Of course, I love tools. I also love arranging them, to the point where I came up with a name for my organizing metric: first-order retrievability.

I'm not a sculptor; I'm a hard-edged model maker. You give me a drawing, you give me a prop to replicate, you give me a crane, scaffolding, parts from 'Star Wars' - especially parts from 'Star Wars' - I can do this stuff all day long. It's exactly how I made my living for 15 years.

I had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my 'Creative Projects' folder - it's a repository for my brain, everything that I could possibly be interested in. Any time I have an Internet connection, there's a sluice of stuff moving into there, everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos.

It's a treat to see the sun rise over the desert. What am I saying? It's a treat to fire off a rocket car over the desert!

There's this group online that I frequent. It's a group of prop crazies just like me called the Replica Props Forum, and it's people who trade, make and travel in information about movie props.

From earliest times, humans - explorers and thinkers - have wanted to figure out the shape of their world. Forever, the way we've done that is through storytelling. It is difficult to let the truth get in the way of a good story.

The difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.