Groonk's Newsmine 2.0

When Copperfield's turn came, Riley was bamboozled.

Copperfield told Page Two he pulled out all of his pockets for Riley to see he had nothing, even though he had a cellphone, passport and wallet stuffed in them.

"Call it reverse pickpocketing," Copperfield said.

Riley jumped behind the wheel, and the car took off.

Copperfield said police told him the teens may have been involved in five other armed robberies last week but authorities lacked an accurate description.

"We don't know nothing, and we don't want to know," said a man at the home of one of the juvenile suspects, when asked whether the kids realized whom they were robbing.

"If you could make a car engine that was as efficient as one of these black holes, you could get about a billion miles out of a gallon of gas," said study team leader Steve Allen of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University.

"In anyone's book, that would be pretty green."

[...]

"Once gas comes within a distance about a million times larger than the event horizon of the black hole, it becomes gravitationally captured," Allen explained. "At this point the gas becomes fuel for the black hole engine."

Anyway, if the whole futurism thing interests you, go and take a look.

[...]

The Vatican says abstinence is the best way to tackle HIV/Aids.

But last week, a retired archbishop backed the use of condoms for married couples to prevent Aids transmission.

Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, who used to be Archbishop of Milan, said that in couples where one partner had HIV/Aids, the use of condoms was "a lesser evil".

It has a top speed of 100 km/h (60mph) and uses a novel tilting chassis to make it safe and manoeuvrable.

The traffic-busting two-seater is the result of a 40-month project by researchers in nine European countries.

[...]

The prototype on show in Bath was just a metal skeleton, but the complete car has a roof that protects both the driver and the passenger sitting behind in the event of a crash.

The plastic panels, that sit on the aluminium frame, also protect the occupants from the elements.

At just over one metre wide it is even narrower than Daimler Chrysler's original Smart car.

The micro-mini is able to park efficiently and opens up the possibility of an increased number of lanes on jam-packed city streets.

However, more cars should not mean more fumes, because the Clever car uses compressed natural gas.

"It costs less to run, is quieter and is less polluting," said Dr Jos Darling, a senior lecturer in charge of the Clever project at Bath University.

The first title in the series, Dr Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain?, sees players follow a daily regime of brain-enhancing exercises and is due to be released in the UK in June.

Dr Kawashima's Brain Training comprises a variety of mini-games designed to give brains a workout.

Activities include solving simple maths problems, counting people going in and out of a house, drawing pictures on the Nintendo DS touchscreen, and reading classic literature aloud into the device's microphone.

Players are given a brain age reflecting their performance. Over time, your brain age should get younger as you achieve better scores.

Unheard of in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, blogging is providing ordinary Iraqis with a voice -- a chance to vent and reflect on the changes reshaping their country.

For the outside world, the generally anonymous internet postings offer raw insider views and insights in which sorrow and joy, hope and despair, fear and defiance coexist as the violence of the insurgency and now sectarian divisions swirl around Iraqis.

"The West should listen to the opinions of the simple Iraqi people. They only hear from analysts and politicians," said Zeyad, who agreed to discuss his blogging only if his family name wasn't revealed for security reasons. "This is a good window into the world."

Zeyad typed his first entry in his Healing Iraq blog in October 2003 about Iraq's new currency, calling it "wonderful and so symbolic" that the distribution of the new dinar coincided with the anniversary of a referendum that re-elected Saddam. He has gone on to chronicle his thoughts on all aspects of life in the new Iraq.

A self-described agnostic born into a Sunni Muslim family, Zeyad reacted angrily in 2003 when the then interior minister announced that people found eating in public during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan would be detained for three days and fined.

"I wanted to kill someone after reading all that," Zeyad wrote. "Free country my ass."

In later postings, he seethed at the growing influence of Muslim clerics, saying it made him fear for the future of freedom in Iraq.

"I want to be able to buy my vodka without having to look left and right. I want to be able to walk with my girlfriend in the street while holding hands together without people glaring at me. Is this TOO MUCH to ask?" he wrote. "Do I have to immigrate and leave my country for wanting to do all that?"

But there were moments of pride and exhilaration, too.

One came when Iraqis voted for an interim legislature in January 2005, their first democratic election in decades.

"Hold your head up high. Remember that you are Iraqi," Zeyad wrote that day.

[...]

While lamenting the violence in Iraq, a blogger who uses the pseudonym The Mesopotamian praised the war that ousted Saddam.

"The blood and sacrifices by the American soldiers and people will never be forgotten," The Mesopotamian wrote. "It was right, it was just and it was ordained by God that a murderer and tyrant should be overthrown."

Scientists insist it wasn't an earthquake. The Federal Aviation Administration has no record of any planes producing a sonic boom by breaking the sound barrier.

Camp Pendleton officials say no activities on the Marine base could have created such a disturbance. There were no large explosions in San Diego County that day, and no meteor fireballs were reported in the sky that morning.

What was it, then?

[...]

Among bloggers and Web-based conspiracy theorists, one of the leading explanations for the San Diego disturbance is that the military is testing a top-secret spy plane called the Aurora, which supposedly can travel several times the speed of sound.

“Sir, I've never even heard of that plane before,” an Air Force spokeswoman in Virginia responded when asked about the possibility.

Even UFO experts are baffled by what happened in San Diego. Asked whether a flying saucer might have caused such an event, Peter Davenport of the Seattle-based National UFO Reporting Center said, “Probably not.”

“UFOs almost never generate sonic booms or shock waves,” he added. “They accelerate so rapidly that they leave a vacuum in the sky, much the way lightning does.”

Ms. Gillespie, 49, said she has worked in the store for nearly 20 years and has seen people from every walk of life, including "every Sunday churchgoers."

"I know of multiple marriages that sex toys have sold because some people need that. The people who are riding us (the adult novelty industry) so hard are probably at home buying it (sex toys and novelties) on the Internet. It’s ridiculous."
The measure would add sex toys to the state’s obscenity laws, which already prohibit the dissemination and advertisement of obscene materials.

People convicted under obscenity laws face up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Studios also want to offer a legal alternative to the many file-swapping services that offer pirated copies of shows.

[...]

"If you want to make money from television, you have to find something a million people want to watch," said Josh Bernoff, principal analyst for Forrester Research. "If you want to make money on the internet, maybe all you need is thousands or even hundreds."

ABC said it has learned important lessons so far about offering online content. Among them is that TV ratings of hit shows haven't been hurt.

"We've only increased overall media consumption for some of our hit shows and some of the shows we're trying to promote," said Albert Cheng, executive vice president of digital media for the Disney-ABC television group.

One analyst said digital delivery can be more valuable for promoting shows than generating revenue.

"If digital can help drive a movie's box office and DVD sales or help a TV show be successful, the actual digital revenues are secondary," Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Research, said in a recent note to clients.

The creature's skeletal structure suggests it was evolutionarily closer to its four-legged ancestor than previous fossils. And since the scientists found it in a terrestrial deposit, it is near certain that the animal lived on land.

"This snake is an important addition because it is the first snake with a sacrum. This represents an intermediate morphology that has never before been seen," says Hussam Zaher, curator of herpetology at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, and part of the research team.

The fossil was found in a deposit from the late Cretaceous period and Zaher says the snake is at least 90 million years old. "This fills an important morphological gap of information regarding the early evolution of snakes," he says.

The LOX-liquid methane combination is about 20% more efficient than traditional "hypergolic" fuels, which ignite on contact. It also leaves behind less residue than fuels such as kerosene, helping prevent blockages in engines.

No spacecraft have ever used LOX-methane engines, and only a few countries – notably Russia and the US - have tested the engines in laboratories. But now, NASA, the US Air Force and KT Engineering Corporation in Huntsville, Alabama, US, have achieved the new US record for a LOX-methane engine test firing.

Philips suggests adding flags to commercial breaks to stop a viewer from changing channels until the adverts are over. The flags could also be recognised by digital video recorders, which would then disable the fast forward control while the ads are playing.

Philips' patent acknowledges that this may be "greatly resented by viewers" who could initially think their equipment has gone wrong. So it suggests the new system could throw up a warning on screen when it is enforcing advert viewing. The patent also suggests that the system could offer viewers the chance to pay a fee interactively to go back to skipping adverts.

Researchers announced that the newly discovered meat muncher, Mapusaurus roseae, belongs to a group of gigantic carnivorous dinosaurs called carcharodontosaurids. This group includes Giganotosaurus, the largest meat-eating dinosaur to ever walk the earth.

The discovery is published in the latest issue of the journal Geodiversitas.

[...]

"This is arguably the nastiest thing ever found, as it is the first pack found for giant meat-eating dinosaurs," said "Dino" Don Lessem, who participated in the Patagonian dig and helped to fund it.

Lessem, a dinosaur expert who served as a consultant on the film "Jurassic Park," told Discovery News that Mapusaurus would have been contemporaneous to the largest animal that ever lived, Argentinosaurus, which was a 125-feet-long, plant-eating dino.

"In a pack, (Mapusaurus) could take down this herbivore despite its weight — 10 times (more than) even this largest of meat eaters," he said.

Philip Currie, who also worked on the excavation and is a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta, told Discovery News that the new dino somewhat resembled Tyrannosaurus rex.

"Mapusaurus looked something like T. rex but had a longer, narrower skull," Currie explained. "Its teeth were shorter and more blade-like. The teeth and long skull were better adapted to biting big chunks of meat out of sauropod dinosaurs. T. rex, on the other hand, had longer, thicker teeth for biting through the bones of its prey."

The paleontologists therefore think the newly discovered carnivore both scavenged and hunted for meat.

Joe: Well, we fans can look forward to Perfect Tommy, Reno, and New Jersey (and Mrs Johnson of course) all being at Banzai’s side during this adventure. Plus, there are two NEW Cavaliers that we will meet that also play a major role: (bass player/sharp thing wielder) Lady Gillette and (drummer) Red River Daddy. The mini series is a complete story written by Banzai’s creator
Earl Mac Rauch. It is JUST as funny and crazy as the movie, and that’s the truth. The script just crackles with all of those crazy dialogue moments between the characters, as well as a heavy heapin’ of double entendre’s!

The plot, as always, is about saving the world! But, along the way, we get a few glimpses of Buckaroo’s secrets, as well as
get a view of life within the Cavaliers.
There is some far out action, fever dreams, alien technology, silly spoken inner thoughts, daring rescues, some rock and roll, some medical wizardry, and that wild JET CAR!

(full interview with team banzai via moonstone comics)

There's an old story that in the hours before dawn on July 16th, 1945, a young woman named Georgia Green was being driven back to school at the University of New Mexico by her sister Margaret and her brother-in-law Joe. Suddenly, she saw a bright flash of light, and she gripped Joe's arm hard enough to make him swerve the car. "What's that light?" she asked.

The thing is, Georgia Green was blind.

At that moment, some fifty miles away, a tall, gaunt man in a porkpie hat was also staring at the light, through a pair of darkened welder's glasses. He was the architect of Georgia Green's dark miracle, and he was very, very tired -- as tired, perhaps, as anyone can be and still move and breathe. It had been a long road coming out to this empty desert spot, which he called Trinity. It had been a long war.

Some of the men around him cheered. Some of them wept. A few, mostly scientists, were quietly sick in the sand beyond the dim lights of their camp. But he just stood and watched the great glowing mushroom cloud that rose in the darkness like a judgment from one angry god or another.

I am become Death, thought Robert Oppenheimer, remembering an ancient Hindu text. I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

...a South Bay third-grader, received an unwelcome reply to her hand-written letter to Steve Jobs suggesting improvements to the iPod nano.

She wrote the letter as a school project and received an unpleasant response from Apple's legal department noting the company does not accept unsolicited product ideas. Shea's mother's description of the girl running into her bedroom to hide is a perfect description of how it usually feels to ask questions of Apple.
(via cult of mac)

IPac, a political action committee dedicated to preserving "individual freedom through balanced information policy" has sent 12 U.S. Senators iPods as campaign donations.

They're preloaded with a policy video by Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig, as well as music from Creative Commons.
(via cult of mac)

Meet the Tune Buckle, a series of belts that allow you to listen to your iPod nano in style -- and while fiddling with your waist-line.

The company's Dean Nguyen says the first models have just started shipping, and more are on the way. I'd like to see one capable of holding -- and making visible to passersby -- the iPod video. That would be a conversation starter.

(via cult of mac)

Hundreds of monks and scholars are visiting the eastern city of Hangzhou, but Buddhist spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has not been invited.

China regards the exiled Tibetan leader as a separatist.

It has made its choice of Panchen Lama - Tibet's second most important figure - the figurehead of the conference.

But according to Reuters news agency he appeared to be shunned by delegates.

Fellow Buddhists made no attempt to greet Gyaltsen Norbu during greeting ceremonies ahead of the conference on Wednesday, the agency reported.

The Dalai Lama has nominated his own Panchen Lama, who has disappeared and is believed to be under house arrest.

China appointed Gyaltsen Norbu in his place in 1995.

[...]

China said it did not want the Dalai Lama to "disharmonise" the forum, which opens on Thursday and runs until Sunday.

"The Dalai Lama is not only a religious figure, but is also a long-time stubborn secessionist who has tried to split his Chinese motherland and break the unity among different ethnic groups," said Qi Xiaofei, vice-director of the state administration for religious affairs.

But China is trying to thaw relations with religious establishments, including the Vatican, our correspondent says.

The material, described in the journal Nature, can be printed in wafer thin sheets that could transform walls, ceilings or even furniture into lights.

The OLEDs do not heat up like today's light bulbs and so are far more energy efficient and should last longer.

[...]

To create the new material, the scientists build up ultra-thin layers of plastics coated with green, red and blue dyes.

When an electric current passes through them, they combine to produce white light.

Previous attempts to make OLEDs like this have largely failed to make an impact because traditional phosphorescent blue dyes are very short lived.

The new polymer uses a fluorescent blue material instead which lasts much longer and uses less energy.

The researchers believe that eventually this material could be 100% efficient, meaning it could be capable of converting all of the electricity to light, without the heat loss associated with traditional bulbs.

The new material can also be printed onto glass or plastic and so in theory could create large areas of lighting, relatively cheaply.

It is tied in to Google's e-mail service, Gmail, automatically offering to add the date information in a message to the calendar.

The calendar is Google's latest effort to offer all-purpose web services.

Sex, he says, "is about the connection. Great sex is a by-product, for me, of a great relationship, where you have communication and it's an extension of that. Where it's just ... free. And that's how it should be. It's spectacular. If you're not in good communication with your partner, it sucks."

[...]

"I just picked something up. And I knew at that moment she was pregnant. 'Cuz I notice things in people."

Christy Jackson contacted WAFF 48 News after her son told her about a graphic Internet clip he watched in Steve White's 8th grade science class at West Limestone High School.

"I do not think things like that should be shown in school," says Jackson.

The filmstrip opens with black and white clips of war and what appears to be the Great Depression. Then it shows color photos of President George Bush with profane captions under his picture.

The music behind the video is graphic too.

The painting's provenance was undisputed: Don Trachte, known as the cartoonist who took over the Sunday edition of the comic strip "Henry" in the 1940's, bought the painting from Rockwell for $900 in 1960. It became his prized possession.

So prized, it seems, that when Mr. Trachte and his wife, Elizabeth, jointly filed for divorce more than a decade later, the cartoonist cooked up a ruse, presumably to ensure keeping the treasure himself, hiding the original in a secret niche behind a wall in his house in Sandgate, Vt.

What he and his wife subsequently divvied up — the Rockwell and seven other paintings by other local artists — were therefore copies, presumably made, their children say, by Mr. Trachte himself.

Last month — more than three decades after the divorce, and nearly a year after Mr. Trachte's death — his son Dave, 54, noticed a strange gap in a wood-paneled wall in his father's house. When he and his brother Don Jr., 59, gave it a shove, the wall suddenly slid open, revealing the Rockwell and the other canvases hanging on a wall in the hidden compartment.

"Every divorce is always a little messy," conceded Don Jr. in an interview.

[...]

Mr. Trachte's ex-wife, Elizabeth Markey, now 98, is apparently unfazed. When her eldest son gave her the news, he said, her response was a wry, "Doesn't surprise me."

President George W Bush is said to be so alarmed by the threat of Iran’s hard-line leader, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, that privately he refers to him as “the new Hitler”, says Seymour Hersh, who broke the story of the Abu Ghraib Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.

Some US military chiefs have unsuccessfully urged the White House to drop the nuclear option from its war plans, Hersh writes in The New Yorker magazine. The conviction that Mr Ahmedinejad would attack Israel or US forces in the Middle East, if Iran obtains atomic weapons, is what drives American planning for the destruction of Teheran’s nuclear programme.

The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings among the joint chiefs of staff, and some officers have talked about resigning, Hersh has been told. The military chiefs sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran, without success, a former senior intelligence officer said.

The Pentagon consultant on the war on terror confirmed that some in the administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among defence department political appointees…

"RunBot" is the fastest robot on two legs – for its size. At 30 centimetres high, it can walk at a speedy 3.5 leg-lengths per second. This beats the previous record holder – MIT's "Spring Flamingo" – which is four times as tall but manages just 1.4 leg-lengths per second.

The robot is controlled by a simple program that mimics the way neurons control reflexes in humans and other animals. Unlike most other two-legged robots, RunBot has few sensors and can detect just two things – when a foot touches the ground, and when a leg swings forward.

"I just call myself the robo-chick."

Robertson is blind, but this device allows her to see, not with her eyes but with her brain! Fifteen years ago, she lost both of her eyes in a car accident. She was just 19 years old.

[...]

Neurosurgeon Kenneth Smith, M.D., of Saint Louis University School of Medicine, said the procedure is the first to reverse blindness in patients without eyes. "They are really seeing. The brain is getting impulses just like when you and I see."

A camera on the tip of Robertson's glasses sends signals to a computer that's strapped around her waist. The computer then stimulates electrodes in the brain through a cord that attaches to the head. Patients see flashes of light and outlines of objects.

The religious celebration is attended by as many as one million devotees.

[...]

Iztapalapa hillside, known as Hill of the Star, overlooks one of Mexico City's poorest and most dangerous neighbourhoods.

Local people began re-enacting the Passion of Christ there in 1833, to give thanks for divine protection during a cholera epidemic - a ritual which now draws as many as a million spectators every year.

The site will not be fully explored because it is now considered a religious centre in its own right, said Mr Sanchez of the National Institute of Anthropology and History.

"Both the pre-Hispanic structure and the Holy Week rituals are part of our cultural legacy, so we have to look for a way to protect both cultural values."

[...]

"We are going to lose a whole generation of researchers because there is no funding to train them," Millie Hughes-Fulford, a former space shuttle payload specialist now at the University of California-San Francisco, told Gannett. "They look at people who put their life's work into NASA and see those people have no funding."

Black holes, wormholes, and cosmic strings – each of these phenomena has been proposed as a method for time travel, but none seem feasible, for (at least) one major reason. Although theoretically they could distort space-time, they all require an unthinkably gigantic amount of mass.

Mallett, a U Conn Physics Professor for 30 years, considered an alternative to these time travel methods based on Einstein’s famous relativity equation: E=mc2.

“Einstein showed that mass and energy are the same thing,” said Mallett, who published his first research on time travel in 2000 in Physics Letters. “The time machine we’ve designed uses light in the form of circulating lasers to warp or loop time instead of using massive objects.”

To determine if time loops exist, Mallett is designing a desktop-sized device that will test his time-warping theory. By arranging mirrors, Mallett can make a circulating light beam which should warp surrounding space. Because some subatomic particles have extremely short lifetimes, Mallett hopes that he will observe these particles to exist for a longer time than expected when placed in the vicinity of the circulating light beam. A longer lifetime means that the particles must have flowed through a time loop into the future.

“Say you have a cup of coffee and a spoon,” Mallett explained to PhysOrg.com. “The coffee is empty space, and the spoon is the circulating light beam. When you stir the coffee with the spoon, the coffee – or the empty space – gets twisted. Suppose you drop a sugar cube in the coffee. If empty space were twisting, you’d be able to detect it by observing a subatomic particle moving around in the space.”

And according to Einstein, whenever you do something to space, you also affect time. Twisting space causes time to be twisted, meaning you could theoretically walk through time as you walk through space.

The study points to a rare combination of optimal water and atmospheric conditions for development of a unique, localized freezing phenomenon that Nof and his co-authors call "springs ice."

In what is now northern Israel, such ice could have formed on the cold freshwater surface of the Sea of Galilee -- known as Lake Kinneret by modern-day Israelis -- when already chilly temperatures briefly plummeted during one of the two protracted cold periods between 2,500 and 1,500 years ago.

A frozen patch floating on the surface of the small lake would have been difficult to distinguish from the unfrozen water surrounding it. The unfrozen water was comprised of the plumes resulting from salty springs situated along the lake's western shore in Tabgha -- an area where many archeological findings related to Jesus have been documented.

"As natural scientists, we simply explain that unique freezing processes probably happened in that region only a handful of times during the last 12,000 years," Nof said. "We leave to others the question of whether or not our research explains the biblical account."

It isn't the first time the FSU researcher has offered scientific explanations of watery miracles. As a recognized expert in the field of oceanography and limnology -- the study of freshwater, saline and brackish environments -- Nof made waves worldwide in 1992 with his oceanographic perspective on the parting of the Red Sea.

That's the legislation that would make it a crime to kill or injure an unborn baby.

The bill is named after Brandy Parker's unborn child, Brody. Both were killed last summer in Albertville.

The final vote was 33 - 0.

Senators made slight changes to the bill. They say the passage of the Brody Bill will give a voice to the unborn and change the way crimes are handled in Alabama.

"We've done a good thing for the people of the state of Alabama for unborn children we don't even know about today," said Senator Bradley Byrnes.

The senate did make two changes to the bill. The new language states the law cannot be used against legal abortions or against a woman who has had a miscarriage.

The amendment also incudes some minor re-wording.

A: It means that companies cannot enter certain areas of commerce with the word/phrase "superhero" as part of their product name.

Q: What products does this apply to?

A: Publications, but basically comic books and magazines. Also, cardboard stand-up figures, playing cards, paper iron-on transfers, erasers, pencil sharpeners, pencils, notebooks, stamp albums, and costumes

Q: Does this affect our ability to use the word superhero?

A: Only if you want to make a product that fits into those categories and sell it. So, if you want to sell (you can make it for your own personal pleasure) a comic book called "Star Spangled Superhero Stories," you would not be able to. But if you want to refer to your characters as superheroes within the comic, you can do so. This is what allows DC to refer to their character Captain Marvel as Captain Marvel within the comic, but they cannot use the name Captain Marvel in advertising or as the name of the comic, because Marvel holds a registered trademark of that name.

Q: When did Marvel and DC do this?

A: 1979. They recently re-filed the trademark.

[...]

Q: Are Marvel and DC evil corporations, trying to keep the little man down?

A: Perhaps, but their use of the trademark laws are really quite standard operating business for corporations. Now, that doesn't mean corporations aren't evil, but that's a whole different FAQ.

It has been brought to my attention that one chapter of my 1997-2002 serial TRANSMETROPOLITAN has been placed online. Since it's one chapter out of sixty, and no-one's trying to earn money off it, and I am lazy benign, I choose not to release the throatfucking hounds of hell upon the criminal Internets pirate responsible.

Instead, I offer it to you to read, and tell you that the story can be found in the collection TRANSMETROPOLITAN: LUST FOR LIFE, available from Amazon and all better comics stores and bookstores.