March 14, 2015

What are you doing for pie (pi) day

This only happens once a century. The date and time come out to the first ten digits.

This calls for something special. Get your (mathematical) freak on, everybody.

No slackers!!!!!

March 13, 2015

A Friday "Feel Good" that we all could use:

http://hothardware.com/news/tony-stark-delivers-3d-printed-bionic-arm-to-7-year-old-iron-man-fan

A little dusty in here.

March 12, 2015

Beloved British Author Terry Pratchett passes away

Source: Agence-France Press, via RawStory.com

ritish author Terry Pratchett, creator of the science fantasy Discworld novels, died on Thursday aged 66 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease, his publishers said.

Pratchett, who sold over 85 million books worldwide, “passed away in his home with his cat sleeping on his bed, surrounded by his family”, said Larry Finlay, managing director at Transworld Publishers.

“The world has lost one of its brightest, sharpest minds,” Finlay said, adding: “Terry enriched the planet like few before him… his legacy will endure for decades to come.”

After being diagnosed in 2007 with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s, which he called an “embuggerance”, Pratchett campaigned to raise awareness and reduce the stigma related to the disease.

Pratchett won worldwide fame and a cult following with his Discworld novels about a flat, parallel universe balanced on the back of four elephants which themselves stand on the shell of a giant turtle.

He wrote the first book in the series, “The Colour of Magic”, in the late 1960s although it was not published until 1983. The 41st book was completed last summer, before he succumbed to the final stages of his disease.

A fan of science fiction and conventions from his youth, Pratchett wrote his first Discworld novel to make fun of the rival fantasy genre — but the target of his satire grew to include all the world around him.

“As all who read him know, Discworld was his vehicle to satirise this world: he did so brilliantly, with great skill, enormous humour and constant invention,” Finlay said.

After her father’s death, Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna referred to one of the recurring characters in the Discworld novels, Death, a strangely endearing creature who is fond of cats — and whose utterances on the page are written in Caps.

“AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER,” she tweeted. “Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.”

- Passion, resilience and courage -

Pratchett wrote more than 70 books over the course of his career, and Finlay said that in the last few difficult years, “it was his writing that sustained him”.

He found it difficult to type and so switched to dictating to his computer, refusing to let his disease silence him.


Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/03/beloved-british-author-terry-pratchett-dies-aged-66/

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An author of great wit and compassion. who taught by using the wonderfully powerful tool of satire.

He will be missed... Greatly.