Damon Diehl
Author's posts
Aug 16
NAVAIR SBIR Advice: Part 2 of 3
Be Brief [Part 2 of my three-part interview with Dr. Daniel Harris of the Navy Air Warfare Center in China Lake.] The title says it all, folks: Be brief! A clear and concise proposal will stand out from those that press against the length limit. Dan says he receives as many as thirty-five proposals for each SBIR …
Aug 16
See me at SPIE Optics + Photonics 2011!
This coming Sunday I will be teaching a grant-writing seminar entitled “45 Minutes to Impact: an intensive seminar on crafting compelling research proposals” at the 2011 SPIE Optics + Photonics conference in San Diego. It’s part of the free Professional Skills Workshop. For more information, click here. I will be at the conference all week. …
Aug 08
Cool Tech: 2011 NASA Innovative Advance Concepts Fellowships Announced!
Back in May I wrote about the rebirth of the NASA Innovative Advance Concepts (NIAC) program. Today NASA held a press conference to announce the winners. NASA announced all sorts of cool stuff including fantastic science-fiction projects like: deflecting space debris using pressure waves in the atmosphere fabricating spacecraft using 3D printers using metallic hydrogen as …
Aug 01
NAVAIR SBIR Advice: Part 1 of 3
Three GUARANTEED Ways to Fail at Department of Defense SBIRs The Department of Defense has just released the third and final round of small-business research contract topics for 2011. I will be studying them for interesting research opportunities (and maybe some weird ones), but in the meantime, here is the first installment of my long-promised …
Jul 17
Cool Tech: Surface-Plasmon Color Holograms
A month or so ago Lisa Grossman’s article “Plasmons Create Beautiful Holograms” at Wired caught my attention. The article highlights the work of a team of researchers in Japan who have developed a new way to illuminate color holograms (M. Ozaki, et al, Science 332, 218–220). The line in the article that grabbed me was: “In a …
Jul 01
“Weird Tales” Reproductions (featuring H.P. Lovecraft!)
OK, this is totally off topic, but it’s been a long week, my projects are done, and it’s gorgeous outside. (Plus there is also the thrill of scooping Dr. Skyskull on something related to weird fiction.) The folks at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which sells all sorts of clever Lovecraft novelty items (my favorite …
Jun 28
Too Many Tabs
Part 1: In Which I Explain My Tardiness and Then Deliver a Teaser For the past week or so I have been working on a series of SBIR articles based on an interview that I did with my former project manager at Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR). The articles took longer to write than I expected, …
Jun 12
NASA Spinoff Technology: More Than Meets the Eye
I’m kind of late on the uptake on this one, but this past spring NASA put together a competition to encourage 3rd through 8th graders to study how space-science research affects their daily lives. For the competition kids studied examples from NASA’s Spinoff program (see the grown-up version here—great stuff for people interested in tech …
Jun 06
Government Inaction in Action
So, I’m trying to get an EIN (the business equivalent of a Social Security Number). Ostensibly you type your information into an online form on the IRS page, opt to have the letter delivered electronically, and a few minutes later you are registered. Except that the process crashes to a halt with a “technical difficulty” …
Jun 03
Weird Science Facts on Twitter
A huge number of visitors to this site have found their way here because of my article on “Weird Science SBIRs.” I’ll try to keep an eye out for other weird-science funding opportunities, but for those who need an immediate (and daily!) “weird science” fix, you really can’t do better than my buddy Greg Gbur’s …