It's a hoax. And not even a good one.

Found Image #8

Here's a follow-up to a story I blogged in October of last year:

Did 'Masked Little People' Attack Bishop?

For more than a year, speculation, rumors and mystery have surrounded the former leader of the Gallup Catholic Diocese, in Albuquerque, N.M.

Last July, Bishop Donald Pelotte sustained multiple injuries in his home. He said he fell down a flight of stairs, but a mysterious 911 call from Pelotte is casting doubt on his claim -- so are his injuries.

[. . .]

And adding more mystery to his injuries was a bizarre call to 911.

A dispatch log from September details Gallup police were called to the bishop's home after he told operators "gentle little people about 3 to 4 feet tall wearing Halloween masks" were in his home.

"Can you tell me what happened?" the dispatcher asked.

"They're just moving. They've been quiet. They've been going upstairs in the bedrooms and hiding behind the artifacts. But they don't talk," said Pelotte, adding that they were wearing masks.

(Via The Keyhoe Report.)

Close encounter, hallucination or something altogether more disturbing . . . ?

Nasa Moonship flight target slips

Agency officials say they are now aiming for September 2014 for the first crewed mission of the Orion ship.

This is a year later than Nasa had hoped for, but still inside its March 2015 absolute deadline.

The officials say the funds currently available to develop Orion and its Ares launch rocket mean the faster timeline is no longer tenable.

Also:

Moonlighting engineers design alternative NASA rocket

The Chinese "Weather Manipulation Missile" Olympics

Sounding like a military operation, the Chinese government authorized the use of 1,104 cloud seeding missile launches from 4:00-11:39pm on Friday night to remove the threat of rain ahead of the 29th Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. This was the first time the weather manipulation technique was used during any Olympic event in the history of the games.

Pat Condell at his best:

Bigfoot Body: "Georgia Gorilla" Will Shock The World

We shall see . . .

Just taken today . . .







The more I look at the latter photo, the more I'm impressed with how the artist approximated muscle and tendon with metal cable. I'm not sure if it's a finished project or not, but I'd love to have it in my "office"/living room.

Steampunk hermit crab destroys city!

I've added yet more photos to my Flickr stream. From now on I doubt that I'll blog new photos; Flickr will suffice, at least for the most part. Also, I've decided to pick up a respectable digital camera instead of relying on my cellphone. (I found myself in a Wal-Mart in Laramie and was surprised at how inexpensive they've become.)

Scientist claims Mars has 'contemporary' life

"The discovery of liquid water on Mars combined with earlier discoveries of organic substances in a meteorite that came from Mars, and also of methane in the Martian atmosphere all point to the existence of life -- contemporary life -- on the Red Planet," said Chandra Wickramasinghe, a globally renowned astrobiologist.

"I am not speaking of fossilized life but contemporary life," emphasised Wickramasinghe, who is professor of applied mathematics and astronomy at the University of Cardiff in Wales.

Wickramasinghe, a student and collaborator of the late British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, spoke to London-based Sri Lankan diplomat and journalist Walter Jayawardhana, who made the text of the interview available to IANS.

I've said something to this effect before, but if Mars doesn't have life, then what we think we know about organic chemistry will require fundamental revision.

In any case, I fully expect Nick Bostrom to be very disappointed sometime in the foreseeable future.

Found Image #7

A Bridge between Virtual Worlds

The discussion of linking together today's virtual worlds is not new, but this is the first running code that demonstrates previously hypothetical approaches--another tangible sign that Linden Lab is serious about interoperability. "We are still early in the game. The point of the beta is to give the rest of the development community the chance to try the protocols themselves," says Joe Miller, Linden Lab's vice president of platform and development. More than 200 users have signed up for the beta program, and currently 15 worlds have been connected.

On a planet 4C hotter, all we can prepare for is extinction

We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming, Bob Watson told the Guardian last week. At first sight this looks like wise counsel from the climate science adviser to Defra. But the idea that we could adapt to a 4C rise is absurd and dangerous. Global warming on this scale would be a catastrophe that would mean, in the immortal words that Chief Seattle probably never spoke, "the end of living and the beginning of survival" for humankind. Or perhaps the beginning of our extinction.

(Via Chris Wren's blog.)

A charming example of cartoon reality deftly inserting itself back into "meatspace" reality:

Contact lenses for "anime eyes"

Build a better being

Will Wright's hugely successful games SimCity and The Sims let players shape the structure of urban areas and the lives of virtual humans; his upcoming game, Spore, lets them control the universe.

Although it is just a game, the young gamers of today may grow up to be the bioengineers of tomorrow. If Spore has any influence whatsoever, we foresee an utterly comical genetic future.

Speaking of found images: this site is nothing but.

Recent acquisitions:

Film-maker/videographer Greg Hemmings saves me the effort of recounting my recent jaunt to Wyoming and Wisconsin in this Kerouacian account. (Hemmings' professional site can be found here.)

I especially like this anecdote:

We climbed a huge mountain to film up an observatory. In fact it was an infrared telescope that could see a quintillion miles away. Mac did his first bit of b roll filming, checking out the scope, looking over the cliffs, running into guy wires. It was horribly funny actually, I was doing a hand held tracking shot of Mac walking around the observatory, I had asked him to look to the side as if he where walking and admiring at the same time, then WHAMMO! One of the electrical pole guy wires nailed him in the face! He was lucky it didn't slice his face right off his head. We all had a chuckle, Mac laughed.

Fortunately, it's all on tape; with any luck it will wind up on YouTube.

In a couple weeks I'll be departing for Arizona and California to film additional interviews with astrobiology/SETI luminaries. Watch this space.

Rudy Rucker on the creative process:

I enjoy my complex, layered, recursive, misleading ways of coping with reality and processing information. My mind is like an anthill, carting each twig of experience into this or that midden heap. If I can think of myself as a character in a transreal novel, then my life becomes more bearable, more mythic, less raw. Also it's a good way of amusing myself: a way to put reality in quotes, a way to handle life with pot-holders.

Franz Kafka's porn brought out of the closet

A stash of explicit pornography to which Franz Kafka subscribed has emerged for the first time after being studiously ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the iconic writer's saintly image.

Having stumbled by chance across copies in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford while doing unrelated research, James Hawes, the academic and Kafka expert, reveals some of this erotic material in Excavating Kafka, to be published this month. His book seeks to explode important myths surrounding the literary icon, a "quasi-saintly" image which hardly fits with the dark and shocking pictures contained in these banned journals.

So Kafka had a thing for "shocking" sexual imagery. So what? Frankly, I find it more endearing than anything else.

Found Image #6

New computer simulations show how special the solar system is

"Such a turbulent history would seem to leave little room for the sedate solar system, and our simulations show exactly that," said Rasio. "Conditions must be just right for the solar system to emerge."

Too massive a gas disk, for example, and planet formation is an anarchic mess, producing "hot Jupiters" and noncircular orbits galore. Too low-mass a disk, and nothing bigger than Neptune -- an "ice giant" with only a small amount of gas -- will grow.

"We now better understand the process of planet formation and can explain the properties of the strange exoplanets we've observed," said Rasio. "We also know that the solar system is special and understand at some level what makes it special."

Oh, yeah? Well, I still say we're an utterly insignificant speck of dust adrift in an endless existential abyss!

I've added a couple new photos to my Flickr stream.

Kickin' it old-school in the LHC:



(Thanks: Communist Robot.)

This thing is sure to turn a few heads:

Odysseus: Aurora's radical, unlimited endurance, solar powered aircraft

Aurora Flight Sciences has revealed the design of the aircraft it hopes will achieve the ambitious goals set out in DARPA's ambitious Vulture program: sustained uninterrupted flight for over five years at altitudes of 60,000-90,000 feet. Known as Odysseus, the solar-powered concept aircraft is as radical as the mission it is designed to accomplish, combining three self-sufficient "constituent aircraft" in a unique Z wing configuration that spans almost 500 feet (150 meters).

(Via Beyond the Beyond.)

Well, I'm intrigued.



Incidentally, this item was brought to my attention by John Shirley, whose excellent novel "Crawlers" hinges on the crash of a research satellite bearing malevolent nanobots. Seek it out if you're in the mood for a literary science fiction/horror hybrid.

NASA chief: ISS tests for super plasma space drive

The plasma drive is intended to work by using electric power to blast hydrogen reaction mass from its rocket nozzles at a much greater velocity than normal chemically-fuelled rockets can achieve. This means that the carrying spacecraft gets a lot more acceleration or deceleration from a given amount of fuel, and so can potentially make interplanetary journeys in much shorter times. Another potential application seen for VASIMR is maintenance of the space station's orbit, without the need to burn off colossal amounts of chemical rocket fuel.

Found Image #5

Styrofoam dome homes

But are they cat-friendly?

The Largest Human-Made Art on Earth

Forget crop circles.

Before steampunk there was "Victorian ParaTechnology."



(Thanks: BB.)

I saw "The Dark Knight." Aside from some fine supporting roles, I found virtually nothing of interest. The title character (and his alter-ego) are wooden, unconvincing and unsympathetic. (Contrast Christian Bale's comatose delivery with those of the always dependable Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, characters I would have been happy to see more of.)

"The Dark Knight" has garnered some serious praise. I don't doubt it's a superior super-hero movie. But it's devoid of ideas and stripped of character; whereas many viewers see the reinvented "Batman" franchise as cerebral and even morally challenging, I see an excuse for yet another car-chase.

Tokyo Fantasy: Images of the apocalypse

These fantastic photoshopped images by Tokyo Genso (Tokyo Fantasy) show a post-apocalyptic Tokyo overtaken by nature.

And you thought the future of "Blade Runner" was bleak.

Montauk Monster Replica

Yep, a replica of the Montauk Monster. It looks very well done, nice color tones, and a good representation of a weekend wonder, if you ask me.

When I'm not listening to The Smiths, there's a decent chance I'm listening to Vangelis.

The following is the kind of proposal that reminds me how cool it can be to live in the 21st century.

Autonomous NanoTechnology Swarm (NASA)

The Autonomic NanoTechnology Swarm (ANTS) is a generic mission architecture consisting of miniaturized, autonomous, self-similar, reconfigurable, addressable components forming structures. The components/structures have wide spatial distribution and multi-level organization. This 'swarm' behavior is inspired by the success of social insect colonies where within their specialties, individuals outperform generalists and with sufficiently efficient social interaction and coordination, groups of specialists outperform groups of generalists.

I'm not ashamed to admit that Radiohead's "Creep" is something of a tongue-in-cheek personal anthem. Imagine my astonishment to discover this haunting cover version:

60 Belgian Women Sing Radiohead's 'Creep' - Scala & Kolacny Broters

Now, this is a fine example of a cover bringing a new dynamic to a well established song. There's nothing quite like the sound of multiple voices stacked together (in a more freewheeling light, see also: Arcade Fire live). I'm not 100% behind the straight piano accompaniment, but on the other hand, it does feel like a slight stylistic nod to the ballad-y version of 'Like Spinning Plates' off 2001s I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings. Either way, the track's slow build manages to become more and more atmospheric as it progresses.

(Via Aberrant News.)

Found Image #4

Kite Power Could Generate Energy for 100,000 Homes

If we told you that a free-flying kite could provide enough energy to power your house, you might consider us crazy. How about all the homes on your block, or even an entire city? Scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands recently tested just such a technology, tethering a 10 square meter kite to a generator to produce 10 kilowatts of power (enough energy for 10 homes). They are currently planning to scale the experiment with a 50 kilowatt kite and a 100 megawatt array called the Laddermill that could potentially power 100,000 homes!

'Slow Life' and its Implications

Imagine a form of life so unusual that we cannot figure out how it dies. That’s exactly what researchers are finding beneath the floor of the sea off Peru. The microbes being studied there -- single-celled organisms called Archaea -- live in time frames that can perhaps best be described as geological. Consider: A bacteria like Escherichia Coli divides and reproduces every twenty minutes or so. But the microbes in the so-called Peruvian Margin take hundreds or thousands of years to divide.

Obscura demonstrates Minority Report display

Obscura Digital has released a video of a new technology it's dubbed a multi-touch hologram.

The demonstration shows a man interacting with holographic images projected before him, moving them around and resizing them much as you would on Microsoft's Surface.

However, unlike Microsoft's pet project all the images are projected in the air, bringing fond memories of Minority Report to PC Pro's offices.

(Via KurzweilAI.net.)

Peter Watts has done what I always assumed was impossible: he's made me want to take in a NIN concert.

Found Image #3

I realize I've been on a Mars kick recently, but you really don't want to miss this.