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Showing posts from January, 2011

I Never Doubted It

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"Physicists at the University of Queensland in Australia claim to have discovered time teleportation , no flux capacitors involved: Just like quantum physics allows for teleportation in space , they say that the same is possible in time. Time travel to... the future!" This is how it works (...) imagine an experiment that Ralph and Olson describe in which a qubit is sent into the future. The idea is that a detector acts on a qubit and then generates a classical message describing how this particle can be detected. Then, at some point in the future, another detector at the same position in space, receives this message and carries out the required measurement, thereby reconstructing the qubit. But there's a twist. Olson and Ralph show that the detection of the qubit in the future must be symmetric in time with its creation in the past. "If the past detector was active at a quarter to 12:00, then the future detector must wait to become active at precisel

The Knife Of Never Letting Go

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" But a knife ain't just a thing, is it? It's a choice, it's something you do . A knife says yes or no, cut or not, die or don't. A knife takes a decision out of your hand and puts it in the world and it never goes back again . " In a dystopian society on another world, men cannot hide their thoughts and they go around in a cloud of Noise--Noise that can't hide always the secrets of Prentisstown. The protagonist, Todd, is given a chance to escape and is given a knife for protection. But can a knife be protection against the darkness in men's hearts? The Knife Of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness is a story that doesn't let go from the first few paragraphs. Todd, and his dog, Manchee, gripped my heart and mind immediately and took me on a breathless ride that demanded to be finished in one day. There are two more books in the series called Chaos Walking , which is good, because one is not enough. Already, I long

"My Family Is Not My Weakness...

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...it's my strength." So says Vince Faraday, aka The Cape . The story begins with a good cop and family man, Vince Faraday, who is framed for a heinous crime he didn't commit. His wife and son think he's dead and it must appear that way if he has any hope of protecting them from the arch villain, Chess. After falling in with some circus performers (awesome, right?), he learns some new mad skillz with a cape spun from spider's web to use to bring down Chess. He has no super powers, only a super-sized sense of family and justice, and that's what sets this comic-to-film apart from so many others. Vince is a good guy who you care about and root for. He adores his wife and son and will do whatever it takes to keep them safe, while his secret identity reminds his son to work on his math. What's not to love? I enjoy a broody, angsty protagonist as much as the next person, but a character with a clear-cut commitment to what's right and to his family

The Forest of Hands and Teeth

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The title of this book immediately caught my attention and I ended up reading it in one day, which I never get to do. I have a To Be Read pile that's nearly a hundred books strong. This one grabbed me right from the start...not unlike one of the zombies that populate the novel. As a HUGE zombie fan, I found the opening of the book lyrically-written, beautifully described, and with a fresh twist on the zombie meme. And as a HUGE zombie fan, I hold to the classic view of what zombies symbolize, which is death. That said, The Forest of Hands and Teeth was a great metaphor for life and death, free will and fate, and wondering of what path we take, what choices we make, will give us a different outcome. However by the time I was two-thirds of the way through the book, I no longer cared about those choices. Mary, initially a fierce, determined protagonist, becomes mercurial in her desires. She has cravings, then once those cravings are fulfilled, she casts the object of her desire

The Haunted South

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Another great Southern Fried Gothic author feature : This week, Pamela Kinney (aka Sapphire Phelan). She writes paranormal non-fiction and paranormal fiction.