Mostrando resultados por autor "Stephen Donald" en Todas las categorías

On the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the eleventh holy epoch, he killed God. First, you're probably asking, “Why eleven?” Second you're probably asking, “God with a capital ‘G'?” Of the first question, the killer would only say “because”. It's what the Big Guy wanted. Of the second question, the killer would answer “yes”. God with a capital ‘G'. Some say God is sleeping. Some say God is dead. In this story, the protagonist kills God with his bare hands.

Listen to mystery stories by today's top writers and the masters who inspired them. The idea for this collection came to Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Lawrence Block when he was asked, "What is your favorite mystery story?" Block compiled this unique collection by posing the same question to some of today's favorite writers of the genre, including Stephen King, Tony Hillerman, and John Lutz.

An ordinary traveler. A typical business trip. Nothing unusual or out of place. If the inhabitants of Spittsville, Texas seem a bit odd, blame overbearing sunshine and endless horizons of arid wastes. Since a rational mind will neither conceive nor believe the startling truth. As gradual as the growth of a creeping vine, deep within the wilds of West Texas an unholy invasion begins. One changeling at a time.

This course provides a detailed executive-level review of contemporary topics in supervised machine learning theory with specific focus on predictive modeling and linear regression. The ideal student is a technology professional with a basic working knowledge of machine learning theory. Additionally, to better inform the interested student, the final lesson of this course presents samples in Python describing the essential implementation of described regression methods.

He was an enigma and a genius. He was perhaps the greatest chess strategist of all time. Unable to relate to his fellow human beings, he relied upon his pieces in rank and file for all his companionship and comfort. Though their friendship is decidedly one-sided, his long-suffering assistant tells how his mad genius would lead the nation out of the most costly and deadly war ever waged between men. The bloodiest conflict in history was in an endless state of stalemate. Only a mad genius could save humankind from itself, but the price for victory might be too high to pay.

On a beam of light as in the fog of dreams, a hundred human beings of all ages and walks-of-life find themselves standing on narrow pedestals in a strange auditorium filled with noxious, frigid liquid. With no room to sit or recline, they cannot rest or sleep. They can only shift from foot to foot atop the pedestals, standing for hours then days, their fears unresolved and their fate unknown. Only one man among them, a hardened felon zapped out of solitary confinement, seems to have any answers to their questions. Countless hapless human beings relate tales of alien abductions, and each ...

The universe is a strange, all but impenetrable mystery. Every scientific advance sponsors countless new questions, and every new explanation spawns immeasurable unknowns. How can dinosaurs of all kinds and from all epochs of evolution suddenly and randomly appear all over the world? What would you do with a tyrannosaurus peering through your bedroom window? How would you deal with pterosaurs soaring above your roof? His is an unpredictable world surrounding an entirely too predictable suburban neighborhood. Then everything changes. One thing is certain, during a plague of prehistoric ...

This course provides a detailed executive-level review of contemporary topics in graph modeling theory with specific focus on Deep Learning theoretical concepts and practical applications. The ideal student is a technology professional with a basic working knowledge of statistical methods. Upon completion of this review, the student should acquire improved ability to discriminate, differentiate, and conceptualize appropriate implementations of application-specific ("traditional" or "rule-based") methods versus deep learning methods of statistical analyses and data modeling.

During the summer of 1823, fortune called from the frontier of North America’s Great Plains. Alternately rowing or tromping along the Missouri River from Saint Louis through Fort Mandan and then beyond to Fort Henry and the Upper Missouri Breaks, countless traders gambled their lives to exploit the bounty of an untamed wilderness. All dreamed of easy profits. Through a hundred years, a plague of such interlopers had traveled there to procure beaver, mink and marten pelts via trap or trade. Herds of buffalo perished to feed them. Whole populations uprooted to serve them. Virulent diseases ...

Terminus I – III (Conquest) is a Terminus Series Compendium containing the third trilogy of the series. This special edition contains three complete novels; Terminus, Terminus II (Control) and Terminus III (The Wild Bunch). Terminus Part I: Civilization deconstructed itself like a riot in a madhouse. In the aftermath, a handful of guilt-wracked holdouts stumble onto a terrible secret. To learn the final truth and save their species, they must cross a blood-soaked wasteland, where they confront and overcome hordes of crazed lunatics and ravenous chimeras to investigate the long-standing ...

This compendium contains three complete novels comprising the middle trilogy of the Terminus Series. Titles include “Simian’s Gate”, “Simian’s Walk”, and “Simian’s Way”. During his service as an intern at the SETI Project, Simian Wynwood fatefully records “first contact” with an alien intelligence. Within months, this so-called SETI-Tech seizes control of nearly every aspect of civilization when humankind foolishly opens Simian's Gate. Perversely efficient in the aftermath, an alien-incepted Terminus Signal drives roving clans of homicidal lunatics to exterminate ...

He can't avoid the stench. It's everywhere… in his food… in his clothing… his home… his office. Everything swims in the odor of feces and he can't possibly know if it's all in his mind or if the entire world has gone to shit! Sometimes the brain gets cross-wired. What happens when everything smells really, really bad?

He is the worst of the worst; a perverted deviant and an elusive killer who presents himself as an old-fashioned country preacher. She is the distraught widow of a man who successfully embezzled a fortune. With her two young children, she lives amid the dilapidated ruins of a declining estate named Slate Gardens, where rumor insists three million dollars remains hidden. Beguiled by the preacher's psychotic manipulations, the widow takes him into her home as her second husband and a malign father to her vulnerable son and daughter. She longs for companionship and love. He craves only profit.

Continuing their unlawful flight across the broad State of Texas, Corporal Terrance “Tare” McGee (retired) and his four-legged handler, Perquisite Bombdog, must evade arrest and successfully do what they need to do. Whatever that might be. Properly supplied with ample snack foods, drugs, and liquor, and having collected an endangered primate named “Bobo” along their way, they must flee south into the rugged and notoriously violent Rio Grande Valley with the aid of their many supporters, despite running desperately low on ammo for Bobo’s Squad Automatic Weapon.

One of the most pivotal waterborne engagements in history would not be fought ship-to-ship in the traditional fashion of naval warfare, a brutal duel between massive battleships. This titanic contest would be decided without either commander sighting the other, for victory would ultimately be claimed in the skies, aircraft to aircraft. Its outcome directly determined the future of the individual sailor and aviator, but it also indirectly decided the fates of their homelands, as well. For the combatants, Midway was not merely an isolated battle in the larger conflict, rather it would decide ...

This is reality television run amok, daytime programming in the bloody Roman Coliseum. Survival is the game and vast wealth the reward. What of the hapless individuals tossed together into competition? Can they retain their humanity and still do what it takes to win? When defeat is death, does this difference matter? Fun and games in the depths of a hostile rain forest. It’s every man, and woman, for themselves!

Insomnia is a special kind of torture. Its short-term effects are something everyone experiences from time to time, but its long-term effects are known only to an unfortunate few. These effects include panic attacks, paranoia, and phobias. Eventually, hallucinations and convulsions become noticeable, followed by symptoms of dementia, coma and then death. Inevitably, the difference between waking and sleeping dissolves and the two become inseparable. After months of restlessness, a chronically sleepless man loses the ability to differentiate between nightmares, daydreams and reality. While ...

During the final years of the Soviet Union, its government started building an ultra-secret airbase in the center of a vast wilderness. Its secrecy outstripped its management such that construction continued despite its abandonment. Occasionally, an errant aircraft drops somebody on its tarmac, and they are never seen alive again. At the end of a late night international flight from India to Russia, a weary traveler finds himself deposited in a lonely ramp of an empty terminal. As he navigates its endless gates and corridors, this hapless traveler begins to realize he has landed in no ...

1943. World War II. The U.S. government drafted him out of his life of normalcy and complacency into the life of a United States Marine Corps officer. After intensive training, he would serve during some of the bloodiest assaults of the war. The violent rigors of combat would teach him the rules of long-term survival amid the most lethal fighting in human history. Those who failed to learn these lessons would not return home to their families. During the bloody throes of combat, all is fair and the only rules that apply are those that promote survival. When confronting evil, what is the ...

Matriculating across that stage, nothing betrayed the Texas sand behind his ears, though his stiff, high collar hid a neck roasted red by long hours spent laboring beneath August sunshine. Indeed, years of careful study and patient attention had polished away the roughest facets of his country-born demeanor with a doctoral degree, but he would always be Charles Ray McCormick, white trash. Learning from the invariably negative example set forth by his errant, wayward siblings, Ray avoided the pitfalls of youth via intervention of a well-meaning mentor and pursuit of an academic career. ...