Expanding Your Pool Potential

photo credit: photosbyflick via photopin cc

Ever wanted to learn how to play pool? This handy piece of technology actually helps show and thereby teach you all the numerous angles and trajectories needed in order to make the perfect shot at the pool table! Not only do you get to play the game but you can show others how you made the shot too!

There was a scene on Star Trek once (I believe) where Spock had managed to send every ball to their pockets all in one shot- because he knew the geometry and the angles needed. I've always wondered if this was actually possible!

Post by Willy Foo - Photographer, Marketer, Technopreneur.

Rounding Up 150 Children With Math

Children chart

Who's up for another fan extra?
I'm working on a sequel to The Alien Mind, but in order to do so I needed to back track some math to try to figure out how many kids are on the scene, how many are needing to be found, and which ones are available to be rounded up from other scenes. This got so complicated I needed two sheets of notes and three tally mark charts; talk about some writer problems! It was so confusing pulling this all together that I thought you all might enjoy a bit of a peek!


In The Alien Mind an alien group called the Aruk kidnap 150 children originally. During the original captivity and before the Aunantet rescue the children a girl is killed during when her and Rivi are trying to escape, leaving 149 children (including Rivi). At the beginning of the book we find that these 149 children are now being raised by the Aunantet. (You can find out more about the book as well as some fan extras here!)

When Aun is attacked the Children are sent off to safety in 10 ships each with a 20 person capacity. 50 Aunantet join them.

 Because Rivi and Ankh stay behind on Aun to make sure the children's ships get off the planet safely  that leaves 148 children to be divided among the 10 ships with two seats empty.

8 of the ships  are filled with 15 Kids and 5 Aunantet

2 of the ships are filled with 14 kids and 5 Aunantet

One of the ships of 14 kids and 5 Aunantet ends up destroyed (any more information here would be a *spoiler*) 

                           

 Which leaves 127 kids and 45 Aunantet

Later the book says the children and Aunantet decide to split up into 45 smaller groups to better evade the Aruk.

20 of those groups are found and Rivi  is put in charge of relocating 15 of those groups- 30 children of which decide to join some of Earth's new planetary colonies. Rivi then takes 15 of the youngest to the mars colony. However the book never really states how many kids (exactly) are found and how many decide to stay on Aun . (Which is important to me if they are going to be in the second book.)

It does say 75 of the kids are left to be found.

So in order to get a better picture... I ended up breaking out the old pen and paper and drew out the above chart. Separated evenly into 45 groups you get:

12 of the groups have 3 kids to 1 Aunantet
8 of the groups have 2 kids to 1 Aunantet

So working backwards... if you take the 75 kids out of the picture first and leave the 20 groups that end up found you get 52 kids. Rivi is put in charge of relocating 15 of those groups (so 42 kids out of the 52) and we are also told that 30 of her children decide to go to the other colonies. I'm assuming here that the Aunantet took charge of relocating most of the youngest ones thereby deciding to send them to Mars. So with 30 of Rivi's group gone to the other colonies that leaves 5 that were Rivi's (out of those youngest 15) that go to mars and 7 of Rivi's end up staying on Aun!

So... what trouble can I get these children into now?
If you'd like to see me finish this second book so you can find out what happens next, comment in the blog comments with #finishthatstory !

Have any questions? You can ask those in the comments too ;)