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.

Tuesday, 30 July 2013

NET GLEANINGS 048

Beam me up, Scotty, is impossible, unless you are going to live quadrillions of years:
'...to complete a fully successful human teleportation from Earth to space... assuming the bandwidth is 29.5 to 30 GHz... would require up to 4.85x10^15years. The universe is thought to be around 14 billion years old (14x10^9 years), so it would take around 350,000 times longer than the age of the universe to transport the information of a single human--it would be quicker to walk!'

The arithmetic of gun-control says limiting weapons lowers the death-rate:
Should we act surprised? 'The duo reviewed available data stretching as far back as World War I, then drew up equations to compute whether policies ranging from a total firearm ban to "arm everyone" increase or decrease homicides. After running the numbers, they found that in more common domestic and one-on-one crimes, reduced legal gun availability--if properly enforced--is likelier to lower deaths.'