Rainbows Edge

Four time Hugo Award winner Vernor Vinge has taken readers to the depths of space and into the far future in his bestselling novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. Now, he has written a science-fiction thriller set in a place and time as exciting and strange as any far-future world: San Diego, California, 2025. Robert Gu is a recovering Alzheimer's patient. The world that he remembers was much as we know it today. Now, as he regains his faculties through a cure developed during the years of his near-fatal decline, he discovers that the world has changed and so has his place in it. He was a world-renowned poet. Now he is seventy-five years old, though by a medical miracle he looks much younger, and he's starting over, for the first time unsure of his poetic gifts. Living with his son's family, he has no choice but to learn how to cope with a new information age in which the virtual and the real are a seamless continuum, layers of reality built on digital views seen by a single person or millions, depending on your choice. But the consensus reality of the digital world is available only if, like his thirteen-year-old granddaughter Miri, you know how to wear your wireless access—through nodes designed into smart clothes—and to see the digital context—through smart contact lenses. With knowledge comes risk. When Robert begins to re-train at Fairmont High, learning with other older people what is second nature to Miri and other teens at school, he unwittingly becomes part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to use technology as a tool for world domination. In a world where every computer chip has Homeland Security built-in, this conspiracy is something that baffles even the most sophisticated security analysts, including Robert's son and daughter-in law, two top people in the U.S. military. And even Miri, in her attempts to protect her grandfather, may be entangled in the plot. As Robert becomes more deeply involved in conspiracy, he is shocked to learn of a radical change planned for the UCSD Geisel Library; all the books there, and worldwide, would cease to physically exist. He and his fellow re-trainees feel compelled to join protests against the change. With forces around the world converging on San Diego, both the conspiracy and the protest climax in a spectacular moment as unique and satisfying as it is unexpected. This is science fiction at its very best, by a master storyteller at his peak. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

It's 1958. Gas is 25 cents a gallon. The USA has just launched its first satellite into orbit. Elvis Presley has been inducted into the US Army. And a little boy named Buddy has just been born into a black and white world. Twenty-four years later, that boy, now a young man, is left in a coma by a car accident. When his father-a devout Nebraska farmer-visits Buddy in the hospital, he discovers they are able to communicate telepathically. Through a week of mental conversations and time travel, they revisit the events and secrets of two decades that made them strangers to each other. A dog with two names shepherds them through the path of betrayal, abuse, and-eventually-reconciliation. Told with devastating simplicity and magic, this small novel will change the way you look at rainbows forever.

Right at that moment, I realized, I wasn't losing pieces of myself along the way, I was finding myself, and through my willingness to believe, God gave me the gift to love again, with my whole heart perfectly placed inside my chest next to the lungs that gave me the breath to carry myself through a journey that I will never forget.

In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Graph Drawing, GD 2008, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece, during September 21-24, 2008. The 31 long papers and 8 short papers presented together with 10 posters and two invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 83 submissions. The volume also includes a report on the Graph Drawing Contest which was held during the conference. An important aspect of the conference is bridging the gap between theoretical advances and implemented solutions of geometric representation of graphs and networks. It is motivated by those applications where it is crucial to visualize structural information as graphs.

Meteorology is the science of the atmosphere and its phenomena, including weather. Nowadays, when we speak of a “meteor,” we generally mean a shooting star; but formerly this term was applied (and it still often is in technical literature) to a great variety of phenomena and appearances in the atmosphere, including clouds, rain, snow, rainbows, and so forth. That is how the science of the atmosphere came to have its present name. Meteorology is not a branch of astronomy. These two sciences are as different from each other as zoölogy is from botany. They are both founded on physics, and they “overlap” each other to some extent, just as every science does certain others; but if you want information about the atmosphere, weather and climate, an astronomical observatory is not the place to seek it; while if you wish to make inquiries about comets, sun spots, eclipses, standard time, or the date on which Easter fell in the year 1666, do not apply to the Weather Bureau. In the city of Washington the Government maintains an astronomical and timekeeping institution known as the Naval Observatory, and it maintains in the same city the central office of the United States Weather Bureau. The two establishments are a mile apart in space and nearly a whole library apart in the subjects with which they are concerned. The fact that their functions are persistently confounded by the public indicates the necessity of writing this preface to a popular book on meteorology.