A.C. Flory's Blog, page 122
August 16, 2016
The Methuselah Grove~
The world truly is full of wonders and these thousands [yes – MULTIPLE thousands] of year old trees are amazing. They make our technological world and everything in it feel…irrelevant.
The Great Basin Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in The White Mountains of California/Nevada have the world’s oldest living non-clonal organisms, ancient bristlecone pine trees. Non-clonal means these trees are not genetic duplicates of a parent organism, but are in fact, original organisms.
The oldest known tree in the basin is 5,065 years old and was germinated in 3051 BC. This tree started growing before the first pyramid was built-in Egypt.
Another, Methuselah, is 4,848 years old.
The White Mountains run parallel to the Sierras in the west and Death Valley in the east.
White Mountain is a sister peak to Mt. Whitney, the highest mountain in the continental US. When you hike here you look to your left at almost eye level with Mt. Whitney, and to your right at the lowest non-submerged place in North America, Death Valley.
In the dolomite covered White Mountains these ancient organisms continue to…
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August 15, 2016
#Cicret wrist projector/smartphone
When I began writing Innerscape, I had a lot of fun dreaming up the kind of tech I, personally, would like to use.
One of those wanna-have gadgets was something I called the ‘chrono’. Essentially, my idea was that a truly useful wearable would be able to project an image or a holo above the wrist so that short-sighted people wouldn’t have to squint all the time. Well….
The Cicret bracelet [pronounced ‘secret’] literally projects an image of your smartphone onto your wrist. You can then manipulate that ‘image’ exactly as you would a real, physical smartphone.
Not exactly as good as my chrono but…in Innerscape the chrono isn’t invented until about 2060. Colour me egg-on-face. But also happy. My thanks to the Offspring for this tip.
cheers
Meeks
p.s. Sorry, you can’t buy one yet, but one day you’ll be able to select a bracelet from ten gorgeous colours, including fire engine red. Get in the queue behind me.
August 11, 2016
This Incredible Wooden Book Is a Series of Puzzles That Have to Be Solved to Continue Reading
Oh now this…this is so wonderful I’m having trouble picking my jaw up off the floor. I WANT!!!!!!!!!!!
Merging two of the ultimate pastimes books and puzzles the Codex Silenda has to be physically solved in order to read it. And no, these aren’t simple word games and math problems, but rather deviously complicated mechanical puzzles crafted from laser-cut wood
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August 6, 2016
I’ve just written the Epilogue to Innerscape…and the story isn’t even finished yet!
As a pantster, I rarely outline, but as I’ve mentioned in the past, StoryBox has changed the way I write. Instead of writing every story as a long, linear progression, as I used to do in Word, I now write in chapters and scenes. What this means is that when I get a flash of inspiration, I can bung it in a new chapter without worrying about all the bits in between that still have to be written.
In the case of the Epilogue, I still have about 3 critical chapters to write before the story actually reaches ‘the end’, but the ideas I had this morning were too good to just note down for future reference. Dot points really don’t allow the nuanced feelings of a scene to come through, so I thought ‘why not’ and went for it.
Whether this out-of-sequence writing turns out to be useful in the end, I don’t know, but I have a funny feeling the 1600+ words I wrote today will not end up on the cutting room floor.[image error]
-happy dance-
Meeks
Filed under: Innerscape Tagged: Innerscape, science-fiction, software, StoryBox, technique, Word, writing
August 3, 2016
#amlistening to Gift of Life by Thomas Bergersen
I’m on a roll with Innerscape today so I thought you might like to share the music that’s fueling the writing :
The song is ‘Gift of Life’ and it’s from the Album ‘Illusions’ by Thomas Bergersen. For those who don’t know this incredibly talented composer, he’s one half of the amazing duo behind the music of Two Steps From Hell.
If you’re not a classical music fan please be patient until about 1:20. That is when the theme kicks in and it is GLORIOUS!
Vaguely [very vaguely] reminiscent of Massenet’s Meditation deThais :
[Just by the by…the conductor is my favourite tenor of all time – Placido Domingo!]
and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings [used in the movie Lorenzo’s Oil] :
the theme from Gift of Life is intensely emotional yet uplifting at the same time.
Okay, back to work,
Meeks
Filed under: Music Tagged: Adagio-for-Strings, Domingo, Gift-of-Life, Illusions, Lorenzo's-oil, Massenet, Meditation-de-Thais, Samuel-Barber, Sarah-Chang, Thomas-Bergersen, Two-Steps-From-Hell, youtube
August 1, 2016
#Dollhouse – Melanie Martinez
My thanks to the Offspring for this one:
I don’t normally listen to ‘pop’ but this video clip is so clever I just had to share. It tells a story, a dark one, while lulling the conscious mind with a melody that is almost upbeat.
Enjoy,
Meeks
Filed under: Music Tagged: clever, dark, Dollhouse, Martinez, Melanie, music, story, video
A most unexpected gift!
I published Vokhtah in 2013 and have done little marketing since, so to have one of my favourite reviews resurface out of the blue is gobsmackingly wonderful!
The site is Peer Reviewed and you can find the review here:
Vokhtah
The reviewer is Jonathan Brazee, a fellow sci-fi writer and his review nailed it.
July 31, 2016
Natural language processing – or the future of chatbots
Natural language is what we humans use with each other, and it is not always logical and straightforward. That is why we have had to learn to rephrase our queries so Papa Google knows what we mean.
But most people don’t know how to search effectively because they are still stuck in natural language. Hence the rise of chatbots.
For now, chatbots are stupid, irritating pieces of code that work by leading us through a long, tedious process of questions and answers. If this article is right, however, chatbots of the future will use natural language processing [NLP] to work out what we want, and give it to us with the minimum of fuss and bother [on our part]. Machines getting smarter? Or humans dumbing down?
Meeks
Chatbots don’t quite understand us yet. We speak and they process our commands. In a chatbot like Yahoo Weather, you ask about the forecast in Seattle and the bot returns an answer. Natural Language Processing or NLP can read what you say and interpret some meaning. You don’t want to know the current temp in…
via Pat.ai chat technology is a step in the right direction — VentureBeat
Filed under: technology, Uncategorized Tagged: chatbots, Google, language, natural, NLP, processing, search, Venture-Beat
July 30, 2016
July 27, 2016
The Real Islam
Yesterday (July 26) in the northwest of France, two Muslim terrorists attacked a Catholic church, taking nuns hostage and killing an elderly priest, before they themselves were shot dead by police. It certainly fits the pattern of ISIL violence: vile, shocking, made for media, and—something we talk about less—standing in stark opposition to the very…
via ISIL’s violence against Christians isn’t just un-Islamic, it’s blasphemy — Quartz
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