Archives for April 2014

My second novel hit US store shelves (and digital shelves!) today, and I already had the delight of seeing it hit #1 in Western Science-Fiction on Amazon!

Thanks so much to everybody out there who’s picking it up, and I hope you all heart it with all your hearty hearts!

If you haven’t gotten a copy and you’d like to, you can conveniently find:

A print version here.

and

A Kindle version here.

Or of course you can find it at your local Barnes & Noble or other fine purveyors of books and such!

If you’re in an actual, for real bookstore, you want the one that looks like this:

 

Just a heads up that my second novel Morningside Fall is coming out in the US tomorrow, April 29th!

If you haven’t read my first book, Three, you’ll probably want to do that first, else all the SURPRISING TWISTS and things won’t actually be surprising so much as weird and confusing.

Feel free to order them both from Amazon here:

Three (Mass Market Paperback)

Morningside Fall (Mass Market Paperback)

Or pick them up at your local bookstore!

Also, for those of you in the Raleigh-Durham area, I’ll be at the Barnes & Noble at the Streets at Southpoint Mall on Saturday, May 3rd, at 1:00PM, signing books and mumbling apologetically about my poor penmanship!  Please come out and say hi!

A handy device to confusticate and bebother those annoying loud talkers in the public sphere – The Speech Jammer !  A pretty brilliant application of regular boring old microphones and speakers.  It’s basically like what happens to people who call into radio shows and forget to turn down the radio.

You guys!  Earth has shields!  There’ve been, you know, a couple dozen nuclear-scale explosions in our atmosphere from asteroids in the past 13 years or so.

I don’t usually like sharing “scary” news but it’s worth being aware of how germs are adapting to our use of antibiotics.

A fun tidbit about how we game developers use sneaky psychology to affect player behavior (in positive ways!).  We do a lot more research about people than you might think.

This is old, but if you’ve never seen Victor Borge’s Inflationary Language bit, I find it great fun.  (Grnine fun!)

Did you know … ? Apparently cordite makes a delicious chewing gum!  Just don’t chew it too hard or your friends might get quite a surprise.  It’s like Russian roulette for your tastebuds!

A backpack drone, already in use by US forces.  Not really news per se, since the Ghosts (of Ghost Recon fame) have been using them since 2010 or so, but it’s always cool to see reality catch up.

The best use of image searching technology EVER.  Totally frivolous and excellent.

3D printing synthetic human tissue! Baby steps towards exciting and important medical applications for regenerative medicine … restoring damaged organs, replacement skin for burn victims, those sorts of things.  Science!

An academic paper on availability cascades; not exactly light reading, but some interesting thoughts on how social dynamics impact public discourse.  Or, you know, why when everyone else is talking about Game of Thrones, you feel like you should at least pretend you do too.

Support for saving the A-10 close air support aircraft is growing, which is great because it’s an aircraft literally built around one of the most awe-inspiring weapons ever created AND it was the inspiration for Cobra’s Rattler.

My second novel Morningside Fall is set for release on April 29th, and leading up to that the Robot Overlords at Angry Robot Books have seen fit to release some bits of it into the wild!

If you’re interested in a sneak preview, the pages look something like this:

(People often ask me where I get all my ideas for various writery type things, like characters, or events, or technology.  Usually I just say “I read a lot”.  I decided to go one better and invite you all to read along with me.)

Veteran-owned and operated business GORUCK gives a look at their War Stories and Free Beer event, and tells a personal story from a combat veteran’s perspective.

The US Navy released some video of their railgun project using electricity to propel projectiles instead of the usual chemical concoctions.

A fine look at antifragility – things that thrive from disorder and shocks (as opposed to mere resiliency which absorbs shock and stays the same).

No-nonsense marketing and media grandmaster David Mooring lays out 5 sure-fire ways to get repeat visitors on your website.  Handy things I hadn’t even thought about.  (Sorry!)

French scientists use the science of acoustics to create an “earthquake shield”.

University of Edinburgh scientists have, for the first time, regenerated a living organ in an animal.

The US Navy (again!) flew a radio controlled plane using a new fuel made from sea water.

Someone (or someones) deduced the geology of Game of Thrones using “character observations, official maps, and earth principles of the geologic science”.