The Wing-Friends and Other Books

In Blogger's slideshows images are greatly reduced, so lose much of their impact. And captions added to them in Picasa Albums vanish, so the images shown above are: the Milky Way, the Orion Nebula, Earth, Earth with New Zealand circled, New Zealand, Auckland & the Hauraki Gulf, Waiheke Island, some native NZ forest, a Fantail and chicks, various doves, etc.

(If you want to see the first ten images in their original size, they are in a posting made on the 24th of November 2011.)

My book The Wing-Friends is an imaginative tale of a small brave boy, a magical adventure, a magnificent Pegasus and the wonderful Kingdom of the Pegasi. It has been given very good reviews, and virtually every reader on Goodreads has so far awarded it five stars. It is available here. Some of my other writings are available as e-books, such as The Lower Deck, which is an over-the-top take on Waiheke happenings--sort of.

Thursday, 30 May 2013

NET GLEANINGS 007

A new machine-learning algorithm outperforms its predecessors:
In computer simulations the new algorithm arrived at more reliable predictions in a fifth the time.

The strangely familiar browsing habits of 14th-century readers:
Today we constantly switch from one text to another: news, blogs, email, workplace documents and more. But a new book by an MIT professor shows that this is not a new practice. In the 14th century, for instance, many people maintained eclectic reading habits, consuming diverse texts in daily life.

Radiation data from Curiosity shows the danger to manned missions:
NASA's Curiosity rover has confirmed what everyone has long suspected. Astronauts on a Mars mission would get a big dose of damaging radiation. The robot counted the number of high-energy space particles striking it on its eight-month journey to the planet. Another story on the same subject. And another.

New Zealand police ordered to return Dotcom items:
Taken illegally. Nothing, including copies/clones, is to leave New Zealand.