Kate Rauner's Blog, page 43

What Happens When a Cult Colonizes Saturn’s Moon? Looks Like a Crazy Plan #scifi #sciencefiction #solarsystem #Saturn #giftidea

It’s here at last! A year in the writing and editing. I’m going to curl up in a corner with a mug of eggnog, but please…

Check out my New Release – Titan – Fynn learns his father’s secret when he’s shoved into a stasis pod. He’s not going back to college, he’s joining his family’s cult to colonize Saturn’s moon. Get the book on Amazon, Kindle or paperback, or read on Kindle Unlimited and KOLL.

Real readers love it:

This is an amazing sci-fi that I could not put down. Read it all up in one sitting over a weekend – lost a lot of sleep but worth it. Patricia Eroh

I devoured this book in less than two days. cany58

Feel like you were there experiencing some of the accomplishments, frustrations and trials of building their first colony. There is mystery, secrets, and murder; there are characters you will wonder about their agenda. There is a major tragedy. PC

Fascinating Glimpse of Ancestors’ Lives Exposed in Ancient Writing #poem #poetry #history #archeology #ancient

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Early writing tablet recording the allocation of beer in southern Iraq, 3100–3000 BC

What do you share with ancients,

With people lost in time?

Messages in cuneiform

Reveal that

our worries rhyme.

Advice to sooth a baby,

Betray a brother’s fear,

Invoice your meal’s delivery,

Including all your beer.

Maps to aid your travels,

Proof your taxes have been paid,

Seals that are signatures

That eons couldn’t fade.

Will future anthropologists

Revere your grocery list?

Concern themselves with UPS

From kin they can’t dismiss?

The world was once so different

At civilization’s s dawn,

But we are human,

as they were,

And our heirs

will carry on.

Kate Rauner

Thousands of cuneiform writings remain to be translated so we can understand the Mesopotamians who gave us the wheel, astronomy, the 60-minute hour, maps, economics and politics, and the story of the flood and  ark.

The records give us a picture of day-to-day life in ancient Mesopotamia, of power structures and trading networks, but also of other aspects of its social history, such as the role of female workers.

Thanks to advanced imaging techniques, anyone with an internet connection can now access treasures.

New imaging techniques are making the job of working with such ancient, often damaged texts easier… machines will eventually be able to translate more complex Sumerian tablets, and other languages like Akkadian. bbc.com

On This Day in History, Remembering a Genuine Genius #physics #poetry #poem #RichardFeynman #Feynman #quantum

Fifty-three years ago today, Richard Feynman gave his Nobel lecture on Quantum Electrodynamics. Even if you don’t remember him for his Nobel Prize or for Feynman Diagrams, you may recall how, during a televised hearing, he demonstrated what caused the shuttle Challenger’s disaster with a simple experiment using a glass of ice water.

Feynman was also a fascinating human being and you should read about his life.

But on this blog, I celebrate Feynman for his challenge to poets.

[image error]Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them…

Far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? Who are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

In honor of Feynman, I’m re-posting my poem inspired by his Lecture 1: Atoms in Motion, from the book Six Easy Pieces.

Your cup of tea sits quietly, its surface still and calm.

A tiny wisp of steam is all that’s going on.

Now magnify your vision, expand the scale up.

A cup as big as planet Earth with atoms big as cups.

Tea is a glob of atoms, each jiggling in the heap.

Atoms that are water and jiggling that is heat.

Cup-atoms block tea-atoms, despite how fast they seem.

But if tea-atoms hit the air they pop right out as steam.

Hot tea-atoms jiggle fast – move randomly in air.

If jiggling down, back to the tea, they’re stuck again in there.

Now blow away the steam – atoms don’t return to tea.

Hot atoms still keep popping out; removing heat, you see.

And so atomic theory

Allows your mind to see:

If tea’s too hot for you to sip

Then blow to cool your tea.

Kate Rauner

Hanukkah continues – time to celebrate – #scifi #sciencefiction #giftguide #giftidea #Mars #series

[image error]Dream of living on Mars? Take a scifi journey to the Red Planet and share the settlers’ dangers and triumphs, at Amazon for Kindle & paperback, and at all your favorite stores Read the series

Happy Saint Nicholas Day #holiday #holidayseason #StNicholasDay

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Behind the scenes at my Volunteer Fire Department Open House #volunteer #community #volunteering

It’s been a long day, but rewarding. My volunteer fire department’s new fire station is officially open with our flag raising and Open House. I was too busy to take pictures once guests began arriving, but here are some peeks behind the scenes.

In rural America, we don’t have anough money to hire people for every vital service, so volunteers are crucial. Across America, volunteer firefighters outnumber paid/career firefighters. And all sorts of volunteers do so much for our communities. What interests you? Where does your heart lead? What needs to be done? So – do it!

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Our classroom set up to welcome visitors

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Refreshments courtesy of New Mexico State Forestry

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The flag flies over our new station

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Great wildland firefighting technology – foam! High-tech soap sprayed from our brush engine clings instead of running off, so more efficient than mere water

3,700 years ago (1,500 BCE) did disastrous asteroid destroy ancient cities in Middle East and sow the fields with salt? #history #asteroid #middleeast

Cities and farms north of the Dead Sea were obliterated by an asteroid, a new study indicates.

Massive airburst caused by a meteor that exploded in the atmosphere instantaneously destroyed civilization in a 25-kilometer-wide circular plain called Middle Ghor, said archaeologist Phillip Silvia. The event also pushed a bubbling brine of Dead Sea salts over once-fertile farmland… People did not return to the region for 600 to 700 years sciencenews.org

Here’s a string of videos from the Chelyabinsk meteor that entered Earth’s atmosphere over Russia on 15 February 2013. This was a little one in comparison.

Fifty thousand people may have died in the ancient disaster. On pottery glazes found at the sites:

Zircon crystals in those glassy coats formed within one second at extremely high temperatures, perhaps as hot as the surface of the sun

The flash, the winds, and the heat must have terriferd people for miles around, and brave souls surviving nearby must have ventured onto the blasted landscape. Did those awed visitors lose friends and allies, or competitors and enemies? What would they have thought? What stories would they tell when they returned home and how would those stories travel along the world’s trade routes?

A lot of questions, and I don’t find enough information to align the dates exactly. But, this was the late Bronze Age when early-monotheistic claims of a universal deity began in the general region. I hope someone who knows what they’re doing investigates the possible link. Could the god of the biblical patriarch Abraham, the god of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have arrived on a cosmic ball of fire?

Giving Tuesday may almost be over, but volunteering is year-round #giving #volunteers #community

[image error]In a rural area like my southwest New Mexico, USA, we don’t have a lot of money to hire people. Volunteers – your neighbors – are a big factor. My spouse and I volunteer at the monthly food bank (on a Wednesday in my area) and also in the local fire department. In America, over two-thirds of firefighters are volunteers, and volunteers also manage non-firefighting tasks like office support and maintaining tools and equipment. Whatever your interests and capabilities, what can you do to help your community? You’ll meet people you might never run into at work and do something useful and appreciated. Volunteer.

Touch Down! Seven More Minutes of Terror End in Success for Mars Lander InSight #NASA #Mars #space

[image error]Hurray! NASA scores another landing. Insight is catching some rays on Mars. This is a lander, not a rover, so it’s established in its new, permanent home, ready to study Marsquakes and drill deeper than ever before into the regolith. Congratulations NASA. Can’t wait to see what you learn.

If you’re ready to leave for Mars, you need scifi to take you there today. Join the first twelve settlers and share danger as you struggle to build a colony on the Red Planet. Then read on through generations as settlers battle the planet and sometimes each other as they build lives on Mars. Would you take the one-way journey? Read the series at Amazon and other favorite stores.

Thanksgiving, Family Day, and their opposite, Black Friday – #thanksgiving #amreading #family #Friday

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Yes, wild turkeys can fly – and there are hens as well as those overstuffed males with their fancy tail feathers

Thanksgiving arrives tomorrow in the USA. Join us. That goes for our friends to the north too. Canadian Thanksgiving is long past, but who can resist another turkey?

Being a Thursday holiday, Thanksgiving leads into a long weekend for many Americans, and the Friday after is sometimes called Family Day rather than Black Friday, to get away from all the consumerism. That’s important because Thanksgiving has come to mean More Food Than We Can Eat, so Friday and the rest of the weekend it’s sandwiches made from turkey, stuffing, cranberry jelly, pieces of toasted marshmallow, and anything else in the fridge.

The holidays are definitely heating up with Christmas only a month away.

But on Thursday, eat, relax, argue politics with your relatives, and watch too-much football. Then take a brisk walk in the autumn air. There’s a piece of pie waiting for you when you return.

In between football and leftovers, make time for a short story, or two, or more. Check out my short reads on Amazon – on Kindle Unlimited and KOLL too. Please leave a review! A sentence or two is all it takes to help other readers find me. Thanks.

[image error] Three Fantastic Tales

Burritos and his daughter’s birthday party keep a computer developer from his artificial intelligence project, but he’ll never succeed without them.
A painter ensnared in his master’s Renaissance studio discovers a deadly escape.
For this micro spaceship, one of hundreds crossing interstellar space to search for life, sacrifice is part of the mission.

[image error] Dragon Bones, a Fantastic Tale

Two desperate brothers find misery in California’s Gold Rush until a Chinese doctor promises them riches. They should have asked, at what price?

[image error] Two Fantastic Tales

A trio of physics students find that theory is safer than practice.
A lonely woman on a deadly mission receives a second chance, if she can seize it before it’s too late.