Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author known for his novels and work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped to define the cyberpunk genre. Sterling's first science fiction story, Man-Made Self, was sold in 1976, he first became famous by hosting annual Christmas event to present digital art. He spent many years after this creating many science fiction novels such as Schismatrix, Islands In The Net, Heavy Weather. In 1992, he published his first nonfiction novel, The Hacker Crackdown: Law And Disorder On The Electronic Frontier. Sterling is one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction, along with William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, Pat Cadigan. In addition, he is one of the subgenre's chief ideological promulgators; this has earned him the nickname "Chairman Bruce". He was one of the first organizers of the Turkey City Writer's Workshop, is a frequent attendee at the Sycamore Hill Writer's Workshop, he won Hugo Awards for his novelettes Taklamakan.
His first novel, Involution Ocean, published in 1977, features the world Nullaqua where all the atmosphere is contained in a single, miles-deep crater. The story concerns a ship sailing on the ocean of dust at the bottom, which hunts creatures called dustwhales that live beneath the surface, it is a science-fictional pastiche of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. From the late 1970s onwards, Sterling wrote a series of stories set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe: the Solar System is colonised, with two major warring factions; the Mechanists use a great deal of computer-based mechanical technologies. The situation is complicated by the eventual contact with alien civilizations; the Shaper/Mechanist stories can be found in the collection Crystal Express and the collection Schismatrix Plus, which contains the original novel Schismatrix and all of the stories set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe. Alastair Reynolds identified Schismatrix and the other Shaper/Mechanist stories as one of the greatest influences on his own work.
In the 1980s, Sterling edited the science fiction critical fanzine Cheap Truth under the alias of Vincent Omniaveritas. He wrote, he contributed a chapter to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky, he contributed, along with Lewis Shiner, to the short story "Mozart in Mirrorshades". From April 2009 through May 2009, he was an editor at Cool Tools. Since October 2003 Sterling has blogged at "Beyond the Beyond", hosted by Wired along with contributions to several other print and online platforms like the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, his most recent novel is Love, a Paranormal Romance. He has been the instigator of three projects which can be found on the Web - The Dead Media Project - A collection of "research notes" on dead media technologies, from Incan quipus, through Victorian phenakistoscopes, to the departed video game and home computers of the 1980s; the Project's homepage, including Sterling's original Dead Media Manifesto can be found at http://www.deadmedia.org The Viridian Design Movement - his attempt to create a "green" design movement focused on high-tech and ecologically sound design.
The Viridian Design home page, including Sterling's Viridian Manifesto and all of his Viridian Notes, is managed by Jon Lebkowsky at http://www.viridiandesign.org. The Viridian Movement helped to spawn the popular "bright green" environmental weblog Worldchanging. WorldChanging contributors include many of the original members of the Viridian "curia". Embrace the Decay - a web-only art piece commissioned by the LA Museum of Contemporary Art in 2003. Incorporating contributions solicited through The Viridian Design'movement', Embrace the Decay was the most visited piece/page at LA MOCA's Digital Gallery, included contributions from Jared Tarbell of levitated.net and co-author of several books on advanced Flash programming, Monty Zukowski, creator of the winning'decay algorithm' sponsored by Bruce. Sterling has coined multiple neologisms to describe things that he believes will be common in the future items which exist in limited numbers. In the December 2005 issue of Wired magazine, Sterling coined the term buckyjunk.
Buckyjunk refers to difficult-to-recycle consumer waste made of carbon nanotubes. In his 2005 book Shaping Things, he coined the term design fiction which refers to a type of speculative design which focuses on world building. In July 1989, in SF Eye #5, he was the first to use the word "slipstream" to refer to a type of speculative fiction between traditional science fiction and fantasy and mainstream literature. In December 1999 he coined the term "Wexelblat disaster", for a disaster caused when a natural disaster triggers a secondary, more damaging, failure of human technology. In his book Zeitgeist, he introduced the term "major consensus narrative" as an explanatory synonym for truth. In August 2004, he suggested a type of technological device that, through pervasive RFID and GPS tracking, can track its history of use and interact with the world. In the speech where he offered "spime", he noted that the term "blobject", with which he is sometimes credited, was passed on to him by industrial designer Karim Rashid.
The term may have been coined b
MythBusters Jr. is an Australian-American science entertainment television program created for the Science TV network and produced by Australia's Beyond Television Productions. The series is a spin-off of the TV show MythBusters and follows its premise of examining the validity of myths, it premiered on the Science network on January 2019 and consisted of 10 episodes. The show has a cast of six children skilled in STEM topics. There has not yet been an official announcement of. Adam Savage Valerie Castillo - 15-year-old skilled builder and robotics expert with experience in CAD drawing and 3D printing. Elijah Horland - 12-year-old self-taught maker and programmer who started building computers at 9. Cannan Huey-You - 12-year-old with a background in coding and motion physics who dreams of being an astronaut. Jesse Lawless - 15-year-old car enthusiast who built a mini chopper by himself at age 12. Rachel Pizzolato - 14-year-old who's remodeled houses since she was young. Rachel is an award-winning scientist who has won numerous Regional and National Science Competitions.
She has been a Top 30 Broadcom MASTERS Finalist in 2016 & 2017, 2018 Akron Global Polymer Academy Champion, 2018 AIAA National Essay Champion. Allie Weber - 13-year-old patent inventor recognized by 3M as one of the top 10 young scientists in the country. Tamara Robertson - contestant and finalist of MythBusters: The Search. Jon Marcu Official website MythBusters Jr. on IMDb
Kermit Oliver is an American painter who studied and worked in Houston before moving to Waco, Texas. His work reflects his Texas heritage and his interests in mythology and history. Oliver combines “contemporary and classical elements, resulting in a style he calls symbolic realism.” His paintings create “strange, lushly illustrated worlds populated by people and animals realistically drawn but placed in surreal juxtaposition.”Oliver was named the 2017 Texas State Two-Dimensional Artist by the Texas Commission on the Arts. His painting, “Tobias,” was included in the 2016 inaugural exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D. C. In 2013, Oliver was honored with the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the Art League Houston. Oliver was born in Refugio, where his father worked as a cowboy on a cattle ranch. By the age of 6 or 7, his talent for drawing the cattle and the south Texas flora and fauna was evident. After graduating from high school, in 1960 Oliver enrolled at Texas Southern University in Houston, where he was a student of the artist, Dr. John T. Biggers.
He married fellow art student, Katie Washington, in 1962. While at Texas Southern University, he was the recipient of a Jesse Jones Art Scholarship, he graduated in 1967 with Bachelor of Fine Arts and art education degrees. In 1968 Oliver began teaching art at Texas Southern University, he taught at the Art League of Houston during this time. For most of his life, Oliver worked as both an artist and a full-time mail sorter for the US Postal Service in Houston and for thirty years after moving to Waco, Texas in 1984, he believed that a steady income was the best way to support his family while allowing him the freedom to pursue art on his own terms. He continued working as an artist. While still an art student, Oliver’s work was included in a show at Houston’s Courtney Gallery, in 1970 the gallery gave him his first solo exhibition, he had his second solo show at the DuBose Gallery the following year. In the years after his graduation from Texas Southern University, Oliver became an integral part of the Houston art scene.
He was the first African-American artist in Houston to be represented by a major commercial gallery. His work was subsequently exhibited in numerous solo and group shows and has been included in a number of museum collections. In 2005, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts held a retrospective exhibition of Oliver’s work titled, “Notes from a Child’s Odyssey: the art of Kermit Oliver,” that included a selection of more than 90 works created over four decades. Alvia Wardlaw, curator of Oliver's 2005 retrospective exhibition, noted that “The love of flora and fauna that you see in Kermit’s art began in that childhood where he was free to roam around Refugio and ride horses and hunt and sketch and draw…His visual sensibility with regards to the Texas landscape which he makes a metaphor for the wonders of the universe was born out of those youthful experiences.” Oliver has noted that his work deals with ideas such as growth, birth, rebirth, immortality and "redemption...that especially." His paintings create worlds where "...animals and humans interact in surprising scenes that seem freighted with a mysterious and complex significance.”
For example, a painting of a figure standing in front of rows of tall shrubbery is not a study of a garden--it is titled “Theseus and the Labyrinth.”Oliver is known for his celebrated work as a designer of scarves for Hermes, the French fashion house. The relationship began in 1980 when Hermes asked Lawrence Marcus of the upscale department store Neiman Marcus, if he knew of an American artist who could create a design for a scarf with a Southwestern theme. Marcus told Hermes about Oliver, the design was a success—so much so that Oliver created 17 designs for Hermes over 32 years, he is the only American artist to create designs for Hermes
Jim Morin is the internationally syndicated editorial cartoonist at the Miami Herald since 1978 and a painter working in the medium of oil, of more than 40 years. His cartoons have included extensive commentary on eight U. S. presidents: Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Morin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1996 and again in 2017. Morin is syndicated nationally and internationally by his own Morintoons Syndicate, he was syndicated by CWS/The New York Times Syndicate and by King Features Syndicate. His cartoons and caricatures run in newspapers in states including New York, Colorado, Oregon, Michigan, Tennessee, Washington, D. C. Texas, as well as in Canada and countries in Europe and Southwest Asia, his work has appeared on Internet sites and magazines. Morin has been interviewed on CNN, WFOR, NPR, Sky News, Comcast Newsmakers and several other television programs. Morin was raised in the Boston suburb of Wayland.
He began drawing at age seven. As an avid watcher of the television cartoons of the day, Morin began to develop his own cartoon characters, some of which were registered in the U. S. Patent & Trademark Office by his father, attorney Charles H. Morin, he attended the Rivers School in Weston and Suffield Academy in Connecticut, studied painting and drawing at Syracuse University under Jerome Witkin. "He was the only teacher I had who saw cartoons as paintings, as art," Morin says. "Painting has made me more conscious.... My paintings affect my drawings and vice versa." The Watergate scandal inspired Morin to explore the art of caricature. During his senior year at Syracuse, he was the editorial cartoonist for their daily student newspaper, The Daily Orange. Following college, Morin served a brief stint as the editorial cartoonist at The Beaumont Enterprise before moving on to Richmond, where he spent one year as the editorial cartoonist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. During his time in Richmond, Morin became a close professional acquaintance of Jeff MacNelly, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist at the Richmond News Leader.
Upon MacNelly's passing in 2000, Morin accepted the invitation of colleague Dave Barry to contribute to A Quiet Genius: Remembering Jeff MacNelly. Morin is the author of several books: Line of Fire: Political Cartoons by Jim Morin and Ambushed. Morin's work has been shown in compendiums of political cartoons and on the PBS documentary, The American Presidents. Morin's watercolor work is evident in Jim Morin's Field Guide to Birds, his cartoons have been exhibited worldwide, most at the University of Miami's Lowe Art Museum, where he spoke to a packed and standing audience. His retrospective exhibition of cartoons at the International Museum of Cartoon Art hung for nine months due to popular demand; the Coral Springs Museum of Art exhibited a large body of his work in its two-month show, Jim Morin: Art of Politics Drawings & Paintings in 2008. His canvasses have been exhibited in Miami group shows at the Museum of Science, the Art Collector's Gallery, the Don Webb Gallery, the Virginia Miller Gallery and Patou Fine Art.
He had a one-man show at the Futernick Gallery in Miami in 2006. On the web, his paintings can be viewed at that of Absolute Arts. Morin won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1996 and in 2017, he shared the Pulitzer with the Miami Herald Editorial Board in 1983 and was a Pulitzer finalist in 1977 and 1990. In 2007, he won the prestigious Herblock Prize. Upon awarding the Herblock Prize to Morin, Harry Katz, the Herb Block Foundation curator, praised Morin for his "impressive, unrelenting barrage of cartoons and caricatures displaying artistry and conviction."Internationally he has won the Thomas Nast Prize, given every three years. Nationally, he has been awarded the 2000 John Fischetti Award, the 1996 National Press Foundation Berryman Award, the 1992 National Cartoonist Society Editorial Cartoon Award, the Overseas Press Club Awards in 1990 and 1979. Official website Absolute Arts website
Empress Wu is a 1984 Hong Kong television serial based on the biography of Wu Zetian, the only woman in Chinese history to assume the title of "Empress Regnant", starring Petrina Fung as the title character. The serial was produced by ATV and was first aired in Hong Kong on ATV Home from 6 August to 28 September 1984, it was shown with English subtitles in Australia on SBS from 1987 to 1990. A dubbed English version of the serial was broadcast in the United Kingdom on Channel 4 in sixty-five weekly 30-minute episodes from 4 October 1987 to 21 January 1989. Note: Some of the characters' names are in Cantonese romanisation. Petrina Fung as Mou Zak-tin Tony Liu / Savio Tsang as Ming Sung-yim Lo Chun-shun as Tong Ko-tsung Pat Poon as Yu-man Chun Lau Hung-fong as Sheung-koon Yuen-yee Ban Ban as Empress Wong Chan Choi-yin as Consort Siu Kong Hon as Tong Toi-tsung Pamela Peck as Empress Cheung-suen Eric Wan as Lei Yin Wong Siu-fung as Ha Fei-yin Lee Ngoi-wah as Lady of Ngai Ling Man-hoi as Cheung-suen Mo-gei Simon Chui as Yuen Tin-gong Lee Kwok-fai as Lei Toi Tong Pan-cheung as Ching-sum
The Sun Prairie Water Tower was built in 1899 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. It was added to the State Register of Historic Places in 1999 and to the National Register of Historic Places the following year; the first settlers arrived in Sun Prairie in 1839. In 1840 the road to Madison passed nearby. A sawmill was there by 1847, a hotel by 1850, the railroad reached town in 1859; the village was incorporated in 1868. In the late 1800s the village began developing public services. A volunteer fire department formed in 1891. In 1900 a private electric company hung electric wires along Main Street. Before 1899, people got their water from private cisterns. In that year the village trustees and the Sun Prairie Countryman debated building a waterworks, arguing that: "To induce others to settle with us we must have the conveniences that they are used to. To get factories here we must have better fire protection and in order to better our facilities we must have a waterworks." Fear of taxes weighed against. After much debate, a public waterworks was approved by vote.
Stegerwald and Lessner, a local firm, won the bid to build a 60-foot stone tower to support the tank for $1750, they built it in October and November of 1899, re-using stone from the old Stevens Mill five miles northeast on the Maunesha River. The stonework is uniform and done. At the base of the tower, a round-topped door is framed in radiating limestone blocks. Five windows allow light into the tower. A wooden tank sat on the tower, bought from Challenge Wind Mill and Feed Mill Company of Batavia. John M. Healy of Chicago provided pipe for the water system, laid it. By 1911 the wooden tank was insufficient, was replaced with a steel tank from Kennicott Water Softener of Chicago. Another flaw was; that problem was resolved in 1918 with a waste water treatment plant. The NRHP nomination considers the Sun Prairie tower significant for being built of stone, rare for a water tower in Wisconsin, it is significant for its fine stonework, as a symbol of the movement toward municipal services in the community