Do you like pi? I’m not talking about fruit or custard in a round pastry shell like those made with apples, cherries, or lemon meringue.

I am talking about a mathematical constant that shows up almost everywhere in our understanding of the universe, symbolized by the Greek letter “Ï€”. This is pronounced “pi.” It is the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference, or more plainly, the ratio of how tall a circle is to the distance traveled when it rolled exactly once around.

Every year, Pi Day is observed on 3/14, since 3.14 are the first three digits of pi. But twice today, 3/14/2015, we’ll get to see the clock hit the first 10 digits of pi — 3.141592653 — an occurrence that won’t happen again for another 100 years.

For Cyber Monday today, Amazon is offering up to 75% off on more than 900 Kindle ebooks.

Check out the main Cyber Monday Kindle Deals page to browse the selections, which can also be browsed through by category (science fiction, mystery, literature and fiction, non-fiction, etc). Prices are as low as $.99 for eBooks by Jack Higgins, Barbara Hambly, Alan Dean Foster, Alice Walker, and many more.

Here’s a few sale items that caught my interest:

– Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho – $2.99
– Henry VIII: Wolfman by A. E. Moorat – $3.99
– The Theory of Relativity: and Other Essays by Albert Einstein – $2.99
– The Time of the Dark: The Darwath Series (Book One) by Barbara Hambly – $1.99
– Spellsinger: A Spellsinger Adventure (Book One) by Alan Dean Foster – $1.99

By Paul Malmont

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown, my new novel, is what I like to call faction — a hybrid of fact and fiction. A fact: Thanks to editor John W. Campbell, golden age science fiction writers Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and L. Sprague de Camp were hired by the Navy to work on military research at the Philadelphia Naval Yard during World War II. A fact: L. Ron Hubbard was a pulp science fiction writer, a friend of Heinlein’s, and was court martialed for, well, basically incompetency during the war — yet he always claimed he was off on super-secret missions in the Pacific. A fact: Nikola Tesla built a strange communication tower at Wardenclyffe, Long Island. A fact: a legend has grown up since the 1960s that experiments in Philadelphia may have led to a ship being transported from the harbor, to Virginia, and back again. A fact: a spring-fed river appears under the Empire State Building and runs underground to Washington Square. Somewhere beyond those facts, my fiction begins.

I do a tremendous amount of research preparing for my novels. I have a responsibility to the real lives of the people I’m turning into characters; to plausibly connect what we know about their lives with what we don’t. One thing I really like to do, whenever possible, is visit the locations I’m writing about. Two things that I write about often in describing a locale are smells and sounds — two things that I don’t have to imagine if I visit a place. So, I thought for this Geeks of Doom guest blog post that I’d share some of the real world settings I visited and photographed (and one I visited but didn’t photograph and had to borrow photos from).

The Astounding, The Amazing, and The Unknown
By Paul Malmont
Hardcover | Kindle
Simon & Schuster
Release date: July 5, 2011

The Astounding, The Amazing, And The Unknown is a vibrant, highly suspenseful race to solve a Nikola Tesla mystery, defeat the Nazis, and help end World War II. In a desperate attempt to make that happen, the U.S. Navy forms a team of some of the best and brightest imaginations from the world of popular science fiction pulp magazines of their time. The team includes Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Walter Gibson (of The Shadow fame), and a pre-Scientology L. Ron Hubbard, all of whom were regular contributors to the pulps named in the title of this book.

Using equal parts imagination and scientific research, the team attempts to accomplish their government-mandated goal of thwarting the enemy by creating death rays and invisibility cloaks for naval ships. In the midst of their research, the group stumbles upon an unconfirmed experiment of Tesla’s that may have either led to free electricity across America or a super-bomb capable of completely obliterating a whole country half a world away, as well as an old rivalry between two scientists that may have led to murder. It’s up to the team to sort out the mystery and complete Tesla’s experiment before the military shuts down the project altogether or someone else shuts them up permanently.

In honor of what would be Albert Einstein‘s 132nd birthday today, Open Road has published seven digital books by the iconic physicist, including The Theory of Relativity and Other Essays, exclusively in Amazon Kindle store.

These new Kindle editions are enhanced versions with new photographs and biographical information, as well as introductions written by Neil Berger.

The Kindle versions range from $7.99 – $9.99 each in price and can be purchased at Amazon’s Kindle Store.

According to Open Road, this selection of Einstein books was designed for readers interested in Einstein’s seminal works in physics, his collaborations with colleagues, and his broader philosophy. The seven digital works that are exclusive to the Kindle Store are listed below, along with descriptions and the direct links to the product pages.