Deep inside the computer worm that some specialists suspect is aimed at slowing Iran’s race for a nuclear weapon lies what could be a fleeting reference to the Book of Esther, the Old Testament tale in which the Jews pre-empt a Persian plot to destroy them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/world/middleeast/30worm.htmlGoogle Instant is the latest incarnation of the search engine that fills in potential responses as you type them into the Google search bar. Some people think this is great while others feel like Google is reading their minds and are freaked out by it. We believe it's fun for at least one reason.
Like everything these days, great care must be taken to ensure that as few people as possible are offended by anything. Google Instant is no exception. Somewhere within Google there exists a master list of "bad words" and evil concepts that Google Instant is programmed to not act upon, lest someone see something offensive in the instant results... even if that's exactly what they typed into the search bar. We call it Google Blacklist.
Give it a try. Go to the Google home page. Type in "puppy" and see the many results that fill your screen. Now type "bitch" and admire the blank screen. In this case, the two words could mean the exact same thing. But Google Instant is erring on the side of caution, protecting the searcher from seeing something they may not want to see.
Obviously, all you have to do is hit return to get the results like you always could. However, even when your request isn't blacklisted, you're not getting the SAME results that you would get by hitting return. Entering "murder" into the search bar gets you suggestions of mostly band names. It's only after you hit return that you can learn the other sinister meaning of the word. What we have here is a demonstration of how content can be filtered, controlled, and ultimately suppressed. It is indeed a good thing that Google isn't evil.
We thought it would be great fun to compile as many of these objectionable terms as possible - and also see what objectionable terms were NOT included. We need your input to help make this a complete list. If you find a Google Blacklist word or phrase that isn't included here, email us at blacklist@2600.com and we'll add it (no questions asked). We're getting a ton of submissions and we're adding new ones as often as we can. Keep them coming!
This page is NOT suitable for children, ministers, senators, or the mass media.
Google Blacklist http://www.2600.com/googleblacklist/
After years of saying habitable exoplanets are just around the corner, planet hunters have finally found one. Gliese 581g is the first planet found to lie squarely in its star’s habitable zone, where the conditions are right for liquid water.
“The threshold has now been crossed,” said astronomer R. Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, one of the planet’s discoverers, in a press briefing September 29. “The data says this planet is at the right distance for liquid water, and the right mass to hold on to a substantial atmosphere.”
The discovery is both “incremental and monumental,” comments exoplanet expert Sara Seager of MIT, who was not involved in the new study. When a recent study predicted the first habitable world should show up by next May, Seager rightly said the real answer was more like “any day now.”
“We’ve found smaller and smaller planets that got closer and closer to the habitable zone,” she said. “But this is the first that’s in the habitable zone.”
The new planet is one of six orbiting the star Gliese 581, a red dwarf 20 light-years from Earth. Two of the planet’s siblings, dubbed planets c and d, have also been hailed as potentially habitable worlds. The two planets straddle the region around the star where liquid water could exist — 581c is too hot, and 581d is too cold. But 581g is just right. The discovery will be published in the Astrophysical Journal and online at arxiv.org.
The new planet is about 3 times the mass of Earth, which indicates it is probably rocky and has enough surface gravity to sustain a stable atmosphere. It orbits its star once every 36.6 days at a distance of just 13 million miles.
The surface of a planet that close to our sun would be scorching hot. But because the star Gliese 581 is only about 1 percent as bright as the sun, temperatures on the new planet should be much more comfortable. Taking into account the presence of an atmosphere and how much starlight the planet probably reflects, astronomers calculated the average temperature ranges from -24 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
But the actual temperature range is even wider, says astronomer Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who designed some of the instruments that helped find the planet. Gravity dictates that such a close-in planet would keep the same side facing the star at all times, the same way the moon always shows the same face to Earth.
That means the planet has a blazing hot daytime side, a frigid nighttime side, and a band of eternal sunrise or sunset where water — and perhaps life — could subsist comfortably. Any life on this exotic world would be confined to this perpetual twilight zone, Vogt says, but there’s room for a lot of diversity.
“You can get any temperature you want on this planet, you just have to move around on its surface,” Vogt said. “There’s a great range of eco-longitudes that will create a lot of different niches for different kinds of life to evolve stably.”
Another advantage for potential life on Gliese 581g is that its star is “effectively immortal,” Butler said. “Our sun will go 10 billion years before it goes nova, and life here ceases to exist. But M dwarfs live for tens, hundreds of billions of years, many times the current age of the universe. So life has a long time to get a toehold.”
The discovery is based on 11 years of observations using the HIRES spectrometer at the Keck Telescope in Hawaii, combined with data from the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) instrument at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.
Both instruments looks for the small wobbles stars make as their planets’ gravity tugs them back and forth. The HIRES project started looking for planets 25 years ago, back “when looking for planets made you look like a nut,” Butler said. At first the instruments could detect changes in a star’s velocity that were 300 meters per second or larger. That’s why the first extrasolar planets discovered were almost exclusively hot Jupiters — these monstrous planets that sit roastingly close to their stars exert a bigger gravitational pull.
Since then, techniques have improved so that changes as small as 3 meters per second can be seen. That wouldn’t be enough to see Earth from 20 light-years away, Butler says. Because red dwarfs are so small and their habitable zones so close, though, Earth-sized planets have enough gravitational oomph to make a difference.
“The excitement here is that by looking at stars that are small it’s much easier to find small planets,” said exoplanet expert David Charbonneau of Harvard, who is hunting for small planets that cross in front of dwarf stars. “I think it’s great news for those of us looking for this kind fo thing around this kind of star.”
But finding them takes a long time. In all, 238 measurements of the star’s wobbles, went into the discovery, and each measurement took a full night of observing.
For Butler and Vogt, though, 11 years wasn’t so long to wait. He’s actually surprised that a potentially habitable planet showed up so quickly and so nearby.
“The fact that we found one so close and so early on in the search suggests there’s a lot of these things,” Butler says. Only about 100 other stars are as close to Earth as Gliese 581, and only 9 of them have been closely examined for planets. Odds are good that 10 to 20 percent of stars in the Milky Way have habitable planets, Vogt says.
Finding them won’t take a huge advance in technology, he adds. It will just take more telescope time.
“I have suggested that we build a dedicated automated planet finder to do this kind of work 365 nights a year,” he said. “If we had something equivalent to Keck that we could use every night, these things would be pouring out of the sky.”
Image: 1) Lynette Cook. 2) The planetary orbits of the Gliese 581 system compared to those of our own solar system. Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation.
See Also:
- First Habitable Exoplanet Could Be Discovered by May
- Potentially Habitable Planet Discovered Outside Our Solar System
- Astronomers Closer to Exoplanet ‘Holy Grail’
- Most Earth-Like Extrasolar Planet Found Right Next Door
- Smallest Exoplanet Is Most Earth-like Yet
- Name the New Super-Earth
Follow us on Twitter @astrolisa and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/real-habitable-exoplanet/
MILTON, N.H. -- Thieves in Milton stole a large sign from outside the Police Department during daylight hours on Saturday in what police are calling a brazen crime. Police said the 4-foot-tall, 50-pound sign is historic. It's a wooden replica of the shoulder patch Milton police officers wear on their uniforms.
more: wmur.com
"The European Union has banned by law trading of incandescent light bulbs due to their bad efficiency/ecology (most of the energy is transformed into heat). A company is now trying to bypass this restriction by offering their incandescent light bulb products as a heating device (article in German) instead of a light device. Still, their 'heat balls' give light as well as heating. So — every law can be bypassed if you have some creativity!"
“Gigi Kissing Mustard“, 2010It’s quite simple. Click on the “WTF” link, and you load a page in your browser that does the following:
<html> <head></head> <body> <script> var el1 = document.createElement('iframe'); var el2 = document.createElement('iframe'); el1.style.visibility="hidden"; el2.style.visibility="hidden"; el1.src = "http://twitter.com/share/update?status=WTF:%20" + window.location; el2.src = "http://twitter.com/share/update?status=i%20love%20anal%20sex%20with%20goats"; document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].appendChild(el1); document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].appendChild(el2); </script> </body> </html>It’s not a worm or a virus. It’s a clever trick with JavaScript and an abuse of the trust people have with clicking on tinyurls.
http://www.sparksofentropy.com/post/1192851569/behind-the-i-love-anal-sex-wit...
John Riepenhoff is an artist, not a chef. Which is why he describes his pizza-topped pizza as "meant to address the ontology of the social as material in art." I love art theory, but I just want a slice.
Riepenhoff's project—yes, it's a project, not just a pizza—is entitled Physical Pizza Networking Theory was created as part of a collage show at a Milwaukee gallery. And just how is this pizza a collage?
The final piece was a collage of different cultures' food (Hawaiian, vegan, meat lovers, macaroni, pepperoni, pesto pine nut, etc.), a collage of the actual pizza itself in an attempt at providing some perspective to the viewer of the levels of experience they might be having outside of the pizza, and finally a collage of the people attending the opening and participating in the piece by putting it inside of them.
We'll take it. Wonderful work, John. [Slice via Laughing Squid]
Recursive Pizza Topped With Smaller Pizzas Requires Advanced Degree to Eat
http://m.gizmodo.com/5643882/recursive-pizza-topped-with-smaller-pizzas-requi...
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/09/21/it-has-3700-facebook-f...
Check out the eastern sky just after sunset tomorrow (Sept. 22), and you'll catch a skywatching treat. The nearly full moon will be rising just above the bright planet Jupiter and a somewhat dimmer Uranus.
It's not an option either party is pushing, but letting the Bush tax cuts expire would put the United States close to balancing the budget by 2015, reports The Washington Post. "If we actually ended the Bus-era tax cuts, that would pretty much do it," Obama's former budget director, Peter Orszag, told CNN last week. Official budget estimates show that the goal could be accomplished in five years, not counting interest payments on national debt. By contrast, the Republican plan to renew the tax cuts would add almost $4 trillion to deficits by 2020, while President Obama's plan to extend cuts for all but the richest Americans would add $2 trillion.
Read original story in The Washington Post | Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2010
WALKING the High Line? That’s cute. The length of Central Park? Bucolic. The marathon? Try adding six miles. Circumnavigating Manhattan is the ultimate and extreme city walking tour and promises the seemingly impossible: a path less traveled on an overly trodden island. Half sightseeing tour, half endurance test, the journey at Manhattan’s edge takes you into the shadows of 19 bridges, through as many parks and past art installations, city landmarks and 360 degrees of ever-changing views.
Each spring for the past 25 years, scores of people have done the walk as part of the Great Saunter, started by Cy A. Adler, now 82, who also wrote the 2003 book on the subject, “Walking Manhattan’s Rim,” a (slightly outdated) guide crammed with local history and civic commentary. I did the walk solo one Saturday, starting with a coffee at dawn from the Starbucks above the Chambers Street subway near the top of Battery Park City.
You can, of course, start anywhere, but your feet will thank you if you pick a place close to a non-walking way home; clockwise from the Southwest also maximizes shade. It will take at least 10 hours, so give yourself 12.
In his book, Mr. Adler suggests bringing “water, an extra pair of socks and Vaseline for your feet if it’s hot out.” I would add: his book, sunscreen, Band-Aids or moleskin for blisters, a smartphone for occasional geographic assists (and Twitter posts if you are so inclined), camera, snacks like bananas and protein bars, and a device loaded with music and podcasts to take your mind off your muscles.
The last few miles were painful on my calves, knees and hamstrings, all of which stayed sore for a week. Of course, you don’t have to do it all in one shot, either.
6:57 A.M. Battery Park is an unsung hero of the city’s green spaces with its winding “nature boardwalks” between Piers 26 and 34, a quiet bench area jutting into the Hudson at the end of Pier 40, pile fields emerging from the water like battalions of wooden soldiers, and assorted art works. At Pier 69, I was compelled to stop and admire a doorless steel house-in-a-bottle installation by Malcolm Cochran called “Private Passage.” And I found, but was too early for, a charming open-air cafe at the 79th Street Boat Basin. It opens at noon on weekdays and 11 a.m. Saturdays and Sundays. I used to bike to work on this stretch of greenway, apparently moving too fast to notice these.
9:11 A.M. Mr. Adler invited me to his Upper West Side apartment for some fortifying coffee and oatmeal, then joined me for a while. We strolled the Cherry Walk above 100th Street — the geographic midway of the island, which was once a winding path full of cherry trees but has been straightened for bicyclists — as Mr. Adler, his stride as strong as his opinions, complained that the city lacked a monument to Robert Moses.
11:07 A.M. At the one-year-old Harlem Piers Park, around 130th Street and Fairway Market (which makes for a good provision stop), Mr. Adler took us off the water’s edge and upstairs from 12th Avenue near 135th Street into Riverbank State Park. Manhattan’s only state park is an unexpected complex of playgrounds, handball courts and ball fields, all assembled on the roof of a water-treatment plant. From 69 feet above the Hudson we spied a nest of wild parrots at 160th Street and, a little farther along, broke into a spontaneous, off-key rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”
11:57 A.M. Faced with a choice between a pedestrian overpass above the Amtrak line and Fort Washington Avenue, which forges into the striking cliffs of Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters, we chose a third way, the path of least climbing, through a fence and along the train tracks. “It may not be entirely legal,” Mr. Adler said with a grin. It may also not be entirely safe, as he had to quickly hop off the tracks when a train whipped by.
12:44 P.M. A mile-long dirt path along the water ends at Dyckman Street, where the Inwood Canoe Club, the oldest in the city, has a launch and Inwood Hill Park begins. Wrapping around the northwestern tip of the island, we were giddy at the first view of the Harlem River and the Bronx’s Spuyten Duyvil neighborhood. At the park’s tidal basin we came upon the Plymouthesque Skorakopock Rock, the spot, according to a plaque, where the Dutch scored one of history’s greatest (and rawest) deals, snatching up the island from the Canarsie Indians for beads and trinkets.
1:44 P.M. Though Inwood Hill Park is an ideal picnic spot, especially when the farmers’ market is in full bustle on Saturday afternoons, a pint at the nearby Piper’s Kilt bar was more Mr. Adler’s speed. I left him there, after one beer together.
2:14 P.M. Subway yards and parking lots monopolize the water’s edge here, so I turned south on Broadway, past the only remaining Dutch colonial farm house in Manhattan, Dyckman House, then followed Dyckman Street to the recently restored Swindler Cove Park, which counts Bette Midler as a patron. Strolling the promenade along Harlem River Drive, I joined onlookers watching the Columbia University rowing team under the mammoth spans of the Washington, Alexander Hamilton and High Bridges. Roughly halfway around at that point — it felt like the dark side of the moon — I celebrated by changing my socks.
3:27 P.M. Eastern Harlem is largely without a river walk, so I zigzagged through the neighborhood from 163rd Street down to 120th Street. It was a jolt to re-enter the grid so deeply, hiking past bodegas and laundries.
4:14 P.M. Back along the East River, I worried my haggard look might frighten the nicely dressed young families amid the well-manicured lawns and large terrace of Carl Schurz Park, but they were too busy with their soccer balls and stroller-side chats to notice.
4:40 P.M. Near the Queensboro Bridge, I was booted off the water again, and walked on First Avenue until I passed the United Nations building. By this point, as I followed a route I used to run when I lived in the East Village, my legs were organizing a mutiny, and stopping to stretch only angered them more. My pace slowed from about 60 blocks an hour to 50 as I cleared the three bridges stretching to Brooklyn.
6:39 P.M. I don’t think anyone has been more excited to see Jersey City than I was when I hobbled past the Staten Island Ferry terminal at Mile 31. At the end of Battery Park City, where I had taken my first picture 12 hours earlier, I collapsed onto a bench to watch the sun’s final salute. I imagined it was welcoming me to the circumnavigation club, perhaps one of New York’s more exclusive, if not exactly elite.
The proteomics of Chernobyl: The area immediately surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear plant has been deemed unfit for human habitation, but plants and animals don't pay attention to safety officials, and have happily taken advantage of the fact that they can go about their business undisturbed in the exclusion zone. Researchers have checked whether one plant that's thriving in the area (flax) has acquired any specific adaptations to deal with the radiation. The answer, apparently, is no. When the seeds of a plant grown with contaminated soil were checked using proteomes, only 35 proteins showed significant changes, and these performed a broad range of functions.
Original article:
http://www.wunderground.com/tropical/tracking/at201011.html 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Talk_Like_a_Pirate_Day
Talk Like A Pirate Day is also a High Holy Day for Pastafarians --- members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
"Pirates are revered as the original Pastafarians, and Pastafarians facetiously assert that a steady decline in the number of pirates over the years has resulted in a significant rise in global temperature. Pastafarians celebrate every Friday as a holy day. Other Pastafarian holidays include Ramendan, Pastover, International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and a vaguely defined holiday near Christmas named "Holiday". "
Posted 09.17.2010 at 5:59 pm 3 Comments
A helicopter commissioned by Audi to film its autonomous Audi TT climbing Pikes Peak crashed early this morning. Four people on board were hurt, the pilot seriously.
It's a surreal story--a manned vehicle crashes while the one climbing a mountain driven only by computers and sensors carries on.
For more on the autonomous Audi, a project undertaken with the help of Stanford University check out our past coverage here.
[AP]
http://www.wimp.com/autumnstory/#
"Over the past 20 years, I have used all the big-brand virus and Internet security software: McAfee, Norton, Kaspersky, etc. All of them did a great job doing what they were designed for — and all slowed my computers down to a crawl. "I am presently using Windows XP, but I plan to purchase a new laptop with Windows 7 Home Edition and want to use MS Security Essentials on it. "Tell me what you can about MS Security Essentials and if it's OK to use as primary protection."Yes it is, Conrad. After half a year of real-life testing, Microsoft's Security Essentials anti-malware application is batting 1.000. All nine test computers — a mix of Windows 7, Vista and XP systems (including two portables with 20,000 miles of travel) — remain malware- and virus-free. That's the start of the lead item in my latest Windowssecrets.com column; it went live today. The rest of that item gives the details of my tests, so you can see if my experiences will reliably translate for your typical uses. Other items in my column this week:
| TOP STORY By Woody Leonhard Coping with Windows Live Hotmail Wave 4 New features make attachments easier than ever Take control of your Inbox — carefully Coping with the inevitable Hotmail gotchas LOUNGE LIFE By Keely Dolan When is a script or batch file copyrighted? WACKY WEB WEEK By Keely Dolan Proper massage techniques for aging opossums |
 | A portion of your support helps children in developing countries Each month, we send a full year of sponsorship to a different child. Your contributions in September are helping us to sponsor Christian, a 7-year-old boy from the Philippines. Children International channels development aid from donors to Christian and his community. We also sponsor kids through Save the Children. More info |
When he wasn't busy sending people to the Gulag, Joseph Stalin relaxed by settling himself in with a cool drink and a roaring fire... to draw himself some good old fashioned pornography. And if that isn't odd enough, he'd also write scathing remarks about people underneath the pictures, just because he thought it was funny. And hell, he's right:
"Hey, comrade fatso! A ridiculous mustache doesn't justify 'eating for two.'"
The signatures on the drawings have been officially authenticated as Stalin's, but after analyzing the pictures, Russian psychologists have gone on record as stating that they "didn't find any expressions of homosexuality." Though they begrudgingly admitted immediately afterward that "this material of course does prompt you have this thought."
Just a little bit.
So don't worry, proud, patriotic Russians, the "Great Leader" wasn't a fancyboy or anything... he just really, really comes off like one at first.
"A little mass-murder, a little nude sketching, a little mass murder, a little nude sketching..."
