Most Popular Books by Thomas Armstrong

Of Water and Rock derives its power from the basic human need for connectedness and belonging. When Torontonian Edward Hamblin steps off the plane in Barbados, in the winter of 1969, he crosses more than the tarmac at Seawell Airport. As he navigates the island''s racial and cultural boundaries, he leaves behind an empty life of comfort and discovers a vibrant world of simple beauty, an undiscovered family, and reconciliation with the memory of a long dead father. Powerful converging themes give the novel an emotional strength: Edward Hamblin''s immersion into the post-colonial culture of Barbados; his unresolved animosity towards his long dead Barbadian father who deserted his family when he was young; the poor black peasant farmer, Sissy Braithwaite, and her unrequited love for an abandoned daughter; the wealthy white Mary Collymore''s disconnected life of privilege and racial intolerance. After Sissy''s death, when Edward discovers his Great Aunt''s diary, the apparently disconnected threads are drawn together. As well as revealing the true relationships between the protagonists, Edward hears his father''s voice, comes to understand and pity the man that he has for so long despised, and resolves to unite his newly discovered family in a way his father never could

88,000 word adult novelFlap Copy: Dr. Harvey Sumner has a dirty little secret. Although he''s a world renowned child psychologist with honors galore and the scion of a long line of child healers, he''s childless and hasn''t worked professionally with a single child for over thirty years.The tension between his fame and the reality of his life finally reaches a breaking point when he''s kidnapped by the U.S. government and held in a bunker twelve floors below the National Institutes of Health. Here he learns of a covert government project to declare childhood as a medical disorder and eliminate it from the human genome in America.Will Harvey manage to escape from his underground prison and save the country''s children and childhood itself? Or will America become a childless nation?

At the Navy Prototype Optical Interferometer (NPOI), during stellar fringe acquisition and tracking, optical stations along the NPOI vacuum line array remain in passive mode. Optical drift amplitude and rate must remain below certain limits lest stellar acquisition and fringe tracking become unachievable. Subsequent to each observation, relay mirrors are reconfigured within the long delay line stations to provide appropriate constant delays. The placement of these mirrors must be reliable and repeatable within certain tolerances. We describe the results of drift tests conducted on the current long delay line stations.

Using a 15.9m baseline at the Navy Prototype Optical Interferometer (NPOI), we have successfully detected interferometric fringes in observations of the geosynchronous satellite (geosat) DirecTV-9S while it glinted on two nights in March 2009. The fringe visibilities can be fitted by a model consisting of two components, one resolved ([greater than or equal to] 3.7m) and one unresolved (~1.1m). Both the length of the glint and the specular albedos are consistent with the notion that the glinting surfaces are not completely flat and scatter reflected sunlight into an opening angle of roughly 15 [degrees]. Enhancements to the NPOI that would improve geosat observations include adding an infrared capability, which could extend the glint season, and adding larger, adaptive-optics equipped telescopes. Future work may test the feasibility of observing geosats with aperture-masked large telescopes and of developing an array of six to nine elements.

Sue Crowther is a steadfast, gallant young woman who manages to keep her own high standards in the face of harrowing circumstances.