Michael E. Marotta as Processed by Google Gemini NotebookLM

I started with the latest of very many resumes that I enjoy writing and I gave it to Gemini to rewrite. I took that new resume and directed Gemini to rewrite it against four posts about technical writing from this blog. This is the AI's first pass. I am editing a new version.

Michael E. Marotta
Technical Communicator & Data Architect

Kyle, Texas | 734-223-9054 | books78640@gmail.com 

LinkedIn Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike7marotta/ 

Technical Editorial Portfolio - https://had.aas.org/resources/astro-history

Observations on Automation, Accuracy, and the Evolution of Knowledge 

Michael E. Marotta is an experienced technical writer and editor. His resume details a diverse background in industrial automation, aerospace documentation, and automotive technology, as well as his expertise in using artificial intelligence to manage complex data. Complementing his formal credentials, Marotta's personal blog explores a wide range of interests including amateur astronomy, literature, and ancestral history. The combined texts portray an individual who balances high-stakes technical accuracy with a deep passion for scientific inquiry and lifelong learning. Overall, the collection serves as a comprehensive portrait of a communicator dedicated to explaining emerging technologies and objective truths.

Created by Gemini NotebookLM
I could talk for 50 minutes about this slide.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE MANIFESTO: A PROFESSIONAL PROFILE

I understand technical writing—procedures, plans, policies—as stories because when a machine operator faces a crisis, reading a meter becomes a socially impactful event. My career is a commitment to documenting the evolution of autonomous and intelligent systems, seeking truths that are perceivable and reasonable, empirical and logical. With over 20 years of experience, I serve as a technical editor and data manager, ensuring that complex systems remain rational and accessible. My expertise ranges from hardwiring Zilog processors in the early 1990s to the ethical "gathering" of insights from modern Generative AI.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHRONICLES OF EXPERIENCE: OBSERVATIONS ON INDUSTRY

University of Texas (Austin) | Parking Enforcement Officer | 09/2023 – Present In this role, I coordinate with AI-driven identity tracking systems to manage the equitable allocation of 13,000 vehicle-specific records for a population of 79,000 users. I treat database integrity as a necessary fact, interpreting complex regulations to ensure the system remains logic-proof and efficient.

American Astronomical Society | Editor | 02/2020 – 12/2024 Serving as a technical editor for a scientific body, I solicited, edited, and approved submissions, adhering to rigorous standards of quality assurance. I built SharePoint delivery systems to streamline the editorial process, ensuring that the history of discovery is documented with absolute data accuracy.

Green Revolution Cooling, Inc. | Senior Technical Writer | 08/2022 – 02/2023 I applied critical thinking to create product release notes and operations instructions for high-capacity immersion cooling systems. I wrote for an international and transnational readership, recognizing that the best way to make a "story" stop is often a well-documented "Ctrl-Z".

Austin Community College | Instructional Designer | 07/2021 – 11/2021 I developed a textbook on Optics and Lasers for the Advanced Manufacturing department. My goal was to create a midrange guide that integrated clear narratives with the relevant and necessary mathematics of electromagnetic radiation.

EOS North America | Senior Technical Writer | 07/2019 – 04/2021 Documenting additive manufacturing (3-D printing) systems for aerospace and medical applications, I conducted investigations into newly developed mechanical, electronic, and optical components of selective laser sintering (SLS) machinery.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PREVIOUSLY ON THE CAREER PATH: HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS

• Kapsch TrafficCom USA (2018): Interpreted complex design specifications for highway tolling solutions, including electro-mechanical and optical sensor systems.
• Carl Zeiss IMT (1997–1998): Translated German manufacturer specifications for high-precision optical gauges used in General Motors quality assurance.
• Kawasaki Robotics (1991–1993): Translated complex parts lists from Japanese to English and delivered technical training in robot operations and programming for Ford Motor assembly plants.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CORE COMPETENCIES & INTELLECTUAL TOOLS

• Data & Editorial: High-Volume Data Entry, Peer Review, OEM Data Interpretation, and Quality Assurance.
• The Scientific Method: Proving intuitive insights through rigorous testing so that others can replicate the work.
• Technology & AI: Proficiency in Google Gemini/ChatGPT, MS Excel, Jira, Salesforce, and Content Management Systems (SharePoint/Confluence).
• Critical Literacy: Navigating the ecosystem of pseudographic simulations and ensuring digital literacy in the age of AI impersonation.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE: EDUCATION

• Master of Arts, Social Science | Eastern Michigan University.
• Bachelor of Science, Criminology (Summa cum Laude) | Eastern Michigan University.
• Continuing Education: Introduction to Generative AI (LinkedIn Learning, 2024); Introduction to Astrophysics (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, 2021).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

COMMUNITY SERVICE & PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS

• Greater Austin Regional Science and Engineering Fair: Administering professional academic peer-review standards for research.
• ArmadilloCon: Planning and delivery committee for literary conventions involving professional editors.
• OWASP: Contributed to the planning committee for computer security conferences.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Forbidden Planet

For the Glory of Old Lincoln High 

Hurricane Harvey 

Love, Loss, and Redemption in Atlas Shrugged 

Answering G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) loved to debate. Among his interlocutors at public forums were George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, and H. G. Wells; he also enjoyed engaging over ideas as a recreational virtue. He wrote 80 books and 4000 newspaper columns. Today, he is best known for the Father Brown mysteries that stream on BritBox. (Originally, the books presented 51 stories in five volumes over three decades.) Chesterton supported liberal and even progressive social reforms but as a convert from Unitarianism to Anglicanism and finally Roman Catholicism, he was essentially conservative. Therefore, Chesterton condemned science fiction as “fear of the past.”

Chesterton writing from www.chesterton.org

To me, his literary style was “confectionary.” He wrote for people who have time to enjoy reading, for whom being in your own living room in an overstuffed chair with a book or newspaper is relaxing and refreshing because it is intellectually stimulating. So, he takes a long time to make a point. There are no punchy aphorisms here.

Gilbert Keith and Frances Blogg Chesterton
from www.chesterton.org

“The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen--which is (apparently) much easier. The modern man no longer presents the memoirs of his great grandfather; but is engaged in writing a detailed and authoritative biography of his great-grandson. Instead of trembling before the specters of the dead, we shudder abjectly under the shadow of the babe unborn. This spirit is apparent everywhere, even to the creation of a form of futurist romance. Sir Walter Scott stands at the dawn of the nineteenth century for the novel of the past; Mr. H. G. Wells stands at the dawn of the twentieth century for the novel of the future. The old story, we know, was supposed to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two horsemen might have been seen--.” The new story has to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two aviators will be seen--.” The movement is not without its elements of charm; there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so many people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened; of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning. A man in advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in advance of the age is really rather odd.

[…]

Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of society. The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity. Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.”

(“Fear of the Past” in What’s Wrong With the World, 1910. (Scanned and archived by Project Gutenberg and also Wikisource).

In those days of cold type before photo-offset, books were reset by hand.
I found a discrepancy between two printings: in this essay
the word "brave" (Cassell, London) appearing as "braver" (Dodd Mead, New York).

"The charge of the Crusades was a charge; 

it was charging towards God, the wild consolation of the braver."

Since my first professional sale in 1973, I have written three stories, two science fiction, one horror. Fiction is hard to write because you have to create people, and their actions must make sense because their universe is understandable. It is much easier to report on what I find: pet groomers, political lobbyists, computers, restaurants, stars, coins, robots, airplanes. I take the people as I find them and usually publicize the best side of them. I also read science fiction and participate in the culture of it through ArmadilloCon here in Austin. 

Before I could read, I watched Captain Midnight on television. The first science fiction book I read was The Magic Ball From Mars by Carl L. Biemiller (Curtis Publishing, 1953; website here: https://biemiller.com/bchapt1.htm.) I was nine. As wonderful as it was in two books to meet a boy from outer space, those were stories no different than Paul Bunyon and Davy Crockett. What changed was my library card. Entering the 9th grade, I traded my juvenile card for an adult card. After a few fruitless visits to the adult stacks and a last brief walk along the juvenile stacks, I asked the librarian for help. She gave me two books in one: When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie. 

I knew end-of-the-world stories as matinee movies about World War III and I knew The Day the Earth Stood Still. But this was different. I could see myself in the story. If we are going to another planet with the smartest people around, I knew some girls I would like to have gone with, especially once we arrive on Bronson Beta. This was a planet with an indoor pool!  (It also had troublesome commies and fascists.) (Book and movie reviewed here: https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2021/01/when-worlds-collide.html)

Closer to this decade, I read and enjoyed The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice. They are also invented worlds where the reader can find a place. Fitzgerald and Austen are compelling. But their worlds are static, not merely unchanged but unchangeable. Elizabeth Bennett does not perceive the canals and steam engines that are reshaping her world.

Gatsby is close to science fiction but unintentionally so. The plot hinges on an automobile accident. A generation earlier it could have been a horse-drawn carriage or any other happenstance for which people refuse to accept responsibility. But it was not. It was a new invention that they could not control. 

by Alexandra Samuel, Ph. D. on JSTOR Daily February 19, 2019
https://daily.jstor.org/can-science-fiction-predict-the-future-of-technology/

Chesterton’s complaint is valid when people are taken out of their social context. He is concerned with eternal moral problems. Those never change. But the external world and our society within it all do change, especially now. And we believe that we have some control over those changes. 

Our choices are greatly consequential. Ivanhoe could help King Richard but he could do nothing about feudalism, even though Walter Scott (1771-1834) lived in a time of rapid and powerful changes. 

The Thomas Theorem of sociology says, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Science fiction gives reality to unreal situations: colonies in space; plastic-eating bacteria; computer programs you can live inside of; artificial super humans with a four-year lifespan.“I’ve seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” Like rockets into outer space, robots, and cloning, plastic-eating bacteria are now real. It is not that science fiction predicted those and multiverses more but that it allows us to model them, test them, plan our responses to them, and prepare for the changes we cannot predict and do not expect. 

For Chesterton, the most important problems were moral, and so they remain for us. 

Science fiction is not a set of engineering drawings—though you can buy the plans to the starship Enterprise—it is about the moral problems that people will solve in new  circumstances. That is the "science" in the fiction as defined by Steven Weinberg who identified the experiment as an unnatural arrangement designed to test a hypothesis. 

Previously on NecessaryFacts

Anthropocene: A Bad Name for a Good Thing

Coins and Stamps

Females and Women

Psychohistory from Asimov's Foundation to Big Data

Aphorisms

I am the point-of-contact for a support group here in Austin. I joined as a member and inherited the work when the person before me had to move forward. This kind of work is something that I do by the numbers: I do not have a talent for it. Discussing the agenda (which is to say, "gossiping") with one of the regulars, they said about another member that the other person seems to be "worshipping the problem instead of finding a solution." I asked if that was a quote and they did not know. 

I do not have a solution but I admire your problem.
https://www.ashleighbrilliant.com/

Googling that phrase brought evermore many hits from after 2018 and fewer before. I eventually found Ashleigh Brilliant, creator of Pot Shots. He has thousands of them, all copyrighted and aggressively protected. Oddly enough, I found nothing by Ashleigh Brilliant in the libraries of the University of Texas, the City of Austin, or the City of Kyle. So, I went to Abe Books and bought five from two sellers. 

https://schaffnerpress.com/books/short-flights/

The Austin Public Library did have Short Flights, a book of aphorisms from an array of modern writers. Ashleigh Brilliant is one of them, so this came up in a wider search. I am reading through that now as I wait for the books.

Right now, I have two original aphorisms:

You can only be as open with others as you are with yourself.

Not much happens in a society that punishes ambition.

In republican Rome, ambition, literally ambling about glad handing strangers to make friends among the voters, was a crime. 

The best one that I learned somewhere else is a post title here: "How do you make God laugh? Tell Him your plans."

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Longevity 

Aaron Feldman: Buy the Book Before You Buy the Coin 

Dealers Make the Show: ArmadilloCon 41 Day 3 Part 2 

Contradictions in the Patentability of Numbers 

If a Philosopher Falls in the Forest …

I thought that I might pursue a doctorate here at the University of Texas because the school will pay for up to 5 credit hours per semester for an employee. The plan died aborning. I sent a letter to the philosophy department and they never answered. While I was waiting, I checked out some books from the library to read over Christmas. Among them were two from the department chair, David Sosa, and an anthology on epistemology by a group of Objectivists. I cannot see myself engaged in such meaningless discussions based on unstated, arbitrary assertions. I actually think well of philosophy and invest time in it and if this is the best that they can do, then I confess to hubris here: It is not that I know more than they do but that I think more clearly.

The Mantis Shrimp sees things that you do not.
It is the same universe for all of us.

When I say “red” and you say “red” are we talking about the same thing? People who are color blind adapt to the world around them. It is only by the application of a special visual test—given to aircraft pilots, medical doctors, and others—that we can establish that a person is color blind. These philosophers seem to be disengaged from the experiential world. Their limiting cases are people with eyeglasses. And they gloss over the problem of what it means for tree to appear “fuzzy” as if bark were made of acrylic sheets. 

Microscopes at right reveal details not visible to
the naked eye. It is the same universe.

Is Perception Infallible?

Consider Salmieri’s instructive example of the myopic man looking at a tree without his glasses. While he sees the same tree he would see if he was wearing them, he sees it blurrily, and this blurriness is part of the way or form by which he sees the tree. As Salmieri notes in his section, “Epistemology and the Nature of Awareness,” “An especially naïve realist would take the blurriness to be a feature of the very tree in front of which the man is standing.” Such a naïve realist is, of course, mistaken, for he mistakes a way he perceives an object for a feature of the perceived object. -- Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology, Allan Gotthelf, Editor; James G. Lennox, Associate Editor; Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies, University of Pittsburgh Press; 2013; page 217, “In Defense of the Theory of Appearing: Comments on Ghate and Salmieri,” by Pierre Le Morvan.

 Onkar Ghate is resident expert in Objectivism at the Ayn Rand Institute. He received his doctorate in philosophy in 1998 from the University of Calgary. Gregory Salmieri completed his doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh in 2008. Pierre Yves Le Morvan earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Syracuse University in 2000.

Orion Nebula (Messier 42) and the Moon and the 
consumer goods that bring them to your iPhone camera.

Spectroscopy kits for amateur astronomers and other
citizen-scientists.

Data available to anyone who wants to explore the 
Universe otherwise unrevealed to the naked eye
(Image at right from "The Revival of Amateur Spectroscopy"
by Maurice V. Gavin. Sky & Telescope, July 2006.

It is not only my Objectivist comrades who are lost in the woods. This passage starts off sounding very technical, promising close analysis. In the end, though, it comes down to a sophomoric failure. It is well known that so-called “natural language” allows nonsense. And this is an example of it.

If philosophers were pursuing new knowledge, they would be formalizing the integration of perception across many transducers from your own senses to the most sophisticated instruments. How and why do all of these outputs describe the same objects? 

“A simple account teaches us that argument validity is a matter of truth-preservation: roughly, an argument is valid just in case the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. A bit more precisely, a set of sentences G of a language L entails a sentence s of L just in case, (for any model M), whenever all elements of G evaluate to the truth (in L, and M) so does s. Then we can say that an argument is valid, just in case (for all models), the premises entail the conclusion(s). On this account, then, entailment is characterized as a relation between sets of sentences and a sentence (a conclusion); and arguments are individualized as sets of premises and conclusion(s).

“But this simple account becomes instantly more complex once we are dealing with inference patterns in natural languages. One immediate problem is ambiguity. For instance, consider the following:

(1)   Ambiguity

a.     If John is at the bank, he will deposit a check

b.     John is at the bank.

c.     He will deposit a check.

“Suppose that ‘the bank’ in the big premise, (1-a) refers to a financial institution and in the small one, (1-b), to the bank of a local river.”

Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Language (2 vols), edited by Ernie Lepore and David Sosa; Oxford University Press, 2022. Vol 2. 7; “The Anatomy of Arguments in Natural Language Discourse,” by Una Stojnic, page 184.

Ole Miss journalism interns working for ESPN use
parabolic reflectors to capture voices on the field.
If a tree falls in the forest, they will hear it.

The failure of so-called “natural language” to explain the truly supernatural is an old lesson.  To hang an argument on a pun--bank versus bank; and no mention of turning an aircraft-- seems frivolous. 

(ii) Yet sometimes men are led by a natural tendency to think and speak of God as if He were a magnified creature — more especially a magnified man — and this is known as anthropomorphism. Thus God is said to see or hear, as if He had physical organs, or to be angry or sorry, as if subject to human passions: and this perfectly legitimate and more or less unavoidable use of metaphor is often quite unfairly alleged to prove that the strictly Infinite is unthinkable and unknowable, and that it is really a finite anthropomorphic God that men worship. But whatever truth there may be in this charge as applied to Polytheistic religions, or even to the Theistic beliefs of rude and uncultured minds, it is untrue and unjust when directed against philosophical Theism. The same reasons that justify and recommend the use of metaphorical language in other connections justify and recommended it here, but no Theist of average intelligence ever thinks of understanding literally the metaphors he applies, or hears applied by others, to God, any more than he means to speak literally when he calls a brave man a lion, or a cunning one a fox. 

“The Nature and Attributes of God”

New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06612a.htm

It is a fact that if all of the boulders, rocks, and stones between Mars and Jupiter were gathered into a single body, it would be the size of our Moon, hardly a planet, and yet we still call them “asteroids” as if they were star-like. The first quasar was identified as a pulsar. And Pluto is no longer a planet. And that is just one science. 

I have several books from the library on genetics. As much as we know, we still describe basic knowledge with footnotes and exceptions. Just for one fun fact: sometimes for a gene to be replicated the transcription RNA must “read” the molecule backwards. And yet here we all are, even if we do not know everything about how and why. 

Science proceeds by accepting ambiguity. Philosophers want to argue it away—in English. If you want to fall down the rabbit hole of analytic philosophy, read what many philosophers think that Immanuel Kant meant by “Das Ding an sich.” The problem is the word “an.” It sounds like “on” but it means “next to” or “nearby. “ Hans ist an den Wandtafel. (John is at the blackboard.) And it could be “in” “of” “with” and so on, depending on the context and the acceptance of idiomatic expressions. 

  

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Galileo and Saturn: Epistemology not Optics 

An Objective Philosophy of Science 

The Scientific Method 

Harriman’s Logical Leap Almost Makes It 

The Big Whimper of Modern Philosophy 

Understanding Objectivism