In the hours before his brother is born, eight year old Joe has an unusual visitor, Mika, who falls out of a spaceship and lands upside down in an apple tree in Joe's garden. Hens, dinosaurs, an astronaut and a white rabbit all play their part in this magical story in which the encounter between Earth-boy and alien opens up the wonders of the universe.Tender and enchanting as The Little Prince and with the same classic quality, HELLO? IS ANYBODY THERE? confirms Jostein Gaarder as an exceptional writer for children. Sally Gardner's lively pencil drawings on almost every page make this a delightful package.

Inspired by her popular Wild Thing podcast, journalist Laura Krantz incorporates the scientific method and her journalistic skills to determine if aliens might exist How likely is it that humans aren’t alone in the universe? Reports of strange lights, UFO sightings, and alien encounters abound—and some (like recent accounts from US Navy pilots) even sound credible. And in recent years, armed with state-of-the-art technology and better information, the search for extraterrestrials overflows with exciting possibilities. Within our own solar system, astrobiologists search for the biochemical building blocks that might sustain microbes, astronomers discover far-flung stars, orbited by planets that could be teeming with life, and astrophysicists point sophisticated telescopes toward the deep reaches of the universe, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Is There Anybody Out There? turns our collective gaze skyward: What’s the likelihood of life on other planets? Or that aliens have already made the trip to visit us? How would they get here? Why do we want to find them? And what does it mean if we do (or don’t)? Teaching readers to challenge their gut assumptions and open their minds to new possibilities, using critical thinking and the scientific method, journalist Laura Krantz investigates the science, culture, and philosophy of a universe where we’re not alone—and why the idea of alien life has abducted our imaginations.

Tom Woolberson was oblivious to the fact that his impending doom was circling overhead. When he awoke and found himself in a mysterious place that was unlike anywhere on Earth, he assumed the unthinkable had happened – that he had died (unfortunately… he was right). Standing at the foot of an unimaginably tall tower, his destiny laid before him, he was greeted by a terrifying spectre known simply as ‘the Headmaster’, the Angel of Death (or at least ‘the spectre formally known as the Angel of Death’). What Tom would find at St Michael’s, along with friendship, adventure and blossoming young love, were the answers to the questions that had plagued him since the death of his brother. But little did he know, what he would find there would change his existence forever…

A marathon dance mix consisting of thousands of mashed up text and image samples, In the House of the Hangman tries to give a taste of what life is like there, where it is impolite to speak of the noose. It is the third part of the life project Zeitgeist Spam. If you can't afford a copy ask me for a pdf.

Think back to a time in your life that you made a decision that you now regret. Oh, don’t be so coy – everybody has one. Okay, maybe not Mother Teresa. Or, Bruce Springsteen. But, unless you’re Mother Teresa or Bruce Springsteen – and we’re pretty sure you’re not – you have been in that position. What if you could go back in time and change that decision? What if you could make the other choice? Or, even better, choose a third option that you didn’t even see at the time? Wouldn’t you like to know how things would have turned out if only you had done something different at that critical juncture in your life? DON’T BOTHER. Have you never read any science fiction time travel stories? Don’t you know that they always end with either dinosaurs becoming the dominant species on the planet or your grandfather killing Hitler, causing you to be born with a speech impediment and an irrational fear of listening to Born in the USA? Time branches are not something you can borrow books from – they are paths to realities that you couldn’t anticipate and don’t want to live in, and just try to get a decent corned beef on rye in any of them! In Random Dingoes, the third Transdimensional Authority novel by Ira Nayman, investigators Noomi Rapier and Crash Chumley look into reports of a drug that allows people to travel between universes without technological assistance. They methodically work their way up the drug ring’s chain of command and are just about to arrest its leader when – time travel happens. With the assistance of Time Agency agent Radames Trafshanian, Noomi and Crash must navigate realities they hadn’t anticipated and which they wouldn’t want to live in. But, can they find a decent corned beef on rye? You’ll have to read Random Dingoes to find out!

Everything in moderation . . . The Get Fuzzy gang is back, and they’re leaner and meaner than ever. Bucky Katt (mastermind of mayhem) is on a steady diet of raw bacon, Beluga nut crunch, and carpa-cola in order to fit into his El Megaroid superhero suit—oatmeal cans are very slimming these days. The hapless and hopeless Satchel Pooch is in the kitchen perfecting his recipe for rubber chicken l’orange in a crayon/marker reduction sauce. And poor Rob, the vegetarian and ”owner” of the bunch, is scrounging for scraps in the midst of this gastronomical fury. Delicious and satisfying, this treasury of cartoons features a healthy serving of favorites from Clean Up on Aisle Stupid! and You Can’t Fight Crazy. Don’t feel guilty for polishing it off in one sitting. Honestly… . . . moderation is overrated.

Welcome to the quirky—and always eccentric—household of human Rob Wilco. While his existence as an ad executive would be bland under normal circumstances, one mangy, temperamental cat and one docile dog make it anything but. In this Get Fuzzy collection, the ever-popular pairing of mischievous Bucky Katt and tolerant pooch Satchel return to comically define the separation between animal instinct and human nature.

Billy had lived through the most horrible experience a child could imagine, but it was over. The creatures that had tortured him were dead and he would have to learn to suppress the memories and go on. Or were they? Why was he having these nightmares and why did he feel them inside his head? The Elder remembered everything that had happened – the Kindred’s release, the massacre and their escape. He stared out into the darkness with thoughts of revenge consuming him. This time we will not fail, he thought as he turned and watched the young girl below him struggle to escape the horrors he had manifested in the pit.

Endor’s fate rests in their hands … And it’s game on for Esther “Ez” Summers and her brother-in-arms, Austrello, as they travel back to the dimension of their birth to put to rest a threat that could destroy the beautiful, peaceful Endor. They know their enemy. They have a plan. Yet the more they know, the less certain they are about the outcome. Tutulies everywhere. Mass genocide by the ruler, who just happens to be Ez’s female parent. And it doesn’t help that Alan, Ez’s human lover, slipped into the dimension of Endor, even though he was told not to. He only complicates things. But with a ready-made army, an alliance with their biggest enemies to help solidify the possibility of their success, and a coven of witches, they just might succeed. Ez wants to save her fellow Endorians and go back to Earth to become human. Austrello wants the same thing. They’ve got the biggest motivation anyone could have—love. And they’ve got a riddle to solve. Bound Together, the fourth and final book in the Witch of Endor series, takes us to the dimension of Endor, to friends old and new, and to a climactic ending that might leave Ez without the one thing she wants—a life with Alan as a human. It’s a series unlike any before full of interdimensional travel, deceit, infinite power, and love.

The Go Programming Language is the authoritative resource for any programmer who wants to learn Go. It shows how to write clear and idiomatic Go to solve real-world problems. The book does not assume prior knowledge of Go nor experience with any specific language, so you’ll find it accessible whether you’re most comfortable with JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Java, or C++. The first chapter is a tutorial on the basic concepts of Go, introduced through programs for file I/O and text processing, simple graphics, and web clients and servers. Early chapters cover the structural elements of Go programs: syntax, control flow, data types, and the organization of a program into packages, files, and functions. The examples illustrate many packages from the standard library and show how to create new ones of your own. Later chapters explain the package mechanism in more detail, and how to build, test, and maintain projects using the go tool. The chapters on methods and interfaces introduce Go’s unconventional approach to object-oriented programming, in which methods can be declared on any type and interfaces are implicitly satisfied. They explain the key principles of encapsulation, composition, and substitutability using realistic examples. Two chapters on concurrency present in-depth approaches to this increasingly important topic. The first, which covers the basic mechanisms of goroutines and channels, illustrates the style known as communicating sequential processes for which Go is renowned. The second covers more traditional aspects of concurrency with shared variables. These chapters provide a solid foundation for programmers encountering concurrency for the first time. The final two chapters explore lower-level features of Go. One covers the art of metaprogramming using reflection. The other shows how to use the unsafe package to step outside the type system for special situations, and how to use the cgo tool to create Go bindings for C libraries. The book features hundreds of interesting and practical examples of well-written Go code that cover the whole language, its most important packages, and a wide range of applications. Each chapter has exercises to test your understanding and explore extensions and alternatives. Source code is freely available for download from http://gopl.io/ and may be conveniently fetched, built, and installed using the go get command.