Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks series (steampunk/magepunk), the Hand of the Trickster series (sword-and-sorcery heist capers), and short stories which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.
If the future is better than the past, it will be because of people like this.
Originally shared by Self-Rescuing Princess Society
“It is an honor and a great responsibility to be part of the network that gathers the best of the best of women (and some great men) from across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa and now Latin America, who have the same issue to fight, who face radicalization and foster sustainable peace. I found a diversity of expertise. We have the common goal, and I am learning from them and they are learning from me. It was a blessing to have women from different ages, backgrounds and religions come together. I want to have that wisdom to represent my community.”
I listened to this very moving podcast on my way home yesterday.
It’s about a Somali main who becomes a political prisoner of the regime and is kept in solitary confinement. His only human contact is when his friend in the next cell teaches him how to tap out code, letter by letter, on their shared wall.
Then his friend gets a book. Anna Karenina. And he reads it to the guy. All 800 pages. By tapping it out, letter by letter, on the wall.
And it helps him in completely unexpected ways that are thought-provoking from a writer’s POV.
I don’t know about you, but if my first draft is vaguely coherent and resembles a novel in the way that, say, Swamp Thing resembles a human being, I take the win.
Originally shared by Nicola Smith
Sage advice from a Hugo-award-winning, million-dollar-book-deal author:
Via Lisa Cohen, like all the stories in my Kindness collection so far.
Originally shared by ****
When they realized they were stuck, they decided to keep themselves busy and help the community and made as many loaves of bread as they could. By the time the owner managed to get to them, they had made so much bread that we took the loaves to loads of emergency centers across the city for people affected by the floods.
“We didn’t count exactly how many loaves they made, but they used 4,400 pounds [1,996kg] of flour.”
It’s not every day you meet a high school student who’s been building functional robots since age 10. Then again, Mihir Garimella is definitely not your average teenager.
Nice work. “When 16-year-old Kavya Kopparapu wasn’t attending conferences, giving speeches, presiding over her school’s bioinformatics society, organizing a research symposium, playing piano, and running a non-profit, she worried about what to do with all her free time.
[…]
Of 415 million diabetics worldwide, one-third will develop retinopathy. Fifty percent will be undiagnosed. Of patients with severe forms, half will go blind in five years. Most will be poor.
“The lack of diagnosis is the biggest challenge,” Kopparapu says. “In India, there are programs that send doctors into villages and slums, but there are a lot of patients and only so many ophthalmologists.” What if there were a cheap, easy way for local clinicians to find new cases and refer them to a hospital?
That was the genesis of Eyeagnosis, a smartphone app plus 3D-printed lens that seeks to change the diagnostic procedure from a 2-hour exam requiring a multi-thousand-dollar retinal imager to a quick photo snap with a phone.
Kopparapu and her team—including her 15-year-old brother, Neeyanth, and her high school classmate Justin Zhang—trained an artificial intelligence system to recognize signs of diabetic retinopathy in photos of eyes and offer a preliminary diagnosis. She presented the system at the O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence conference, in New York City, last month.
“The device is ideal for making screening much more efficient and available to a broader population,” says J. Fielding Hejtmancik, an expert in visual diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Other research groups, including Google and Peek Vision, have recently announced similar systems, but Hejtmancik is impressed with the students’ ingenuity. “These kids have put things together in a very nice way that’s a bit cheaper and simpler than most [systems designed by researchers]—who, by the way, all have advanced degrees!”
[…]
Hejtmancik, the NIH expert, notes that there’s a long road to clinical adoption. “What she’s going to need is a lot of clinical data showing that [Eyeagnosis] is reliable under a variety of situations: in eye hospitals, in the countryside, in clinics out in the boonies of India,” he says.
Still, Hejtmancik thinks the system has real commercial potential. The only problem, he says, is that it’s so cheap that big companies might not see the potential for a profit margin. But that affordability “is exactly what you want in medical care, in my opinion,” he says.”
So many ordinary people became heroes in the dark days before and during WW II.
Originally shared by Self-Rescuing Princess Society
“They did it because it was the right thing to do, nothing more, nothing less.”
Even so, it was incredible brave. While they weren’t smuggling people out of the Germany, they were helping folks escape by smuggling their material wealth, against Nazi law. And doing it completely under the noses of the Nazi boarder guards.
Jews leaving Germany in the 1930s weren’t allowed to take their possessions, and would have had to surrender them at the boarder. But, many countries accepting refugees, like the UK, required each person to have a means of supporting themselves — money and a job. It was a terrible catch-22 for many.
By helping to smuggle their money and furs and jewels, they helped the escapees meet both of those requirements.
‘Ted says if Zahir hadn’t been so kind, his life would look very different.
“None of my attitude would have changed,” Ted says. “I would still have the same beliefs I always did. The way they responded to this is what changed me.”‘
Via Lisa Cohen.
Originally shared by Chris Kim A
“They actually were doing more against extremism than I was,” Ted says. “I just realized all the misconceptions I had about Islam were wrong, because I didn’t know any actual Muslims.”
The next week, the congregation’s leader invited Ted to visit the mosque. In the prayer hall still marked by his bullets Ted apologized, and in front of everyone the leaders hugged him. When it came time for prayer, Ted turned to Zahir.
“He just said, ‘I want to pray with you,'” Zahir says. “I said, ‘Follow me,’ and then we bowed down. That’s when he became my brother.”
Lisa Cohen’s share of this post reminded me of the Jewish concept of tikkun olam – basically healing the world’s imperfections by doing acts of kindness and goodness. I want to celebrate that in this new collection.
Originally shared by Joyce Donahue
Ballet dancer saves homeless man pushed onto train tracks. Definitely a case where strength and agility came in handy.
