Archive for April, 2009
Understanding ‘Lost’ — Draw Me A Hexadecimal
Hexadecimals are interesting; they’re sometimes used to encode messages, and that was the case with the DHARMA Initiative Recruiting Project alternate reality game. One of its components was Ajira Airways, whose logo was on the bottle found in the outrigger.
This one’s for the code-cracking geeks and the book nerds: The source code for the Ajira Airways web pages contains embedded hexadecimal code, code that wouldn’t show on the page itself.
When translated, one block of code gives the famous biblical passage from John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Given the Catholic sub-themes, that’s understandable.
But the hex in the source code for the flights page gives: “So off they started about Irish sport and shoneen games the like of lawn tennis and about hurley and putting the stone and racy…
Understanding Lost – Draw Me A Hexadecimal
Hexadecimals are interesting; they’re sometimes used to encode messages, and that was the case with the DHARMA Initiative Recruiting Project alternate reality game. One of its components was Ajira Airways, whose logo was on the bottle found in the outrigger. This one’s for the code-cracking geeks and the book nerds: The source code for the Ajira Airways web pages contains embedded hexadecimal code, code that wouldn’t show on the page itself. When translated, one block of code gives the famous biblical passage from John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Given the Catholic sub-themes, that’s understandable.
But the hex in the source code for the flights page gives: “So off they started about Irish sport and shoneen games the like of lawn tennis and about hurley and putting the stone…
A Nazi/Rockefeller Plot to Ruin Music Forever?
Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse would cost me between 39 and 700 dollars if I were stupid enough to buy it. And yes, that extra zero is supposed to be there.
This book is another prime example of someone making money off of people not putting a second’s worth of research into wild claims and not even verifying anything they themselves say. That someone being Leonard G. Horowitz.
A Nazi/Rockefeller Plot to Ruin Music Forever?
You dance, but it is they who have called the tune!?!
LEGO Recreation of Waterboarding
Legofesto on flickr:
LEGO recreation of the torture technique known as waterboarding, which has been used by the USA in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and Bagram airbase, as well as in other “black sites” in the name of the War On Terror.
Images of waterboarding can be found here and
here (in Vietnam).
As we now know, the CIA destroyed thousands of images and videos of interrogations using torture, including those showing waterboarding.
TARP Oversight Chair Elizabeth Warren is Frank and Funny About This Governmental Trainwreck (Part 1 of 2)
Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel in charge of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), details on The Daily Show how much taxpayer money has been sent to Wall Street and what they’ve done with it.
Cheney Wants CIA Files Declassified For His Book
MIKE ALLEN & JOSH GERSTEIN | Politico: Researching his memoirs, former Vice President Dick Cheney is pushing the CIA to declassify files that he claims would vindicate the CIA’s use of coercive interrogation techniques that President Barack Obama has banned.
The request, which the CIA has not yet answered, sets up a showdown between the past and current administrations. Cheney can be expected to argue that the Obama administration’s publication of other files last week is a precedent for release of the reports he wants. Cheney contends that the information he seeks does not pose a threat to anyone, nor to intelligence sources and methods.
Cheney originally requested the reports in late March as he worked on his book, but now thinks the documents should be made public immediately as evidence that waterboarding and other controversial practices deterred terrorist attacks and therefore saved American lives.
The conflict represents an unusual turnabout. In the…
Glenn Greenwald: The Pulitzer-Winning Investigation That Dare Not Be Uttered on TV
The New York Times’ David Barstow won a richly deserved Pulitzer Prize yesterday for two articles that, despite being featured as major news stories on the front page of The Paper of Record, were completely suppressed by virtually every network and cable news show, which to this day have never informed their viewers about what Barstow uncovered. Here is how the Pulitzer Committee described Barstow’s exposés:
Awarded to David Barstow of the New York Times for his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended.
By whom were these “ties to companies” undisclosed and for whom did these deeply conflicted retired generals pose as “analysts”? ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN and Fox — the very companies…
The Pulitzer-winning investigation that dare not be uttered on TV
The New York Times’ David Barstow won a richly deserved Pulitzer Prize yesterday for two articles that, despite being featured as major news stories on the front page of The Paper of Record, were completely suppressed by virtually every network and cable news show, which to this day have never informed their viewers about what Barstow uncovered. Here is how the Pulitzer Committee described Barstow’s exposés:
Awarded to David Barstow of The New York Times for his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended.
By whom were these “ties to companies” undisclosed and for whom did these deeply conflicted retired generals pose as “analysts”? ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN and Fox — the…
Scientists Have No Idea What’s Up with the Sun
The protective shield of energy that surrounds our solar system, has weakened by 25 per cent over the past decade and is now at it lowest level since the space race began 50 years ago.
Scientists are baffled at what could be causing the barrier to shrink in this way and are to launch mission to study the heliosphere.
The Poppy Palace
Connect the dots. According to the UN’s latest report, under U.S. occupation 92% of the world’s opium production comes from Afghan poppies. Most of the heroin going to Europe is manufactured in or transits Turkey.
The exact value to Turkey of its heroin exports is unknown but experts estimate a range in the tens of billions of dollars per year. The neocons helped establish and remain closely associated with Turkish lobbying efforts in the U.S. The question is, then: does the seamy side of Turkish influence peddling involve, among other things, money laundering, narcotics trafficking, espionage, bribery of U.S. officials, nuclear proliferation, and aid to terrorist front groups (not to mention whatever motivated the previous administration to invade Afghanistan)?
Put differently, how and to what extent has the Turkish “deep state” joined forces with the American “deep state”? To consider some of these questions, and others, I turned to Sibel Edmonds, the…
Torture, Iraq, and 9/11
5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said “my interest is to hit Saddam.”
He also said “Go massive … Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”
And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement “judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time”, is the statement “Hard to get a good case.” In other words, top officials knew that there wasn’t a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.
Moreover, “Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks…
To Prosecute or Not Prosecute, That Is the Question
Torture investigation is a job for the American legal system – the one that grants the same rights to accused torturers that the torturers denied their victims. Lacking cartilage for a spine and having gelatinous goo for brains, Congress can do nothing but make the situation worse. We need an impartial special prosecutor now.
Children’s Letters To AIG
The people in AIG’s Financial Products division might be feeling a little low about all the public criticism they’ve been receiving lately (after losing colossal amounts of other people’s money, being bailed out to the tune of 180 billion taxpayer dollars, and then receiving lavish bonuses on top of their lavish salaries). To cheer them up, a school in Texas had all of its fourth-graders break out the crayons and create cards with messages of sympathy and encouragement which were mailed to AIG headquarters in Connecticut and London.
According to the Washington Post, AIG’s employees were moved by the gesture; “There were more than a few moist eyes and tight throats,” employee Patrick O’Neill wrote back to the class. “To have reached out to us in such a heartfelt way is really a testament to your individual and collective humanity.” Sounds like there was a happy ending for everyone.
Freddie Mac Exec: Suicide or Suicided?
I have seen no reports of anything other than a straight forward Great Depression style CFO suicide, but with juicy news tip like this, I couldn’t resist using one of [Disinformation World News hosts] Joe & Raymond’s great catch-phrases.
Vintage Alien Lanscapes From Japan
The blog Pink Tentacle has a collection of stunning illustrations created in the early 1970s by artist Kazuaki Saito. For a period, his works comprised the covers of SF Magazine, Japan’s first successful and longest running science fiction publication. He depicts countless imagined alien landscapes; one wonders if these vivid worlds exist somewhere in alternate universes.
Scientists Invent Blackest Material Ever
Wired Science reports:
Scientists have fashioned what may be the blackest material in the universe: a sheet of carbon nanotubes that captures nearly every last photon of every wavelength of light. The substance absorbs between 97 percent and 99 percent of wavelengths that can be directly measured or extrapolated. It’s the closest that scientists have yet come to a “black body,” a theorized state of perfect absorption. To the naked eye, the substance appears perfectly flat [even though] it’s a sheet of deep holes.
By comparison, the blackest paints and coatings merely absorb between 84 and 95 percent of all light. Researchers say the material would be useful in solar panels or to collect heat in the frigid vacuum of space.
Computer Spies Breach Fighter-Jet Project
Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon’s $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project — the Defense Department’s costliest weapons program ever — according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks.
Similar incidents have also breached the Air Force’s air-traffic-control system in recent months, these people say. In the case of the fighter-jet program, the intruders were able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems, officials say, potentially making it easier to defend against the craft.
The latest intrusions provide new evidence that a battle is heating up between the U.S. and potential adversaries over the data networks that tie the world together. The revelations follow a recent Wall Street Journal report that computers used to control the U.S. electrical-distribution system, as well as other infrastructure, have also been infiltrated by spies abroad.
Attacks like these — or U.S. awareness of them —…
Two New Possibly Habitable Planets Discovered
After locating more than 340 planets orbiting other stars, astronomers have identified two that are the most similar to Earth so far.
The most recently discovered one is almost twice as large as Earth, making it the smallest exoplanet — for extra-solar planet — found to date. The second one was found in 2007, but new observations have shown that it is the only exoplanet to date that orbits its star in the so-called habitable zone, where water remains a liquid. Thus, it is the only exoplanet discovered that is likely to have oceans.
Intriguingly, both orbit the same star, a dwarf 20 light-years from Earth called Gliese 581, European researchers said Tuesday.
The identification of the small planet “is a remarkable discovery and bodes well for our eventual discovery of a true Earth-like, habitable planet,” astronomer Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington wrote in an e-mail.
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