STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

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Rock Lines in Peru Were GPS for Ancient Fairgoers

Peru is famous for its Nazca Lines – the hundreds of geoglyphs in the shapes of geometric forms, animals and humans found in the Nazca Desert and believed to have been created by the Nazca culture beginning around 300 AD. Recently, new lines were discovered that are older than the Nazca Lines and may have directed ancient Peruvians to fairs.

According to Charles Stanish, the director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, the newly discovered lines were made by the Paracas, a Peruvian culture dating back to 800 BCE. Working in the Chinca Valley 125 miles south of Lima, Stanish and his team found straight rock lines, circles, rectangles and a point where lines converged in a circle of rays. They also found mounds and some lines that outlined pyramid structures.

Reporting his findings in journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Standish speculates that the lines were tied to ancient festivals held in the area because it was unsuitable for farming. Some of the lines line up with the position of the sun during the June (winter) solstice and may have marked the festival times, while others run parallel to roads still used today and may have led people to the fairs, with the mounds and pyramids possibly acting as forms of ancient road signs.

The new lines date to around 300 B.C., predating the oldest Nazca Lines by 300 years. Standish points out that what makes these geoglyphs interesting is that they appear to have served more than one function.

The lines are effectively a social technology. They’re using it for certain purposes. Some people have said the lines point out sacred mountains. Sure, why not? The lines [might] point out sacred pyramids. Why not? The lines could [also] be used to point out processions.

Whatever their purpose, Standish is right about this:

Native Americans in this part of the world were extremely ingenious.

Paracas geoglyphs lined with sunset on winter solstice.

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James Packer Versus David Gyngell Is Best Viewed In Taiwanese Animated Form

strong: You’d have to be living under a rock not to know that multi-millionaires James Packer and David Gyngell got into a biff this week in Bondi. Now it’s making world news, too, with Taiwanese animators taking on the infamous brawl.

The best part has to be James Packer surfing a private jet. Classic.

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REZVANI BEAST

Is it a race car, or a racy daily driver? Actually, the Rezvani Beast is a little bit of both. Based on the Ariel Atom racer, the USA-made Beast features a sleek carbon fiber body penned by Samir Sadikhov, who previously created both the Aston Martin DBC and the Ferrari Xerzi, as well as 19 inch wheels and aggressively slender headlights.

It comes in two flavors: the 300 model, which packs a turbocharged 2.0L engine pumping out 315bhp and a 0-60 time of 2.9 seconds, or the 500, which is powered by a supercharged 2.4L engine cranking out 500 bhp and a 0-60 time of just 2.7 seconds.

Either way, there's no way you'll be mistaken for slow.

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RAAKA BOURBON CHOCOLATE

You're already becoming a smarter consumer when it comes to things like bourbon, so why not educate yourself a bit on the subject of chocolate, or at least the combination of the two? Raaka Bourbon Cask Aged Chocolate comes from Brooklyn, NY and is the first chocolate to feature cask-aged cocoa beans.

It's a chocolate bar unlike any you've had before, with rich vanilla and caramel flavors mingling with sweet, oaky tinges thanks to the Berkshire Mountain Bourbon barrels. Impress your significant other with this purchase and order an extra bar for yourself.

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Can You Catch Your Own Football Pass

Is this real or fake? I don’t know (yet). Of course I could catch my own pass if I threw the ball straight up, but what about this case? If you could do it like this, it would be pretty tough.

Ahh, Mr Perfect did that years ago

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Meet The Men Who Are Seriously Building Time Machines

Everyone wants to go back into time and see historical events or jump ahead to experience the future. It’s human nature to wonder about tomorrow and reminisce about yesterday. We can’t help it. But even though DeLoreans and Victorian open carriages and hot tubs have helped us imagine time travel, most of us are resigned to the fact that it’s not going to happen. That’s sad. Some people aren’t giving up. That’s awesome.

In this trailer for Jay Cheel’s documentary, “How to Build a Time Machine”, we meet two men who are taking on time travel as a serious undertaking. One is spending years of his life recreating the time machine of HG Wells’ imagination to the point that it’s pretty much the real thing and the other has dedicated his career in physics to figure out how to go back in time to save his father.

When Rob Niosi decided to build a full scale replica of the time machine prop from George Pal’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novella ‘The Time Machine’, he had no idea what he was getting himself into. The three month project is now in its eleventh year, and he’s not sure it will ever end. His perfectionist attitude and obsessive nature — cultivated by years of detail oriented, time consuming work as a stop-motion animator — has elevated his machine from prop replica to a true work of art. His goal? To capture the impression he had as a kid when he first laid eyes on the beautiful machine.

When Ronald Mallett was a young boy, his Father died unexpectedly of a heart attack. This event turned his world upside down. He became ostracized from his friends and family and found solace in science fiction. It was H.G. W ells’ The Time Machine that inspired Ron to pursue a career in physics. His goal? To build a time machine so he could go back and save his Father.

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Inside The Boeing Capsule That Could Take You On A Space Holiday

If you’re looking to one day spend your summers aboard the scenic International Space Station, your travel options are steadily growing. Now, Boeing has unveiled new interior shots of its next-gen commercial spacecraft, the CST-100.

And although one of its main competitors, SpaceX, may have the benefit of having been in the space game for longer, Boeing’s got a significant edge when it comes to knowing what passengers want in luxurious interior design. It’s been doing it forever, after all.

Boeing recruited Bigelow Aerospace to help out with the capsule’s exterior, which totals just under 4.5m. And squeezed into that little space is room for up to seven total passengers (or a mix of passengers and cargo).

With a non-pro crew comes a spacecraft that is significantly less complicated to navigate — at least as far as space vehicles go. As Chris Ferguson, director of Boeing’s Crew and Mission Operations and a former astronaut told NASA:

What you’re not going to find is 1,100 or 1,600 switches. When these guys go up in this, they’re primary mission is not to fly this spacecraft, they’re primary mission is to go to the space station for six months. So we don’t want to burden them with an inordinate amount of training to fly this vehicle. We want it to be intuitive.

You still have a bit to wait. Boeing’s first CST-100 flight isn’t set to take off until 2017. And it’s going to be one hell of a classy ride.

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NASA Wants To Send Plant Life To Mars In 2020

In less than a decade, there might be life on Mars. No not because the aliens have been hiding all this time, but because NASA might just put it there. The brightest minds at the Ames Research Center recently proposed sending plant life along with the next Mars rover. It’s actually a pretty good idea.

Plainly named the Mars Plant Experiment (MPX), the plan aims to see how Earth life handles the red planet’s lower gravity and higher radiation levels. But NASA scientists don’t expect to dig holes and plant seeds in Martian soil. Rather, they intend to convert a clear CubeSat box into a greenhouse of sorts that will be filled with Earth air and about 200 seeds for the Arabidopsis plant, a cousin to mustard. The box will then live on top of the rover which will keep it watered. The bonsai tree pictured above is a (poor) rendering of what plants on Mars could look like, but the actual NASA rendition isn’t much better. The neon green box in the middle is supposed to be the MPX box.

The experiment isn’t just to see if it’s possible to keep plants alive. It’s actually an important step towards figuring out if Mars colonization will ever be possible. “In order to do a long-term, sustainable base on Mars, you would want to be able to establish that plants can at least grow on Mars,” said Heather Smith, the deputy principal investigator for MPX. “We would go from this simple experiment to the greenhouses on Mars for a sustainable base.” She added — although possibly incorrectly, as far as we know — that the plant “also would be the first multicellular organism to grow, live and die on another planet.”

This specific proposal is still just a proposal. At the end of the day, there’s only so much space for so many instruments on the next Mars rover which is scheduled to depart for the red planet in 2020 and land in 2021. At present, NASA’s considering proposals for a total of 58 different instruments, and since the Curiosity rover’s only carrying about 10 instruments, it seems very unlikely they will all make the cut. All else fails, we can always just shoot plants at the moon.

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Scientists Have Created 'Alien' DNA

After 15 years of work, scientists have successfully created a living cell that contains two unnatural DNA building blocks. The breakthrough brings us one step closer to being able to synthesise cells that can produce drugs on demand. It even opens the door to a future where we could create life that’s unlike anything ever found on Earth.

“What we have now is a living cell that literally stores increased genetic information,” explains Floyd Romesberg, who has led the research for the past decade and a half. It’s also worth highlighting that we’ve convinced natural life to live in harmony with synthetic genetic material — which is huge. After all, we’ve created synthetic DNA before. But this is a new kind of cyborg DNA, and it’s potentially much more powerful.

Nature refers to these artificial bases somewhat extravagantly as “alien”. And while scientists certainly aren’t dealing with aliens from space, they are dealing with something entirely foreign. Life on Earth has always contained the same four DNA subunits — also known as nucleotides — represented by the letters A, T, C and G. Now, the possibilities are seemingly endless, as scientists have literally expanded that alphabet to include at least two new, unnatural subunits.

That said, we now know that the old four-letter DNA model isn’t the only way to create life. Some even think that it’s possible to create an organism solely out of the foreign nucleotides. These bear little resemblance to the four natural ones according to Steven Benner, who pioneered this type of research back in the 1980s. “I don’t think there’s any limit,” Benner told Nature. “If you go back and rerun evolution for four billion years, you could come up with a different genetic system.”

So that’s pretty mind-bending. However, it’s also incredibly hopeful as this kind of science could help us do great things like cure cancer. That is, if we don’t accidentally create some new kind of cancer first.

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This Guy Collected 75,000 McDonald's Items Over 50 Years

This is Mike Fountaine, a guy who has spent almost 50 of his 60 years in this planet collecting stuff from McDonald’s. From more than 1000 cups and glasses to dozens of Happy Meal boxes, he has a 75,000-object collection, fully catalogued, divided in 389 categories displayed over 3km of shelves.

It’s the best and biggest collection in the world, according to McDonald’s own archivist, who says that some pieces are “one of a kind” and in pristine state.

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This Strange Barrel Aeroplane Is The Ancestor Of Modern Jet Engines

Video: Stipa-Caproni is an Italian experimental aircraft designed by Luigi Stipa and built by Gianni Caproni in 1932. Its barrel-shape fuselage, enclosing the engine and propeller, served as inspiration of the modern jet engines.

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This Pop-Up Chair Would Make Long Layovers So Much More Tolerable

With the blazing speed of the internet mitigating our every expectation — especially wait times — it’s no wonder we get impatient so easily. Delays at the airport are particularly maddening, because there never seem to be enough seats to accommodate the many fuming passengers who all need to get their destinations more urgently than you.

RESMO, a dynamic and malleable piece of folding furniture, is designed to solve just this problem. The hybrid chair’s design makes it incredibly functional, since it can be moulded into a chair, a bed, or even a love seat for those travelling with company. The chair also boasts an extra flap that can be craned over into a hanging screen to give users privacy.

The pros are obvious. But what about the cons?

RESMO is being proposed as a service that airlines will offer passengers who have been inconvenienced — not as a free-for-all seating epidemic that airports will have to deal with regularly. However, its implementation inevitably raises the question: how will airports regulate and restrict the use of chairs and beds that turn any public space into a seemingly private domain? The TSA gets angry when I forget the wine key in my backpack — how will they respond to potential fire code violations that people splayed on the ground in every which way will surely bring?

While RESMO is in its infancy, its usage may thrive outside airports if taken to the street. Lawn seating at music festivals is always burdensome, because you either pack so much gear that you might as well bring a tent, or your blanket gets rather uncomfortable quickly. RESMO could serve as a nice alternative to pop-up public seating.

At the same time, RESMO could make waiting on the streets of NYC for events like Saturday Night Live or The Daily Show infinitely less troublesome too, since the NYPD has claimed it is illegal to sit on the footpath for such durations. The RESMO would ensure you have a small, legal cushion between your butt and the footpath.

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Watching A Human Navigate Like A Bat Is Impressive

Daniel Kish, who lost his eyesight to cancer, is now an expert in echolocation — the technique that a bat uses to navigate at night. This is why he is sometimes known as the real life Batman — although Daredevil would be more accurate. Using these skills Daniel is able to enjoy independence and freedom from many of the constraints that might inhibit him otherwise.

http://youtu.be/vpxEmD0gu0Q

Daniel locates objects in his environment by clicking his tongue and interpreting the echoes that this returns. In fact his sense of visualisation is so strong that he can detect the exact location, size and even density of his surroundings.

Daniel’s story has been around for a while but there have been some positive developments – he is nowteaching echolocation to other blind people and the results are truly amazing.

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Nintendo Upholds *** Marriage Ban in Tomodachi Life

Nintendo delicately rebuffed requests from *** gamers to simulate same-sex weddings in its upcoming release, Tomodachi Life, saying that they "never intended to make any form of social commentary"

Dozens of countries across the globe now allow *** marriage, but it’s still verboten in some virtual worlds. Nintendo has resisted calls from *** rights advocates to allow avatars in same sex relationships to marry in its new life simulator game.

A Nintendo representative told the Associated Press that the company “never intended to make any form of social commentary” with its upcoming release, Tomodachi Life. In the game, an avatar called a “Mii” can go shopping, visit amusement parks and do just about anything other than marry another avatar of the same sex.

That design feature irked Tye Marini, a 23-year-old gamer who’s in the process of arranging his own real-life *** marriage. “I want to be able to marry my real-life fiancé’s Mii,” he says.

Marini launched a social media campaign to pressure the company into creating a same-sex marriage option. Nintendo declined, saying, “The relationship options in the game represent a playful alternate world rather than a real-life simulation.”

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Homeless Blame World Cup for High Rent in Brazil

Just a few kilometers away from the World Cup stadium, where soccer fans worldwide will flock next month, about 5,000 impoverished Brazilians have set up a tent city that illegally occupies about two miles of field

(SAO PAULO) — Thousands of impoverished Brazilians are living illegally on land near the World Cup stadium where the opening match will be played next month, blaming the arena’s construction for rent increases that drove them out of their homes.

Braving insects, little food and a lack of privacy, the families seized a field nestled in the green hills of eastern Sao Paulo forming a village 2 miles (3.5 kilometers) away from the stadium built for the sports’ biggest tournament.

The new residents have shoveled dirt, hammered wooden stakes into the ground and fastened tarps and plastic bags to makeshift frames to improvise a tent city. The still-under-construction Itaquerao stadium hovers like a flying saucer on the horizon, just beyond a wall of trees.

The approximately 5,000 people who invaded this private property say rising rents are a result of World Cup real-estate fever in the neighborhood around the stadium.

But the occupation has come to symbolize Brazil’s persistent income disparity and the frustration that the country’s poor feel as the government focuses its spending on world-class arenas rather than providing more affordable housing and improving woeful schools, hospitals and other public works.

“We are not against the World Cup,” insisted Rita de Cassia, a 35-year-old nurse who says her landlord doubled the rent on her one-bedroom house nearby, driving her family out of their home. “We are against how they are trying to belittle us. They are giving priority to soccer and forgetting about the families, about the Brazilian people.”

The mother of three says her cabinetmaker husband is unemployed and they are living off her $350 monthly salary, which she had used to pay about $110 a month in rent.

But their landlord notified them earlier this year that the rent on their home in the Itaquera neighborhood was being raised to $220.

“We just don’t have that kind of money,” she said. “We wouldn’t have clothes. We wouldn’t have food.”

She joined the thousands of others organized by a group called the Homeless Workers Movement, which has been helping the families set up the tents.

Robson Goncalves, one of the movement’s leaders overseeing the occupation dubbed “The People’s Cup,” says he doesn’t know who owns the land that measures about 37 acres (150,000 square meters). He said it has been abandoned for two decades, and noted that no one has claimed it since the families began squatting on it last weekend.

“Ever since they started building that stadium, property owners started overselling. This area is really becoming affordable only to the upper class,” Goncalves said.

The leader said the government should redistribute the property for subsidized housing and cited a federal program that has built hundreds of thousands of houses for families eligible for low-interest rate mortgages.

Sao Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad has told local media he’s studying how to register the land so the families could move there legally. But critics say other people are already waiting for a government funded house or apartment in Sao Paulo, which has a housing deficit of 230,000 homes.

Some experts question whether the World Cup is really to blame for rising rents near the stadium.

Pedro Taddei Neto, an architect and urban planning expert from the University of Sao Paulo, said the World Cup hype won’t leave a lasting impact on real-estate prices.

He said rent increases in Itaquera reflect speculation about future development in the industrial suburb and may be related to a nationwide real estate boom and inflation in Latin America’s biggest economy.

“Of course, there’s a lot of speculation. It’s inevitable. The World Cup is around the corner and it worries these people,” he said. “Once the World Cup is over, we will go back to reality.”

Meanwhile, those in the squatter village try to get on their uprooted lives.

On a recent day, a boy pushed his friend in a wheelbarrow, while a little girl hugged her mother’s thigh as strangers passed. One woman dried her hair with a towel after taking a shower at the communal bathroom while another cooked the last of the 60 kilos (132 pounds) of rice she prepared for the residents that day.

“The government might want to treat us like we are anarchists, disruptive, but we are families,” said De Cassia. “You think that I want to have a girl as little as mine in the streets? No. I just deserve my rights.”

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New Tyrannosaur named 'Pinocchio rex'

A new type of Tyrannosaur with a very long nose has been nicknamed "Pinocchio rex".

The ferocious carnivore, nine metres long with a distinctive horny snout, was a cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex.

Its skeleton was dug up in a Chinese construction site and identified by scientists at Edinburgh University, UK.

The 66-million-year-old predator, officially named Qianzhousaurus sinensis, is described in Nature Communications.

"Pinocchio" looked very different to other tyrannosaurs.

"It had the familiar toothy grin of T. rex, but its snout was long and slender, with a row of horns on top," said Edinburgh's Dr Steve Brusatte.

"It might have looked a little comical, but it would have been as deadly as any other tyrannosaur, and maybe even a little faster and stealthier.

"We thought it needed a nickname, and the long snout made us think of Pinocchio's long nose."

Researchers now think several different tyrannosaurs lived and hunted alongside each other in Asia during the late Cretaceous Period, the last days of the dinosaurs.

The enormous Tarbosaurus (up to 13m) had deep and powerful jaws like T. rex - strong enough to crush the bones of giant herbivores.

The thinner teeth and lighter skeleton of Qianzhousaurus suggest it hunted smaller creatures, such as lizards and feathered dinosaurs. But at nine metres tall and weighing almost a tonne, it was still a gigantic carnivore.

"You wouldn't want to run into either of these guys," said Dr Brusatte.

'Weird features'

Pinocchio's snout was 35% longer than other dinosaurs of its size. So, why the long face?

"The truth is we don't know yet. But it must've been doing something different," Dr Brusatte told BBC News.

"The iconic picture of a tyrannosaur is T. Rex, the biggest, baddest dinosaur of all.

"But this new species was lighter, less muscular. It breaks the mould. Perhaps it had a faster bite and hunted in a different way."

The thinner teeth and lighter skeleton of Qianzhousaurus suggest it hunted smaller creatures, such as lizards and feathered dinosaurs. But at nine metres tall and weighing almost a tonne, it was still a gigantic carnivore.

"You wouldn't want to run into either of these guys," said Dr Brusatte.

'Weird features'

Pinocchio's snout was 35% longer than other dinosaurs of its size. So, why the long face?

"The truth is we don't know yet. But it must've been doing something different," Dr Brusatte told BBC News.

"The iconic picture of a tyrannosaur is T. Rex, the biggest, baddest dinosaur of all.

"But this new species was lighter, less muscular. It breaks the mould. Perhaps it had a faster bite and hunted in a different way."

Prof Junchang Lu and Dr Steve Brusatte at construction site where dinosaur fossil discovered

The discovery of "Pinocchio" settles an argument over a series of strange new fossil finds.

In recent years, two tyrannosaurs with unusually prominent proboscises were dug up in Mongolia, and named Alioramus.

The horny-snouted predators appeared to come from an entirely new branch of the tyrannosaur family.

"The trouble was, they were both juveniles. So it was possible their long snouts were just a weird transient feature that grows out in adults," said Dr Brusatte, an expert in tyrannosaur evolution.

But this new Qianzhousaurus specimen is an almost fully mature adult. It was found largely intact and remarkably well preserved by road construction workers near Ganzhou in southern China.

"It's twice the size of the juveniles, and yet it still shows the same features - including the distinctive horns," said Dr Brusatte.

"This is the slam dunk we needed: the long-snouted tyrannosaurs were real."

Palaeontologists are now confident that Qianzhousaurus and Alioramusare part of a new subgroup of tyrannosaurs with elongated skulls.

Their discovery from Mongolia to southern China suggests these "second tier" carnivores were widely distributed, according to Prof Junchang Lu of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, a co-author on the paper.

"Although we are only starting to learn about them, the long-snouted tyrannosaurs were apparently one of the main groups of predatory dinosaurs in Asia," he said.

With these "weird" creatures now accepted as being part of a whole family, more and more of their long-snouted relatives are expected to be unearthed.

As for the riddle of Pinocchio's nose, the scientists hope to solve it via biomechanical studies of its jaw - which may hint at its feeding habits.

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Yummy Sandwiches Are Falling From The Sky In Australia

Could this be the greatest fast food innovation ever? All signs point to yes.

Well, except perhaps for the pizza delivering drone… that is epic. But this is a close second.

For those not in the know, in Australia, grilled cheese sandwiches are called jaffles. And in Australia, they fall from the sky .

In a new phenomenon sweeping the laneways of Melbourne, a ‘jafflechute’ is a mini parachute with a grilled cheese sandwich tethered to its undercarriage.

Dropped from a few storeys above street level, these toasty hot parcels of deliciousness cascade to the hungry crowds gathered below.

So how do you partake in such delights? Well, whip out your Paypal, make an order, then stand on the street at the spot marked with an ‘X’.

The geniuses behind the jafflechute business call it a “gravity controlled melted cheese delivery mechanism”, and while it’s only in Melbourne for now, they are preparing to take the jaffle maker to New York in the near future.

jafflechutes

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16 Powerful & Interesting Images From The Past

I've hunted the furthest corners of the web to track down photographs that are as interesting as they are powerful. I'm now back with 16 compelling images that I think tick both of those boxes.

The real Alice In Wonderland, Alice Lindell 1862

Audrey Hepburn shopping with her pet deer “Ip” in Beverly Hills, CA, 1958

Arnold Schwarzenegger shows off to some elderly women in the 1970's

Batman riding an elephant

Elton John performs at the Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, October 1975.

Celebrating the end of prohibition 1933

A Young Hans Zimmer with his Moog Modular system

Axl Rose & David Bowie

A former slave named Gordon shows his whipping scars, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 1863

Freddie Mercury 1958

Transporting a circus elephant early 1930s

Hunter S. Thompson

Jaws 1975

UVa School of Medicine, Cadaver Society, 3rd Club, 1909 posing with specimens

Michael Jackson drops the puck for the Vancouver Canucks vs Pittsburgh Penguins game Vancouver, 1984

John Lennon sniffing coke

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THE BARBECUE BIBLE BY TRAMONTINA - MUST GET!

There are countless books out there that will give you barbecue recipes, but there’s only one book that will actually walk you through the cooking procedure, step by step. That book is the Bible of Barbecue.

When thinking up creative ways to promote their Brazilian line of kitchen supplies, the team at Tramontina hit a home run with this bad boy. Working with the team at JWT Brazil, they created a book that will guide you through your entire barbecue process. Open the book to reveal a page made of charcoal (smash it into pieces), while the following pages feature both a fire starter and a fan.

Each chapter covers a different stage of the grilling process, and consists of everything from an apron page and knife sharpener to the wooden constructed cover that serves as a chopping board . The book will only be available in Brazil when it’s released, and I imagine it will pretty difficult to get your hands on. If anyone here reading does find a way of grabbing a copy, let me know via PM!

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DUCATI MONSTER MS4R BY PAOLO TESIO

Ducatis are one of those bikes that you can’t imagine could get any better than they come from the factory floor. Italian automotive designer Paolo Tesio is proof that these things can get more badass, showcasing his customization skills with this Ducati Monster MS4R.

At first glance, this thing looks like it’s been re-worked from top to bottom, but that’s not the case. Based on a 2003 Ducati SR4, the design for the bike was completely mocked up in CAD before applying any changes to the physical vehicle. The updates includes a new seat, 43mm adjustable Showa front suspension, and a modified rear subframe. The 2-wheeler is still equipped with the 996 cc motor, a setup that’s good for 115 horsepower – a hefty amount for this 399 pound street bike.

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ALFRED HITCHCOCK CIGAR BOX

Finding interesting and affordable pieces of history like this cigar box is a specialty of Bonhams, the upcoming Entertainment Memorabilia Auction is literally full of sub-$1,000 gems like this one – an Alfred Hitchcock cigar box signed and sent by the director to his friends in Britain during WWII.

Its value has been estimated at $400 to $600 USD, you can click here to register to bid on this lot or here to view the full list of items due to be sold.

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The US Navy's Huge, Hidden Problem: Barnacles On Ships

It’s a problem as old as sailing itself. Ever since man set out sea, barnacles have been clinging like, well, barnacles to ships, growing into bumpy masses that slows down vessels and wastes fuel. Could the solution to this age-old dilemma be a new coat of special paint? It’s not as simple as it sounds.

A recent report touting the benefits of anti-barnacle paint got me wondering just how big a problem barnacles could possibly be. Turns out these tiny creatures can make a ship burn up to 40 per cent more fuel. Their collective mass is small compared to the overall ship, but their little bodies have an outsized effect creating drag around the ship’s otherwise smooth hull.

Biofouling is the technical name for the crusting of barnacles, mussels, and bacteria on ships. Barnacles, with their superstrong non-soluble glue, are the worst culprits. It’s all an especially big problem for the Navy, whose vessels are docked and stationary for much of the year. The US Navy spends an additional $US 500 million per year in fuel and maintenance costs thanks to biofouling. Now there are ready solutions to biofouling, but as you might expect, chemicals that kill barnacles aren’t so great for the ocean, either.

In the 18th century, the British navy began sheathing their ships in copper, which made the hulls immune to both barnacles and a particular hazard to wooden ships of the era, shipworms. Underwater, a toxic film forms on the copper, keeping away any marine life. “That was a radical technical advance,” biochemist Ben Van Mooy told Oceanus Magazine. “It was probably one of the things that contributed to the emergence of England as a naval superpower in the 18th century.” Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “copper-bottomed” to describe an especially reliable thing.

Copper-sheathing came to an end though, because of steel. Navies shifted from wood to stronger steel ships, but the presence of copper causes steel to corrode faster. They could, however, still use copper-based paints. Other paints were also tried, using poisons such as arsenic, mercury, strychnine, cyanide and tin. “Tin was wonderful,” port engineer Dutch Wegman said. “But it’s a funeral of death — everywhere it went, it was killing off, to some extent, everything around it.” The tin-based tributyltin, for example, was banned after it killed off oyster farms in Europe.

That leaves us with trying to find more eco-friendly antifouling solutions. The Navy has announced plans for a Robotic Hull Bio-Mimetic Underwater Grooming system, or Hull BUG. “In some ways its mission is similar to a robotic home floor cleaner, lawn mower or some advanced pool cleaners in that it is designed to be tether free, autonomous and run on a battery for a significant duration of its mission,” says the Navy. It’s a four-wheeled underwater roomba for barnacles.

But a solution easier to implement will probably come from the realm of chemistry. Most recently,Argentinian scientists reported that chemicals isolated from the Maytenus tree could repel barnacles. That’s on the heels of many other supposedly environmentally-friendly antifouling coatings, inspired by everything from shark skin to bacteria to animal anesthetics. Whether any of these can tough it out at sea remains to be seen.

Barnacles are so small, it’s easy to overlook their outsized effect on ships all over the world. Consider the magnitude of the problem, and we can see the magnitude of benefits to a solution. What if we could save millions of gallons of fuel with a new ship paint?

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Government Intelligence Agencies Built Facebook, Corporations Adopted it and They Both Love Collecting ‘Likes’

There is a good chance you found this article via some form of social media. Perhaps you are one of the hundreds who follow the FOH page via Facebook, or you are Facebook friends with one of those members and read the post because they liked or shared it.

Whichever you might be, one thing is certain, you are making it way too easy for the government, and everyone else for that matter, to keep tabs on what you are doing, what you like, websites you visit on line, your political leanings, and the friends you keep. In fact, you are using a program allegedly financed by government intelligence agencies and designed for the explicit purpose of gathering information about the public.

“So what? I’ve got nothing to hide,” you might be thinking to yourself right now, oh, but you most certainly do.

There is also a good chance if the government, practically any government, but particularly the United States Government, wants to find out any information about you, like for example where you work, or currently live, so it can find you to recoup those student loans you still owe, or the back taxes you’ve yet to pay, it can. The government might also want information for more nefarious reasons, like finding out your community’s collective position on environmentalism, so it can pick the best town for hosting an anti-environmentalist protest in an effort to restore the public reputation of an environmentally-destructive corporation who donated millions to political campaigns, by creating a social media buzz to combat persistent negative coverage by the media.

A peek into the Facebook profiles of everyone in a geographic location can reap that kind of data.

The conspiracy theory claims the government actually bought Facebook back in 2005 via investments by James Breyer, a former board member for Raytheon BBN Technologies, an agency contracted with the US government, specifically DARPA — Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency— to assist with the development of defense and information-gathering technology. Breyer’s ties to the intelligence community run even deeper than that when one looks at his associations at BBN. Among the board members who served with Breyer at BBN, were other key figures in the defense technologies and intelligence-gathering world, such as Gilman Louie, the head of In-Q-Tel, and of course, Anita K. Jones, whose official responsibilities included oversight of DARPA at the time.

They are all just pieces of a government-spying puzzle that doesn’t require a MENSA chapter president to figure out. The framework of that puzzle was put together for us by documents brought to light by Edward Snowden, but filling in the details still takes a little bit of speculation.

To speculate, though, one has to take a look from the highest possible vantage point to get a good view of the entire picture. That’s when we see Facebook as an entity of greater value than just keeping tabs for military defense. Facebook also opened the door for economic growth by way of enhanced target marketing using information collected from your Facebook profiles, and other online activities, which is valuable information to the corporations whose money and lobbyists influence government decision making.

What better perk is there to give back as a, “Thank you, for your support,” than that?

While this element is often left out of the Facebook conspiracy theory, it is certainly part of the narrative that can’t be ignored. Quid pro quo is after all, what makes the wheels of government go round.

Hiding Information from The Man Is Now Harder Than Ever:

Think about how much the corporate world of marketing already knows about you, and how they use it in an effort to manipulate your buying habits. It’s kind of scary when you think about it, and even scarier when you realize the government itself might have opened the door to allowing such practices to happen.

I recently spent an afternoon on Google researching web hosting and domain name registration options to get myself caught up on information I hadn’t looked into for several years. I spent several hours that day reading about rates, packages, limitations, service agreements, and all of that mess, and seemed benign while I was doing it. Now for the past week, I’ve been inundated with advertisements from hosting companies pitching their lowest rates and offering me special discount codes through advertisements in my social media accounts and just about every other website I visit.

Google is notorious for tracking your activity online, including your GMail conversations, and the company uses those results to provide its advertising clients a target marketing campaign based on specific search criteria. Google doesn’t hide this fact. It’s in their privacy policy.

Facebook, and many others, do the same thing. The practice is so widespread, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep the watchful eyes of marketers away out of your life, as Princeton University Assistant Sociology Professor Janet Vertesi found out when she attempted to hide her pregnancy from the prying eyes of online marketers.

She instructed her friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers, to refrain from mentioning the pregnancy on Facebook or other online platforms. She also went to great lengths to stay off the grid with her own Internet searching and purchasing practices. To do this she made her purchases in cash from local businesses without the use of shopper-loyalty cards or other incentive programs retailers offer in exchange for the convenience of tracking your purchases at the register.

She searched the Internet for baby-related products using Tor, the allegedly secure, and untraceable, search engine famous for providing the Silk Road to the Dark Web and access to sellers of illegal substances who rely on cryptocurrencies for transactions. When she and her husband had to use a retailer like Amazon for a purchase, they did so with Amazon Gift Cards linked to a privately-hosted email account, and to the physical address of a postage locker. This unusual behavior prompted an unusual response while trying to buy $500 worth of Amazon Gift Cards in cash from a local retailer. When the cashier rang up the purchase, the cash register cued the employee to report excessive transactions to the authorities.

Ultimately, Vertesi did manage to avoid receiving target marketing about her pregnancy, but the effort to avoid it was so inconvenient it was hardly worth the bother. There are just too many ways for information to be collected and analyzed in the retail world to avoid them all without great discipline and added expense. It’s hard to beat intelligence gathering tactics essentially built directly to devices we carry in our pockets everywhere we go, as is customary with smartphones. No wonder stores like Target can figure out if a woman is pregnant, and even when she is due, before she ever registers for baby shower purchases in a Target store. They can tell simply by monitoring what you buy in their stores. They are so good at it, they often let the secret out before the woman is ready to reveal the information to family and friends.

If the government was involved in creating Facebook, it makes you wonder whether corporate lobbyists didn’t catch wind of the ongoing development of a powerful tool intended for use by the intelligence community to gather information about the public, and then begged for access by way of significant contributions to the right political palms in Washington D.C..

Was Facebook founded by the CIA just to be a data collection tool?

With the private sector spending millions to pry into our lives via electronic means for marketing purposes, and being shockingly successful at it, and given Edward Snowden’s revelations about the information gathering practices of entities like the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, it’s not that great of a stretch to imagine there was a collective effort at some point make gathering information easier.

That’s when thunder clapped, lighting struck, and an electronically altered voice crackled from a speaker phone to a boardroom full of government information-gathering specialists, and said, “Let there be Facebook.”

And boy was there ever a tool called Facebook.

As of January 1, 2014, there were 1.3 billion active monthly users of Facebook. There were only 800 million users as recently as 2012. It just keeps growing.

In parts of the world where nearly everyone has Internet access, and where nearly everyone possesses the technology to access it, there is a good chance the folks living there who don’t have a Facebook account are in the minority.

So when information arises that connects government intelligence gathering organizations directly to Facebook on an investment-level at the company’s infancy, it immediately raises concern.

As mentioned earlier, conspiracy theorists often point to investments totaling nearly $14 million by James Breyer in 2005, through a personal investment and an investment by Breyer’s venture capital company, Accel Partners, as being a connection between the government and Facebook. Breyer’s BBN connections with Gilman Louie, who set up the CIA’s own investment capital and technology development agency In-Q-Tel in 1999, and Anita K. Jones of DARPA, also adds fuel to the conspiracy theory fire.

In-Q-Tel’s primary mission is to assist the CIA in finding technological solutions for its missions, and data collection is a big part of that mission.

InQtel is most likely behind the development of PRISM, a data collection effort by the NSA and GCHQ which collects/collected user information from the servers of Google, Facebook, Apple, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Yahoo, and PalTalk. The existence of PRISM was revealed in classified documents obtained and released by former CIA-employee Edward Snowden. As recently as last week, Snowden claims we are all still under surveillance at all times, and everything we do is being watched and collected. Snowden is being sought by the US in connection with the release of the classified information, but is currently hiding out in Russia where he was granted asylum last year.

The information-gathering claims associated with PRISM alleging a Facebook connection make connecting some dots easy, but if theorists are right, and Breyer’s investment group was used by the CIA to provide the capital needed to develop Facebook, there is still a lot more left to learn.

A quick look at Facebook’s history gives more credence to the claims made by conspiracy theorists.

Facebook wasn’t open to general public users until September 26, 2006, well after the investor with In-Q-tel, BBN, and DARPA connections became involved with the project in 2005. Prior to that, Facebook was only open to college students from February 4, 2004-September 3, 2005, when it was then opened up to users still in high school too.

This timeline is certainly right for conspiracy theories about government involvement from the company’s infancy to erupt and run rampant.

Thanks to Snowden, we know the NSA and others have collected data about Facebook users over the years, but the timeline of investment and development, and the dots that can be connected surrounding the entities involved, does make one wonder whether conspiracy theorists are right, and the NSA and CIA were behind the development of Facebook for that very purpose. If this is true, it could be the most successful information gathering device ever created by a government to spy on not only its people, but people around the world.

In 2006, the same year Facebook became open to everyone, Louie, of In-Q-Tel, received numerous accolades such as the Medallion of Outstanding Service and Support from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, and the CIA Director’s Award, all for his work with In-Q-Tel.

Were the accolades connected to the public launch of Facebook? We can’t say, but Louie was obviously doing something right, and in In-Q-Tel’s business, doing something right means finding new ways for intelligence agencies to use technology to gather the information needed to accomplish their missions.

Government Spying So Scary We Have To Laugh To Maintain Sanity

The conspiracy theory about the government creating Facebook is in the mainstream now, but it exists there primarily as a laughing matter. Surprisingly, laughing at it, or at least laughing about it, is among the most appropriate responses a person could choose.

Laughter has long been a mystery psychological researchers have been looking into for years, and they have found we laugh for a number of different reasons, but among them is nervousness, stress, and anxiety. It’s just our way of getting through mentally/emotionally challenging experiences, like knowing, without a doubt, conspiracy theorists were right about the government watching us and collecting our data for intelligence purposes.

With that in mind, here is the piece from standup comedian Pete Holmes, which inspired me to write this piece after hearing it for the first time several days ago. Holmes makes the claim Facebook was created by the government, and then he goes on to elaborate about how easy we make it for them to find out what we’re up to on a daily basis.

The Onion, perhaps the greatest online source for pure satire, too a different approach that not only explored the idea Facebook was created by the government, but takes a stab at the talking heads on 24-hour cable news networks who spout off about issues they don’t know any more about than the average guy on the street who has read a few magazine articles or blog posts about a given issue.

So was Facebook a government project that grew into a cultural phenomenon, just as they anticipated it would by testing it on college and high school kids, or is it all just conspiracy theory and conjecture?

If the marketing world can legally obtain enough information to figure out if a woman is pregnant before she announces it to the world, and if our online activities dictate the ads we see while surfing the net, then believing the government, any government, but especially the one in the US, is already doing what marketers do, and then some, is quite easy to do. It’s even easier when the government in question throws a fit when classified documentation declaring as much get released to the public without its consent.

The idea the government knew Facebook would catch on and become a website used by more than 1.3 billion people within 10 years of its launch, way back in 2005 when it was still being developed, does seem far fetched. At the same time, it is conceivable that the investment was the was just the equivalent of a $14 million lottery ticket that paid off bigger than the intelligence gathering community ever dreamed.

And that is the beauty of a good conspiracy theory. It might sound crazy on the surface, but deep inside its bowels are enough puzzle pieces to put together a clear picture. That clear picture, however, isn’t the only one that can be made from those very same pieces.

In this particular situation, however, the puzzle pieces do come together to make a clear image portraying the government as being a driving force behind the development of a social phenomenon that gave it direct access to nearly every detail of our lives, and provided corporate constituents with improved marketing strategies to help their bottom line.

The bottom line for us, as consumers and citizens, is what little privacy we have left in the digital world, if there even truly ever was any, is on life support and might not make it through the night.

[MIKA27]

How Superman Would Look if He Was an Average Dude Trying to Fly

Superman has long endured as the quintessential superhero—strong, brave, and practically invincible. But in Norwegian photographer Ole Marius Jørgensen’s wistful and gently humorous images, the Last Son of Krypton is but one man at the center of a small drama about the end of childhood.

In No.Superhero, a collection of images depicting Superman as an average guy just trying to fly, Jørgensen confronts the difficulty of making dreams come true—and of coming to terms with the fact some of them won’t.

Nothing in the series is taken from Jørgensen’s own childhood; rather, he “tried to make a fantasy world” to depict the struggles of achieving one’s goals in life. He does, however, draw parallels between the quest for flight depicted in his series and his own decade-long ascent as a professional photographer.

“It’s about chasing your dream,” Jørgensen says. “And it’s the process I’m going through.”

Growing up, the photographer was “bombarded” with American pop culture, soaking in Star Wars and the world of He-Man. His first comic book love was the Incredible Hulk, and he was later drawn to the clean lines and bright colors of the Roy Lichtenstein-like classic Superman style.

He’s since stopped reading Superman but still recognizes the Pop Art appeal, even as the style of his series has moved far beyond that inspiration. With its selectively blurred realism, No.Superhero is closer to the work of Matthew Southworth than any Golden Age artist.

Jørgensen’s first dream was to be a filmmaker. He was drawn to movies—particularly American movies—and spent two years in film school in England and Norway. But the realities of movie production discouraged him from pursuing it further. “You have to fight a hundred people, and you need millions of dollars,” he says.

While he’s given on up film, he’s carried those storytelling instincts into his photography. In No.Superhero, the images suggest action before and after the shutter closes, and demonstrate an ability to convey both kinetic bursts and quiet moments of pathos. And his process in some ways mirrors the major beats of a film production, including location scouting, casting, scheduling shoots—no small feat in Norwegian weather.

Like conventional comic artists, Jørgensen handles his backgrounds and foregrounds separately. He’s built a library of more than 200 skies, personal stock images sorted by weather and time of day, that he plugs into his storyboarded scenes.

For No.Superhero it was important to Jørgensen that the project had a “touch of Norway.” It’s not the snow that makes the series Norwegian, he says, it’s that his Supermen are—literally and figuratively—down-to-Earth. “We are on the ground,” he says, referring to Norwegian values that discourage high-flying public behavior.

Jørgensen credits some time in New York with helping him develop an ambitious artistic alter ego. For aprevious project titled B-31 Ward, he broke with decorum by sneaking into an asylum during a two-year period to hurriedly snap its surreal series. It became the center of a minor controversy, but it is also his most successful commercial work to date.

These days Jørgensen is once again looking for inspiration close to home. His current work in progress is called The Way North and has the same DNA as Game of Thrones, with vivid renderings of characters from Scandinavian mythology. The images are as stark and beautiful as those in his Superman series, but the subjects seem far less likely to stumble and fall.

[MIKA27]

New Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Trailer Sets the Stage for Simian War

A new full-length trailer for this summer’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is here—and it’s not monkeying around. Fueled by vindictive desperation and the inevitability of all-out primate war, it’s the most intense look yet at what is coming in director Matt Reeves’ flick.

The sequel to 2011′s spine-chilling Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn takes place ten years after its predecessor. Caesar and his tribe have colonized the Muir Woods just north of San Francisco and now they are all living in peace, learning to read and write. It’s all going wonderfully until, naturally, some surviving humans (in Rise, remember, a virus was released that killed most of them) stumble upon the primates in the woods and proceed to shout, “We don’t mean any harm!” while simultaneously training gigantic hunting rifles on the lot of them.

There are peacemakers like Ellie (Keri Russell) and Malcolm (Jason Clarke), but the bellicose rage of folks like Dreyfus (Gary Oldman) and others who have lost loved ones thanks to the virus—which they are blaming on the apes—overpowers any sympathies for the apes. This, of course, leaves the apes absolutely no choice but to defend themselves and, well, we all know where this is going.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes hits theaters July 11, but the war, as Caesar grunts, “has already begun.”

MIKA: I've been looking forward to this one.