My thirty-first commercially published novel came out in September 2013. I've published about 5 million words that I got paid for. So I'm an abundantly published very obscure writer.I used to teach in the Communication and Theatre program at Western State College. I got my PhD at Pitt in the early 90s, masters degrees at U of Montana in the mid 80s, bachelors at Washington University in the 70s; worked for Middle South Services in New Orleans in the early 80s. For a few years I did paid blogging mostly about the math of marketing analysis at TheCMOSite and All Analytics, and lately I've been covering tech, especially space, stories in the Government section of Information Week. If any of that is familiar to you, then yes, I am THAT John Barnes. There are also at least 60 Johns Barneses I am not. Among the more interesting ones I am not:1. the Jamaican-born British footballer who scored that dramatic goal against Brazil2. the occasional Marvel bit role who is the grandson of Captain America's sidekick3. the Vietnam-era Medal of Honor winner4&5. the lead singer for the Platters (and neither he nor I is the lead singer for the Nightcrawlers)6.the Australian rules footballer7. the former Red Sox pitcher8. the Tory MP9. the expert on ADA programming10&11. the Cleveland-area member of the Ohio House of Representatives (though we're almost the same age and both grew up in northern Ohio) who is also not the former member of the Indiana House that ran for state senate in 2012 (one of them is a Democrat, one a Republican, and I'm a Socialist)12. the former president of Boise State University13. the film score composer14. the longtime editor of The LaTrobe Journal15. the biographer of Eva Peron16. the manager of Panther Racing17. the British diplomat (who is not the Tory MP above)18. the conservative Catholic cultural commentator (now there's an alliterative job)19. the authority on Dante 20. the mycologist21. the author of Marketing Judo (though I have an acute interest in both subjects)22. the travel writer23. the author of Titmice of the British Isles24. the guy who does some form of massage healing that I don't really understand at all25. the corp-comm guy for BP (though I've taught and consulted on corp-comm)26. the film historian, 27. the Pittsburgh-area gay rights activist (though we used to get each others' mail)28. the guy who skipped Missoula, Montana on bad check charges just before I moved there29. the policeman in Gunnison, Colorado, the smallest town I've ever lived in, though he busted some of my students and I taught some of his arrestees30. the wildlife cinematographer who made Love and Death on the Veldt and shot some of the Disney True Life Adventures ("Hortense the Presybterian Wombat" and the like) or 31. that guy that Ma said was my father.And despite perennial confusion by some science fiction fans and readers, I'm not Steve Barnes and he's not me, and we are definitely not related, though we enjoy seeing each other and occasionally corresponding (not often enough).I used to think I was the only paid consulting statistical semiotician for business and industry in the world, but I now know four of them, and can find websites for about ten more. Semiotics is pretty much what Louis Armstrong said about jazz, except jazz paid a lot better for him than semiotics does for me. If you're trying to place me in the semiosphere, I am a Peircean (the sign is three parts, ), a Lotmanian (art, culture, and mind are all populations of those tripartite signs) and a statistician (the mathematical structures and forms that can be found within those populations of signs are the source of meaning). The branch in which I do consulting work is the mathematics and statistics of large populations of signs, which has applications in marketing, poll analysis, and annoying the literary theorists who want to keep semiotics all to themselves.I have been married three times, and divorced twice, and I believe that's quite enough in both categories. I'm a hobby cook, sometime theatre artist, and still going through the motions after many years in martial arts.