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

[MIKA27]

MERCEDES-BENZ X GARRETT MCNAMARA CORK SURFBOARD

Mercedes-Benz may not be known for their surfboards, but after unveiling their Silver Arrows of the Sea last year, we’ve been waiting to see more from the German luxury brand. We didn’t have to wait too long as Benz has released an all new cork surfboard.

Once again they have teamed up with big wave surfer Garrett McNamara to craft what could be the most gorgeous surfboard of all time. Ditching your typical foam construction, MB opted for a board made entirely from Portugal-sourced cork produced by Polen Surfboards. For surfing big waves, McNamara needed a flexible board, and this thing fits the bill perfectly adding flexibility to the mix without sacrificing strength. The surfboard was created specifically for McNamara’s return to the North Canyon waves in Nazare, where he will ride the waves that made him famous. Seeing that he set the record for the highest wave ever surfed on his MBoards from Mercedes-Benz, we can’t wait to see what he’s capable of doing while shredding the surf on this thing.

[MIKA27]

A MIDWINTER NIGHTS DRAM WHISKEY

The chill of winter is near, and there's nothing like a pour of whiskey on a winter night to ward off the bitter cold. A Midwinter Nights Dram from the High West Distillery is a limited edition release of their Rendezvous Rye finished in port and French oak barrels. Named with Shakespeare in mind, this whiskey is sure to warm up a cold winter night with its vanilla, caramel, cinnamon, and spice flavors.

[Jeremy Festa]

And even togher 80 years earlier than that - Has anyone actually red the Brothers Grimm original stories before they were changed? Some pretty graphic and cool stuff IMO

Too true. Made the mistake of reading the original little red riding hood to my then 3 year old, from a beautiful old book, just before bed time. She was horrified, when the wolf actually ate both grandma, and little red riding hood, and then the woodsman kills the wolf and skins him. I couldn't believe the words as I read them. But it was too late as I kept reading out of intrigue, wondering who gave us such a book as a present? All the stories are quite horrifying. Supposedly, traditionally to scare the children into behaving.

[MIKA27]

Too true. Made the mistake of reading the original little red riding hood to my then 3 year old, from a beautiful old book, just before bed time. She was horrified, when the wolf actually ate both grandma, and little red riding hood, and then the woodsman kills the wolf and skins him. I couldn't believe the words as I read them. But it was too late as I kept reading out of intrigue, wondering who gave us such a book as a present? All the stories are quite horrifying. Supposedly, traditionally to scare the children into behaving.

Germans....

Now you MUST read your kids Hansel and Gretel....

[MIKA27]

The Scientist Who Seriously Believed Criminals Were Part Ape

If you’ve been following this column, you’ve noticed that I while I’m admittedly a tad flippant and snarky, I try to make it clear that in science, being wrong is perfectly OK. Because when someone comes along to prove you incorrect, it’s progress. Edmond Halley hypothesizing that our Earth was hollow, for instance,helped solidify the scientific method as we know it. Even the dazzling cruelty of trying animals for crimes and executing them strangely enough had an upside. You can be wrong and still contribute much to society.

The 19th century professor of criminology Cesare Lombroso was not one of those people. Cesare was a dum-dum.

Lombroso took Darwin’s recently published theory of evolution and added a horrifying twist that would reverberate for decades. You’d be hard-pressed to find an upside to his argument that criminals in fact express the physical qualities of our ancestors, bringing them closer to the dispositions of an ape than a human. Or see what good came from the towering whirlwind of racism that accompanied his hypothesis. Or in profiling people with big earlobes, “as in the ancient Egyptians,” as born criminals.

But you’re welcome to give it a shot.

Around the World in 80 Racial Slurs

Where to begin? Well, first of all, Lombroso’s “revelation.” It was during a post-mortem of a famous brigand that Lombroso discovered a distinct impression at the base of the man’s skull, which he named the median occipital fossa. This was indeed peculiar, similar to the skull of “inferior animals, especially rodents.”

“This was not merely an idea, but a revelation,” Lombroso later wrote. “At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who produces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.”

Now, when diagnosing someone as a “born criminal,” we don’t exactly have the option of opening their heads to find this tell-tale giveaway of their savage nature. But we have savages all over the world to help us profile the fiends in our midst. How lucky! (In fairness, it should be noted, to a degree Lombroso was a product of his time—even in On the Origin of Species, Darwin himself invoked the “savagery” language.) Their features, Lombroso argued, are the hard evidence we need to identify their counterpart European delinquents.

Tattoos, according to Lombroso, aligned criminals with savage peoples who also got ink done.

Like the related pseudoscience of physiognomy, which advocated judging your personality based solely on your face (a story for another week, perhaps), criminal anthropology had a long list of qualities to look out for in hooligans. Here are just a few of the giveaways of being apish, which Lombroso’s daughter summarized in 1911’s Criminal Man, the first English translation of her father’s views:

• “The projection of the lower face and jaws (prognathism) found in negroes.”
• “Oblique eyelids, a Mongolian characteristic.”
• A nose with a “tip rising like an isolated peak from the swollen nostrils, a form found among the Akkas, a tribe of pygmies of Central Africa.”
• Aside from biology, the tattoos criminals adorn themselves further harken to the same practice “among primitive peoples.” And their pictographs scrawled on prison walls are also much like the hieroglyphics used by ancient man.

We might also find characteristics the European criminal shares not just with his fellow savage man, but with beasts:

• An entirely missing earlobe, or one that “is atrophied till the ear assumes the form like that common to apes.”
• A hooked nose, which “so often imparts to criminals the aspect of birds of prey.”
• “And in some cases there is a prolongation of the coccyx, which resembles the stump of a tail, sometimes tufted with hair.” (What, what?)

Indeed, Lombroso thought many animals themselves are criminals, according to Adalbert Albrecht in his 1910 essay “Cesare Lombroso: A Glance at His Life Work.” The bloodshot eyes of the tiger and hyena, for instance, is a sign of their immorality. Birds of prey, in addition to their nasty hooked beaks, have large eye sockets that indicate sexual perversity. Animals in general, he insisted, are exceedingly violent and prone to murder.

Some thieves and, interestingly, an effeminate pyromaniac at lower left known as “The Woman.”

“In view of these facts,” Lombroso wrote, “how can one fail to come to the conclusion that crime in its rudimentary expressions is bound to organic conditions and is one of their direct effects? This is absolutely confirmed when we study crime and prostitution among savages.”

And study he did—at length. While a French psychiatrist named Bénédict Morel already had declared “the criminal to be a form of degeneration or a morbid variation from the normal type of mankind,” Lombroso took those ideas and got a bit … carried away with the whole thing, to the point where “no one can dispute his right to be considered the godfather” of what would become known as criminal anthropology, writes Albrecht.

Smuggling a dagger into prison inside a crucifix is either sacrilegious or genius—or both.

Among the many criminals Lombroso studied, there are a few standouts worth mentioning. Representing the cynicism with which many deviants operate, “one criminal humbly entreated to be allowed to retain his own crucifix while in prison,” Lombroso’s daughter writes. “It was subsequently discovered that the sacred image served as a sheath for his dagger.” Representing impulsiveness was a man who had a habit of killing horses, who “even went to the length of throwing a lady down a well, because she ventured to contradict him.” Still another rather impulsive criminal was sentenced to labor aboard a galley, where he bravely “stole the bands from the masts, nails, and copper plates.” Classy.

Now, the question becomes: What to do with these scoundrels who are fated by their very nature to compulsively commit crimes? One of Lombroso’s colleagues, according to the great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, suggested that if “they ravish, steal, and kill, it is by virtue of their own nature and their past, but there is all the more reason for destroying them when it has been proved that they will always remain orang-utans.” Ouch. And Lombroso himself hinted at such. When it comes to criminals “organically fitted for evil,” we should have no compassion, for the fact that they continue their terrors “steels us against all pity.”

Picking on Epileptics, Because Why Not

There is of course the problem of criminals that don’t bear any of the requisite attributes: the small ears, the general hairiness, the long arms. What to make of them?

Well, not every criminal is born with qualities of earlier humans, Lombroso argued. There is the criminal of passion, which women tend to fall into more than men, and the criminal of opportunity, which, oddly, Lombroso ties to epilepsy. “According to him,” writes Albrecht, “epilepsy is not much else than a highly strung normal function of the nerves, so that some epileptics would appear to be merely highly strung impulsive natures.”

Lombroso believed epileptics, with their impulsive actions, were natural criminals.

Also, there’s the habitual criminal without the brain defects of the born criminal. “In consequence of a neglected upbringing, however,” writes Albrecht, “he does not gain the strength to overcome the naturally bad qualities of the child, developing them perhaps till habit makes him a criminal.” Interestingly enough, for all of the horrible predestination-style theories of Lombroso, this actually touches closer to what we now consider to be the driving factors of criminality.

While much debate still rages about what drives people into the life of crime, it seems clear that both genetic and environmental factors are at work. Men, for instance, may be more prone to aggression, but that doesn’t mean all men are like my crazy uncle, who probably spent 90 percent of his waking hours starting fights. On top of socioeconomic status and education, your upbringing, as Lombroso rightly noted, likely also plays a part. But a less-than-ideal upbringing of course doesn’t necessarily turn you into a criminal. My dad, for instance, is a lamb to his brother’s knife-wielding wolf. (I may be understating my uncle’s aggression. This was a man, after all, who once got in a bar fight and ended up with a pickax embedded in his brain.)

What we can say with certainty is that weird ears and excessive body hair doesn’t necessarily peg you as a criminal, or a less-evolved human being for that matter. But Lombroso’s toxic idea, while now mercifully dead, “lives on in popular notions of criminal genes or chromosomes,” notes Gould. And criminal anthropology played no small part in influencing social Darwinism—the wildly wrong and brutal application of natural selection to human society to boost the “strong” and stomp on the “weak.” But wait, there’s more! His association of epileptics and crime helped contribute to the stigmatization of those who suffer from the disorder.

So yeah, not much good coming out of this deplorable theory, other than Lombroso’s missteps taught us exactly how not to confront the idea of criminality. Not unlike my uncle, really.

Browse the full Fantastically Wrong archive here.

[MIKA27]

Nazis in New Mexico: Roswell’s Secret

What exactly crashed in the open terrain of the US Southwest back in 1947? Was it a weather balloon? Aliens from a far-off galaxy? Or even worse… could it have been the Nazis?

A new German documentary, UFOs and the Third Reich, aired last month on Channel N24 andmade some bold claims about flying saucers. The main claim is that the real secret behind the Roswell crash was that it was a high-tech stealth aircraft made by Nazis. Well, in fairness, they weren’t still Nazis when they built it. Thanks to Operation Paperclip, many German scientists were secretly relocated to the US at the end of World War II. Instead of facing war crimes, they were put to work by the US government to help beat the Soviets in the ‘space race’. Undoubtedly, allowing people like Hans Kammler (who organized the forced labor factories at Auschwitz) to escape any form of punishment to gain a scientific edge casts its own black shadow over the already dark, elusive, and controversial study of UFOs.

A photograph of one of the Nazi’s prototype disc-shaped aircraft showing the German Luftwaffe flag painted on its side.

Between 1941 and 1943, fifteen prototypes of what’s known as the Schriever-Habermohl Model were said to have been built in Prague. Named for its designers, engineers Rudolf Schriever and Otto Habermohl, this craft bears an uncanny resemblance to what we now think of when we hear the term “flying saucer”. Flight was achieved through a combination of rotary wings like a helicopter and let engines mounted beneath the disc-shaped craft. The blueprints for these craft are believed to have been taken to the US in 1945 where work continued. It’s one of these American versions that the filmmakers allege crashed two years later in New Mexico.

Under Hitler’s command, the Nazis experimented with peculiar and radical aerospace technology, most notably “Die Glocke“, a bell-shaped metal chamber measuring 15 feet tall and nine feet in diameter intended to fly without wings. It is believed that work was carried out to create 15 prototypes in Poland’s Owl Mountains in secret subterranean labs hidden inside the Wenceslas Mines which were later dynamited when the tide of the war turned against the Nazis. According to historian and former Polish journalist Igor Witkowski in his book The Truth about The Wunderwaffe, test flights of Die Glocke were conducted over Germany and Czechoslovakia… like Charlie and Willy Wonka in the Great Glass Elevator, no doubt. Were was Augustus Gloop when you needed him?

An alleged photograph examining the experimental inner workings of Die Glocke from Igor Witkowsk’s book.

A German engineer named George Klein supports Witkowski’s claims that such an aircraft existed. He told the Daily Express, “I don’t consider myself a crackpot or eccentric or someone given to fantasies… This is what I saw, with my own eyes: a Nazi UFO.” Klein wasn’t alone; many American and British airmen also witnessed strange craft, including the Schriever-Habermohl Model and possibly Die Glocke, over Nazi-occupied territory.

And if Roswell was a Nazi craft, what can be said about the famous Kecksburg UFO of 1965? Resembling an upside-down acorn, Die Glocke was thought by many to have been an idea never brought to life. Looking at diagrams for Die Glocke and the object which crashed into the woods outside Kecksburg, it’s hard to deny the similarities. The US allegedly obtained plans for these craft around 1943, and some believe they experimented in building their own version.

Illustrations of both Die Glocke and the Kecksburg UFO.

Could Die Glocke (or an American counterpart) have been launched, reached too high of an altitude and orbited the Earth as a satellite before reentering the atmosphere where it became a fiery meteor landing in Pennsylvania?

If there was ever a good reason for a government conspiracy covering up a crashed unidentified flying object in New Mexico outside of Roswell, it being a top-secret Nazi aircraft is most certainly a good one. Or is there an even bigger conspiracy at work here? Last year, Greg Newkirk revealed the surprising fact that Rachel, Nevada (UFO mecca and next door neighbor to the infamous Area 51) is slowly being consumed by Neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Is this new revelation about Roswell really just propaganda trying to justify a land claim by Neo-Nazis in New Mexico? Or is their settlement of these towns some deep-rooted attempt at a Nazi comeback in the 21st Century? Either way, I’d prefer the aliens.

[MIKA27]

Here Are The Russian Warships Headed For Brisbane

There are four Russian warships heading towards Brisbane, presumably because of Tony Abbott’s schoolyard challenge to Vladimir Putin. In the interest of national security, we thought it best to analyse the four vessels, and calculate their chance of success in any possible conflict.

As a response to Tony Abbott’s comment that he will “shirtfront” Putin, the four warships have been sent just in time to embarrass Abbott during the G20 conference. There’s speculation over whether the warships will hang around international waters outside of Brisbane, or request to dock, as some sort of weird diplomatic taunt.

Of course, we’d all just rather they forgot the BS and carried on with saving the world’s problems, but if our global leaders are intent on a pissing contest, let’s have a little fun with it.

There are 51 ships in the Royal Australian Navy, and they might not be all in Brisbane, but I’m betting we have the numerical advantage. If RPGs have taught me anything, it’s that if you level up enough, you can take on an army.

Let’s leave for a second that stopping boats is kind of this government’s “thing” — the real question is, has Russia chosen its heroic party well enough to take on our aquatic dungeon, and defeat our final boss, Abbottron? Let’s take a look.

Varyag: Tank

The Cruiser-class Varyag is a bit more of a utility tank, as it can do decent damage, has a bit of crowd control, and most importantly, can take a pounding. You’ll catch this vessel taunting our defence forces from the front line, holding agro while the destroyers do their dirty business. The Varyag is the flagship of the Russian fleet, so it’s spent quite a while grinding reputation, and will likely be calling the raid shots over Ventrilo.

Marshal Shaposhnikov : Damage Dealer

The Shaposhnikov excels in damage efficiency, and will be careful to not do too much damage at once, but just a nice, consistent stream of pain while floating under the radar. It spends most of its time soloing against Somali pirates, and once notably recaptured a motor vessel from pirate control in 2010, but its gear since that raid is becoming dated and needs to be upgraded.

Boris Butoma : Druid

As a supply tanker, the Butoma will provide heals while making sure the party has everything else it needs. It’ll keep the other ships topped up, while trying to avoid damage itself. In combat lulls, it will provide everyone with the ammo regeneration and all the Vodka they need.

Fotiy Krylov : Priest

This is the Russian fleet’s salvage ship. Should everything go wrong for this brave fellowship, the Krylov will be the one that makes sure there’s a respawn. It’s certainly not here to salvage diplomacy, after all. Johnny On The Spot with the resurrections, is the name of the Krylov’s game. Perhaps it can clean up Abbottron’s evacuated bowels when he sees Russian warships outside of Brisbane. Perhaps ironically, he’ll fall down and grab Putin’s shirt to stabilise himself.

[MIKA27]

Why The Rosetta Comet Mission Is Such A Huge Deal

The first attempted landing on the surface of a comet is a huge landmark in the history of space exploration that will not only uncover further details about comets but could unlock further clues about the origins of our solar system and the development of life on Earth.

Comets are the icy remnants of the phase of planet building in our solar system, some 4.5 billion years ago. Thousands of them have been seen orbiting our sun and hundreds have been studied by Earth-based astronomers. From these measurements we know that a large proportion of a comet is made of water-ice. This turns to vapour when heated by the sun, producing a transient atmosphere around the comet together with microscopic “dust” particles, eventually flowing into the the tails for which they are so well known.

Not only are comets fascinating bodies in their own right, they may also be the original source of much of the water on our planet. Many lines of research point to a hot, dry Earth in the early days of the solar system. While it is possible that some water was released from the Earth’s interior at this time, the suspicion has always been that comets delivered the rest when crashing into Earth.

Visiting A Comet

We have been afforded a clearer picture of the composition and physical evolution of comets since 1986 when the European Space Agency (ESA) sent the Giotto spacecraft to study Halley’s Comet. Several others have followed, but all have only provided fleeting glimpses. Now the robotic Rosetta spacecraft is carrying out the first proper rendezvous with a comet.

Rosetta launched in 2004 and completed three fly-bys of Earth and one of Mars en route to its destination. On August 6 this year it matched trajectories with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and arrived within 100km of the icy nucleus. Since then European and American scientists have analysed the 2.5 mile-long body via optical and infra-red imaging, and sampled the gas and small solid particles – comet dust – being released from its surface. The onboard spectrographs, mass-spectrometers, microscopes and plasma sensors have been used to characterise the nucleus of the comet and the material it is already releasing while still more than 250m miles from the sun.

Landing On A Comet

Once the attached Philae lander is released, it will spend seven hours slowly descending to the surface. Philae has its own suite of instruments and cameras which will enable it to fully characterise the surface environment of a comet for the first time. The isotopic, molecular and structural properties of a 4.5 billion-year-old time capsule will be freshly revealed.

Philae is an engineering marvel in itself – the gravity on the comet’s surface is so weak that an astronaut could easily jump up and escape from its gravitational pull. To make matters more complicated, the structure of the surface is relatively unknown. So how do you make sure a lander sticks to the surface and doesn’t bounce back into space?

For Philae, the answer comes in the form of two harpoons, ice screws on its three landing legs, and a small thruster to hold it down. Plus, given the surprisingly rugged surface of the comet as photographed by the Rosetta spacecraft, a few crossed fingers back at mission control.

Assuming success, Rosetta and Philae will spend the coming months refining their measurements at comet 67P and showing us for the first time how these bodies evolve and erode as they approach the sun. Central to this will be studies of the comet led by Ian Wright at the Open University.

By the time comet is closest to the sun next August, Philae will almost certainly be dead. Rosetta is due to stay with the comet until at least December 2015 – but right now, a scientific treasure trove awaits.

[MIKA27]

SpaceShipTwo's Surviving Pilot Ejected Into -56C At 15,000m

Investigators are still trying to figure out exactly what went wrong in the tragic crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. While the National Transportation Safety Board has been looking into an issue with the braking system, the agency has released details from surviving pilot Peter Siebold about how he managed to escape the exploding spacecraft.

When SpaceShipTwo broke apart it was about 14km above sea level — which is twice the height of Mt Everest. Siebold was ejected, still in his seat, moving at about 965km/h through air that was estimated to be at least -56C. He was not wearing a spacesuit.

Siebold was knocked unconscious almost immediately, but according to the report, his last memory was sensing that the moisture on his tongue was boiling. That’s because water boils at much lower temperatures when you’re at higher elevation due to a decrease in pressure, so the heat of his own body would have been plenty to push it over the boiling point.

Siebold’s parachute deployed automatically, and even though he spent as many as 15 seconds in the ultra-thin atmosphere, he regained consciousness when he drifted closer to Earth and suffered no permanent damage from the lack of oxygen. Sadly, his co-pilot, Michael Tyner Alsbury did not survive, and investigators are trying to determine if this was due to his position in the craft. You can read more details from the NTSB report here.

[MIKA27]

Philae's Bad Landing Turns The Rosetta Mission Into A Race Against Time

It was a historic landing on a comet, but unfortunately, not a smooth one. The ESA confirmed that Rosetta’s lander, Philae, bounced twice and ultimately ended up sideways in the shadow of a cliff, where its solar panels can’t gather enough energy. When Philae’s battery dies, the mission will die with it.

For now, it’s race to gather as much scientific data as possible before the battery’s initial charge of 64 hours runs out. Philae’s investigation of the comet’s ice and rock, which is supposed to give clues to the origins of our solar system, will be severely hampered and cut short by the rocky landing.

The problem began, it seems, when Philae touched down on the comet for the first time, but its harpoons did not fire to anchor the lander. The comet’s gravity is 100,000 times weaker than Earth’s, so Philae bounced more than half a mile into space before setting down, once to bounce a second time. Now, the ESA thinks Philae is sitting on its side, with one of its three feet in the air, at the bottom of a cliff.

In this position, Philae will only get 1.5 hours of sun every 12 hours. Once its initial charge runs out, it will go dark. The lander has no way of moving around on its own, but the ESA is exploring how its drill or harpoons can be repurposed to give the machine a jolt. Philae might also become active again when it gets closer to the sun, but that’s only a distant possibility for now.

The borked landing means Philae won’t be able to use its scientific drill to take samples of the comet. (With such low gravity, drilling while unanchored could destabilise the whole lander.) The drilling system was designed to take samples up to 23cm below the comet’s surface, feeding them into ovens that vaporised them for analysis. One of Philae’s key experiments was examining hydrogen isotopes on the comet to figure how whether Earth’s water, which is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, really did come from comets crashing into the planet long ago.

Now, unless something changes, Philae will have a radically shortened amount of time to study the comet — hours instead of months. It was supposed to operate until March 2015, when it got too hot with the comet’s approach toward the sun. It is also limited to samples on the surface.

That doesn’t mean the mission was a complete failure; Philae is already sending back a ton of data and photos back to Earth. Landing on a comet after a 10 year journey through space is still a historic accomplishment.

[MIKA27]

This Australian Budgie Sounds Exactly Like R2-D2

For the first seconds I thought it was just a coincidence, but this budgerigar really sounds exactly like R2-D2 down to every squeak, beep and bop. Even the colours are the same. His name is Bluey and, according to his owner Carli Jeffrey, he drives them crazy with it.

Bluey was our first budgie and our seven-year old daughter hand-raised him. He has always been a curious bird, he was really intrigued by our voices and the cockatoos we have in our garden — he even copied the noise the crested pigeons make when they take off. We played R2D2 sounds off Youtube to him four or five times and a few days later our daughter came running in saying he was doing R2D2. We were blown away that he picked it up so quickly! The other budgies in his cage started copying him but could only manage a few seconds at a time. Bluey also loves making lazer sounds, the R2D2 scream sound, kissing sounds, and he whispers English jibberish we can only make out a few words.

[MIKA27]

Spectacular Picture Of Rosseta With The Comet In The Background

ESA just released this spectacular image captured last month by Philae’s CIVA (Comet Infrared and Visible Analyser) from a distance of approximately 16km from the comet 67P/C-G. It shows one of Rosetta’s 14m long solar panels and the comet in the background.

UPDATE: New images just in

This incredible image was taken by the Philae lander of one of its legs resting on the comet's surface.

This is the first 360-degree panorama shot released from the Philae lander. The view was captured by the CIVA-P imaging system. Parts of Philae’s landing gear can be seen. The next image in the gallery is a sketch of the lander superimposed on this photo.

This photo was captured by Philae's downward-looking ROLIS camera from about 40 meters above the surface of the comet as the lander descended.

The image shows the comet as seen by Philae's ROLIS instrument on the during descent from about 3 Kilometers away. Resolution is about 3 meters per pixel.

Image of the comet taken by Rosetta from 10 kilometers away.

Image of the comet taken by Rosetta from 10 kilometers away.

Image of the comet taken by Rosetta from 10 kilometers away.

Image of the comet taken by Rosetta from 10 kilometers away.

This photo of the original planned landing site was taken by Rosetta just days before its lander Philae began the descent

[MIKA27]

America's First Flying Aircraft Carriers Just Couldn't Stay In The Sky

Flying aircraft carriers are a great idea on paper — especially when they’re commanded by the likes of Nick Fury — but in reality they’re more death trap than sky island. Or, at least, the short-lived USS Akron was. When it crashed off the New Jersey coast in 1933, it took nearly everybody on board with it.

The Akron and her sister ship, the USS Macon, were helium-filled dirigibles developed by the US Navy beginning in 1929 at the newly-completed Goodyear-Zeppelin Airdock in Akron, Ohio. Construction was overseen by Karl Arnstein, one of the leading airship designers of the day, and his 12 hand-picked engineers.

An F9C Sparrowhawk affixed to its trapeze hanger

Arnstein’s design for the 239m Akron was nothing short of revolutionary. The airframe was built from duralumin alloy and could fly 17,000km on its 75,000-litre supply of gasoline. Rather than having a single keel running the length of the vessel along the bottom, he employed three separate keels set at 45 degrees (positioned at 12, 4, and 8 o’clock) to better support the airship’s envelope. The tri-keel design also eliminated the need for multiple cross-shaped supports that dominated the interior of the Hindenburg, allowing the Akron to transport other vehicles within its envelope. Eight 560 hp Maybach VL-2 engines ran along the length of the lower keels to provide thrust for the external propellers.

The Akron also employed a unique spy basket device — part radio transmitter, part inverted periscope — that allowed the dirigible to remain hidden within a cloud but still peek out and scout for enemy ships and aircraft. Both the Akron and the Macon were initially constructed as long range reconnaissance platforms though navy brass did also consider them for use as flying aircraft carriers replete with a contingent of prototype F9C Sparrowhawks stored in the underside of the vessel. The Akron could load up to five Sparrowhawks in its 23m x 18m x 5m hangar, then both launch and land them using a unique overhead “trapeze” arresting system that let the F9Cs be employed either for forward reconnaissance or defence of the mother ship.

Unfortunately, neither airship got the chance to see combat. Since the Navy was just beginning to consider the potential uses for dirigibles, the Akron spent most of its time as a development platform. It made its maiden voyage in 1931 and was almost immediately beset by accident. The Akron’s tail section was badly damaged in February 1932 when the dirigible broke free of its moorings and was smashed about in high winds.

The USS Akron over Manhattan.

It broke free once again in May of that year while at the Naval Training Station in San Diego — this time carrying four seamen from the mooring crew (the dudes that held the airship’s mooring lines as they were being staked down) high into the air. One sailor let go at a height of 5m, two more fell from much higher and died. Only the fourth man, Apprentice Seaman, C. M. “Bud” Cowart managed to secure himself to his line and was rescued an hour later when the dirigible was brought back under control.

A third accident in August of 1932 saw more damage to the tail section, though it was quickly repaired. The Akron’s fourth accident, however, was its worst. The airship became caught in severe weather off the coast of New Jersey and was smashed against the water by massive gusts of wind where it broke up and sank, killing 73 of the 76 airmen on board. As a result, the Macon was outfitted with life preservers which came in handy when it too crashed into the ocean in 1935. That time, however, 70 of the 72 crewmen survived.

The loss of both airships spelled the end for America’s military love affair with dirigibles. And while civilian-use of these vessels has slowly gained traction over the last 70 years or so, the US military has only begun reconsidering the technology now that autonomous air systems have matured.

[MIKA27]

'Paris tiger': Big cat loose near French capital - report

Police, fire officials and a specially-trained hunting dog are searching for a big cat - believed to be a tiger - seen in a town outside Paris.

A woman alerted officials after spotting the animal in a supermarket car park in Montevrain, east of the French capital.

Officers armed with tranquiliser guns have been combing countryside outside the town, helped by a helicopter.

Residents of Montevrain and two other towns have been told to stay indoors.

As darkness fell, the Montevrain council said on its Facebook page that the search had been called off for the night but local schools would be secured by 08:00 on Friday.

During the day, children were kept in schools and collected by their parents by car.

It was unclear where the animal came from, though there is a big cat park near Montevrain.

The owner of the lntermarche supermarket in Montevrain said his wife had spotted the animal at about 08:30 (07:30 GMT).

The police have called in animal experts to try to track down the big cat

Armed police are on the streets of Montevrain as the search continues

"She didn't get out of the car and called me to say 'I think I saw a lynx'," he was quoted as saying. The woman took a photograph that appears to show a large cat.

The helicopter was equipped with a thermal detector to try to spot the animal in the undergrowth.

A wolf catcher with a specially trained dog was also part of the search team, authorities in Montevrain and Seine-et-Marne said.

Le Parisien newspaper said several local residents had sighted the animal.

Specialists said the animal's tracks were those of a young tiger. An official from the mayor's office said they had been able to trace the animal to the woodland by following its prints.

The Montevrain mayor's office dismissed the idea that the tiger could have escaped from a circus that was in the town until Saturday, Le Parisien reported.

EuroDisney, which operates nearby Disneyland Paris, said it kept no tigers.

[MIKA27]

The Godfather: 'Corleone family home' for sale

The mansion which served as the fictional headquarters of the Corleone family in the 1972 film The Godfather has been listed for sale.

The five-bedroom, seven bathroom mansion in Staten Island, New York, is being advertised for $2.9m (£1.84m).

The house was gutted and renovated in 2012 after having been a family home for six decades.

The film, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, won three Oscars.

The Godfather was also, for a time, the highest grossing film ever made.

The exterior is most famous for being the location of a Corleone family wedding at the start of the film.

The film's production crew transformed five houses on the same street into the Corleone family residential complex,

'To die for'

Real estate agent Joseph Profaci said that the film had had an impact on how the house had been renovated.

"The current owners have done an amazing job renovating the home, including a first-floor office they remodelled to try to make look like the office in the Godfather movie," he said.

Mr Profaci said the kitchen was "to die for".

"It has anything you would want for entertaining - big open space, a huge island, and a very large eating area that opens up to the yard and pool" he added.

The house is listed as having more than 15 rooms in total, including a gym, a game room and a four car garage.

[MIKA27]

How a War-Weary Vet Created ‘The Twilight Zone’

No television show exerted more influence on the state of American science fiction than The Twilight Zone, the little morality plays of a former Army private.

A strange mix of dramatic styles, one part satiric morality play, one part science-fiction ghost story, The Twilight Zone challenged the sensibilities of both hardened skeptics and true believers. It was never a huge hit, but its stories resonated with an American public tenuously relearning moral ambiguity.

Creator Rod Serling was compelled by the need “not to just entertain but to enlighten.” He wrote 93 of the series’ 156 episodes over the course of its five-season run, which began on CBS in 1959. Most modern shows take an average of 7 seasons to produce as many episodes.

Serling, a veteran of World War II, used the show, and his writing, to deal with the untreated psychological trauma he suffered during his enlistment in the U.S. military. Rather than the glamorized affair the war was to become in subsequent retellings, Serling was intimately acquainted with the horrors of America’s attempt to reclaim its Pacific colonies. Almost half of the author’s comrades were killed fighting in the Philippines. Serling's best friend, a Pvt. Melvin Levy of Brooklyn, was decapitated in front of the future screenwriter by a "biscuit bomb," a food crate intended to nourish the life of the man it killed.

Serling closed out the war living in the horror of occupied Japan where the American treatment of women, children, and the elderly contributed to the nightmares that plagued the author for the rest of his life. The towns that were not obliterated by the atomic bombs, or burned by American’s firebombing raids, were deeply scarred by famine. The U.S. naval blockade around Japan in the waning days of World War 2 was actually called Operation Starvation.

Several Twilight Zone scripts would return to the subject of survivor’s guilt (“King Nine Will Not Return,” “The Thirty-Fathom Grave”) or long simmering military resentment (“The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms,” “The Encounter”).

But many of the classic Twilight Zone episodes focused on the post-war horrors of World War, specifically the twin threats of nuclear armament and the rise of the American secret police. The series two most famous episodes, “Time Enough At Last” and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” explicitly treat on these issues. In the former, a bookish misanthrope survives and cheers a planet destroying nuclear attack, because it will give him time to read all the books his day to day responsibilities always prevented, but is thwarted when his glasses break. In the latter, suburban residents turn against their neighbors when strange events, like the lights going out at all the houses except one, make them doubt their safety from an embedded threat.

Both “Time Enough at Last” and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” broadcast in the show’s first season in 1959. The themes are treated more specifically in later episodes as budgets and allegories wore thin. Third season episode “The Shelter” examines the literal collapse of a social network when an air raid detects possible incoming nuclear missiles during a suburban dinner party and the hosts won’t let their friends into the family bomb shelter. The fourth season episode, “He’s Alive” demonstrates the ubiquity of fascist politics and follows the rise of a laughable bully (played by Dennis Hopper and egged on by the ghost of Hitler) from ignored crank to ethnic murderer on America’s urban streets.

The concerns were ever present on the minds of Americans during The Twilight Zone’s original broadcast run. The year the series debuted, the American military took over custody of the nation’s nuclear arsenal which constituted between 20 and 25,000 total weapons distributed at bases worldwide. By the time the show finished its run, arrests for non-violent drug crimes, mandatory minimum sentences, and aggressive militarized policing had become the national norm.

Season 3’s “The Shelter” aired two months after President Kennedy said, “In the event of an attack, the lives of those families which are not hit in a nuclear blast and fire can still be saved—if they can be warned to take shelter and if that shelter is available” when the Department of Defense and the president were both fully aware the existing and planned shelters were inadequate against the nuclear weapons. Meanwhile the warning systems to alert citizens of an incoming attack were poorly maintained and highly vulnerable to sabotage or disruption.

Despite Rod Serling’s best efforts, the show was never a huge success, losing in the ratings against its contemporary competition: Bonanza, Rawhide, and The Bell Telephone Hour. Then as now, the majority of Americans had little interest in examining the nuclear sword of Damocles their fear had wrought. The year after The Twilight Zone’s cancellation, Serling wrote a modern update to A Christmas Carol so subversive it was broadcast only once, then informally banned from television until it popped up on cable in 2012 on Turner Classic Movies. The dangerous, anti-American course of action the show suggests: cooperating with the United Nations.

As a prolific and early entry in the cannon of television drama, The Twilight Zone never fully disappeared from the airwaves. In the year of its cancellation, ABC launched The Outer Limits, which would run for two seasons and carry on The Twilight Zone’s fascination with moral ambiguity and the macabre. And as the go-go optimism of the 1960s bled into the paranoid Nixonian hellscape of the 1970s, rerun episodes of the show experienced something of a revival.

Although there is some doubt as to where the trend originated, the inexpensive rebroadcast possibilities, combined with the burgeoning visual nostalgia market and the need to fill ever expanding TV schedules, created an environment in which local network affiliates started showing Twilight Zone marathons on major holidays in the early 1980s. The ScyFy Network shows marathons of the series on New Year’s Day and the Fourth of July.

The trend led to a resurgence of anthology television, and renewed interest in The Twilight Zone. Having long ago sold syndication rights back to the network, Serling’s family retained merchandising rights and begin publication of a Twilight Zone magazine in 1981. In 1983, a movie was released with four segments from the classic series remade with modern production techniques where an on set helicopter accident led to the death of Blackboard Jungle actor Vic Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen.

By the middle of the decade, NBC ordered two new anthology series: Amazing Stories from executive producer Steven Spielberg (who had directed a segment in the Twilight Zone movie) and an updated version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents for Burt Reynolds once wrote an episode starring Martin Sheen and Marilu Henner. On rival CBS, which had been the original home of The Twilight Zone, the long running Murder, She Wrote premiered in 1984. The network, having already turned down several revival offers, finally relented and ordered a full season to begin airing in 1985.

Although Serling wrote a little over 60 percent of the original series’ episodes, the rest were created by a veritable who’s who of ‘50s and ‘60s television and science fiction. Other contributing writers on the original series included Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, and Earl Hamner, Jr.

The 1980s series followed in that tradition with episodes from Harlan Ellison, Arthur C. Clarke, and Anne Collins. Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin got his first staff writing job on the new series after penning an episode of HBO anthology series The Hitchhiker, which first aired in 1983.

Christy Marx was one of the writers recruited to participate in The Twilight Zone’s resurrection. After working on Saturday morning cartoon fare such as Spider-Man and G.I. Joe Marx created the series Jem, one of the highest rated animated shows in the late 1980s.When Jem went off the air in 1988, Marx reached out to fellow early Internet adopter J. Michael Straczynski, whom she knew through an animation Bulletin Board System.

Marx's episode almost never aired, a 155 day writers’ strike in 1988 almost derailed the last season. Among the issues fought for by striking writers: Residuals for syndicated rebroadcasts of television shows. The episode was titled “Cat and Mouse” and it follows in the pattern of classic Serlingesque plot twists.

“The original [Twilight Zone] was one of those shows that had a powerful impact on me, along with the original Star Trek,” Marx tells me. “[The Twilight Zone] was filled with superb writing and thoughtful, substantive ideas. Serling was subversive. He was able to touch upon topics and tell stories that were hard to do in that time period, but he could get away with it because of the [science fiction] and fantasy elements. There were the wonderful twist endings that became classics.”

Based on the folk story “The Dundee Cat,” Marx’s episode has Dallas veteran Pamela Bellwood playing a pharmacy employee with a non-existent romantic life who loves reading romance novels. When she is visited by a nocturnal, shape-shifting were-cat, Bellwood’s character and the man (played by Canadian heartthrob Page Fletcher) begin a relationship. Like all romance in The Twilight Zone, it ends well for neither party, but especially bad for the man. Already cursed for his romantic indiscretions to live as a cat during the day, Bellwood’s Andie takes an extra measure of revenge when she catches Fletcher’s Guillaume with another woman.

“I’m not in favor of anyone using gratuitous violence against anyone as a method of storytelling, but the key word here is gratuitous,” she says. “Gratuitous means ‘lacking good reason.’ If the violence has a purpose and a function in the service of telling the story or expressing the theme, if it belongs there, then it should be evaluated as an integral part of the story. Violence for the sake of shock value or titillation or half-assed motivation makes violence trivial, which I find disgusting.”

Marx praises the original series’ artistic style. “There was moody, expressive photography,” she says. “And look at the tremendous acting talent he put into the episodes. They had everything that makes storytelling universal and powerful.”

The original Twilight Zone is renowned for the acting careers it revived or jump started. William Shatner appears in several episodes, including the Richard Matheson classic “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Robert Duvall lists the series among his earliest guest spots on television, as do Burt Reynolds (“The Bard”) and Carol Burnett (“Cavender Is Coming”). Meanwhile, the 1980s series featured guest performances by Bruce Willis (just post-Moonlighting/pre-Die Hard) and a pre-Wonder Years/Princess Bride Fred Savage.

The (revived) Twilight Zone finished its run in 1989, and the same year Fox’s COPS began broadcasting. The polar opposite of Serling’s introspective storytelling, it is considered among the earliest reality shows, and unquestioningly reaffirms the power of the militarized police state. The same year, HBO’s critically acclaimed Tales from the Crypt took up the anthology mantle.

The Twilight Zone would see another incarnation at the dawn of the 21st century, with Forest Whitaker as host. But debuting as it did in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks and birth of the war on terror, it barely lasted a season before disappearing again. Anthology television itself is in something of a decline, while shows like American Horror Story, Fargo, and True Detective have received well-deserved praise, the number of anthology series is down across U.S. television. There were over 200 created for the small screen in the 1950s. In the first four years of this decade, fewer than 20.

And so one of the many imaginary worlds they created and inhabited could not exist without the twisted imagination of a war weary writer from upstate New York trying to make sense of the “vast nothingness that is the beginning and the dust that is always the end” of The Twilight Zone.

Image Entertainment, an RLJ Entertainment (NASDAQ: RLJE) brand, announces the release of The Twilight Zone: The 5th Dimension Limited Edition Box Set.. For the first time ever, Rod Serling’s groundbreaking Original Series (1959-1964) and the classic 1980s Series (1985-1989) are together in one limited edition box set. With only 7,500 sets created, this limited edition 41-DVD box set is available on November 11, 2014 for an SRP of $349.98.

In addition to the two beloved series (225 episodes combined), and more than 20 hours of bonus features , The Twilight Zone: The 5th Dimension Limited Edition Box Set contains one of four possible collectible 1960s Twilight Zone comic books. Limited Edition packaging features 3D black and white lenticulars and a serialized number on each of the box sets.

[MIKA27]

Hunting for a Real-Life Hagrid

Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, fairies. Myths of strange creatures roaming the earth are plentiful, but one man is convinced they’re true when it comes to an ancient race of giants.

Jim Vieira isn’t convinced that giants once roamed North America, but he’s willing to stake years of research and his professional reputation on finding out.

The 48-year-old Massachusetts-based stonemason has spent seven years scouring the country for evidence that an abnormally tall race of human-like creatures with double rows of teeth lived here many thousands of years ago. He explains his work is of the historical detective variety, as he digs into accounts as recent as 100 years ago and mythology tracing back to early civilizations that hint at a lost race of giants who once roamed the earth. His education in economics and training in stonework has little to do with the bones he hopes to find, but he has spent the past seven years making a name for himself as an amateur archaeologist, pouring through historical accounts and searching for mysterious stone structures in search of the skeletal remains of a forgotten civilization.

Vieira realizes this mission makes him the butt of an endless onslaught of skepticism and criticism. “You touch this subject as a professional you’re labeled a nut immediately,” he says. But he’s going mainstream with his theories, alongside his brother, Bill, as the subject of a new History Channel show, Search for the Lost Giants, which aired its second episode this week.

In 2007, Vieira got his first whiff of the mystery when he came across reports from the 1800s through the early 1900s of mysterious archaeological discoveries: bones from creatures taller than seven feet, skulls with double rows of teeth, large stone burial structures. They pointed to a common claim: that at some point in distant history there was a civilization of giants.

A few years later, Vieira found the evidence he was looking for to scale up his search. He went to the Memorial Hall Museum founded by local preservationist George Sheldon in Deerfield, Mass., and asked about reports that the museum once displayed the thighbone of a creature that was estimated to be at least eight feet tall. The curator produced a scrapbook made by Shelton with a collection of clipped articles from across the U.S., all boasting of giant discoveries. Evidence of the interest of this respected figure propelled Vieira on his quest.

Searching town records, scanning microfilm, and tracking down the descendants of the original discoverers, Vieira says he turned up thousands of similar reports, and the concept of a long-extinct race of giants began to ferment in his mind.

He surfaced headline after headline, emblazed with similar claims: “Giant Skeletons Found” in The New York Times in 1902;

“Bones of Giant Race Are Found by CCC Diggers” in a 1934 Miami Daily News; “A Giant’s Remains in a Mound” also in the Times in 1883. Scans of many of these have been amassed by Vieira on his Facebook page, Stone Builders, Mound Builders and the Giants of Ancient.

“We have the reality that either giants roamed the earth or thousands of people [are] lying,” Vieira says.

The only thing that’s missing? Evidence.

According to Vieira, most of the bones unearthed had to be reburied in accordance with the Native American Repatriation Act. Others crumbled to dust after being discovered. Some gravesites were looted, built over, or otherwise lost.

In the filming of the History Channel show, the brothers have spent eight months scouring the country—from Catalina Island, CA, to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.—for physical evidence.

What they’ve found, so far, is stonework scattered across New England that points to living structures and possible tombs of this enigmatic race. One of them, an ancient underground stone chamber, is being investigated by Vieira alongside a team of UMass archaeologists.

Around the world, similar theories and bits-and-pieces of evidence have surfaced. In South Africa, paleoanthropologist and National Geographic explorer Lee Berger is studying an array of bones that he believes indicate that a race of seven-foot-tall pre-humans existed around 400,000 years ago. “Everywhere we find them we find them enormous,” he told a Cambridge University blog called The Naked Scientists. “These are what we call archaic Homo sapiens. Some people refer to them as Homo heidelbergensis. These individuals are extraordinary, they are giants.”

Without Vieira having found an actual bone or skeleton in the sites he is investigating, there’s no chance the scientific community will get behind his claims, even a little bit. But the amount of second-hand evidence, Vieira says, is too great to believe that nothing more solid will show up.

“The only thing that’s going to solve this case is physical evidence, and it seems mind boggling to me that there are so many accounts and so little physical evidence,” he says. “Physical evidence is the holy grail of giantology.”

Naturally, the skeptics are out in abundance. Vieira dumped his personal Facebook page a few weeks ago, partly in anticipation of more backlash that will come with the show. He describes the battlefield he’s entered as “like trying to get in the middle of politics and religion—it’s a real landmine.”

The critics came out in force after Vieira did a highly watched TEDx talk last year. TED organizers eventually removed his video from the Internet after they decided it didn’t meet their scientific standards.

The Center for American Archaeology did not return requests for an interview, but an expert with the organization evaluated Vieira’s claims for TED, writing: “I can assure you that the archaeological Woodland and Mississippian populations were not giants.”

Norman Muller, the conservator of the Princeton University Art Museum, who has been following the research, isn’t convinced by Vieira’s claims, either. “I don’t buy it,” he says, “Period.”

“For evidence I would need to see a number of 8-10 foot skeletons. Not just one extremely long one, since Robert Wadlow [the tallest man in history] was nearly 9 feet tall,” Muller says. “And where are the skeletons with double rows of teeth?”

In conversation, Vieira doesn’t seem like a nutty conspiracy theorist; he comes off as an obsessively curious guy who doesn’t want to toe the scientific line but also would prefer to be taken seriously. “The thrust of what we’re doing is just make the case that further exploration is warranted and justified, not that we have all the answers,” he says.

Others are watching closely. Glenn Kreisberg, vice president of the New England Antiquities Research Association, which has spent half a decade looking into the stone structures in the area and of which Vieira is a member, is impressed with the investigation. He calls it “thorough, comprehensive, and compelling,” but contends that the newspaper articles can’t be taken as evidence. “Reports of ancient giant skeletons have abounded for years, many shown to be hoaxes associated with staged finds to gather attention to a particular community as a tourist attractions,” he says.

“If you're open minded, and believe all there is to know about science is not known and that much about our past is yet to be discovered, then the scientific possibility exists.” Kreisberg says. “Giants are the cornerstone of the myths, legends, and traditions of almost every culture on Earth.”

Vieira says he wants to convey a more multi-dimension version of reality to help break people in scientific fields out of the black-and-white way they’ve been taught to conduct their inquiries. Until he succeeds in this breakthrough, he’ll be plowing away with his clippings and backwoods trampling for a little bit longer.

“We’re going to give [it] our honest effort and if we can’t make a real compelling case, I’ll concede and say it looks like the mystery is unsolved. I would die of embarrassment if [it seemed like] I was trying to pull something over people,” he says, and pledges to give up his cause “if we don’t get our hands on physical evidence very soon.”

If that happens, a DVD of his History Channel show may be locked away for future generations to discover, decode, and then launch their own inexhaustible quests to unearth history’s mythical creatures.

[MIKA27]

How to Get Away With Stealing $2 Million in Jewelry in the Heart of New York

Two gunmen pulled off a daylight heist in the Diamond District and evaded every single cop. It happens more than you'd think on the city's most glittery block.

It was a classic Gotham crime.

On Tuesday afternoon, as a cavalcade of New York City’s elected officials and honorees strode down Fifth Avenue in the Veteran’s Day Parade, a man slipped into 23 West 47th Street, armed with a gun and a bag labeled “K.” Dressed in a trench coat and light colored slacks, he rang the 8th floor, home to Watch Standard Jeweler, and told the voice who answered that he had a delivery . Instead, he made a pick up of jewelry and watches worth nearly $2 million.

Before doing so, four Watch Standard employees on duty told police that the suspect, who appeared to be in his 40s, entered with his gun out and demanded that the safe be opened. Amidst the confusion, a fifth employee—the owner’s father—returned to the store, and was immediately pistol-whipped by the suspect. After emptying out the safe into his bag, the suspect then ran back downstairs and joined his accomplice on lookout, who was outside waiting for him.

Right before SWAT teams arrived at the scene, the two headed towards Sixth Avenue, disappearing into the crowds of Midtown Manhattan. They are currently nowhere to be found.

An NYPD spokesperson told The Daily Beast that the lead suspect is a black man, approximately six feet tall. His unique feature: a tweed-colored Kangol hat. The lookout guy seems a bit younger and is also described as a black man, wearing a red baseball cap. His unique feature: True Religion jeans. They were both caught on surveillance camera outside of Watch Standard.

The heist was the latest robbery in the city’s Diamond District,where, at one point, 95 percent of diamonds imported into the United States landed before heading out to fiancées and high rollers everywhere. For just as long, this neighborhood has shined in the eyes of criminals.

In March of 2010, a similar burglary happened just down the block from Watch Standard Jeweler: a robber lied to get in, emptied the vault, and made off like a bandit. Five months later, $60,000 in cash was taken from a nearby jewelry repair shop. The Midtown North precinct, which also covers Radio City Music Hall and the Theatre District, has already racked up 1,491 instances of grand larceny, 183 burglaries and 94 robberies this year (PDF)—and that’s just local crime.

In 2004, a man was shot on the Diamond District’s streets for a crime possibly linked to an international drug-money laundering scheme based in Colombia. The Diamond District is where Special Agent Dan McCaffrey, a New-Yorker-turned-FBI-diamond-expert, has tracked down shipments of stolen goods from all over the globe. “How ironic it is,” McCaffrey told the Post in 2011. “It ends up halfway around the world, then back in New York.”

It’s almost as if the signature diamond poles that line 47th Street sing clarion calls to criminals. Knowing that, it is no surprise the police have a heightened presence in the area, with cameras and officers on the ground to match it. Yet the criminals still come and still get away.

How?

Eugene O’Donnell, a law enforcement expert at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York, argued that safety in numbers can sometimes be a loophole in law enforcement, especially in “the beating heart of the city” that Midtown is.

“People feel that these crowded areas play to their advantage—it provides this sense of a cover,” he said. “It also reminds people that cops on the grounds doesn’t automatically guarantee security.”

For example, O’Donnell pointed to the notorious Secret Service breach of late when a man penetrated White House security and got as far as the East Room. Or take the 1995 assassination of mobster Paul Castellano down the block from Watch Standard Jeweler in broad daylight. (It was ordered by rival John Gotti.)

Such was the case with Tuesday’s events. Even with the Veteran’s Day Parade serving as a distraction, the robbers were able to yet again pull off a heist—this time, a multimillion-dollar one—in the middle of one of the most touristy areas in New York City. After evacuating everyone from the building, the SWAT teams scurried through the building, searching every floor and store for the crooks; outside, nearby lots and alleyways were checked as well. The cops had come up short, unable to find the two men in a sea of several hundred thousand law-abiding people.

[MIKA27]

The Creepy Masked Monkey Village of Jakarta

In a district in East Jakarta, there is a slum by the name of South Cipinang Besar. When walking through its streets, you may get the impression that it is just another squalid slum like any other. Trash and sewerage litter the ground, it seems like everything is caked with grime and decay, and the poor are drawn to you. They shuffle towards you, sometimes displaying horrific handicaps, extending their gnarled hands towards you to beg for any money you can spare. As you work your way through this throng of disheveled, unfortunate souls, you may notice one that stands out from the rest. At first the figure’s small stature may make you think that a small child has approached to beg like all of the others.

Then you may notice that something is awry. The one who has approached does not move like a child. Its movements are somewhat odd and jerky. The dimensions of the body are also somewhat off. Then you may notice the tail and the hairy, clawed fingers. You might then realize that what you took at a distance to be a child’s face is in fact a plastic, child’s mask. As the sudden, shocking realization sets in that this is no ordinary child, others begin to work their way to you from the surrounding squallor like something out of a nightmare. Some screech imploringly, some may do a disjointed dance or backflips, but all send a shiver up your spine. You have just made the acquaintance of Kampung Monyet’s masked monkey beggars and you now know why this place is called Kampung Monyet, or “Monkey Village.”

The monkeys of this slum are called topeng monyet, or literally “masked monkeys,” and have their origins in the 1980s as traveling monkey acts to entertain the poor kids of the slums, or kampungs. As the shows became more popular, the monkeys became increasingly used for getting money from tourists. The monkeys, typically long tailed macaques, are either bred in captivity, or captured by poachers in the wild, often snatched away from their mothers while still breastfeeding, to embark on a life of servitude. They are usually trained to walk upright and are most often dressed up in bright, garish costumes and masks, which are meant to make them cuter and more humanlike but in reality just transform them into nightmare fuel. Some of the animals simply have a plastic doll’s head from a children’s toy shoved over their heads. The sight of these masked monkeys is certainly a bizarre, almost otherwordly experience. Associated Press photographer Ed Wray, who spent some time studying and photographing the phenomenon, succinctly described the common impression that these monkeys have on most:

The sight struck me as so completely surreal. Bizarre, but also surreal in the sense that it struck me that there was some meaning to the juxtaposition of the baby doll heads on the monkeys that couldn’t be put into words. I was visually fascinated by the sight.

These monkeys are kept by handlers who train them to perform various tricks and stunts, such as juggling, dancing, pushing colorful carts around, walking on stilts, riding toy bicycles, playing musical instruments, and performing acrobatics for tips. Many of these tricks are designed to mimic human behavior as much as possible, and some monkeys are even trained to do things such as smoking cigarettes or praying. They also will directly approach visitors and do simple things such as bow or hold out their hands waiting for some change. Throughout the acts, they remain tethered by a rope around their necks which is held by their handler, usually sitting not far away, who will occasionally tug on it to give a command, signify a change of act, or to reel in the animal and collect any money it has managed to earn.

While the shows themselves are typically lighthearted and cute, the training methods used to teach the monkeys these various tricks are grueling and inhumane. In order to teach the monkeys how to walk upright, for instance, a technique known as “the hanging monkey” is often employed. A ring is fitted around the monkey’s neck and this ring is tethered to two poles erected upright on either side of the animal. The ropes are tightened until the monkey is forced upright, and its arms are tied behind its back in order to prevent it from using them for balance. This position is meant to teach the animals to rely strictly on their two feet to maintain their balance and footing, as well as to strengthen the muscles in their legs. They will be kept like this for hours on end, after which they will be allowed to rest for a short while before starting again. Some owners will not even give rest periods, instead keeping the monkey in this position all day long. It is not a comfortable or natural position for them, and so it is not uncommon for the monkeys undergoing this training technique to shriek and screech in pain and anguish. At the end of the process, which usually lasts from anywhere from a week to a month, the monkey will have acquired a humanlike posture and the ability to walk about bipedally for long periods of time. This is only the beginning of their arduous training regimen, as they are then subsequently taught to do their tricks and handle various toys and props. Training can last months and entails frequent beatings from the masters in order to break down the will of the animals.

Many monkeys, especially ones that were captured in the wild, do not survive the training. Health problems, injuries, disease, stress, and exhaustion all take their toll, and it is estimated that 40% of the animals do not live to perform, while 60% are unable to complete the regimen due to lack of will or physical strength. Most of the monkeys that die during the process are unceremoniously dumped into the river or even into the garbage, after which the handler will simply acquire another. Captive raised monkeys are more prized and fetch a higher price since it is believed they are more mentally stable, hardier, and easier to train then wild caught ones.

In addition to the cruel training process, the monkeys are kept in horrendous living conditions. When not performing, they are kept in cramped, filthy cages stacked one on top of the other. Here the monkeys will be kept either in small cages too small to even turn around in, or they will be stuffed into larger cages that are packed with up to 15 other monkeys. They remain crammed into these cages, which are usually caked and encrusted with feces and urine, waiting until it is time for them to go out and perform. It is the only time they are released. The monkeys are then dressed up, fitted with their mask, and go out for a few hours to work the crowds before being brought back and once again shoved into their cage. They are fed only a meager diet of plain white rice occasionally supplemented by the odd piece of fruit tossed out by visitors watching the shows. Many of the monkey’s are emaciated and suffering from severe malnutrition, yet they go out day after day to dutifully do their performances.

The inhumane treatment and cruelty inflicted on the monkeys is enough to have caught the attention of the animal welfare group Jakarta Animal Aid Network (JAAN), which has begun campaigning to put an end to the practice. The group maintains that the practice of using masked monkeys for street performing violates what they refer to as the five principles of animal welfare: freedom from thirst and hunger, freedom to live comfortably, freedom from pain and sickness, freedom to exhibit natural behaviors, and freedom from fear. JAAN is currently working on convincing the government to enact regulations on the practice, as well as tracking down the main underworld players responsible for trading in the monkeys. They also help to rescue and give sanctuary to the monkeys.

The masked performing monkeys have become a fairly common sight in many places of Jakarta since their beginnings as a mere oddity. Most Indonesians will pass by without giving much thought to them. A few will toss a few pennies out, more out of pity than anything else. It is with Western tourists that the monkeys are able to make the most money and such visitors are often confronted with the masked, costumed monkeys soon after venturing out on to the streets.

It is tempting to look at the deplorable conditions endured by Jakarta’s masked performing monkeys and focus solely on feeling sorry for the animals. However, the practice of keeping monkeys as street performers has many sides and there are high human stakes involved as well. The people who inhabit Jakarta’s slums themselves suffer from horrible living conditions and lack of food. In the case of the Monkey Village, this abject, hopeless poverty has forced some into desperation, with keeping the monkeys their only hope of survival. Balancing the needs of the animals themselves with the needs of the people, and recognizing the underlying factors that drive this phenomenon are bound to be a difficult process.

There is no clear way to put an end to it. Perhaps the best way to start is by simply not encouraging it by refusing to throw out your coins to the monkeys, no matter how heartbreaking a sight they may be. For the foreseeable future, it seems that the masked monkeys will remain a feature of Jakarta’s slums. They will continue to do their tricks as they stare through doll’s eyes, haunting the squalor of the streets, and perhaps haunting our dreams as well.

[MIKA27]

Luckiest Guy In The World Today Survives Road Crash Against All Odds

I never get tired of these videos in which someone is standing in the wrong spot at the wrong time yet survives a major crash against all odds. Like this Russian dude, who was standing on a road when some idiotic car driver decided to turn left while a truck was coming down the opposite lane at full speed.

[MIKA27]

This Heartbreaking Anti-War Commercial Just Won Christmas

British supermarket Sainsbury’s just made my heart melt with its Christmas commercial.

It’s based on the true events of the Christmas truce, unofficial ceasefires that took place in Christmas during World War I. Germans and British soldiers stopped fighting and exchanged presents and played games.

"Lest we forget"

[Fuzz]

Luckiest Guy In The World Today Survives Road Crash Against All Odds

What a moron! Not only does he turn into the path of the truck, but he missed the turn! (turn lane is to the right of the lucky SOB)

[MIKA27]

Apple's Superstar Designer Marc Newson Redesigned This Classic Shotgun

The design world hyperventilated when it was announced that Marc Newson would be going to work with his best bud Jony Ive at Apple. But that doesn’t mean all of his work will be done inside the spaceship, and now Newson has revealed another project: Redesigning one of the most iconic firearms in history.

Newson’s design for the Beretta 486 debuted at an event in London last night as a modern overhaul of the traditional side-by-side shotgun. Basically, Newson gave the shotgun a 21st century industrial design makeover, consolidating and reconfiguring all the elements, but making some aesthetic adjustments as well.

Some of the changes are material. By bringing the walnut wood up and over the receiver, he’s able to add an element of warmth and craftsmanship to what are normally cold steel parts. The receiver is now completely edgeless, without any noticeable breaks between wood and steel.

He also had all the parts re-machined into more streamlined, ergonomic shapes, including a brand-new opening lever design, relocated trigger guard, and a narrowed forend.

Of particular note are brand-new barrels that are completely devoid of any welding lines.

In a statement, Newson seems to have forged a technological bridge between his own work and the traditions of the centuries-old manufacturer. “I got to observe the fascinating mix of traditional skills employed by Beretta’s craftsmen in conjunction with the most impressive state-of-the-art engineering processes including the use of intricate x-ray equipment, sophisticated laser technology, and robotics,” he said. “I believe that my vision to create an innovative and modern design while respecting the DNA of the product typology has been spectacularly achieved.” Perhaps he will bring some of what he gleaned while gun-slinging to Cupertino.

[MIKA27]

Amazing Ultra-High Definition Photo Of The SR-71 Blackbird Cockpit

I still get the chills when I re-read Brian Shul’s account of his Blackbird flight against enemy SAM batteries over Libya. (Previously posted on this thread) Imagine yourself inside that tight SR-71 cockpit with all the alarms sounding. This cool 360-degree virtual reality view will help.

[MIKA27]

Impressive 1980s Photo Of Old Jet Fighters Flying Over Giza's Pyramids

I’m completely nerd-gasming out over this image of old jet fighters flying over the pyramids of Giza during operation Bright Star in 1983. If I’m not mistaken, I see from left to right, top to bottom: F-4 Phantom, Mirage (III?), MiG-19, F-16 Fighting Falcon, F-14 Tomcat, A-6 Intruder, MiG-21, and A-7 Corsair. Paul F and others, correct me if I'm wrong