October 2020

Transcendental by James Gunn

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The novel “Transcendental” by James Gunn was published for the first time in 2014. It’s the first book in the Transcendental trilogy.

Riley is a veteran of a war fought by humanity after the contact with an interstellar civilization altered the balance among the species that compose it. He joins a pilgrimage aboard the starship Geoffrey that aims to seek transcendence, an idea that attracts sentient individuals of all species and perhaps may be real somewhere in the cosmos.

From the beginning, the journey is marked by acts of violence with murders and sabotage. Riley must try to figure out who, on the starship Geoffrey, could become his ally and who could represent a danger. The ship’s captain is an old acquaintance of his, but Riley doesn’t know if he can trust him. Riley himself has his own secrets.

David Brin in 2005

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Glen David Brin was born on October 6, 1950 in Glendale, California, USA. David Brin’s career as a science fiction writer began while he was still studying for his doctorate with the publication of his first novel “Sundiver” in 1980. It became the first novel of what has become known as the Uplift novels and introduces a fictional universe full of sentient species where the practice of uplifting of non-sentient species is normal.

Considered a hard science fiction author because technological and scientific themes are crucial in his works, David Brin has also kept pace with real technologies by embracing the Internet. His online presence has become more visible with the emergence of social networks, which he uses to write about science fiction, real technological and scientific research, and even politics.

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The episode “A Certain Doom” was supposed to be the season finale of “The Walking Dead” 10th season. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it became a special episode broadcast on October 4, 2020.

Views of Gravicalymene bakeri specimens

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An article published in the journal “Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology” reports the identification of a new species of trilobite that lived about 450 million years ago, in the Ordovician period, in today’s Tasmania. Dr. Patrick Smith of the Australian Museum Research Institute and Macquarie University and Dr. Malte Ebach of the University of New South Wales named it Gravicalymene bakeri assigning it to an already known genus and choosing the name of the species in honor of actor Tom Baker because he inspired them to become scientists by playing the protagonist of the famous TV show “Doctor Who”.

BitMEX's home page

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The founders of BitMEX, a well-known cryptocurrency trading platform, have been formally charged with violating US anti-money laundering regulations. One of them, Samuel Reed, has already been arrested while Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo and Gregory Dwyer are wanted. In fact, the allegations are multiple because BitMEX is also accused of operating in the US without the authorization of the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission). In August, BitMEX announced the introduction of its operators’ identity verification procedures, but evidently, it was too little and too late.