Showing results by author "Stephen Donald Huff" in All Categories

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.

His nickname at work, where his colleagues avoid him like a plague, is "Mr. Accident". Alongside a lonely stretch of road on his way home one evening, he earns his reputation once again. While he sits with a dying youth trapped inside an overturned and crumpled automobile, Mr. Accident tells the boy how he earned his reputation. His is a sordid tale of endless cacophony and disaster, and death follows Mr. Accident like a shadow. Today, he earns his nickname with flare. If you should cross paths with Mr. Accident, beware.

Tabloids invite us to gorge ourselves on tales of epic personal failures, and so many of us eagerly oblige. Guilty pleasures, we savor these stories most satisfactorily with a garnish of sex scandal, a dash of fiscal malfeasance and a generous dollop of social corruption. Next, we expect a weeping dessert of shame and regret to follow. Afterward, everything ends in a dumpster or the backseat of an aging sedan before we stagger home again, sated, smug and full of improving condemnations. Cup your ears and shade your eyes now. Peer into the gloom of your neighbor’s windows to eavesdrop. ...

His pranks are sinister and macabre, but each one offers a critical life lesson to his hapless victims. His neighbors, coworkers, and acquaintances rarely associate their strange misfortunes with the odd young man in their midst. Yet he is always watching, always aware, and his cunning mind is inevitably filled with delightfully perverse plans for their future. Any outcome is possible given proper context, impeccable timing, and the right props.

Not everyone in war-torn Europe believed in bigotry and hatred. A few human beings remained, hidden and camouflaged within the guise of Nazism and fanaticism. This is the story of one such old man, a railyard, and tiny scraps of paper drifting on the wind, each bearing a desperate last message from the dead. This really happened. It didn't have to happen, but it really, really did.

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.

During the summer of 1968, the Nightland, Incorporated carnival stopped in suburban Pecan Groves, Texas to stage a one-week show. Its performances paralleled a three-man prison escape, the miraculous resurrection of a cherished young boy, and the mysterious appearance of a young lady with a potent pedigree. If the squalor of its Freak Show and the rigged games of its midway are now known only within the faded archives of history, then contemporary society is its primary benefactor and direct ancestor. We see its shadows and hear its echoes everywhere. Welcome to the Freak Show. We are it.

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.

Human beings are abundant. Yet for every person on Earth, countless insects thrive, chewing through the roots and underpinnings of nature. This year, it will be a very good year for bugs! An ocean of insecticide cannot suppress their demonic hordes. They could easily dominate the planet. Why not?

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 ...

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 ...

Dire questions inevitably linger when someone disappears from a troubled marriage… from a troubled life… from the entire world. When Efren Sinclair’s wife takes a permanent vacation from their comfortable existence, all eyes turn to him, accusatory and condemning. Everyone is certain he murdered her. Nobody believes the ‘woman’ calling his children each night before bedtime is Leah Sinclair. Instead, his family and friends suspect her husband has alibied himself with an industrial grade Live-Jack, an artificially intelligent system capable of passing the forensic Turing Test for ...

Upon hearing of a lost fortune in pure, refined opium, western adventurers stationed in Afghanistan decide to retrieve it despite repeated warnings about the dangers that confront them. When a local guide leads them through the desert into the mountains to a dark and foreboding crack in a towering precipice, they again shrug off the man's dire insistence that they return home. Their decision to enter into the defile is one they will soon regret. Greed can drive a man to dare a deadly waste. Pride can push him to the world's most desolate peaks. In the barren, combat-wracked heart of ...

The mean streets of Skid Row teem with unhappy characters. Each has his or her own sordid tale to tell about their current condition and the sorry fate that deposited them there. Meet ""Narrator"", a documentary film maker who has come to interview these hapless souls. Through the lens of his camera, he hopes to improve his understanding of their plight and the struggles they confront in their daily quest for survival. His story will focus on a minor mystery with major implications. Who killed Cassandra's cat? And why?

In the aftermath of a genocidal galactic invasion, a remotely isolated colony cut off from all sources of resupply must devise a desperate plan to save themselves from certain annihilation. With their last reserves of fuel and determination, they salvage and resurrect a centuries-outmoded spacecraft named Titan, providing it with a skeleton crew consisting of three novice young men led by two sage combat veterans. Their best hope for success resides in the ship’s volunteer captain, Paladin, a genetically modified warrior descended from an elite race of martial experts. Cold, hard, and ...

To earn extra money, he decided to volunteer for service in Afghanistan as a civilian technologist. During training provided by the government, he vowed he would never allow terrorists to easily cut off his head for their propaganda machine. Instead, he determined to make them chase him through the desert first. After his capture by bloodthirsty jihadists in Afghanistan, a young American civilian must confront his worst nightmare with eyes wide open. After he manages to escape, however, he learns a terrible truth. Where will the Poppy Express take him?

On Friday of Easter weekend in Juglan, Texas, many strange events distract from the festivities. Telephone service is sporadic and failing. Fires burn out of control. Police services are nonexistent. The dead and the dying accumulate on the streets. Before the village’s clocktower chimes midnight, many of its citizens will perish and the city itself will lie in flaming ruins. This is the terrible revenge of Nelson Sedgewick. For years preceding this heinous act he has brooded within the ramshackle ruins of his lifelong obsession, his self-styled “Animal Emporium and Family Fun Circus”...

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!

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 ...

He's tall, lanky, flabby and sloppy, and his taste for women is low and vulgar. Bernie has one thing going for him, however, for he is prodigiously endowed as a man and he has a thing for ugly women. They dote and fawn over him and Bernie wallows in it all, much to the disgust and morbid curiosity of his co-workers, who have labeled his penchant for love's baser side "Bernie's Thing". Nobody knows how he does it, but all concede Bernie's success when, once every month, he arrives late at work with a new and noxious female companion hanging from his arm. Many women will say “size doesn't ...