February 2010
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MPs' verdict on Murdoch's phone-hacking scandal:... →
Rupert Murdoch’s media giant News International could face a judicial inquiry after a highly critical parliamentary report today accuses senior executives at its top-selling newspaper of concealing the truth about the extent of illegal phone hacking by its journalists.
The 167-page report by a cross-party select committee is withering about the conduct of the News of the World, with one MP...
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Convict Digs Out of Prison With a Spoon →
A convict in the Netherlands has succeeded in breaking out of prison with an escape worthy of the movies: She tunneled her way out — with a spoon.
The public prosecutor’s office confirmed Tuesday that the 35-year-old female prisoner had escaped through a tunnel from a prison in Breda in the southern Netherlands.
The spectacular prison break was made possible because the convict was...
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Scientist eyes 39-day voyage to Mars →
WASHINGTON (AFP) – A journey from Earth to Mars could in the future take just 39 days — cutting current travel time nearly six times — according to a rocket scientist who has the ear of the US space agency.
Franklin Chang-Diaz, a former astronaut and a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), says reaching the Red Planet could be dramatically quicker using his...
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“I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same...”
– Farewell Note from the IRS Building Plane Crash Pilot
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“Next time you purchase white button mushrooms at the grocery store, just...”
– Strange but True: The Largest Organism on Earth Is a Fungus | Scientific American
Mother Nature’s Internet
(via poortaste)
Mycelium Rising! Related: 6 Ways Mushrooms can Save the World, a TED talk by Paul Stamets.
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Former US officials fend off simulated cyberattack →
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Former top US officials staged a digital doomsday simulation on Tuesday in which a huge cyberattack crashes cellphone networks, slows Web traffic to a crawl and plunges major cities into darkness.
Dubbed “Cyber ShockWave,” the elaborate exercise was held in a Washington hotel room transformed for the day into the White House Situation Room, where the president and...
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France steps up Internet Censorship to a new level →
LOPPSI - otherwise known as Loi d’Orientation et de Programmation pour la SÈcuritÈ IntÈrieure (pdf)- is a ragbag of measures designed to make France a safer place. Like similar UK legislation - most notably the various Criminal Justice acts brought in over the last decade - LOPPSI brings together a number of apparently unrelated proposals which would severely restrict individual rights in...
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Justinfinity: Daily eBook: Carl Jung - Liber Novus... →
Oh yes indeedy my friends. I bring to you this gem I recently found. I had actually come across another scan copy of this about a week ago, but it had separate versions for the German and English translation, and all color pictures were separate jpeg files… that was no fun. This is one PDF, with with the first half the full color scanned German original w/ pics, and the second half English...
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Discovery Dates Seafaring 100,000-Plus Years Ago,... →
Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.
That is the startling implication of discoveries made the last two summers on the Greek island of Crete. Stone tools found there, archaeologists say, are at least 130,000 years old, which is considered strong evidence for the earliest known seafaring in the Mediterranean...
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The Amy Bishop Story: Crimes, Cover-ups and Fringe... →
the rabbit hole of strangeness from Braintree goes very deep. Part II - just like Balloon Boy?
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Collapse of the euro is 'inevitable': Bailing out... →
The European single currency is facing an ‘inevitable break-up’ a leading French bank claimed yesterday.
Strategists at Paris-based Société Générale said that any bailout of the stricken Greek economy would only provide ‘sticking plasters’ to cover the deep- seated flaws in the eurozone bloc.
The stark warning came as the euro slipped further on the currency markets and...
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King Tut died from malaria, broken leg →
CAIRO – Egypt’s famed King Tutankhamun suffered from a cleft palate and club foot, likely forcing him to walk with a cane, and died from complications from a broken leg exacerbated by malaria, according to the most extensive study ever of his more than 3,300-year-old mummy.
The findings were from two years of DNA testing and CT scans on 16 mummies, including those of Tutankhamun and his...
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“Recently though, some interest in the possibility of a holographic universe was...”
– Is this world a hologram and God a laser beam?
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SETI now is making open source the search for... →
You are officially invited to join the search for extraterrestrial life. And no, that doesn’t mean you should head to Kansas and lie in a cornfield awaiting the mothership to scoop you up. All you have to do is log on to SETIQuest.org, which went live on Wednesday. The site’s launch was announced at the TED 2010 conference currently underway in Long Beach, California.
The website...
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Cellular Automata - just click on the screen →
craziness!
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How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True... →
Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country’s already bloated deficit.
(Anyone surprised GS had a hand in this??)
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WatchEntering a Black Hole: Video Simulation
A new interactive program reveals the spectacular light show you’d see if you dared to wander close to a black hole. It demonstrates how the extreme gravity of a black hole could appear to shred background constellations of stars, spinning them around as though in a giant black washing machine.
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German minister calls for EU Army →
GERMAN FOREIGN minister Guido Westerwelle has called for the EU to proceed with plans for a European army under the Lisbon Treaty, which he dubbed “the beginning and not the end” of a common security and defence policy.
His remarks at the annual Munich Security Conference followed a call by Berlin’s defence minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg to end what he called Nato’s “absurd” practice of...
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Iraq Orders Former Blackwater Guards Out →
Iraq has ordered about 250 former and current employees of Blackwater Worldwide to leave the country within seven days or face having their visas pulled.
The order comes in the wake of a U.S. judge dismissing criminal charges against five Blackwater guards who were accused in the September 2007 shooting deaths of 17 Iraqis in Baghdad.
The shooting inflamed anti-American sentiment in Iraq.
...
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“There are but three ways for the populace to escape its wretched lot. The first...”
– M.A. Bakunin (via fuckyeahradicalquotes) (via ontologicalterrorist) (via americansatori)
There should be multiple ways.
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Despite U.S. Conviction, Questions Still Swirl... →
Aafia Siddiqui
The 37-year-old Siddiqui, who is also a mother of three, was convicted of attempted murder and assault. A New York jury found her guilty of grabbing a U.S. officer’s rifle while she was being questioned in 2008 in Afghanistan in connection with containers of chemicals and notes referring to mass-casualty attacks that she was allegedly carrying. She used the rifle to fire at...
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Professor: We have a 'moral obligation' to seed... →
According to Michael Mautner, Research Professor of Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University, seeding the universe with life is not just an option, it’s our moral obligation. As members of this planet’s menagerie, and a consequence of nearly 4 billion years of evolution, humans have a purpose to propagate life. After all, whatever else life is, it necessarily possesses an incessant drive for...
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Nano-culture? Interview with Douglas Coupland -... →
New York Times: Americans think of the Canadian center as socialism. Douglas Coupland: Pretty much. To have a healthy culture you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don’t have that, your culture becomes a parking lot. NYT: How would you define the current cultural moment? DC: I’m starting to wonder if pop culture is in...
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China PLA officers urge economic punch against... →
“Our retaliation should not be restricted to merely military matters, and we should adopt a strategic package of counter-punches covering politics, military affairs, diplomacy and economics to treat both the symptoms and root cause of this disease,” said Luo Yuan, a researcher at the Academy of Military Sciences.
“Just like two people rowing a boat, if the United States first...
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Body found in plane's landing gear bay in Japan →
Tokyo, Japan (CNN) — A body was found in the landing gear bay of an airplane that arrived at Tokyo’s Narita Airport Sunday, the airport announced.
The dead man was not carrying a passport or personal belongings, airport police said.
The man was of dark complexion and dressed in blue jeans and a red and dark blue long-sleeved shirt, police told CNN.
Police said he possibly froze to...
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One step closer to quantum computing →
PRINCETON (US)—Physicist Jason Petta may have overcome a major hurdle to designing and constructing a radically new kind of quantum computer. He’s figured out how to manipulate the single electrons that very likely will constitute the new machines’ processing components or “qubits.”
Petta’s method alters the properties of a lone electron—without disturbing the trillions of electrons in its...
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“Burning petroleum to drive pistons and turn wheels to move a big chunk of metal...”
– Worldchanging: De-Industrializing the City (via earthmancomehome)
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Low Cost Home and Work Surveillance System Now for... →
Ground breaking surveillance software, Vitamin D Video, is now available for sale at an impressively low price. I had a chance to review the program’s impressive object recognition and recording capabilities when I covered the beta launch a few months ago. This is a really cool application of limited artificial intelligence. Vitamin D Video uses algorithms based on human brain activity to quickly...
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US Soldier Waterboards his Daughter →
Sgt Joshua Tabor dunked the girl’s head in a sink full of water for not reciting the alphabet, police in the town of Yelm said.
Yelm police chief Todd Stancil said Sgt Tabor was arrested on 31 January.
The girl was then found hiding in a locked bathroom in the soldier’s home, Mr Stancil said on Monday.
“From what I understand it is very similar to waterboarding,” Mr...
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Palin e-mails reveal a powerful ‘first dude’ →
(NB: This article was conveniently released on Super Bowl Sunday)
Nearly 3,000 pages of e-mails that Todd Palin exchanged with state officials, which were released to msnbc.com and NBC News by the state of Alaska under its public records law, draw a picture of a Palin administration where the governor’s husband got involved in a judicial appointment, monitored contract negotiations with...
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Fists for Jesus? →
A small but growing number of evangelical churches are using cage fighting programs to increase their odds of converting young men, reports the New York Times. Pastors say they hope to “inject” some irresistible “machismo” into their ministries by incorporating the bloody, but increasingly popular, sport of mixed martial arts: “What led me to find Christ was that...
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People Watch News that Does NOT Contradict Their... →
Cable news is not good for the soul. People make fun of Jersey Shore, but at least those randy kids don’t reinforce our deep-seated political biases. A new paper by Shawn Powers of USC and Mohammed el-Nawawy of Queens University of Charlotte looked at the effect of international cable news on the ideology of its viewers. Not surprisingly, they found that people were only interested in...
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“The director of national intelligence affirmed rather bluntly today that the...”
– Intelligence Chief Blair Says U.S. Can Take Out American Terrorists - ABC News