The Gaven

I hope that all my readers had a great Thanksgiving and are looking forward to Christmas and the new year. Although I haven’t written much here, I have been very busy over at Loss of Privacy and The Daily Censored. My position at the junior high also keeps me busy, and exhausted most of the time. As most of you know, I work with special education students and my workload has increased this year.

I have gone from sitting in 4 different classes 7 and 9 students to 17 students. This has meant that, although I passed junior high many years ago, there is a lot I have forgotten. Just because I sit in an 8th grade Science class doesn’t mean I don’t have to learn. I have to help the children with their classwork, homework, and studying for exams. It’s not a difficult job, but it is mentally challenging, particularly when you help a student with their homework and they lose it by the next day in class. That means you get to help them all over again.

This is not meant as a rant against my job. It’s simply an explanation as to why I’m not able to post as much as I’d like to here. There is also some good news about The Gaven.

Two years ago, I threw up an early draft of The Gaven onto the internet for anyone to download and comment on. In that time, I’ve had 973 downloads, 11 people give positive feedback, 3 people point out some grammar mistakes, 1 person write in for clarification on a part of the story (I’ve now fixed that bit), and 1 person actually paid me $7 because they enjoyed The Gaven that much. This generated interest in an interview that I did a few months ago with Morgen Baily.

This was all accomplished with no advertisement. It was word of mouth. Imagine what I could do if I had advertised!

That’s it for now folks. I hope everyone is doing well and keep checking back for more news about The Gaven.

I just wanted to say I’ve sent out a few more query letters. Hopefully, someone will like what they read. Until it gets published, I’ll keep plugging away. I’ll eventually find the right person.

You can read the paper here and on Wired.

I’ve written before about invisibility cloaks. They seem to be popping up in the news often these days.  Now, physicists have created an invisibility cloak that blocks the magnetic field.

Physicists and engineers had already demonstrated rudimentary invisibility cloaks that can hide objects from light, sound, and water waves. Now, they’ve devised an “antimagnet” cloak that can shield an object from a constant magnetic field without disturbing that field. If realized, such a cloak could have medical applications, researchers say.

The cloak could handle fields of any shape and any strength within what the superconductor can stand. If the external field gets too strong, the magnetically induced current becomes so powerful that it knocks the superconductor out of its resistance-free state and ruins its field-repelling qualities. Computer simulations showed that the cloak could work with as little as four layers, but with 10, it would guide a magnetic field nearly as well as a perfect cloak, as Sanchez and colleagues report today in the New Journal of Physics. “It doesn’t need to be a closed cylinder; it can be an open cylinder or open plate, although in this case the magnetic cloaking properties are reduced,” Sanchez says.

Read more about it over on Wired.

Just another interesting technological advancement related to The Gaven.