Night Light is the second album by Kevin Hearn and Thin Buckle. The band recorded it as a quartet, Tielli having left the band prior. It was produced by Walter Zweifel. It was sold at Barenaked Ladies concerts in late 2003, but wasn't officially released until 2004.

"Night Light" is a more upbeat album than the band's previous release, H-Wing, which was written largely while Hearn was in the hospital receiving treatment for leukemia. By the time he began to write and record "Night Light," the disease was in remission. References to the disease are still present (from "Jocelyn": I decided in my head/That I would come back from the dead), but songs like the title track, "Ball of Twine," and "Born Human" are more upbeat than Hearn's previous album, both in tempo and in message.

In addition to providing lead vocals and playing guitar, accordion, piano and keyboards, Kevin Hearn drew the album cover. The album was packaged in a digipack with a standard jewel case booklet included within.

Software is a 1982 cyberpunk science fiction novel written by Rudy Rucker. It won the first Philip K. Dick Award in 1983. The novel is the first book in Rucker's Ware Tetralogy, and was followed by a sequel, Wetware, in 1988.

Plot summary

Software introduces Cobb Anderson as a retired computer scientist who was once tried for treason for figuring out how to give robots artificial intelligence and free will, creating the race of boppers. By 2020, they have created a complex society on the Moon, where the boppers developed because they depend on super-cooled superconducting circuits. In that year, Anderson is a pheezer — a freaky geezer, Rucker's depiction of elderly Baby Boomers — living in poverty in Florida and terrified because he lacks the money to buy a new artificial heart to replace his failing, secondhand one.

As the story begins, Anderson is approached by a robot duplicate of himself who invites him to the Moon to be given immortality. Meanwhile, the series' other main character, Sta-Hi Mooney the 1st — born Stanley Hilary Mooney Jr. — a 25-year-old cab driver and "brainsurfer", is kidnapped by a gang of serial killers known as the Little Kidders who almost eat his brain. When Anderson and Mooney travel to the Moon together at the boppers' expense, they find that these events are closely related: the "immortality" given to Anderson turns out to be having his mind transferred into software via the same brain-destroying technique used by the Little Kidders.

Light is a science fiction novel by M. John Harrison published in 2002. It received the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and a BSFA nomination in 2002, and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2003.

Overview

The book centres on the lives of three individuals — the physicist (and serial killer) Michael Kearney, on the verge of a breakthrough in theoretical physics sometime in 1999; Seria Mau Genlicher, the cybernetically-altered female pilot of a "K-ship", and the ex-space pilot and adventurer Ed Chianese. Seria Mau and Ed's stories take place in the year 2400 AD.

The lives of these three individuals are linked in many ways, though most tangibly by the presence of a mysterious creature called The Shrander, who appears in many guises to all three characters throughout the novel (with anagrammatic names of Sandra Shen and Dr. Haends). They are also linked by the Kefahuchi Tract, a space-time anomaly described as "a singularity without an event horizon", an object of awe and wonder that has been the ruin of many civilisations attempting to decode its mysteries.

A window is an opening in a wall, door, roof or vehicle that allows the passage of light and, if not closed or sealed, air and sound.

Modern windows are usually glazed or covered in some other transparent or translucent material. Windows are held in place by frames. Many glazed windows may be opened, to allow ventilation, or closed, to exclude inclement weather. Windows often have a latch or similar mechanism to lock the window shut.

Types include the eyebrow window, fixed windows, single-hung and double-hung sash windows, horizontal sliding sash windows, casement windows, awning windows, hopper windows, tilt and slide windows (often door-sized), tilt and turn windows, transom windows, sidelight windows, jalousie or louvered windows, clerestory windows, skylights, roof windows, roof lanterns, bay windows, oriel windows, thermal, or Diocletian, windows, picture windows, emergency exit windows, stained glass windows, French windows, and double- and triple paned windows.

The Romans were the first known to use glass for windows, a technology likely first produced in Roman Egypt, in Alexandria ca. 100 AD. Paper windows were economical and widely used in ancient China, Korea and Japan. In England, glass became common in the windows of ordinary homes only in the early 17th century whereas windows made up of panes of flattened animal horn were used as early as the 14th century. Modern-style floor-to-ceiling windows became possible only after the industrial plate glass making processes were perfected.

In theology, divine light (also called divine radiance or divine refulgence) is an aspect of divine presence, specifically an unknown and mysterious ability of God, angels, or human beings to express themselves communicatively through spiritual means, rather than through physical capacities.

Spirituality

The term light has been used in spirituality (vision, enlightenment, darshan, Tabor Light). Bible commentators such as Ritenbaugh see the presence of light as a metaphor of truth, good and evil, knowledge and ignorance. In the first Chapter of the Bible, Elohim is described as creating light by fiat and seeing the light to be good. In Hinduism, Diwali — the festival of lights — is a celebration of the victory of light over darkness. A mantra in Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad(1.3.28) urges God to 'from darkness, lead us unto Light'.

Various local religious concepts exist:

Nyx (English /ˈnɪks/;Ancient Greek: Νύξ, "Night";Latin: Nox) is the Greek goddess (or personification) of the night. A shadowy figure, Nyx stood at or near the beginning of creation, and mothered other personified deities such as Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death), with Erebus (Darkness). Her appearances are sparse in surviving mythology, but reveal her as a figure of such exceptional power and beauty, that she is feared by Zeus himself.

Mythology and literature

Hesiod

In Hesiod's Theogony, Nyx is born of Chaos. With Erebus (Darkness), Nyx gives birth to Aether (Brightness) and Hemera (Day). Later, on her own, Nyx gives birth to Moros (Doom, Destiny), Ker (Destruction, Death), Thanatos (Death), Hypnos (Sleep), the Oneiroi (Dreams), Momus (Blame), Oizys (Pain, Distress), the Hesperides, the Moirai (Fates), the Keres, Nemesis (Indignation, Retribution), Apate (Deceit), Philotes (Friendship), Geras (Old Age), and Eris (Strife).

In his description of Tartarus, Hesiod locates there the home of Nyx, and the homes of her children Hypnos and Thanatos. Hesiod says further that Nyx's daughter Hemera (Day) left Tartarus just as Nyx (Night) entered it; continuing cyclicly, when Hemera returned, Nyx left. This mirrors the portrayal of Ratri (night) in the Rigveda, where she works in close cooperation but also tension with her sister Ushas (dawn).

Night (1960) is a work by Elie Wiesel about his experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–45, at the height of the Holocaust toward the end of the Second World War. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about the death of God and his own increasing disgust with humanity, reflected in the inversion of the parent–child relationship as his father declines to a helpless state and Wiesel becomes his resentful teenage caregiver. "If only I could get rid of this dead weight ... Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever." In Night everything is inverted, every value destroyed. "Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends," a Kapo tells him. "Everyone lives and dies for himself alone."

Wiesel was 16 when Buchenwald was liberated by the United States Army in April 1945, too late for his father, who died after a beating while Wiesel lay silently on the bunk above for fear of being beaten too. He moved to Paris after the war, and in 1954 completed an 862-page manuscript in Yiddish about his experiences, published in Argentina as the 245-page Un di velt hot geshvign ("And the World Remained Silent"). The novelist François Mauriac helped him find a French publisher. Les Éditions de Minuit published 178 pages as La Nuit in 1958, and in 1960 Hill & Wang in New York published a 116-page translation as Night.