea for future research was based on the history of electronics and cathode ray tubes, and the accidental serendipitous discovery of X-rays coming out the back of the TV tubes. Applying the same concept to lightning.

These discoveries have been given the names of Jets, Sprites, and Elves.
According to a NASA web page, existence of this phenomena was confirmed in 1989. 
http://science.nasa.gov/current/event/essd25sep98_1.htm 

Other links of interest for JSE's include:

University of Alaska elf.html and  sprites.htm

Scientific American 0897mende.html

MIT Sprites_ToC.html 

These other links above were found on a Dutch student web page at: Links
This was found doing an exact search in Copernic.

A general term search for all words in Copernic search engine produced 31 other links.

 
From NASA web page.

 
From U of AK .edu web page.

This address at FMA in Ft. Collins, Colorado http://www.fma-research.com has some interesting information.

Stanford University has a lot of information for you. Especially interesting is the use of VLF and ELF radio transmitters around the globe in a holographic array to sense atmospheric disturbances to detect when these JSE events are occurring. Be sure to visit http://www-star.stanford.edu and http://www-star.stanford.edu/~hail and http://www-star.stanford.edu/~vlf. (VLF and ELF means Very low frequency and Extremely low frequency radio waves.)

The Scientific American article linked above, also mentions in their EMP section, that these circular shock expansions seem to be occurring FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT.

***    VISIONARY

Years ago, someone asked me what I do, or what was my calling? I replied that "Actually I build space ships. Its just that there isn't much call for that, so I am somewhat unemployed or miss-employed, and between jobs right now." 

If you look at the sequence of my life you can see it: put on this earth to build spaceships. Born in what is considered the most advanced nation on this planet and in this part of the galaxy. Probably prevented World War 3 more than once, by offering better tools and a better path to our politicians and generals, better than the course they were on; thereby keeping us from slipping backward. Creating various projects, systems and aerospace craft; what might be called subcomponents or major steps toward real space travel. Worked at Rockwell to help get that Space Shuttle stage of the process going. And now getting the TAV spacecraft built and launched from here in Williston where it was conceived, to get us to the next levels in space travel.

**  My third sci-fi story, DRAGONS NEST, is done & copyrighted. Stay tuned in. **

For those who know what the new medical HIPAA is; you can either thank me or blame me, regardless of what name they call it. This Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (1996) seems to be exactly the project I came up with while doing a management internship at the UND University Hospital in Grand Forks. However, I obviously needed to turn it over to others as I went on to something else. That is probably why it took approximately 12 years, from about 1991 until about 2003 to actually show up in local hospitals. If I could have stayed on as director of the effort it probably would have been done in half the time. My key factors identifying the need for this effort were: hardware compatibility between systems (mainframe, midrange, PC & Mac, etc.) along with emerging optical storage, digital x-ray and other diagnostic imaging technologies, and lab automations. Software compatibility between new and existing databases such as the VA hospital's choice - compared to newer relational & object oriented databases, data communications compatibility, patient confidentiality, data security & permissions, and the emerging importance of the internet, and telemedicine. That was mostly from the computer and technology perspective. From the patient perspective, we at the hospital dealt with a lot of "snow birds" or people that travel between North Dakota and Arizona etc., along with university professor's turnover or transience, and military personnel movements that were all imposing such data and medical records requirements.  Then we also had requirements on the accounting side such as dealing with hundreds of different insurance companies, and cafeteria choice styled personnel benefits packages, and it seemed there were at least two or more medical coding systems that needed standardizing, or interoperability capability. The physical square footage storage requirements of paper records and retrieval needs seemed to be growing almost exponentially, requiring a shift to secure electronic & optical storage. I hope HIPAA works well after the transition phase-in.

What I was trying to promote to the University Hospital, and have the Computer Science department assemble, was what I then called a dashboard. Rearranged for each of the various levels, departments and doctors of the hospital, as part of a real-time scheduling system, with EIS executive Information system and ad hoc query capability - sliced and diced. In approximately 2002, Microsoft announced that a medical dashboard was ready. So my visionary consulting in this area apparently is no longer needed, as stated on the home page. 

More of my curiosities later.

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