Archive for May, 2009
MI5 Publishes Intelligence Review of 7/7 Terror Attacks
MI5 Website: Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) has published a review of intelligence concerning the London terrorist attacks of 7 July 2005. The review was carried out as part of a lengthy and detailed investigation by the ISC to determine whether the attacks could have been prevented in the light of what was known at the time and what should have been known. Drawing on sensitive intelligence gathered by the Security Service, the police and other UK agencies, the ISC concludes: “we cannot criticise the judgements made by MI5 and the police based on the information that they had and their priorities at the time.”
Two of the 7/7 attackers appeared on the fringes of another terrorist plot, Operation CREVICE, that the Security Service was investigating in 2004, but were not identified or investigated in detail by the Service or the police as they appeared to be petty fraudsters, not involved…
Got Work? Less Than One in Five U.S. College Graduates Looking for Work Found It
JOHN BERMAN, ABC News: Casey Savage graduated from Trinity College in Hartford with a 3.8 grade-point average and honors. What he doesn’t have is a job. “I’ve talked to 24 different firms so far. Hedge funds, investment banks, private equity shops,” Savage said. “And I just feel that there’s limited opportunities at this point.”
It’s a familiar refrain being echoed at colleges and universities across the country, as the economy continues to slump and layoffs, furloughs and pay cuts dominate the employment landscape. The struggling economy means college seniors are facing one of the toughest job markets in years.
According to a survey from National Association of Colleges and Employers, the class of 2009 is leaving campus with fewer jobs in hand than their 2008 counterparts. The group’s 2009 Student Survey found that just 19.7 percent of 2009 graduates who applied for a job actually have one.
In comparison, 51 percent of those…
German Firm Plans Gold ATMs To Meet Growing Demand
Peter Starck, Reuters: Automatic teller machines (ATMs) — 500 of them — dispensing pieces of gold will be available around Germany, Switzerland and Austria by the end of this year.
That at least is the plan of German precious metals online trading company TG-Gold-Super-Markt.de. The ATMs, to be located at airports, railway stations and shopping malls, are intended to accustom ordinary people to the idea of investing in a physical asset such as gold, the thinking goes.
Thomas Geissler, the company’s chief executive, said the gold ATMs might even improve relations between the sexes. “I have yet to meet a woman who does not like a gift of gold. It’s better than flowers. Flowers are more expensive. They wilt and you (as a man) don’t get as many points at home as if you bring gold,” he said.
A prototype ATM on display for a one-day marketing test at the main railway station…
Actual ‘V’ Trailer Descends Upon The Earth
io9.com: We’ve seen clips and loads of pictures, but right here, right now we’ve got the final, super-dramatic trailer for the remake of the cult ’80s series V. What do you think?
7 Hacks That Turn Everyday Objects Into Deadly Weapons
Mike Haring, Cracked.com: The world is rife with mundane crap that doesn’t qualify as even remotely lethal, and that’s barely hilarious at all. Fortunately, with some moderate tweaking, even the simplest of items can be turned into something horrifying. Just ask the inventors of the…
#7. Super Soaker Flamethrower: When Super Soakers arrived on the scene, they put ordinary squirt guns to shame with their extended range and awesome power. Sure you had to pump till your arm cramped into a freakish, bent claw, but that just prepared us for many lonely, cold nights in front of a glowing monitor.
It was only a matter of time before some disillusioned youth with pyromaniac tendencies and a fascination with WWII-era weapons of horror noticed that water wasn’t the only thing you load into it. And where more wholesome youth would have stopped at firing delicious nacho cheese from their squirt gun, others were determined…
Could ‘Terminator’ Happen? An MIT Professor Answers!
A science magazine asks an MIT professor, roboticists, artificial intelligence workers, and science fiction authors to assess the possibility of an uprising of intelligent machines (a la Terminator).
Answers range from “of course it’s possible” to “why would an intelligent network waste resources on personal combat?” And one nanotech professor says wryly that “Humans are really too stupid, venal, gullible, mendacious, and self-deceiving to be put in charge of important things like the Earth.”
Vernor Vinge answers that a greater threat to humanity is good old-fashioned nuclear annihilation. But the History Channel’s roboticist says it’s inevitable robots will eventually be used in warfare, while an industrial roboticist warns about the possibility of robots in the hands of criminals, cults, and other ‘non-state actors’.
“What we should fear in the foreseeable future is not unethical robots, but unethical roboticists.”
Exactly How Does the Human Body Burn?
Linda Geddes, New Scientist: Until now, scientific knowledge about burned remains has been limited. Anything that wasn’t based on speculation has come either from post-hoc examination of burnt corpses — where the exact circumstances of the fire are usually unclear — or from the deliberate burning of pig corpses, which have key differences to humans. “There wasn’t much literature,” says Elayne Pope, a forensic scientist at the University of West Florida. “The science is young.”
Eight years ago, a medical institute in Memphis, Tennessee, agreed to provide Pope with some of its donated bodies and she began her unusual mission. To date she has made use of about 30 whole corpses and various additional body parts.
So what happens after they light the fire? “A human limb burns a little like a tree branch,” says John DeHaan, a fire investigator at Fire-Ex Forensics in Vallejo, California, who works with Pope. First, he…
Army Terminators Walk Like Men
David Hambling, Wired’s Danger Room: Round four of mankind’s epic battle against the walking, talking, killer machines starts tonight with the opening of Terminator Salvation. But humanoid robots aren’t confined to the movies. Turns out the U.S. military is backing research into robots that act like people, as well.
Today, the American armed forces’ main ground robots, the Foster-Miller Talon and iRobot’s Packbot, look like boxes with caterpillar tracks. It’s a nice, stable design. And it works well — which is why the military has sent thousands of ‘em over to Afghanistan and Iraq.
But these robots don’t easily fit into a world that we humans have constructed for creatures that operate like us. Door handles only work if you have something like a hand — and it has to be at the right height, too. Wheels and tracks get stuck on obstacles that legs just jump over. So it makes sense,…
Milk is a Gateway Drug to Bourbon
Stephen C. Webster, RAW Story: You have never before seen — nor will you ever see again — FBI director Robert Mueller so thoroughly humbled in a discussion about drug policy before the United States Congress.
In this instance, Rep. Steve Cohen (D–TN) gets Mueller to admit that marijuana has never killed anybody, then smashes into tiny bits the decades-old “gateway drug” argument with a unique analogy of milk and bourbon.
As my friend Christopher Largen once opined with iconoclasm: “If cocaine dealers were the nation’s only source of coffee, a cup of Joe would soon be considered a gateway mug.”
Conservative Texas Mayor In Gay Relationship With Illegal Alien
Richard Connelly, Houston Press: Out there in West Texas, they know how to do things right. Like spring surprise mayoral resignations.
The mayor of San Angelo, J.W. Lown, abruptly announced his resignation just days before he was to be sworn in for his fourth term as mayor, the San Angelo Standard Times reports.
Surprise Number One: He made the announcement from Mexico, where he had suddenly bolted to.
Surprise Number Two: He was resigning because he is in a relationship with an illegal alien and they’re trying to fix the alien’s status.
Surprise Number Three: Both Lown and the Mexican citizen are guys. As in HE’S GAY. In San Angelo.
Lown is obviously a well-respected public servant: He won the most recent re-election with 89 percent of the vote, and stunned city council members were effusive in their praise for his work.
But it’s also obvious they didn’t know he was in the closet.
Radio Host ‘Mancow’ Gets Waterboarded: It Lasts 6 Seconds and He Admits It’s Torture
RYAN POLLYEA, NBC News: “It is way worse than I thought it would be,” and so it went Friday morning when WLS radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller decided to subject himself to the controversial practice of waterboarding live on his show.
Mancow decided to tackle the divisive issue head on — actually it was head down, while restrained and reclining. “I want to find out if it’s torture,” Mancow told his listeners Friday morning, adding that he hoped his on-air test would help prove that waterboarding did not, in fact, constitute torture.
“The average person can take this for 14 seconds,” Marine Sergeant Clay South answered, adding, “He’s going to wiggle, he’s going to scream, he’s going to wish he never did this.”
Turns out the stunt wasn’t so funny. Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify…
Parallel Universes: Are They More Than a Figment of Our Imagination?
Daily Galaxy: “The multiverse is no longer a model, it is a consequence of our models.”
— Aurelien Barrau, particle physicist at CERN
The Hollywood blockbuster, The Golden Compass, adapted from the first volume of Pullman’s classic sci-fi trilogy, “His Dark Materials” portrays various universes as only one reality among many, but how realistic is this kind of classic sci-fi plot? While it hasn’t been proven yet, many highly respected and credible scientists are now saying there’s reason to believe that parallel dimensions could very well be more than figments of our imaginations.
“The idea of multiple universes is more than a fantastic invention — it appears naturally within several scientific theories, and deserves to be taken seriously,” stated Aurelien Barrau, a French particle physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
There are a variety of competing theories based on the idea of parallel universes, but the most basic idea is that…
Chernobyl Fallout Could Drive Evolution of ‘Space Plants’
Ewen Callaway, New Scientist: More than two decades after the world’s largest nuclear disaster, life around Chernobyl continues to adapt.
“There are no dogs with two heads,” says Martin Hajduch of the Slovak Academy of Sciences — although birds, insectsMovie Camera and humans have all been affected to a greater or lesser extent by radioactive fallout.
To determine how plants might have adapted to the meltdown, Hajduch’s team compared soya grown in radioactive plots near Chernobyl with plants grown about 100 kilometres away in uncontaminated soil.
Compared to the plants grown in normal soil, the Chernobyl soya produced significantly different amounts of several dozen proteins, the team found. Among those are proteins that contribute to the production of seeds, as well as proteins involved in defending cells from heavy metal and radiation damage. “One protein is known to actually protect human blood from radiation,” Hajduch says.
For this study, his team looked at just…
Stephen Colbert Gets Confessions From A Real Alien Hunter
Seth Shostak, author of Confessions Of An Alien Hunter, believes that, unless Earth is a miracle, there is most likely life among the trillion planets.
A Climate Solution That’s Out of this World: Meet E.T.’s Lobbyist
ANNE C. MULKERN, Greenwire: One of the newest energy lobbyists claims he has the answer to climate change: spaceships. The government has in its possession “extraterrestrial vehicles,” lobbyist Stephen Bassett said. As in flying saucers. Imagine the power source, he said, behind a 30-foot wide saucer that weighs the same as a tractor-trailer yet hurtles through galaxies at 20,000 miles per hour.
“What is the energy system operating that craft?” Bassett said. “They’re not burning kerosene.” He added, “It eliminates oil. It eliminates coal. If it’s as good as we think it is, it transforms everything.” No more ozone hole or melting polar ice caps, Bassett said. And the price of electricity would drop to almost nothing.
Bassett believes this. Fervently. He is working for free as a lobbyist, representing the Hawaii-based Exopolitics Institute, an educational organization which describes itself as “dedicated to studying the key actors, institutions and political processes associated…
Will the U.S. Government Finally Admit There Are Aliens?
Annalee Newitz, i09.com: A whole batch of videos are circulating on YouTube from NASA — they show UFOs zooming around the space shuttle and space station. Is this the beginning of the alien renaissance?
Real UFOs, the blog whose title says it all, has uncovered a treasure trove of videos from NASA which include UFOs. You can see one right here, and there are at least a dozen more on Martyn Stubbs’ YouTube channel. While you ponder that, just remember that the UFO lobby working in Washington thinks that the Obama Administration is the most likely to admit to the alien coverup. The New York Times recently profiled a DC lobbyist whose entire job is trying to get government officials to admit alien technologies exist that could rescue the environment.
Marijuana At The Tipping Point
Sometime in the last few months, the notion of legalizing marijuana crossed an invisible threshold. Long relegated to the margins of political discourse by the conventional wisdom, pot freedom has this year gone mainstream.
Public support for legalization is climbing to a majority position, with a just-released Zogby poll finding that 52 percent support the legalization, taxation and regulation of pot. In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have softened his position on pot by calling for an “open debate” on the subject. Meanwhile, Democratic Assemblyman Tom Ammiano of San Francisco introduced Assembly Bill 390, legislation that would tax and regulate marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol.
Yes, there is a new freedom in the air when it comes to marijuana.
Newspaper columnists and editorial page writers across the land have taken up the cause with gusto, as have letter writers and bloggers. Last week, even a U.S. senator got into the…
Satellites Take on Crime Busting Along the Border
From high above the Earth, the U.S. intelligence community is using satellites to track the activities of drug cartels operating along the U.S.-Mexican border.
Pictures from space are being used along with other intelligence to pinpoint Mexican narcotics operations and anticipate smuggling attempts into the United States, said R. Scott Zikmanis, a deputy director of operations with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
Federal officials say an eye in space adds one more tool in an ever-expanding technological arsenal aimed at defending the border from narcotics traffickers, human smugglers and terrorists.
If a satellite picks up on activities by drug runners, U.S. authorities could then transmit information to agents along the border.
New ‘Terminator’ Director Sees Real Transhumanism
“Before I agreed to do Terminator, I made a point of going to see Jim Cameron on the set of Avatar,” says the director of the fourth Terminator film
