Here's a CV and resume for you.

This is one smart dude. The prototypical high tech redneck. Rocket City Rednecks is on Nat Geo still I think, and it's a fun watch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_S._Taylor

 

That’s a Fresnel zone plate. I carry a small one as part of my survival gear. Screw rubbing two sticks together.

 

"Rocket City Rednecks" was a gas. Travis and some of his friends would shoot a one hour episode, building/doing something science based. You gotta understand that they all have day jobs, then did two day weekend shoots for fun and some extra cash.

That clip was from episode one. There was war in the sandbox, and they were trying to redneck engineer anti-IED armor. They're on the Huntsville bomb squad's practice range, testing their IED. The project was to build something cheap and fast that would protect a truck cabin. Basically they took two sheets of steel and filled the space between them with empty beer cans standing on end, making a crushable honeycomb structure. Bolt that under the cab horizontally and explode a mine under it. Worked decently well for something they knocked together in a day.

That was the show. They built a rocket and flew it to several thousand feet, made of scrounged parts from a junkyard and using moonshine as fuel. Seriously. In two days.

Just a bunch of good old boys having fun doing science on television.

 

Yeah, Doc Travis gets to play with very cool toys. All those intelligence jobs, too. I bet he could tell some stories.

You don't expect a guy who looks and sounds like he does to have that sackful of advanced degrees.