BLOGS

I repost this poem from time to time to remind myself of why I write... and because I love it :). Namaste Fam!

(for my man Quinton Veal, my children and my beautiful, beautiful writing famiy)

With blood beating at my temples

and horizons beckoning for discovery

land, magical strange taboo

waited for my pen

Miles and Coltrane's nightingales

awoke to trill of moonbeams

and desire

Zora,Langston and Octavia whispered: "We waiting

on you, you better create worlds..."

That's I when I knew it was time to speak

rivers-- funky motifs

rip a piece of soulful sinew

Sweeten it

Season it

cry loud my passion

And shards of gold flecked violet

split the air with sound and fury!

With laughter, love and tears

I touched my lips to them

breathed life into these spirits

freed them to walk across

the page

In that hour liberation found me

In that hour I embraced her

And gave voice to my writing hand

Copyright 2009 Valjeanne Jeffers

Published in Liberated Muse: How I Freed My Soul Vol I

Available at http://www.OutskirtsPress.com/LiberatedMuse

Web site: STEMCareer.com

Well, it's March, folks!  And that means my book, "From Slate to Crimson," will soon be released.  Stay tuned!  It's currently in the "coming soon" section of the Whispers Press website, and will be available later this month as an e-book.  I will certainly keep all who are interested in touch.  Incidentally, is anyone interested in this?  Let me know, and I will personally send you notification of its release.  And please, tell anyone you think will be interested!  

Ars Technica

Ars Technica: Giant NASA spider robots could 3D print lunar base

Space Daily

Space Daily: Space race under way to create quantum satellite

All you have to do is go to www.razorlinepress.com, click on any post and respond with, "Yes, I'd like a free copy of The Prophet."  Make sure your email address is included because that's what I'll be using to send it to you as a gift through Amazon's website.

Description

Greg is a reporter who is about to get the story of his life. The Prophet, an elusive figure who makes predictions about disasters has just tapped him to do an exclusive interview. Except Greg's not really a reporter. Two minutes before entering his apartment, he didn't exist and when he meets the Prophet he finds out his true purpose- to kill the Prophet. But killing someone who is near omnipotent isn't easy, in fact, it takes more than one try even if you get it right.

The Prophet is a half horror, half weird, half comedy that will leave your jaw fully dropped by story's end.

Excerpt

No,” the Prophet materialized out of the flashes- shoeless, in jeans with ragged cuffs and his hands stuffed in the pockets of a grey hoodie.  His beard hung to his knees, but it was edged at his cheeks and jawline.  Locks of hair spilled out of his hood, trailing down to mid-chest.  If it weren’t for the eyes, he’d look like a hippie-ish twenty-something.  But those eyes held the ancient stare of the bug-fucking nuts.  Greg realized this person had the same face, but this wasn’t the man he’d seen earlier in the shower. 

“Where?” the Prophet said.

“The guy… y’know, the one standing right there.”

“I don’t see anyone.”

Blue walked over and grabbed Greg by the shirt sleeve, giving it a good tug. “He’s right here.”

“No.  Sorry, I see nothing but you making the international sign for jerking off.”

“Wha—oh.”  Blue sounded embarrassed and let go of Greg’s shirt.

“I knew Anthony was up to something.”  The Prophet scratched under the corner of his lip.  He looked in the general area where Greg was.  Greg was glad those eyes couldn’t find him.  “Did he send you here to kill me?  He should have told you I can’t die.  I am not a man.”  Somebody giggled.  “Shut up!  You know what I mean.”

The Prophet reached up with both hands and made tight fists around his eyes.  He grimaced, a single, strangled cry coming from his throat as trickles of blood ran down his cheeks.  He yanked his hands back and Greg saw empty holes where his eyes used to be, blood flowing freely from the empty spaces.

“Gather closer, children,” he said.  They all pulled in tight around him and he began reaching out, feeling their faces one at a time.

“Too big… too squishy…” he mumbled as he passed each one by.  “I really should have done this part first.”  Finally, he settled on a face that seemed to be to his preference.  A short, fox-headed man looked nervously right and left, but his body went rigid.  He seemed to be struggling, but didn’t move.

“Now open your eyes… wide.”  Fox-head reared his head back, but it was a far cry from the distance he needed to get away from the Prophet.  He made small, grunting noises as the Prophet raised his hands, turning them so his thumbs were poised directly over his face.

He plunged them beneath Fox-head’s eyes, working his hands like he was trying to work twin combination locks with only his palms.  Fox-head’s mouth was pulled back like he wanted to scream, but no sound came out.  Everyone was silent.  The only sound was the dual squelching as Fox-head’s eyes were being plucked out.

It probably only took seconds, but they stretched on forever as Greg watched Fox-head’s bulging eyes being extracted from the sockets.

They finally came free and he collapsed, his limbs curling up to his torso like a newborn baby.  His mouth hung open in agony, but still he didn’t scream.

Greg didn’t know how long he stared at the manimal on the ground, but at some point the Prophet had put the new eyes in his own head.

“There you are,” he said, looking at Greg and wiping the trails of blood off his cheeks with the backs of his hands.  He pointed a gun finger at him and fired.  “You’re dead.”

Greg felt a flash of white, pain more intense than anything he’d felt in his life and then it was gone.  He looked down and saw a perfectly circular hole in his chest and stomach that he guessed went all the way through.  Something warm and red squished around in his socks.  He looked up at the Prophet, wanting to ask a question, but the words were suddenly a million miles away.

He collapsed.

“Now that that problem’s taken care of, let’s get Neil out of my forge.”

“It’s Harry, master.”

“Whatever.  Just get him out.  I’ve got a schedule to keep.”

Greg lay on the ground, listening to them talk and mill about.  It surprised him that he could listen to anything at all, unless this was supposed to be the afterlife.  But then he opened his eyes and looked at his hand and then he began drumming his fingers on the dirt.

“Would somebody scoop that thing up and feed it to something?”

Feet moved closer to him and then two pairs of arms lifted him half to his feet.

Greg raised his head and saw the Prophet surveying the pit.

“You have everything you need,” Anthony had said.  Greg wondered at that, but quickly realized he had the solution to his current problem.

He opened his mouth, moving his lips and waggling his tongue.  Despite having no lungs, he was trying to speak.

The words came out, but they were thick and unintelligible.  But loud enough that the two people-things holding him heard and most importantly, so did the Prophet.  He turned and let his hands slide from the small of his back.

“What?” the Prophet said.  He had a look of dumb shock, so Greg repeated.

“I said,” Greg began and cleared his throat, “you’re a pizza.”

So-called self-assembly technology. When I saw this:

It naturally made me go back to this:

Engineering.com: MIT Unveils 4D Printing

© 3 March 2013, the Griot Poet

If I had a daughter, she’d look like Quvenzhané Wallis.
And her name would be the combination of my wife’s, Qulyndreia, a teacher, and my own, Venjie Wallis, Sr., a truck driver.
And we’d anoint the creation of the third syllable of her name with the Swahili word for “fairy.”
Flitting like one, eyes beaming, pearly-white teeth, dress of royal hue; rocking the toy "pooch pouch."

And we,
The descendants of diaspora
Ripped from the shores of Eden
Through Gorée Island gates
To Atlantic Oceans vast
Sleeping in bile and filth
Separated from families, children, tribes, language
Piled up end-to-end like logs and shipping crates
Endure captivity, Civil War, lynching and Jim Crow
Repeated in Louisiana
Near the French Quarter where slave Sundays birthed Jazz, Gospel, Blues, Ragtime
During Hurricane’s Katrina and Rita
Tossed over like so much trash
And fish food to “Jaws”...

And we,
Creators of algebra, astronomy,
Architects of pyramids,
Taken to Rome to engineer the aqueducts, buildings, obelisks and modern plumbing
The descendants of 3/5th humanity
Teeth examined like livestock,
Skin lightened by forced miscegenation,
The first thing post emancipation…we went looking for wives, husbands…children.
So, we weren’t looking for disrespect
To our young queen on her night,
From Seth “American Dad,” “Family Guy” McFarlane
Insulting her and George Clooney
Or, the self-important Onion

Of which,

You don’t have to peel too many layers

To see three important things:
1. You entered this life from a woman’s womb!
2. Nine-year-old children are not “small adults” you can insult.
3. It’s never a joke in this American rape-celebrating culture…to insult a woman!

This image shows a computer simulation of the polarized electron-spin density on a plane that contains the Earth's rotational axis and Amherst, Massachusetts. (Courtesy: Daniel Ang and Larry Hunter of Amherst College, more info @ link)

Evidence of a minuscule force that could exist between two particle spins over long distances could be lurking in magnetized iron under the Earth's surface. That is the conclusion of a new study by physicists in the US, who have used our planet's vast stores of polarized spin to place exacting limits on the existence of interactions mediated by unusual entities such as "unparticles".

Physics World: Search for 'unparticles' focuses on Earth's crust

A fun, loosely-related embed from "minute physics":

CNN Inside Africa: Boy scares off lions with flashy invention

I am a science fiction writer with a deep and abiding love for the military/space opera part of the genre. I only recently became familiar with steampunk...at least its trappings, having never read the literature. My first introduction to steampunk were steamfunk story excerpts the great Milton Davis wrote and posted in Black Science Fiction Society.com. Then I read The Switch by Valjeanne Jeffers, an absolutely clever and mesmerizing tale that broadened my understanding of steamfunk. Her story also demonstrated that different authors were free to interpret the genre in radically different ways while remaining within the genre's framework.

Still when I decided to contribute a story to the Steamfunk anthology, I felt a bit out of my comfort zone. Having never written anything steamfunk/steampunk oriented, I struggled with story ideas. So, how did I overcome this obstacle of the unfamiliar? Simple, I reached into history, pulled a figure from obscurity plopped him into my imagination and built a steam powered world around him! Who was this figure? His name was Benjamin Montgomery, a slave who was an inventor. Born in Virginia in 1819, Benjamin was owned by Joseph E. Davis, older brother of future Confederate president, Jefferson Davis. Interestingly enough, Benjamin was taught to read and write by the Davis brothers. He was also entrusted with the responsibility of running the plantation store. This special status he enjoyed in bondage, however, was not his claim to fame.

Benjamin was a mechanic and used his skill to invent a type of propeller that helped steamboats maneuver through shallow water. In the late 1850s, he attempted to get a patent for his invention. Not surprisingly, the U.S. Attorney General's office refused to grant a patent to a slave. When the Davis brothers tried to patent Benjamin's invention, they were denied as well, due to neither being the true inventor. How ironic that when Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederacy, he enacted a law making it possible for slaves to patent their inventions.

I'd read about post-slavery black inventors who managed to create their technical wonders despite the harsh, spirit-crushing racial repression they lived under. Benjamin Montgomery and the many nameless slave inventors in existence in Antebellum America intrigued me all the more due to the absolute restrictiveness of their circumstances. Speculative fiction cried out for a historical figure like Benjamin to make an appearance. Once I made the decision to answer that call, all the literary pieces fell into place, making the subsequent writing of my story a smooth and pleasurable undertaking.

Those of you planning to read Steamfunk, I hope you enjoy my story Benjamin's Freedom Magic. Those who've already read it, I hope you liked it. I'm certainly looking forward to reading Steamfunk from cover to cover.

A bit of humor post sequestration...

His paper, Two Body Interactions: A Longitudinal Study, (link below), is laden with science geek speak and tracks the couple's relationship, including a graph (''happiness over time'') and the all important question.

Fellow physics major Ms Nelan - who said yes - published a link to a digital copy of the proposal on social news site Reddit this week and it went viral, viewed over 1.7 million times with tens of thousands of Facebook shares and dozens of news articles.

The article: With this physics paper I thee...

The paper: Two Body Interactions

Hey, folks!  

After talking for awhile with some of you guys in the chat area, I've learned that some of you are aspiring video game makers.  In case you didn't know, there is a LOT that goes into making a successful video game, so much that you could fill chapters of books with all you need to know.  And we're not talking about knowledge of coding or game writing software.  This is where the web show, "Extra Credits" comes in.  Hosted by game designer James Portnow, animator Daniel Floyd, and artists Allison Theus and Elisa Scaldaferri, this show tackles the deeper issues of video games and video game design, like understanding your audience to tailor your game for them, content, dialogue, etc.  It has been around for about 3 or 4 years now, and has amassed quite a library of shows on a wide range of subjects in the interest of gaming and game design.  Here is the link to the current library, found on PATV, an offshoot of the popular webcomic, "Penny Arcade."

 http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/extra-credits

If you have any aspirations towards video game design, then you owe it to yourself to watch this show.  It's presented in a rapid-fire, funny, and insightful manner, and these guys are very knowledgeable about the subject.  Hope you enjoy, and you're welcome!  Happy gaming!

-Brandon

Wolf tumblr blog

American Institute of Physics: The Wolf is at the Door

1. To think. Critical thinking is defined as "the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness."
2. To help your teachers. Lord knows, they're trying to help you, they're literally betting many times, putting their faces on Facebook, Twitter feeds, news sites and blogs that their districts can't fire all of them at once, and pass assigned standardized tests. Frankly, the standardized tests they drill you on isn't what they went to school for, or qualified to do: they want to teach their subjects. That's why they studied them; qualified to teach them.
3. To help yourselves. Every generation has a symbol of rebellion: pomade grease and leather jackets (50's); Afros, bell bottoms, hippy style and mini skirts (60's); more minis, leotards, wide collared polyester suits, disco (70's); more leotards, leggings, and dance wear, valley girl, preppy, Miami Vice, big jewelry, track suits and heavy metal (80's), more preppy, more hippy, more leggings, grunge look, punk, pastel and hip hop (90's)...you get the idea. This is not an inclusive list, by far. Like your parents and grandparents before you, this too shall pass. You'll get older, get responsible, get hopefully a child when you and your mate are ready by mature age, financially, emotionally...and, you'll have to go to work.
4. To educate yourselves. That seems a restatement of #1, but it's not. Education is: "the act, or process of educating"; "the knowledge and development resulting from an education process." It is sharpened with critical thinking, as you might ask: "how does all this standardized testing eventually get me a job?" "Where are the jobs?" "Are they coming back?" "What kind of citizen is this curriculum preparing me to be?"

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: On 15 February at 0920 local time, a huge fireball raced across the skies above the Chelyabinsk region of Russia. This meteorite then exploded creating a shock wave that injured more than 1000 people.

Physics arXiv: A preliminary reconstruction of the orbit of the Chelyabinsk Meteoroid

It is a special calibre of nerd that knows what a tribble is (a hint: Trekkies). A group of Afrogeeks calling themselves "Black Tribbles" have come together to create a unique radio show every Thursday night 9 pm EST. You can tune in at gtownradio.com. Here is the Black Tribbles page: http://www.gtownradio.com/content/blogsection/59/134/. This week I'm a guest on a special episode dedicated to African American women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). I will be sharing the virtual spotlight with two amazing sisters: Leslie Chapman and Amaliris Gonzales. Our host, Kennedy, has made beautiful images with bios overlaid.I can't wait to be on air with such interesting sisters! Listening to past Black Tribble shows they seem to be lively and full of humor...of the nerdy kind! I will be answering questions and hope to get a plug in for my documentary Black Sun. There is usually a dial in number 215-609-4301 so join in the discussion. Also, you have to appreciate the poster for this special show. Fierce!

It is a great way to end Black History Month.
Here are the details:
Thursday February 28, 2013
9 pm - 11 pm EST
Listen Live at gtownradio.com (Germantown).