Bigfoot and me: A visit to the International Cryptozoology Museum
It’s posts like this that make me want to work for the mad geniuses at io9. I’ll go to the International Cryptozoology Museum and take pictures. Seriously I don’t mind one bit!
Taking a breather after student orientations today, I ran across these articles on Wired Science and thought they might be worth your consideration:
I really think that you should watch this short clip of a gorilla playing with a Nintendo DSi XL. A love of gadgets is clear evidence of a highly evolved brain, wouldn’t you say?
(Thanks, Engadget)
Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring (Wired)
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
Web Bot (Wikipedia)
High and Ure claim that the Web Bot works by using a form of the Wisdom of Crowds, with spiders that search the internet for about 300,000 keywords with emotional context[3] and record the preceding and following words to create a “snapshot.” The technology is claimed to be able to examine the collective unconscious and be able to predict catastrophic events 60 to 90 days in advance.
I sure can’t.
Apparently this is Gagra, on the Black Sea. According to io9, it used to be a Soviet resort town until military action and political instability brought it to the edge of ruin. Now it just sits there, beckoning a director to make it the backdrop for her next post-apocalyptic summer blockbuster.
Artist Andy Saunder’s creation, “Picasso’s Citroën”
As Jalopnik is quick to point out, one should not get this confused with the Citroën Picasso – an entirely different beast.
The scene: Kate and I pull up behind a blue pickup wearing two massive bumper stickers on the tailgate while at a red light on 213. Upon reading them, I am smitten but the light changes too fast for us to get a good picture.
Kate: “Do you want me to follow them until we get another light?”
Nick: “Sure…let’s hope they aren’t leaving town.”
A chase ensued.
We only had to make it to the parking lot of the nearest shopping plaza. You can see it was well worth the pursuit. And I thought I’d have nothing to blog about today…
During the 1960s, Bell Labs asked six artists – including Warhol – to submit drawings that were shrunken and printed on a tiny tile that was then shipped off to the moon in secret. This is the awesomest story I have ever read.
Thanks to io9 for reporting on this – and the upcoming PBS documentary on it!
Palin accuses Obama of being in bed with big oil (Yahoo! News)
I can’t even BEGIN to comment on this without spontaneously combusting. WHY is she still here?!
At least according to the Australians, the Voyager 2 spacecraft has been hacked by aliens and is beaming back a signal to Earth that has been indecipherable for the last few weeks. Despite a few launch difficulties, scientists have been able to get 33 years of stellar (pun intended) performance from a piece of 70s technology intended to last for 4 years – making it difficult to understand why the Voyager probe is now feeding only unreadable material to NASA.
So what’s going on? Remember:
Each Voyager space probe carries a gold-plated audio-visual disc in the event that either spacecraft is ever found by intelligent life-forms […]
Is it possible that, on its way to Sirius, Voyager 2 encountered something or someone? What’s going on in the heliosphere, anyway? And where is Arthur C. Clarke when you need him?
(Thanks The Daily Telegraph, NASA and Wikipedia)