Hi, I’m Kyle Bowman. I enjoy all things STEM. My background is in math and physics, but lately I’ve enjoyed playing with the technology portion of STEM. My main project recently has been building out this website and the surrounding infrastructure. The goal of the project is to take digital text - the ephemeral medium, and turn it into something more robust. Something that can grow with me and become a lifelong resource. Another budding interest is amateur radio, which is commonly described as a hobby of hobbies. Recently, I’ve enjoyed using software-defined radio to record various satellite passes. This includes imaging from weather satellites, slow-scan television, and an FM voice recording of astronaut Jeanette Epps talking to an elementary school in Virginia from the international space station.
Years ago, I created the site just to learn how to create the site. I didn’t expect it to ever be useful, so I picked a name that I thought was amusing. Then, the website turned out to be a useful place to drop lecture notes so that people could find them. Once the site became useful, the name stuck.1
In any case, rocketbowman has grown on me. The name conjures up images of a school-aged boy strapped into a junkyard rocket ship atop a hill. Equipped with a football helmet, a bubblewrap suit, and dreams of the moon, he’s ready for launch.
I admire his bravery. I admire his imagination. I admire his hope.
If I can retrofit the inspiration of rocketbowman, it’s to pay homage to the hypothetical kid on the hill. Godspeed, kid!
The old site is gone, but there are still traces of it on the The Wayback Machine! I consider the 2017 snapshots to be the most canonical version of this early era.↩︎