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Dear Friends

Ah, the joys of Canadian winter… Clear. Crisp. White. And cold.

Me auld bones are asking, “What?” “Why?” And I have no answers for them other than to assure them we’ll be back South next winter again.

But having said that…

I Created Another Email List For More Free Stories And Here’s How You Get On It

If you purchased any of my books from Amazon.

• Go to your Amazon account:
• click> Your Account
• click>Manage Content and Devices
• click> Books All (left-hand top)
• click>Titles With Upgrades=Orange box. Click on the box. It will update on your reader. 
• There’s a link at the back of the book. Click that link and fill out the subsequent form.

Work In Progress

A few of you have indicated an interest in seeing some of the short stories expanded into full books. So…

• I am currently outlining some ideas and noodling around good guys/bad guys/environment etc.
• I’ve also kicked up the research division of my day to sort out fact from fiction and see where I can find a hole to drive a story through. The research division btw consists of me – a full pot of coffee – a massive pottery mug – several rather dense texts, reams of economic data from different government websites and a lined 360-page school notebook with my favorite fountain pen. And some serious daydreaming. 
• No timeline on it yet.

Here are a few notes that crossed my desk. You may find them interesting.

Cryptocurrency being hacked

So you think cryptocurrency isn’t hackable. Think again. Turns out “hackers have stolen nearly $2 billion in cryptocurrency since the start of 2017, with sophisticated cybercrime organizations increasingly getting in on the act.” says MIT’s Tech Review Magazine.

Privately funded spaceship to moon

The first privately funded spacecraft is set to go to the moon. (Feb 21,2019) I’ll watch for announcements of results and post those here as well. Click here to read the announcement 

A quick reminder that if you’ve purchased an ebook of mine go to the retailer (likely Amazon) and update it. When you do that, you’ll see a link at the end of the book. Follow that link for even more stories!

Smart Cities Without Infrastructure

This is a bit dense, and small print but it’s interesting how some cities are starting to sort out what they need to do in the future. For example, as most people adopt cell phones, the need for cabling/poles etc disappears. You can read the entire article -and more like it – here

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading – this is a taste of a few of the things in my feed reading over the last few months. Yeah, I have eclectic tastes but when you’re a writer, you just never know what’s going to spark your world.

Legal Rules For Space

With all the major powers looking to space exploration and “harvesting” of raw materials, we are pretty much in a wild west kind of legal limbo. There are agreements in place but not much in the way of enforcement. Here is a reasoned discussion of this future need.

The year is 2087. Thanks to a series of serendipitous technological breakthroughs a few decades earlier, the creation of large-scale, self-sustainable human habitats beyond Earth has become feasible. There are already close to half a million people living on Mars, many of them native Martians.  You can read the entire article here.

[Read more…] about Einstein Was Likely Right After All.

This is just a quick note to update you about a few things on the D. Frank Green.com website.

I have not posted in some time as I have been busy writing for my day job. It’s a heck of a thing when you have to work for a living.

The ideas are piling up one by one in my to write-list, and one of these days I will get back to it.  This note is simply to tell you several things. [Read more…] about Updates Re Servers and Virtual Citizenship

Dear Friends.

Every now and then I try to share a few of the many articles that pass my desk about future tech. It’s fascinating stuff indeed and I could spend days reading about what different countries and researchers are doing.

Having said that, I’m not at all sure I want too much more tech in my life. I don’t know about you but the more I have, the more complicated life tends to get. And I find myself deleting apps, simplifying my daily routines and deleting the many news feeds I really don’t read.

Mind you, I also got a VR headset for Christmas so…..  Yeah, the kid in me can’t resist something bright, new and shiny. I’ll get back to you with how much I really wind up using it.

 

Alexa, What Are You Doing with My Family’s Personal Info?

I don’t have any smart devices in our home because I’m still not convinced I want/need them in any reasonable way.  My only experience with them was over dinner in a friend’s home, one of them started talking. It was responding to something said in the conversation even though it hadn’t been aimed at it.  “Always listening” just creeps me out and here’s another take on this from Scientific American.

Read it here.

This Neural NetThis This Neural Network Built by Japanese Researchers Can ‘Read Minds’

Now, this is a bit creepy too.  “The new technique, dubbed “deep image reconstruction,” moves beyond binary pixels, giving researchers the ability to decode images that have multiple layers of color and structure.”

Read it here.

The Age of Em

I have not read this book but I did watch the videos on this page and they were enough for me.  The age of em is basically the theory by some computer AI people that the first really smart robots will be human brain emulations or “ems.”  Fascinating thoughts.

Read it here.

Can AI Diagnose Your Health?

Here’s Another Sci Am article worth reading about how AI Deep Learning examines retinal scans to predict different health states and how it processes health scans.

Read it here.

Maybe Sex Robots Will Make Men, Not Women, Obsolete

And finally, you may recall a note about sex robots and AI from a few months ago where you might marry a robot.  Well…. Here’s another look at sex robots that might make men obsolete.  Me? I know better than to get into this debate but you…

Read it here.

 Thanks for reading.

This is the semi-regular update on the behind-the-scenes stuff that often amuses readers.  I haven’t done an update since August so I’m calling this one, the first annual roundup.

Mailing List:

I cleaned out the mailing list two weeks ago to reduce the total subscription level to 300.  Approximately 50 of the new readers downloading the ebook really weren’t interested in reading other things I write –  and hadn’t opened a newsletter since the download. (Likely going to the spam or “to never read” folder) 🙂

There’s little sense in me paying to send out stories if they’re not reading them so…

Thanks for reading. 🙂

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Some tech upgrades hit both my desk and this list and blah, blah, blah.

Having deleted two paragraphs above this line, I asked myself, In this day of constant tech upgrades, who really gives a damn.

Think about one thing though.  The average app is updated every 30 days. That means within a very short time, the cell phone you carry around with you isn’t anything like the one you started with.

You have to constantly learn new things to keep up to date with all the tech in your life and the notion of being a lifelong learner isn’t fiction – it’s a reality in our world.

Bottom line: Those who would ignore research that contradicts their political beliefs, would freeze the world so it never changes, or try to turn the clock back to a mythical better time – in tech or politics or ???   These folks just aren’t paying attention.

I can still remember hearing the great Satchel Paige  saying in a pep talk he gave in Toronto when I was a teenager, “Never look back – they might be gaining.“  I’ve thought about that a lot in relation to tech and politics and …   Well, I’ve thought about it a lot.

And blah, blah, blah….

(Who is this guy blathering on anyway?) 😉

#####

Short Stories

I hope you read the email describing how to use your “email preferences” at the bottom of every email.

Click “update email preferences” Click the box that says “short stories”.  Close the window.

You’ll get a short story delivered to your inbox once a week until the entire backlist is sent. At that point, you’ll get every new story as they’re published.

Updates From Previous Notes

Dictating (DragonNaturallySpeaking)   I waver back and forth on this. I’m supposed to dive right in, throw away the keyboards and just go with dictating.  That didn’t work for me (or maybe I gave up too early or maybe I’m too….)

I’m still doing some things on the keyboard and some things with the Dragon.

I could analyze this for the next 2000 words and neither of us would be any further ahead.

Cleaning Out

In the last two months, I’ve killed two of my websites/blogs. They were either not making any money or they were distracting me from the things I truly wanted to write.

This website/writing at DFrankGreen.com will continue for the foreseeable future as I still have things I want to say here.

Book Sales

Trickling.  I surely won’t become immensely wealthy on those first three ebooks. 😉  But then again, I really didn’t expect to.  (To be sure, it would have been nice but …)

The Existing Books

The links are here. And, all are available on Kindle Unlimited.

2047
Flee or Kill
Future Forward
The Wild Hunt and Other Short Stories

New Project

I’m about 10,000 words into a new ebook/extended story and having some fun times with it.   I’m considering how best to share that with you.  That’s a new year problem/solution.

And That

Pretty much sums up the year. It was a year of surprises, of great swings in life and work.

Things The Need Noting

Of noting, I’m blessed with a great family, a life-partner who understands and supports my crazed writerly life and friends who manage to not comment (at least to my face) about the latest idea I’ve adopted.

Thanks for sticking around this year. I’ll have more for you early in the New Year.