O.C. Heaton's Blog, page 10
June 22, 2011
What would you do with $56 billion?
Bill Gates was in London last week to promote, amongst other things, The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation conference. It is a key focus area for Bill Gates' own charity, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which aims to improve global health by eradicating common killers such as enteric and diarrhoeal diseases, HIV, AIDS, malaria, pneumonia and tuberculosis.
Bill Gates has an estimated worth of $56 billion. To this day he has given $28 billion to organisations...
June 20, 2011
Welcome to the Midsummer's Eve Giveaway Hop!
Welcome to the Midsummer's Eve Giveaway Hop!
A Rush of Green is one of 200+ blogs participating in the Midsummer's Eve Giveaway Hop! Each blog is offering a book-related giveaway and we have all joined together so you can easily hop from one giveaway to another and win plenty of book goodies.
THE PRIZE: A Rush of Green will be giving away copies of sci-fi thriller, The Human Race, to three lucky winners.
Ever had a secret so big that your very...
June 17, 2011
Carbon emissions: prepare for a carbon-choked future
Have you seen the latest carbon emissions data released by the International Energy Agency? Unfortunately it makes for depressing reading. After a slight reduction in carbon emissions in 2009, carbon emissions surged by 5% in 2010 to reach an almighty 31.6 gigatonnes. So much for the worst recession in 80 years, which was supposed to cut our carbon emissions and suppress our energy usage!
A gigatonne sounds big, very big, but I can never really appreciate the scale of certain m...
June 12, 2011
Harold Haw: a gentle, remarkable life
My grandpa died this week. He was 101. A remarkable age for a remarkable man.
For almost 98 of those years he lived a healthy, illness-free life. In fact he was still driving his car at 97, just before he was stopped on the Inner Ring Road in Leeds for doing nearly 90 miles per hour! Perhaps he was just trying to drive his age, I don't know, but the police did suggest that we encourage him to hang up his racing skins. He did this, like he did everything he did in life, with...
June 3, 2011
Why increased life expectancy isn't all that
I'm currently reading Michio Kaku's Physics of the Future, which examines the possibility that average life expectancy could reach 150 within the next 100 years. I have mixed feelings about this.
If we could keep our mental and physical health as we got older, there would of course be some upsides to extending our life expectancy. Michio Kaku's book makes the point that this will happen – and just imagine all the things we could achieve.
As a writer, my output could be truly...
May 26, 2011
Beware the patent troll
I hadn't heard of a "patent troll" until last week and in one sense I wish I still hadn't.
For those who don't know, a patent troll is described as "a pejorative term for a person or company that enforces its patents against one or more alleged infringers in a manner considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic, often with no intention to manufacture or market the patented invention."
My research into the numerous different patent trolls swallowed up more than half a day of...
May 24, 2011
Welcome to the Splash into Summer Giveaway Hop!
Welcome to the Splash Into Summer Giveaway Hop!
A Rush of Green is one of 300+ blogs participating in the Splash Into Summer Giveaway Hop! Each blog is offering a book-related giveaway and we have all joined together so you can easily hop from one giveaway to another and win plenty of book goodies.
THE PRIZE: A Rush of Green will be giving away copies of sci-fi thriller, The Human Race, to three lucky winners.
Ever had a secret so big that your very...
May 23, 2011
O.C. Heaton in the Yorkshire Evening Post
I was recently interviewed by Rod McPhee of the Yorkshire Evening Post, about
The Human Race
and my decision to move from New York City to my hometown of Leeds, UK. The full interview is below:
This Life
Leeds People on love, life and everything
FORMER attorney OC Heaton was born and bred in Leeds but left for the bright lights of the New York legal world when he was just 23.
After seven years he returned to his home city, swapping a pad in Manhattan for a family home in...
May 18, 2011
Do we have a "green government" or a "greenwash government"?
Our "green government" is in the news again. I was pleasantly surprised this weekend when I read that the Cabinet had finally agreed to a deal to slash the UK's carbon emissions.
My first reaction?
"It's about time."
For all its aspirations to be a green government, the Coalition was in danger of losing credibility on this front, having made such a big fuss about its green proposals during the General Election.
It is clearly a huge step in the right direction for the environment. ...
May 15, 2011
Do you have a Memory Palace?
Here's a question for all authors out there. Do you ever struggle to remember the characters in your books? What about those incidental characters, created on the hoof?
I have to confess that I sometime struggle, particularly once the book is published and I've moved onto the next story. This was brought home to me most forcibly this week when I was preparing for an interview on BBC Radio Leeds with Adam Pope to promote The Human Race. While gathering my thoughts and ideas...
