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.

Monday 3 June 2013

NET GLEANINGS 009

Electric car fallacies and fables:
'The more I go into the pros and cons of electricity versus the internal-combustion engine purely from the point of view urban transport and of relative carbon footprints, toxic emissions and so forth, the more it becomes clearer to me that in spite of electricity being "dirty", the whole process of getting a vehicle to get from point A to point B leaves the electric vehicle a winner by a large margin.'

Blood-vessels in the eye linked With IQ and cognitive function:
'Having wider retinal venules was linked with lower IQ scores at age 38, even after the researchers accounted for various health, lifestyle, and environmental risk factors that might have played a role. Individuals who had wider retinal venules showed evidence of general cognitive deficits, with lower scores on numerous measures of neurospsychological functioning, including verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, working memory, and executive function. Surprisingly, the data revealed that people who had wider venules at age 38 also had lower IQ in childhood, a full 25 years earlier.'

He said 'one small step for a man' not 'for man':
'When Neil Armstrong took his first step on the Moon, he claimed he said, "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" -- but many listeners think he left out the "a." A team of speech-scientists and psychologists from Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing and The Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus is taking a novel approach to deciphering Armstrong's quote by studying how speakers from his native central Ohio pronounce "for" and "for a."'