Thank you again to everyone who spread the word and supported. Shout out to Jarvis Sheffieild and the BSFS.
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Here's an opportunity for illustrators. A mentor of mine sent this to me and I'm thinking of entering, so i thought I'd share with you all. Happy holidays.
-Rob
Here is the website link: http://www.silentbookcontest.com/silentbookcontest/index-eng.html
The Town of Mulazzo and the Association Montereggio Paese dei Librai /IOB International Organisation of Book Towns, with the support of Carthusia Edizioni and in collaboration with the IBBY Italia and Bologna Children’s Book Fair, presents the first edition of the International SILENT BOOK CONTEST expressly dedicated to Silent Books, that is, illustrated books without words.
The 2014 SILENT BOOK CONTEST will give prize money and publication to an original illustrated and unpublished book project that has been created and produced exclusively through narration by illustrated images.. Given that the illustrated book and the visual language of illustrations and pictures is in no way secondary to written language, with a universal power and potential that supersedes any barrier of language or genre, the SILENT BOOK CONTEST competition invites authors and illustrators to think up and design a book conceived exclusively for the telling of a story through illustrated images, on any subject and intended for a wide and diverse section of the reading public, regardless of genre or age.
From the book designs sent to the competition by the 31st January 2014, an international Jury will select from five to ten finalists to be announced at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair during March 2014. The author of the book project selected as winner by the International Jury will receive an award of Euro 4.500 as advance against copyright with regular publishing contract and the winning book project will be published by CARTHUSIA Edizioni. The book will be presented at the award ceremony to be held in Septemkber 2014 at Montereggio di Mulazzo.
Hey folks, Just want to share a free postcard. If you would like one of these, please comment or message me. I have about 5 or 6 left of each, so I want to get them on people's refrigerators. Shout out to all the illustrators on here giving each other feedback and inspiring us to keep creating regardless of how tough the path is. Much love BSFS!!
-Rob
If you dont want to message me here you can hit me up at info@robdontstop.com
December 18th thru the 22nd Squirrels & Puppies Dark Morality Tales will be free for the Amazon Kindle.
In the meantime, I'm still working on "Ruins of the Fall". I have about 14 chapters written so far, making it already longer than my last book. My lovely wife has been supportive of my endeavors. I recently have found out that my wife has actually been paying attention to my work. Before I thought she was simply telling me that my work is good because I'm her husband, but I let her read my latest chapter entitled "The Colored Girl" and she told me, flat-out, it needed work.
The main character, Zisa Francoeur, transformed from a mild-mannered victim to a cold-blood killer far too quickly, she said. Then she dropped the bomb on me. She said that my main character wasn't angry enough and didn't have enough pain in her life. I like to think that I torture my main characters as if I were some sadistic god-figure. However, my wife has informed me that this last story was a little lacking in that department, so I'm going to have to go back and do a major re-write on the chapter.
I feel very good about this. For a while, I was worried that "Ruins of the Fall" might not be as good as "Squirrels & Puppies" because I haven't had the opportunity to workshop "Ruins" but with my wife giving me honest critiques (even though she finds my works disturbing) I know "Ruins of the Fall is on track to be my best work yet.
Thank God for giving me such a wonderful, beautiful wife!
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| Scientists have discovered a code within a code (Source: cosmin4000/iStockphoto) |
While we all know DNA instructs our cells how to make proteins, scientists have now discovered a second DNA code that suggests the body uses the same alphabet to speak two different languages.
The findings in the journal Science may have big implications for how medical experts use the genomes of patients to interpret and diagnose diseases, say researchers.
The newfound genetic code within deoxyribonucleic acid, the hereditary material that exists in nearly every cell of the body, was written right on top of the DNA code scientists had already cracked.
Rather than concerning itself with proteins, this one instructs the cells on how genes are controlled.
Its discovery means DNA changes, or mutations that come with age or in response to viruses, may be doing more than what scientists previously thought, say the researchers.
"Now we know that this basic assumption about reading the human genome missed half of the picture."
"Many DNA changes that appear to alter protein sequences may actually cause disease by disrupting gene control programs or even both mechanisms simultaneously."
ABC Science: Scientists discover second, secret DNA code
IEEE Explore: DNA and Quantum Theory
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| Life on other planets could have been warmed by the afterglow of the Big Bang. L. CALÇADA/ESO |
Aliens might have existed during the Universe’s infancy. A set of calculations suggests that liquid water — a prerequisite for life — could have formed on rocky planets just 15 million years after the Big Bang.
Abraham Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has realized that in the early Universe, the energy required to keep water liquid could have come from the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang, rather than from host stars. Today, the temperature of this relic radiation is just 2.7 kelvin, but at an age of around 15 million years it would have kept the entire Universe at a balmy 300 kelvin, says Loeb, who posted his calculations to the arXiv preprint server this month.
Loeb says that rocky planets could have existed at that time, in pockets of the Universe where matter was exceptionally dense, leading to the formation of massive, short-lived stars that would have enriched these pockets in the heavier elements needed to make planets. He suggests that there would have been a habitable epoch of 2 million or 3 million years during which all rocky planets would have been able to maintain liquid water, regardless of their distance from a star. “The whole Universe was once an incubator for life,” he says.
Nature: Life possible in the early Universe
Physics arXiv: The Habitable Epoch of the Early Universe, Abraham Loeb
Just in for the holidays... Ebooks Galore.
My father found Bin Laden is now available as a kindle download or any other
electronic reader.
Plus, let's get some Jello Pudding Pops in the mix with some interesting
anthology series, called Immortal Fantasy, which is my version of Heavy Metal
magazine. Its an all genre book, so there is something for every fan of all
storytelling media in graphic form.
And speaking of graphics, last but not least is the Little Miss Strange graphic
novel for kindle and nook.
Time for those links, dont you think ?
Of course, these title are available in paperback editions as well but you
can find them by checking out these e book downloads.
My father found Bin Laden.... wait for it...
Get this ebook from the below link....
Up, next.... the poignant story of Jello Pudding Pops
Ah, shucks, time for the graphic novel stuff...
check this bad boy out... all genre in your face action, humor, etc.
Here's the book that started it all...
Little Miss Strange....the world's first black alien sorceress.
link for this ebook is here....
Now that a cool collection of e books... check it out.
Rocket explosions broiled around Dern. He weaved through a barrage untouched, rolled and rebounded to his feet with bracelet arm extended. Plasma bursts discharged from the bracelet stabbing into three TVVs. The vehicles went up in sheets of flame and molten alloy.
Dern leapt dozens of feet in the air, switching his bracelet’s setting to anti-personnel. He swept his arm back and forth and fifteen criminals death-danced amid a fatal shower of particle clusters.
A rocket clipped his right arm turning what would have been a flawless landing on his feet into a spinning tumble. Tungsten shells exploded against his suit, keeping him momentarily pinned to the ground. He unleashed a plasma beam, destroying a fourth TVV, and shot upward as a storm of tungsten savaged him. He gritted his teeth in pain. The shell impacts felt like chunks of hot lead slamming into bare skin. A red warning bar beamed across his view.
His suit in its down grade mode was not designed for battle conditions. Power levels were plummeting with each hit it absorbed, and his plasma bracelet was nearly spent. A rocket struck him square in the gut and the force of its impact combined with the resulting blast knocked him backwards thirty yards.
He needed to withdraw, but not before he took a final shot…
Tunnal roared his frustration. He went through three clips firing his Viper at the highly elusive former SD bastard. He had no way of telling if his shots hit their mark, amid the thousands of projectiles being hurled at a single individual. He ejected the empty clip and quickly inserted a full one. A rocket struck the armored man and the explosion threw up gouts of smoke and dust.
Tunnal ran forward, gun pointed ahead, straining to get a glimpse of Lowtower through a dusty haze. At that point he realized he had ventured too far from the others, that he was isolated, thus making him a very inviting target. He glimpsed movement in the haze, catching a man size shape with an arm raised in his direction.
Pure instinct drove Tunnal’s reaction. He dove left just as a blade of plasma rippled above him, bathing his body in a heat bath hot enough to singe clothing and skin. The ground behind him erupted in a blazing plume where the beam struck. Tunnal lay face down, smarting from the pain of first degree burns. He still held his Viper and swung it in front of him fully expecting to be roasted by a follow-up blast. The smoke cleared and he saw that Lowtower was gone.
Dern ran as fast as his suit’s power servos could deliver. Armor power levels continued to decline. He ignored the blinking warning readings on his display. He already knew he was in bad shape. If he didn’t stop to allow his suit’s vital functions to recharge and mend some of the damage, it would shut down. On the other hand, stopping too soon would allow his pursuers to over take him. Dern kept pushing it, covering much ground in loping strides, gambling that he could make it to the canyon up ahead before his suit succumbed to catastrophic failure.
Explosions large and small nipped at his heels. A file of rockets zipped over his right shoulder spiking his path in fiery founts. Then came silence, save for labored breaths through his respirator.
A cliff lay up ahead. Beyond that a canyon network stretching across half a continent.
Dern approached the edge at full speed and leapt off, tapping into his remaining reserves to activate his repulsers. It was a 500 foot drop.
Power flows ceased during the last 40 feet. His repulsers winked out and Dern plunged unceremoniously to the bottom, deflecting off a slope in the canyon wall before hitting the ground at a flailing roll.
Five hours crept by. The rust tinted sky above darkened to a foreboding blood colored hue with the encroachment of nightfall. The bottom of the canyon was covered with stalactite shaped rock outcroppings, overhangs, boulders and small craters. Many of the outcroppings loomed so tall they could have been mountains in their own right. Patches of vegetation dotted the canyon bottom. Sturdy sprigs in all their hideous glory, sprouting from ground that looked more like gravel than any soil capable of producing plant life. Cave entrances existed at various points along the cliff rockface.
Dern ducked into one of those caves immediately after his short and bruising freefall.
As much as he wanted to find Alita and the remaining sleeper ship crew, extreme necessity dictated he lay low for a while and let his suit recharge.
Hours later, the recharge completion bar on his display blinked. While regenerates did the best they could to repair the extensive damage to his suit, they could only do so much. He missed his SD support techs. They would have had him patched up in less than an hour. There were other things about the past he missed…more than he cared to admit. A quiet posting as a lawman on Ceres 3 would have forever lain to rest those violent stirrings that had plagued him since his departure from the service. Recent events reawakened that monster inside him and he feared it would never be contained.
He conducted a diagnostic. The results were not encouraging. Seven ruptured micro servos, degraded impact repellants from upper back to midthigh, thirteen burnt out relays, faltering power boosters, and a weapons bracelet operating at 73 percent capacity.
Not encouraging at all. But he would work with what he had.
He slipped out of the cave, embarking on a quest to find his friend.
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| Could metamaterial superconductors operate at liquid nitrogen temperatures? (Courtesy: Charles D Winters/Science Photo Library) |
A new way of making high-temperature superconductors that is based on metamaterials has been proposed by physicists in the US. Their plan involves combining a low-temperature superconductor with a dielectric material to create a metamaterial that is a superconductor at much higher temperatures than its constituent materials. The team is now looking at testing its proposal in the lab and is hopeful that its work could offer a route to creating a superconductor that operates at room temperature.
Ever since the first high-temperature superconductor was discovered nearly 30 years ago, physicists have searched in vain for a material that remains a superconductor at room temperature. But despite a massive effort, physicists have not been able to create a superconductor that endures at temperatures higher than about 140 K, which is still 150 degrees below room temperature.
Now Vera Smolyaninova of Towson University and Igor Smolyaninov of the University of Maryland have proposed a new approach to creating a superconductor with a high critical temperature (Tc) – the temperature above which the material ceases to be superconducting. Their proposal involves creating man-made structures called metamaterials, which can be engineered to have electromagnetic properties that are not normally found in nature. This includes negative indices of refraction, which have been used to create devices such as invisibility cloaks and super lenses.
Physics World:
Metamaterials offer route to room-temperature superconductivity
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| Source: PHUTURELABS |
The American Association for the Advancement of Science had an insightful title: "Global Challenges: Sustaining Life on Earth." Some excerpts from each sub link:
Will The World Have Enough Energy in 2040?
By 2040, planet Earth will be home to nearly 9 billion people — up roughly 2 billion from today — all requiring access to energy supplies in order to participate in modern life. We have the natural resources to meet global projected energy demands in 2040, but how to do so equitably and without exacerbating global warming are more difficult questions, experts said at a AAAS event.
The challenges will be less acute in the developed world, where energy use is projected to stay mostly steady in the next three decades. But the next 30 years should see energy demand surge in other countries whose economies are growing rapidly, especially those in Asia, according to representatives from Exxon-Mobil and the Energy Information Administration (EIA), which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy.
Though they differ in their finer points, projections by both organizations show global energy use growing from roughly 400 quadrillion BTU's in 2000 to over 700 quadrillion BTU's by 2040 with virtually all of the increase coming from outside today's high-income countries. At that point, less than half of the world's oil resources will be consumed, according to Rob Gardner, manager of the Economics and Energy Division of Exxon-Mobil's Corporate Strategic Planning Department. The company also estimates that the remaining recoverable global resources of natural gas are enough to meet current demand for about 200 years
Societies' Nearsightedness Poses Main Obstacle to Extreme Weather Preparation
Extreme weather: Everybody talks about it, but human nature often gets in the way of our doing something about it. This was the consensus among scientists who participated in a discussion about "Building Resilience to Extreme Weather," at the AAAS headquarters auditorium in downtown Washington, DC.
Scientists, engineers and others who study extreme weather have proposed numerous ways to reduce the suffering and damage inflicted by hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, deluges, droughts and such. Obstacles to implementing these measures often arise because peoples' perspectives are short-term and localized, while nature's patterns are vastly longer-term and global, the speakers said.
Society could benefit greatly by taking the same approach to natural hazards as that taken by the aviation industry toward air disasters, which means "learning from experience," he said. For instance, if a wing falls off a plane, the official reaction is that "this must never happen again.'"
Promising Advances in Conservation Science May Test Existing Policies
Already, scientists have cloned an extinct goat-specifically, a Portuguese subspecies of the Iberian ibex (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica), said Haig, one of three speakers who joined moderator Richard Harris of National Public Radio to discuss the frontiers of conservation science and policy. The ibex clone, produced after Spanish and French scientists inserted preserved DNA into a modern goat egg and made 57 implantation attempts, died shortly after birth. In Australia, researchers also have so far cloned early embryos of a mouth-brooding frog (Rheobatrachus) that used its stomach as a womb before habitat loss prompted it to go extinct some 30 years ago. Other research teams have announced plans to try and resurrect the carrier pigeon, the woolly mammoth, an extinct type of cattle known as the auroch, and other animals, using a combination of cloning and selective breeding methods.
Energy, climate, biodiversity: three tall-orders that science is up to the task with the noted exception (lack) of political will and obfuscation from our leaders. At issue is the engineered public distrust of prepared experts on science, and their misplaced trust in "thought leaders" that parrot talking points for respective myopic energy industries. Change at this point could affect their business model, and it might. I'm betting with the right incentives, that change could be mutually beneficial: the climate on earth somewhat stabilized, meaning the economies of nations stable as well, thus more with the means to consume responsibly, and would so gladly. Making money on war, misery and social stratification can only go so far (after all, the Earth is only an estimated 1,097,509,500,000,000,000,000 cubic meters), rather large, but not infinite. Especially for 9 billion souls that will require food, housing and employment. Our species will have to become space faring to survive.
It would be a shame our venture into the stars via Mars is an evacuation versus a colonization. The Red Planet's atmosphere is currently too thin for human life. It would take several centuries of Terra-forming to get it habitable. It would take starting that process.
Our planet is our star ship, and our only practice field. It will stand testament as evidence of our stewardship...or lack thereof.
American Association for the Advancement of Science:
Global Challenges: Sustaining Life on Earth, 11 December 2013, Kathy Wren
Some parts excerpted from original posted 17 December 2012, titled: "Home Going."
a reason to read fantasy again By david mccauley on December 12, 2013
I'm not a huge "fantasy" fan... loved Howard, Wagner, Moorcock, but there havent been any in the genre that have "caught" me... however, i found myself loving this entire series... i have read all 3 of the books... i got "hooked" in the first one... pulled in by the second one... but this 3rd one really blew me away... there is an epic "fight" / conflict scene that twists and turns and just freaking exhausted me, when the fight was over, i was as worn out as the survivors...
all that being said, the thing that drew me in originally and pulled me in even deeper has been the politics and intrigue that drive the story and provide a solid and deep contextual foundation for the entire series... i'm looking forward to more...
all that being said, the thing that drew me in originally and pulled me in even deeper has been the politics and intrigue that drive the story and provide a solid and deep contextual foundation for the entire series... i'm looking forward to more...
Rating: 5 Stars.
On a recent trip to Japan, I had the opportunity to stroll through some of Tokyo's residential districts. Through a combination of war, natural disasters and economics, modem Tokyo is a sprawling high tech megalopolis. However, within this city of skyscrapers and gleaming trains, vestiges of the older city remain.
Many temples, shrines and even single family houses in Tokyo take the form of small walled compounds. From a functional standpoint these walls are not really designed to deter a determined intruder, but they generally provide the boundaries of the particular homestead or site of importance.
Importantly, whole communities exist with within arms length of these compounds and one another. Sometimes, the less then 7 feet separate one walled home compound from another.
While the gate in the picture is not likely stopping a contingent of alien invaders, it might prevent the wandering, shuffling type of zombie featured in most fiction.
All of this leads this leads to an interesting thought experiment about the suitability of different cultural architectural styles to resist an encroaching disaster.
American architectural preferences led to wide suburban sprawl. Large homes are placed on large tracts of land, usually without significant walls or fences encircling the property. The same is true from churches is most of the western world. Americans, it is often remarked, like their space. However this abundance might work to their detriment.
Isolated homesteads can be overrun or worse, subject to siege. Suburban occupants could easily be cut off from resources, eventually running dangerously close to starvation while an ever growing inhuman horde gathers outside. You can not eat bullets and gold bars. Eventually, by desperate act or carelessness, the hordes will eventually find entry through a broken window or a battered screen door
.
In contrast, it is easy to imagine a network of makeshift bridges spanning the short distances between Japanese homesteads, temples and shrines. Resources and skills sets could be combined to colonize abandoned neighborhood homes. Eventually a network of homes, roof-top gardens, protected construction sites, fenced athletic fields, and sundry stores could be maintained, cultivated.
Eventually a new city would build itself over the infested ruins of the old, spreading itself out along ribbons of past density. The inhabitants of this new city would use and adapt the machinery of inherited urbanity; the sewers, canals, underground infrastructure, to short circuit the dangers and maintain living standards.
This new city and others like it would resemble Venetian cities crafted over zombie seas.
Most apocalyptic fiction focuses on a return to wilderness; man as an inherently rural being. This, I think, is a uniquely American fantasy.
However, it might be that cities, as they always have, retain their role as the epicenters of human civilization after the fall of man.
Visit us at: www.MoorsgateMedia.blogspot.com
The pointy-haired boss (often abbreviated to just PHB[1] or "The Boss") is Dilbert's boss in the Dilbert comic strip. He is notable for his micromanagement, gross incompetence and unawareness of his surroundings, yet somehow retains power in the workplace.
The Pointy-Haired Boss is mostly bald, except for a fringe of hair across the back of the head, and two tufts that rise to points above his ears (hence the name). Scott Adams has admitted that the Boss's odd hair was inspired by devil horns. He used to have jowls at first because Adams wanted the character to look gruff, but the boss ended up looking dumb instead.[2]
The Boss is frequently childish, immature, ignorant, and rude, yet also annoyingly cheerful and oblivious to his own actions. He frequently uses bizarre metaphors and analogies to "motivate" employees (Adams admits this to be a pet peeve), and on the TV series engages in rambling non sequiturs in conversation. In some strips, when he displays an above-average intelligence, or at least exhibits surprisingly original and cunning (albeit unethical or unscrupulous) thinking, Dilbert calls him a resourceful idiot. (Wikipedia)
Hence, my interest at this phrasing for the article I excerpt and give link to below. The second paragraph in the industry I work explains my management style precisely. I've often, in conversations with subordinates used the phrase: "I'm trying not to be the pointy-haired boss," and among techno-nerds/knowledge workers, my metaphor is generally understood.
How I do that is a balance between a level of direct engagement and an amount of trust in the engineer (that they must earn). Direct engagement is due the emphasis of our customer and their priorities. I'm likely to ask more questions and drive personnel to solutions in that case. I have two questions I pose: (1) What do you need? (2) How can I help you?
I avoid the obvious temptation to micromanage by having my own educational/career goals and blogging about physics. It tends to keep me out of the streets at night...
There's an extensive body of knowledge devoted to the management of people who think for a living—so-called "knowledge workers"—and to the knowledge-based projects they engage in. While this body of knowledge arose mainly from the software industry, where complex projects can be tough to manage and the stakes high—case in point: Healthcare.gov—it is applicable to other domains, including science.
Any resemblance between such an arrangement and your postdoc appointment is regrettable, because the best motivations of knowledge workers—and scientists above all—are entirely different from those of factory workers. Knowledge workers are motivated by the work itself and the pleasure of doing it, by an internal drive to find answers or to make things. As most readers of this essay surely know from experience, anything that undermines that motivation—pressure to produce, meddling by management, fear of sanctions, anxiety, resentment, even gratuitous performance bonuses—worsens work performance. The best approach to managing knowledge workers, then, is to clarify the objectives, provide the tools and support they need, facilitate collaboration, and get out of the way.
Science: Give Science Some Slack, Jim Austin
Business Insider: 10 Best Pointy-Haired Boss Moments from 'Dilbert', Jenna Goudreau
In celebration of the six 5-star reviews Where the Monsters Are received on #amazon, I did a giveaway for the best under-the-bed and in-the-closet monster encounters. Here are the winning entries.
I have a vague memory from when I was 3... I'm not sure if it's real or was some sort of prank. My parents claim it was real. So, for what it's worth:
I was three or four, and I remember trying to sleep but I couldn't because there was this loud music coming from the living room. Every time I snuck out of bed to open my bedroom door the music would stop the instant I twisted the doorknob. It wasn't the music I was used to either... something was different... it was classical: like the music that would play in old fashioned balls. I heard laughing and lots of voices, but no one was home except my parents. Needless to say, I didn't sleep well at all that night. The music didn't stop until the sunrise. It was around sunrise that I stepped out of my room and walked down the carpeted stairs. As soon as I set foot on the hardwood, I felt something wet and icky. I looked down to see the entire floor was covered in green slime. I wasn't scared, but excited. I ran back upstairs to wake my parents and told them "the ghosts had a party last night!" They seemed puzzled by the weird slime that seemed to evaporate when you touched it or tried to save it in a plastic bag. My grandmother left the house earlier that morning for work and said there had been no such thing on the floor... The memory - although vague - still haunts me.
Tina Rooker
My worst childhood encounter with an under-the-bed monster: I was 8 yrs old and turned off the lights fast, running for the bed so that 'he' couldn't get me. I was careful to wrap myself tight like a burrito so that nothing of skin was available over the edge of the bed or on the bed but somehow during the night I awoke from a nightmare so fierce that I had to get up. The problem was that I couldn't! I was so frozen with fear that I was unable to move, barely able to breathe and most definitely unable to scream for my mom. I tried so hard but it was as if my windpipe was being cut off from the monster standing at the foot of my bed. I have no idea how long I was frozen like that but it seemed an eternity! He was staring at me with huge fangs , claws and breath that I swear I can still smell to this day from the foot of my bed and I was completely and utterly catatonic! I have never gotten over the experience and still sleep completely wrapped neck to toe like a burrito in case he comes back, no matter how damn hot it gets in summer (I'll pay extra for the electric bill to cover the A/C).. I just know he's not done with me yet.
Steve Chaput
When I was about 12 my father, who put up outdoor billboards for a living, told me that he would let me choose a billboard that I could use in place of the flowered wallpaper in my bedroom. There was a great automobile ad that showed a family picking up pumpkins to put in the back of their station wagon. A great, colorful Autumn scene. My dad put it up and on the second night I woke up and saw what looked like the face of the devil staring down from the corner of my room. I screamed and my mother came in. Apparently the leaves of one of the trees, shadowed and partially showing sunlight took the form (in my mind) of a demon's face. I had to live with that for the next three years, because my father told me I was 'being childish'.
RJ Kennett
Pfft. Childhood schmildhood. My worst monster-under-the-bed moment came as an adult, having a bad reaction to medication that caused hallucinations. Visual, auditory, and TACTILE. I actually felt the clawed hands grab my ankles and wrists, saw the red-eyed, white-furred werewolf and heard an odd, but loud, buzzing moving around the room.
Now, fortunately I'm an adult, so I figured it was all in my mind and went to sleep anyway - but it was still freaky and I didn't sleep well!
Michael Noe
One of the coolest things that happened was in a house I used to live in. My ex-wife and I are were coming home from grocery shopping and I happened to look into the kitchen window and was quite surprised to see a dog sitting by the refrigerator. Problem was we didn't own a dog. Scared the hell out of me. In the same house I was looking in the bathroom mirror and suddenly saw a man standing in the doorway. He didn't look menacing just stood there like he belonged. I turned around and there was no one there. Loved that house and all of the activity was always fun to encounter.
Susan Pigott
My encounter is not so much of a childhood encounter as it is now. I apparently have a spirit in my house that has a sense of humor. 'He' likes to turn lights on after I turn them off . I can hear conversations when it's only me in the house and he likes to move things around. And I can hear him moving around and on occasion I have caught a glimpse of him. And yes, I realize this sounds crazy, but it's the truth.
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| See Technology Review link below. |
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW:
The fifth generation of mobile communications technology will see the end of the “cell” as the fundamental building block of communication networks.
Today we get some interesting speculation from Federico Boccardi at Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs and a number of pals. These guys have focused on the technologies that are most likely to have a disruptive impact on the next generation of communications tech. And they’ve pinpointed emerging technologies that will force us to rethink the nature of networks and the way devices use them.
The first disruptive technology these guys have fingered will change the idea that radio networks must be made up of “cells” centred on a base station. In current networks, a phone connects to the network by establishing an uplink and a downlink with the local base station.
That looks likely to change. For example, an increasingly likely possibility is that 5G networks will rely on a number of different frequency bands that carry information at different rates and have wildly different propagation characteristics.
So a device might use one band as an uplink at a high rate and another band to downlink at a low rate or vice versa. In other words, the network will change according to a device’s data demands at that instant.
At the same time, new classes of devices are emerging that communicate only with other devices: sensors sending data to a server, for example. These devices will have the ability to decide when and how to send the data most efficiently. That changes the network from a cell-centric one to a device-centric one.
I think out of force of habit, we'll still call it a "cell phone."
Where the Monsters Are Are is only $0.99, but you can get a copy for free. Just join the Facebook event or respond to this post with your best encounter with the things that go bump in the night and if you write one of the best 6 entries you'll get a free copy of the eBook that shows what happens when a man meets the grown-up version of his childhood monster.
You have until 3 AM December 12.
Also available for Amazon UK.
Come check out the release of the Science Fiction weekly Websisode, SILENT THREAT : ANTHOLOGY at:
Source: Science Channel Videos
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| Images by NASA; Panorama by The New York Times The shadow of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, looking toward the base of Mount Sharp, which rises more than three miles above the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater floor. |
About 3.5 billion years ago — around the time life is thought to have first arisen on Earth — Mars had a large freshwater lake that might well have been hospitable to life, scientists reported Monday.
The lake lay in the same crater where NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity landed last year and has been exploring ever since. It lasted for hundreds or thousands of years, and possibly much longer.
Whether any life ever appeared on Mars is not yet known, and Curiosity was not designed to answer that question. But the data coming back from the planet indicate that the possibility of life, at least in the ancient past, is at least plausible.
John P. Grotzinger, a professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology who is the project scientist for the Curiosity mission, said that if certain microbes like those on present-day Earth had plopped into that ancient Martian lake, they would most likely have found a pleasant place to call home.
NY Times: Ancient Martian Lake May Have Supported Life, Kenneth Chang
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