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

[MIKA27]

You Can Be A Fighter Pilot With Oculus Rift's Most Immersive Flight-Sim Ever

The problem with most plane-based games — from Battlefield 4 to Microsoft Flight Simulator — is the way you move the camera about via either dumb thumbsticks or a dumb mouse. War Thunder for Oculus Rift is different, and might just be the best flight-sim yet.

War Thunder on Oculus Rift takes away the traditional ‘camera’ approach to playing a flight sim, and instead just replaces it with your head and eyes: wherever you look, the camera looks.

Pair that with a stick and control panel and you’ll be shooting down Russian MiGs in no time.

[MIKA27]

Bridgestone's Futuristic Airless Tyres Are Almost Ready For Your Car

Bridgestone continues to taunt us with its wonderful airless tyres that promise enhanced durability, minimal maintenance, and the ability to never go flat. Previously, the tyremaker was only demonstrating smaller versions of the wheel designed for golf carts and the like, but at the 2013 Tokyo Motor Show it’s finally revealed a larger version bringing the innovative tyres one step — or roll — closer to your car.

The second-generation of Bridgestone’s non-pneumatic tyres has a larger diameter, improved load-bearing capabilities, and can handle speeds of up to almost 70km/h. So slapping a set on your family’s minivan isn’t going to happen just yet, but the tyres can finally be used on vehicles larger than a go-kart.

Admittedly, it’s an incremental step, but it’s proof that Bridgestone’s engineers are working hard to perfect the design of airless tyres so that eventually they’re a viable alternative to what’s on your vehicle now. Because while being able to buy an ATV with non-pneumatic tyres is neat, consumers want to be reassured that one day they’ll never have to change a flat tyres on their sedan in the pouring rain ever again.

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: The Only Fast Attack Craft Fit For A President

President John F. Kennedy had numerous brushes with death before an assassin’s bullet ended his life 50 years ago today. Sickly throughout a childhood he wasn’t expected to survive, JFK had to leverage his family’s considerable political influence just to “pass” his Navy physical. And while serving in the South Pacific during World War II he once again narrowly escaped death aboard the most effective fast attack craft of the era: the Patrol Torpedo boat.

PT Boats, or just PT’s (or “Devil Boats” by the Japanese), were originally conceived as fast-moving anti-aircraft platforms however they proved massively effective at surface engagement as well. Operating throughout the whole of the Pacific Theatre, their small size, fast speed and high manoeuvrability allowed these boats to employ hit-and-run tactics, quickly closing in on their targets and unleashing up to four torpedoes before high-tailing it out of there. They often operated under the cover of darkness to reduce the chances of being spotted outside of torpedo range. No enemy ship — from the armoured barges that ferried Japanese troops between islands to full-size Destroyers — was safe from the PT “Mosquito fleet”. Additionally, PT’s turned out to be quite useful at laying mines, performing raids, setting smoke screens, SAR operations and light ISR missions.

Developed by the Navy beginning in 1939, PT’s slowly evolved over the course of the war into three sub-types; the largest one being the PT-103 built by the Elco company’s naval division. At 24m with a 6m beam and tipping the scales at 50 tonnes, the PT-103 division were far smaller, lighter, and faster than the hulking 300-ton “fast” attack craft employed in the Great War.

Much of this weight savings came from the ship’s wooden construction. Much like today’s Avenger-class mine-hunters, PT’s were built of inch-thick mahogany planks layered around glue-impregnated canvas and held together with bronze screws and copper rivets. Its solid and sturdy construction allowed even extensive hull damage to easily be repaired on the front lines. Heck even PT-109, JFK’s command, remained afloat for half a day and it had been cut in cleanly in two by collision with a Japanese Destroyer.

PT’s were propelled by a trio of modified V-12 liquid-cooled aircraft engines based on those found in the WWI Huff-Daland XB-1 Liberty bomber. While they generated enough horsepower for a 50-knot top speed, they also drank 100 octane gas like it was going out of style. The PT’s 11,000-litre supply lasted, at most, 12 hours — 250 litres per engine per hour. At speeds above 41 knots, a PT boat could guzzle a tank in half that time.

The weapon of choice for these boats was originally the 1180kg Mark 8 torpedo. Its 207kg TNT-packed warhead could blow holes in even reinforced hulls from up to 15km away. The system was upgraded in 1943 to utilise the larger Mark 13′s which packed 270kg of Torpex-filled warhead. Topside, PT boats bristled with automatic weapons: a pair of twin M2 .50-cal’s as well as a 20mm Oerlikon cannon. PT’s patrolling the front lines were also routinely outfitted with mission-specific hardware like anti-aircraft guns, depth charges and sub-sea mines.

Though they served valiantly throughout the Second World War, the Mosquito Fleet was dismantled shortly after VJ-Day. Just one PT-103 has survived to today: PT 617, which still resides in Battleship Cove, Fall River, Massachusetts.

[MIKA27]

You Have To Really Love Batman To Use This Absurd iPhone Tumbler Case

Most smartphone cases strive to provide as much protection for your device as possible without adding too much bulk or extra weight. But that’s not the approach Bandai has taken with this monstrosity. Squarely targeted at die-hard Batman fans, this case is a perfect replica of the Tumbler Batmobile featured in Christopher Nolan’s films, but designed to protect your iPhone — not the Dark Knight.

It’s not all flash though. This case will certainly protect your phone from drops, bumps, and Hollywood-calibre supervillain capers. It’s also got a set of extra glowing LEDs so it’s easier to find your phone in the dark, and the front wheels extend and retract so you have access to the phone’s lock button and other functionality. There’s little chance it will squeeze into your pocket, but should be just fine for a well-equipped utility belt.

At $US57 it’s not impossibly expensive either. In fact, you definitely don’t need to have inherited a monstrous corporation to afford one. But if the price tag has you debating whether or not it’s really worth it, consider this: instead of a flame blasting out of the back, the case features a tiny flashlight that projecting the bat symbol. Who could pass that up?

[MIKA27]

The Discovery Of A 3700-Year-Old Cellar Reveals The Origins Of Wine

Wine is old as hell and probably came from Israel, based on the discovery of a 3700-year-old cellar in the city of Tel Kabri. What did the wine of yesteryear taste like? Accounts range from “medicinal” to “hints of cinnamon”.

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have the story of a team from George Washington University, which uncovered 40 jars containing what was once wine. Although the wine itself wasn’t preserved, lab results from organic residue revealed that it was very likely the familiar fermented liquid made from grapes.

But why do we care? Because before this, the oldest collection of fine wines ever found was in Egypt, in the tomb of Pharaoh Scorpion I in Egypt. That particular collection dates back to more like 3000 BC, but the problem there is that Egypt didn’t have any naturally-occurring grapes. Scientists had long believed that grapes had been sourced from sea-faring Canaanites a little bit further north. And this new finding corroborates that hypothesis.

One interesting part of the find is that the scientists could actually figure out what the old arse wine tasted like. “Sweet, strong, and medicinal,” says the WSJ:

The scientists focused their efforts on fragments close to the base of the jars, which would have been in contact with the stored wine and absorbed some of it. They extracted the organic residues trapped in the pores and analysed them chemically. Andrew Koh, an archaeological scientist at Brandeis University, said he discovered the telltale signature of tartaric acid, a key component in grapes. He also found traces of compounds which suggested that other ingredients could have been added to the wine, including honey, mint and herbs.

And the team of brainy winos might have even more to go off — a few days before the dig ended, they found another pair of doors in the cellar, which they think might lead to more wine. Unfortunately, the whole “wine gets better with age” maxim probably expires after a millennium or so.

[MIKA27]

Listen To Da Vinci's Genius Piano-Cello Played For The Very First Time

From the audience, this instrument looks like a typical grand piano. Then the maestro takes his seat and begins to play. It’s a sound nobody has heard before, because this instrument, designed by Leonardo Da Vinci five centuries ago, has just been built for the very first time. And it sounds heavenly.

The viola organista was invented by da Vinci with characteristics of a harpsichord, an organ and a cello. In the place of a piano’s felt hammers, spinning wheels draw across the strings like a violinist’s bow. The player operates a foot pedal to spin the wheels, playing notes on a keyboard identical to a piano’s. But the sound, sinewy like a stringed instrument but with a piano’s direct, well-defined tones, defies comparison to traditional instruments. This short video has some nice close-up shots of the mechanism at work:

Polish concert pianist and instrument maker Slawomir Zubrzycki built the viola organista from sketches and notes in da Vinci’s voluminous manuscripts. The process took 5000 hours spread across three years.

Zubrzycki’s debut performance on the instrument, at the Academy of Music in Krakow, Poland, is the first time an audience of any size has heard the instrument — while the design dates back more than 500 years, there is no historical account of it ever having been built. The sinewy, flowing sound that the master himself never heard makes even the most staid classical music exciting. Just listen to it. It will bring a Mona Lisa smile to your face.

[MIKA27]

One World Futbol

The One World Futbol ($40) is about as unique a ball as they come — nearly indestructible, this ball never needs to be pumped up and never goes flat, even after it's been punctured.

Sponsored by Chevrolet, this ball is not only made to last, it's also made for a great cause. For every ball you buy, a child in need somewhere in the world also gets one, giving them the teamwork and joy that comes from participating in sports. It's the perfect ball for playing on the beach, on the field, or in the gym. And it benefits a great cause. That sounds like a win-win.

[MIKA27]

Alite S.H Sleeping Bag

There are plenty of ways to keep warm on a chilly night of camping, but the Alite S.H. Sleeping Bag ($120) — even though it's rated to 20 degrees fahrenheit — was made with one particular method in mind.

Designed to allow the sleeper to easily zip one or more bags together, these bags were made for you to have sex in (we'll just let you guess what the S.H. signifies). But, that's not all they're good for. In addition to the zippers on either side, these bags also feature a center crotch zipper, padded feet, and built-in fleece slippers so you can open them up at the legs and walk around while wearing them. Arm holes let you free your appendages up for a wide range of motion, while a drawstring hood lets you cinch things down tight.

[Duxnutz]

Willett Family Estate Rye Whiskey:

Whiskey collectors and connoisseurs are constantly hunting for the tastiest and rarest bottles around.

Some bottles carry a hefty price tag, while others are just difficult to find. The latter is the case with Willett Family Estate Rye Whiskey ($35) which isn't outside of most price ranges, but not much is made and it's tough to track down.

Every bottle contains a hand marked age statement and barrel number, but the amount of each batch rarely exceeds 200 bottles.

Despite the 110 proof, it's an easy sipper, with a classic rye mintiness and a clean, crisp finish. Add it to your Whiskey Envy list.

Brought two bottles back from the States, great stuff!

[MIKA27]

Charles Manson Today: The Final Confessions of a Psychopath

He's nearly 80 and his Family is smaller, but darkness still surrounds America's most notorious criminal

In California's San Joaquin Valley, about halfway between Bakersfield and Fresno, on the outskirts of the fly-infested, windblown, stink-soaked, dry-mouth town of Corcoran, sits the squat, sprawling expanse of Corcoran State Prison, where Charlie Manson is serving out the rest of a life sentence for his part in the peace-and-love-era-ending Tate-LaBianca slayings of 1969. He has just entered the visiting room.

He doesn't look how he used to look, of course, all resplendent in buckskin fringe, sometimes sporting an ascot or the Technicolor patchwork vest sewn by his girls, with his suave goatee and his mad Rasputin eyes and his fantastical ability to lunge out of his seat at the judge presiding over his trial, pencil at the ready to jam into the old guy's throat, before being subdued and thereby helping to cement a guilty verdict. Those days are gone. He's 79 years old. He's an old man with a nice head of gray hair but bad hearing, bad lungs, and chipped-and-fractured, prison-dispensed bad dentures. He walks with a cane and lifts it now, in greeting to his visitors, one of whom is a slender, dark-haired woman he calls Star.

"Star!" he says. "She's not a woman. She's a star in the Milky Way!"

He shuffles toward her, opening his arms, grinning, and she kind of drifts in his direction.

From a raised platform in the room's center, two guards armed with pepper spray and truncheons keep an eye on the couple. Star is 25 years old, comes from a town on the Mississippi River, was raised a Baptist, keeps a tidy home, is a prim dresser, has a fun sense of humor. Charlie is probably the most infamous convicted killer of all time. He's been called the devil for the way he influenced friends to murder on his behalf. He's spent the past 44 years in prison and nearly 60 years incarcerated altogether, meaning he has spent less than two decades of his life as a free man. He will never get out. For her part, Star has been living in Corcoran for the past seven years, since she was 19. It wasn't Charlie's murderous reputation that drew her here but his pro-Earth environmental stance, known as ATWA, standing for air, trees, water and animals. She has stuck around to become his most ardent defender, to run various give-Charlie-a-chance websites (mansondirect.com, atwaearth.com, a Facebook page, a Tumblr page) and to visit him every Saturday and Sunday, up to five hours a day, assuming he's not in solitary or otherwise being hassled by the Man. "Yeah, well, people can think I'm crazy," she likes to say. "But they don't know. This is what's right for me. This is what I was born for."

Visiting-room rules allow them a kiss at the beginning and end of each visit. They do this now, a standard peck and hug, then sit across from each other at a table. The first thing you notice about Manson is the X (later changed to a swastika) he carved into his forehead during his trial, to protest his treatment at the hands of the law, an act that was soon copied by his co-defendants – and, all these years later, by the girl sitting across from him, Star, who recently cut an X into her forehead, too. The second thing is how nicely turned out he is. Despite his age, there's none of that gross old-man stuff about him, no ear hair, no nose hair, no gunk collecting in the corners of his mouth, and his prison-approved blue shirt has not a wrinkle or a food stain on it. He looks pretty great. The third is how softly he speaks, so different from how he was in TV interviews during the Eighties and Nineties, when, for instance, he angled in on Diane Sawyer in her black turtleneck and pretty earrings, roaring, "I'm a gangster, woman. I take money!"

He stands up and looks around. "I thought we'd have some popcorn," he says, making his way to a cabinet where inmates sometimes stash food. He bends down, looks inside, moves things and heaves up a great sigh of disappointment.

"Well," he says. "The popcorn's all gone."

"I think we ate it all last time," Star says.

Charlie sighs and takes a seat, seeming lost and befuddled. But then, before I know it, he's reached out and bounced one of his fingers off the tip of my nose, fast as a frog's tongue, dart and recoil.

He leans forward. I can feel his breath in my ear.

"I've touched everybody on the nose, man," he says, quietly. "There ain't nobody I can't touch on the nose." He tilts to one side and says, "I know what you're thinking. Just relax." A while later, he says, "If I can touch you, I can kill you."

He puts his hand on my arm and starts rubbing it. An hour after that, we're talking about sex at the ranch in the old days, what it was like, all those girls hanging around, a few guys, too, the group-sex scene. "It was all this," he says, putting his hand on my arm again, sliding it up into the crook of my elbow and down. "That's what it was like. We all went with that. There's no saying no. If I slide up, you've got to go with the flow. You were with anyone anyone wants." I nod, because for a moment, with his hand on my skin, sliding up, I can see how it was. It feels OK. It feels unexpectedly good to go with the flow, even if it is Charlie Manson's flow and even if, since he's touching me, he can kill me, which is probably how it was way back when, too.

Meanwhile, Star is arranging a little spread: candy bars, pumpkin pie, potato chips, corn chips, strawberry shortcake, peanut butter cups. Charlie goes for a candy bar, washing it down with a soda. This is how he spends his time today.

This is how he is waiting for his time to end.

What most people know and believe about Manson is almost wholly derived from prosecuting attorney Vincent Bugliosi's 600-page account of the crimes, investigation and trial, Helter Skelter, more than 7 million copies sold since 1974, more than any other true-crime book in history. It was a scary, Establishment-brain-frying read when it was first published, and it still is.

Bugliosi laid it out like this: On March 21st, 1967, after serving six years for violating parole on a $37 check-forgery conviction, penny-ante career criminal Charles Milles Manson, age 32, stepped out from behind prison walls into the groovy, peace-and-love world of San Francisco. It was the Summer of Love. He'd never seen such a thing before, free love, free food, lots of hugging, pot and acid, girls, so many girls, many of them lost girls just looking for someone to tell them they'd been found. Charlie was their man.

He played the guitar, he had the mystique of the ex-con, he had a good you-can-be-free metaphysical rap. The girls flocked to his side, starting with librarian Mary Brunner, followed by pixie-cute Lynette Fromme, soon dubbed Squeaky, oversexed Susan Atkins and trust-funder Sandra Good. This was the beginning of what the prosecutor would later call "the Family." This was also the beginning of the end for Manson.

They eventually dropped down to L.A. More than anything, according to Bugliosi, Manson wanted to be a rock star. He made friends with the Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson, who thought he had potential, and big-shot record producer Terry Melcher. He was going places. Everybody was banging everybody else. So much fun, so loving. It really was, except when, as some of the girls later testified, Charlie would knock one of them around. They lived at Spahn Ranch, a sometime Hollywood backdrop for Westerns where Charlie let it be known he might be Jesus, and everyone treated him as such, which has led to the belief that he had some kind of super-duper hypnotic Svengali-on-blotter hold over the people there. And for a while it was all good. Kids who'd never really had a home before now had one. You've never seen so many smiling faces. But something changed in 1969. The Beatles had recently released the White Album, and Manson developed a sudden and complex attachment to the song "Helter Skelter." He divined in it a coming apocalyptic war between blacks and whites, during which he and his gang would live in the desert, underground, in a magical land of milk and honey, and after which the blacks, who had won the war, would beg him to come be their leader, because they could not lead themselves.

Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys

In Bugliosi's account, Manson got tired of waiting for the war to start, so on August 9th, 1969, he decided to kick-start it by sending former star high school athlete Tex Watson, former Catholic-college student Patricia Krenwinkel, former church-choir singer Susan Atkins and a recent arrival named Linda Kasabian to a house some rich people were living in on Cielo Drive in Los Angeles – a house that Melcher had once rented – with the order to "totally destroy everyone in [it], as gruesome as you can." They were to leave "witchy" signs and portents behind that would make it look like the work of Black Panthers. There was no saying no. Or at least no one did say no.

"I'm the devil and I'm here to do the devil's business," Watson announced upon entering the home. Roughly 25 minutes and 102 stab wounds later, it was all over, at least for that night.

Among the butchered were pregnant actress Sharon Tate, 26, wife of director Roman Polanski; celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, 35; screenwriter Voytek Frykowski, 32; and Folger's-coffee-fortune heiress Abigail Folger, 25. And then the next night, the killers did it again, again under Charlie's direction, with former high school homecoming queen Leslie Van Houten added to the group, tacking on 67 more stab wounds to the total and slaughtering a seemingly random couple, grocery-store-chain owner Leno LaBianca, 44, and his wife, Rosemary, 38, as they lounged at home. In both cases, they also left words like "pig" and "death to pigs" scrawled in blood on walls, a door and a refrigerator.

The way Bugliosi saw it, these things were meant to connect the crimes to blacks; the whites would go after the blacks; the blacks would rise up; and the revolution would be joined. He said Manson termed it Helter Skelter, after the Beatles song. It was a loopy, harebrained scenario and one that Bugliosi's fellow law-enforcement types wished he would ditch in favor of something more down-to-earth, like robbery or a drug deal gone sour. But Bug, as Manson calls him, would not be deterred. He gave Kasabian immunity – she apparently was not present when any of the murders took place – and with her as his star witness, he was able to sell Helter Skelter not only to the jury but also to the rest of the country. In 1971, the defendants were all found guilty and sentenced to death, which was commuted to life when the state briefly did away with the death penalty. Atkins died of cancer four years ago, at the age of 61. Krenwinkel, 65, and Van Houten, 64, are in the California Institution for Women in Chino, where they have been model prisoners and continue to hope for parole. Watson, 67, is incarcerated in Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California. He has confessed to perpetrating all the killings in the case, with the girls mostly just stabbing the victims after they were already dead, for what difference that makes. They have all repudiated Manson. And Bugliosi, 79, after a lengthy career both as an attorney and a bestselling author, is now mostly resting at his California home, battling cancer and giving the occasional interview.

"There are thousands of evil, polished con men out there, and we've had more brutal murders than the Manson murders, so why are we still talking about Charles Manson?" Bugliosi says. "He had a quality about him that one thousandth of one percent of people have. An aura. 'Vibes,' the kids called it in the Sixties. Wherever he went, kids gravitated toward him. This is not normal. I mean, I couldn't get someone to go to the local Dairy Queen and get me a milkshake, OK? But this guy, I don't know what it is. How the hell do I know?"

Sharon Tate

How the hell would anyone know? It's inexplicable, and no one will ever really know, just as I will never know or understand why when Manson rested his hand on my arm it felt so good, not passively good, but actively, like leave it there, leave it there some more. It's a presence. And it's that presence, coupled with how he used it, that for the past 44 years has made him a face-of-evil superstar symbol second only to Hitler. In 1970, this magazine published the first exhaustive account of Manson and his followers, 22 pages long, titled "The Incredible Story of the Most Dangerous Man Alive," taking a nuanced approach and allowing Manson to speak at length. Since then, the books and stories have kept on coming. He rarely participates, however, and it's been around 20 years since he last granted a wide-ranging press interview.

I first talked to Star in September 2012, and spoke to Manson on the phone two months later, after which he became increasingly squirrelly about seeing me, some days half-agreeing, some days saying no, some days berating me for being a media stooge. "You're a faraway dude, man," he once said. "I only meet people like you when I'm going to rob you. You're a flunky, man. I don't talk to flunkies." When I went to visit Star this past September, Charlie once again made it clear he wouldn't see me. But he changed his mind at the last minute and then, after our initial talk, asked me to come back the next day.

Over the years, Manson's face and name have managed to remain firmly lodged in the public's imagination no matter what Manson himself wants. You can find his black-hole eyeballs on T-shirts and on reruns of South Park's "Merry Christmas Charlie Manson!" episode. He's inspired an opera and a musical. The deep-thinkers have also had their say. In 2010, theologian David R. Williams wrote, "We, as a collective culture, looked into Manson's eyes and saw in those dark caves what we most feared within ourselves, the paranoia of what might happen if you go too far. He was the monster in the wilderness, the shadow in the night forest, the beast said to lurk in the Terra Incognita beyond the edges of the map." The point is, like that lurking beast, he's always here, always with us. In a 1988 TV interview with Manson, Geraldo Rivera called him "the stuff of a nation's nightmares," and if he wasn't exactly that before the media got ahold of him, he certainly has been ever since.

This also explains why, in part, the case itself has never gone away, especially on the Internet, where every detail is open to re-examination and reinterpretation. Bugliosi's Helter Skelter race-war theory, for instance, has been bandied about endlessly, with many observers concluding that it's a bunch of hooey, testimony of well-prepared prosecution witnesses and Spahn Ranch hangers-on notwithstanding. It may have been in the air at the ranch. It may have been talked about during the nightly dinners. But so were lots of things.

And now, here sits Charlie in jail, where he has sat for so long, saying the same thing he's said basically since the beginning. He didn't tell Tex to go kill anyone ("I didn't direct anyone to do a ***************** thing"), he's innocent ("I never killed anyone!"), there was no Family ("Bug made that up!"), he was no leader ("Go for what you know, baby; we're all free here. I'm nobody's boss!"), Helter Skelter wasn't what Bugliosi said it was ("Man, that doesn't even make insane sense!"), he was wrongly denied the right to act as his own attorney during the trial ("I wanted my rights!"), and the government owes him $50 million "and Hearst Castle, for 45 years of bullshit," and none of this is important anyway, given what we are doing to our air, our trees, our water, our animals, the saving of which he sometimes puts on display as a good enough reason alone for what happened at the Tates' and LaBiancas', regardless of his involvement.

"Look, here's how that works," he says. "You take a baby and" – here he says something truly awful about what you could do to that baby, worse beyond anything you could imagine – "and it dies," and here he says something equally wretched. Then he goes on, "I know what you're thinking. I can see your brain rattling and running back and forth. But what happens when that baby dies?" He breathes in and he breathes out, he breathes in and he breathes out. "A dog would have done it, kill to take another breath. So, was it wrong to do it to those people?" And it's at moments like these that you realize prison is the only place for him, and hope to hell he never puts his hand on your skin again.

Visits with Charlie are always taxing for Star, and she takes it easy driving the two miles from his door back to her own. It used to be she'd make the trip with a tall, gaunt, spooky-looking guy named Gray Wolf, 64, a Manson believer from the Spahn Ranch days who carved an X into his forehead at the same time Star did, but earlier this year he was arrested for attempting to smuggle a cellphone into prison for Charlie, and there went his visitation rights, leaving Charlie's weekend companionship almost all up to this slight, doily-thin girl.

Star

How she got here is pretty much like how many of the Spahn Ranch girls got to where they were going, too, as a reaction to the world around them and how it made them feel. She grew up on the Mississippi River, near St. Louis, had an early fondness for I Love Lucy, had parents who were deeply religious and disliked all her friends. "They thought I was turning into a hippie," she says. "I was smoking marijuana, eating mushrooms, not wanting to go to church every Sunday, not wanting to marry a preacher. They are Christian Baptist and wanted me to be a preacher's wife." To keep her out of trouble, they would lock her in her room, which is where she spent a good portion of her high school years. And, like Charlie, she found a way to coexist with such solitary confinement. "I've never been lonely since those times when I got used to being alone." Then one day, a friend gave her a sheet of paper with some of Charlie Manson's words on it about the environment. She'd never heard of Manson, but she liked what he had to say – "Air is God, because without air, we do not exist" – and began writing to him. After their correspondence took off, she put her nose to the grindstone, saved up $2,000 while working in a retirement-home kitchen and in 2007, stuffed all the belongings she could into a backpack and took a train to Corcoran. And soon enough, Charlie nicknamed her Star, just as he had once named Squeaky (Red) and Sandy (Blue).

Her pad is not large, not well-lit and inexpensively furnished, with a bedroom too messy for her to let me into. A guitar and a violin case are in a corner. No television. On one wall is the great, evocative black-and-white photograph of Charlie at Spahn Ranch, wearing a beat-up side-tilted fedora with a crow on his arm, the rugged Dust Bowl guy who could tame birds. ("We became road dogs and ran together," he says. "I didn't give it a name. It was just a crow." Others have said its name was Devil.) On a nearby table is the computer where Star spends much of her time trying to rehabilitate Charlie's image in the public eye. She is especially rankled by the long-standing belief that Charlie is only five feet two – she says he is at least three inches taller – and thinks Bugliosi intentionally published that lie in Helter Skelter to further diminish Manson's stature. He's short, just not that short.

Of the original Family girls, only two of the main ones are thought to still believe in Charlie – Sandra Good, now 69, and Squeaky Fromme, 65. Sandy's current whereabouts are unknown, though she was recently photographed smiling and riding a mule in the Grand Canyon. In 1975, Squeaky was convicted of attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford and wasn't released until 2009. She has long been Manson's favorite. "That little girl right there, Lynette," he says, "I've never met a girl as truthful as her. She's never turncoated. She did 34 years in prison and never broke her vow. A man can't even do that." But Star is on the scene now, leading some of those on the Internet Manson beat to wonder if she's replaced Squeaky in Charlie's affections.

Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten walking to court in 1969.

"Lynn deserves to be number one," wrote LynyrdSkynyrdBand on the Tate-LaBianca Homicide Research Blog, after a picture of Star and Gray Wolf with Charlie made the rounds. "She's been loyal for decades." Marliese: "I'm guessing the beautiful girl with Charlie hasn't experienced any strip and suck demands from him, or felt his fist smash across her face." A number of them commented on how unsettling it is that Star looks so much like Susan Atkins "when she was all waxed and pretty."

Star, however, pays little attention to these things. She'd rather spend her online time ordering items for Charlie's quarterly-allowed gift box stuffed with, most recently, roasted peanuts, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, protein bars, vegetable-soup mix, vitamins, crackers, cough drops, teas, tank-top T-shirts, socks, shorts, an electric shaver and guitar strings.

A while later, she sits on a couch talking about a problem she and Gray Wolf are having with a Manson-memorabilia collector named Ben. Every time Manson does something wrong and is sent to solitary, he has to get rid of everything he owns or the state will take it, so he sends the stuff to those who have befriended him, mostly collectors looking for some big future payoff. Currently, Ben has an old pair of Manson's flip-flops for sale, $5,000. With Manson's permission, he's also selling some early Manson recordings, but just today Ben started accusing Star and Gray Wolf of trying to sabotage his sales, as well as with swiping a $4,500 wheelchair he'd sent Charlie. "It's war!" he wrote on his Facebook page. "This is just the beginning! Your [sic] toast!" Star shakes her head. "He's freaking out because Charlie stopped calling him. He doesn't want to let go. And we're the bad guys. Anyway, that's the problem we have. People are so weird."

Charlie gets up in the morning, leaves his gray concrete cell, goes to breakfast, grabs a bag lunch, comes back, naps, eats his lunch, takes another nap, paces back and forth, maybe plays a game of chess, goes to dinner, has to be back in his cell by 8:45 p.m., has no specific time for lights out. "I like my cell," he says. "It's like that song I wrote. I called it 'In My Cell,' but the Beach Boys changed it to 'In My Room.'" Manson makes this claim about "In My Room" fairly often, which is kind of ridiculous, since the song came out in 1963, four years before his release on the parole-violation conviction, but obvious fabrications like these never seem to slow him down. "Like all my songs," he continues, "it's about my heaven is right here on Earth. See, my best friend is in that cell. I'm in there. I like it."

Even so, he worries constantly about the prison's ventilator system and swears the air is killing him. He's afraid that the guards will put garbage in his shoes, just to mess with him. He says he always has to be on high alert. He has never been held in general population, always in some kind of protective-housing unit, where it's supposed to be harder for inmates to get at him, especially the fame-seekers. Even so, back in 1984, at a different prison, a guy doused him with paint thinner and set his head on fire. Right now, he has only about 15 other prisoners to contend with, among them Juan Corona, who murdered 25 people in 1971; Dana Ewell, who ordered the murder of his own family in 1992; Phillip Garrido, the rapist who kidnapped 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard and held her for 18 years; and Mikhail Markhasev, who was convicted of killing Bill Cosby's son, Ennis. So far, they seem to all get along just fine.

Charles Manson in 1980.

Manson doesn't watch much TV, although he used to like Barney Miller, Gunsmoke, and Sesame Street in Spanish. He plays his guitar and sometimes offers musical advice to fellow guitarist Corona, the serial killer. "I'm not a teacher, but I show him how to make chords and progressions." He'd listen to an old Doors or Jefferson Airplane album if he could figure out how to get his CD player working. Sometimes he'll have to leave his cell while sniffer dogs search for contraband; during a recent visit, the dogs found nothing but did leave behind a single ****, delighting Manson. He gets thousands of pieces of mail a year, more than any other prisoner. Sometimes he will send out autographs signed, "Hippy cult leader made me do it." During his time behind bars, he's committed 108 infractions. The last time, in 2011, he was caught with an "inmate-manufactured weapon" – in this case, a sharpened eyeglass stem – and thrown in solitary for a year.

In the late afternoon, he saunters over to the wall where the telephones are. His phone calls are recorded, but he can make pretty much all the calls he wants, collect only, 15 minutes at a clip, and he makes tons. I know this, because I have been on the receiving end for months now. He calls while I'm at the movies, while I'm driving, while I'm at cocktail parties, while I'm walking my dogs in the park, while I am everyplace he'll never be again.

Here's how he has begun some of his recent conversations: "Hello, hello. Are you ready? OK. There's seven steps from the death chamber of holding to the death chamber of release." "I forget – was you mad at me or was I mad at you?" "Would you come and swing upon a star? Carry moonbeams home in a jar?" "Why don't you go ahead and say what's best for you, and then I'll go along with it and meet you later over on the beach." "I've got something important I'd like to explain."

Mostly, he wants to discuss the environment – "The end is on the way, baby bucks" – and what should be done about it. Once, when he was talking to me about the rightness of killing to get more air, he said, "Whoever gets killed, that's the will of God. Without killing, we got no chance." He paused, then went on, "You might want to keep that out of your paper and say to yourself, 'How can that work for me?'" At the time, I didn't think much of it. It took a while for what he was suggesting to sink in.

Sometimes he seems lonely ("Star, Star, nobody comes to visit me but Star"). Sometimes he'll give props to Neil Young for once saying that the Manson musical style was pretty good. "He didn't play no games on me, didn't try to steal a lot of my stuff like Zappa and them others. He's a straight-up dude." And sometimes he'll try to con me.

"When we were talking once," he says, "you promised me half of it."

"Half of what?"

"Whatever you could give."

"Well, half of nothing is nothing."

"Well, half-and-half is still half. Like one and one is still one. See, you've been confused, honey. You didn't know you was my wife? I recognize you."

I change the subject, the way you sometimes have to do with him, bluntly, with no social niceties, and tell him I'm suffering from a bad case of poison ivy. He brightens right up and admonishes me to go soak my blisters in apple-cider vinegar. "I had fungus on my feet and tried everything and nothing worked until Star sent me this apple cider. It's some miracle stuff, man!"

Then he'll get irritated about something and start shouting, "I'm an outlaw, I'm a gangster, I'm a rebel, I'm a desperado, and I don't fire no warning shots," which always makes me smile, because it's a pretty comical thing to say about yourself.

You may not want to know about his sex life, but he'll tell you anyway. "You think I'm too old to jack off. You think, 'He's too old to **** his pillow.' But I'm not. I'm still active with my roscoe. I'm still me."

Vincent Bugliosi

He reserves a goodly amount of venom for Bugliosi. "He knows I'm too stupid to get involved in something of the magnitude of Helter Skelter. So how could he convince himself of that for all these years? He made the money, he won the case. He's a winner! He got over! He's a genius! He took 45 years of a man's life for his greedy little grubby self. And he's going to go to his deathbed with that forever on his conscience? Is there no honor in him at all?"

And then he'll go on again about how he has no sympathy for any of the Tate­LaBianca victims, especially not Sharon Tate. "It's a Hollywood movie star. How many people did she murder onscreen? Was she so pretty? She compromised her body for everything she did. And if she was such a beautiful thing, what was she doing in the bed of another man when that thing jumped off? What kind of **** is that?"

Finally, he'll pull out the old time-tested Jesus trope and say, "I don't think you understand the gravity of the situation, man. How can you interview Jesus when He's dying on the cross?" Or he'll say, "Don't ask why they crucified Christ, ask why are they crucifying Christ." And if I scoff at that, he'll get all puffed up again and say, "When you come face to face with me, you're only you. I don't give a **** what you are. I'll take you. Put you in the grave. What're you going to do about that, jitterbug? Who's protecting you, sweetheart?"

This is how he spends his days. This is how he will spend them until the end.

"Well, I got to go," he says. "Get back with you later."

And then, grudgingly, he'll talk about the murders, not a lot, not all at once, but enough that over time, as the months tick by and one year turns to the next, you can piece together some kind of rudimentary narrative.

More or less, here's Manson's version of what happened, and it's far different from Bugliosi's: Tex Watson was having problems with a drug dealer named Bernard "Lotsapoppa" Crowe, so he called Charlie to come help him out, which Charlie did, by shooting Lotsapoppa. He didn't kill him, but he thought he did. Now Tex was in his debt, man to man. Then a musician pal, his "brother" Bobby Beausoleil, also known as Cupid, got into a beef with a drug dealer named Gary Hinman, and he too called on Manson for help, which Manson gave, by coming over and slashing the side of Hinman's face with the sword he used to carry. He took off after that, leaving Beausoleil with an even greater problem than before – what to do with Hinman, who was now wounded and probably ready to go to the police, which would bring the law right to Spahn Ranch. Beausoleil couldn't let that happen, so he killed Hinman. Then he got arrested. Then someone at the ranch, Manson won't say who ("I don't snitch"), had the bright idea to commit some murders that had the same signature elements as the Hinman murder, the idea being that, since Beausoleil couldn't be in two places at the same time, he would be freed.

Robert Kenneth Beausoleil

"See, I'd saved Tex from the fate he was suffering under, so when the brother has a problem, I pass it on to Tex. He said, 'Let's get the brother out of jail. What do I do?' I said, 'Don't ask me. I don't want to know, man. I know the law. I walk the line all my life. Do whatever the **** you want to do.' I knew what Tex was doing. I also knew it was none of my business. He says, 'I'll kill everybody!' I say, 'Don't tell me that ****. I don't want to know!' They say, 'Well, we're going to go murder these people.' I say, 'Well, lots of luck.'"

And so off Tex and the girls went, ending up at the house on Cielo Drive that had once been rented to record producer Melcher, who'd come out to the ranch a few times, heard Manson's music, and apparently decided Manson wasn't a talent worth pursuing. Although Manson himself told everyone that a recording contract was imminent.

"Yeah, it was Terry Melcher's house, and he lied to everybody at the ranch, said he was gonna do stuff he didn't do. He got their hopes up, you dig? Terry was a spoiled brat that had seven automobiles and didn't have nothing to worry about. I'd cheated him in a card game and won a house. It was part card game, part con, all devil, heh heh. But I won it. He owed me. So, Terry Melcher was part of it. He did a lot of things that wasn't right. But no one was mad at Terry Melcher. Not really. He was just in somebody's mind, and when they went by there, it was a familiar place, and they went into a familiar place. Sharon Tate just happened to be there, that's all. Tex did what he had to do. Good boy. Good soldier. Should have given him a Silver Star."

Did you go over and try to clean up the mess they made, which some books say you did, but never with proof, and, if true, would put you at the scene of the crime?

"Well, yeah, I had to look out for my horses. I look out for what looks out for me," he says, although later on he will say he misspoke, that he never went to the Tate house that night.

And the next night, at the LaBiancas'?

"Yeah, I went to the LaBiancas'. I went in there and seen an old man on the couch, and I said, 'Hey, man, I didn't know you was in here, sorry. There was nobody here the last time I came.' I used to go there whenever they had big parties at Harold True's house next door. It'd be empty. It was the crash camp where everyone would go to fall on girls. I'd live in there for a couple of hours at time, that's all. Anyway, I turned around to get out. Tex was right behind me. It was his play, not mine."

Terry Melcher

What did you do before you left? Did you tie the LaBiancas up and leave them for Tex and the girls to deal with, which is what Tex claims?

"No," he says, quietly. "Hell, no."

So much death, so much violence.

"What violence?" he says, speaking louder. Then the subject turns from knives to guns. "What's violent about pulling your finger across the trigger? There's no violence. It's just a person there and you move your finger and they're gone. What's violent about that? But let me ask you this. Will you ever forgive me for what you think I did? Think about it. Don't let your brain be lame. I didn't kill nobody. So will you ever forgive me for what you think I did?"

Forty-four years on, the facts in the Manson case aren't really facts anymore – they're beliefs and conclusions fashioned out of bits and pieces of bent and redirected light, or, as Charlie likes to call them, they're "perspectives." "Helter Skelter wasn't a lie," he says.

"It was just Bugliosi's perspective. Everybody's saying it the way they want to remember it. Sooner or later, we all got to submit to each other's point of view. Sure, it was going on. But it was just part of the part. The reasons was all kinds of different things that were happening in Tex's mind and all of our minds together, and there's lots of different discrepancies in there that don't correlate to be straight. There was a lot of motives, man. You got a motive for every person there. It was a collective idea. It was an episode.

A psychotic episode, and you want to blame me for that?"

In a sense, Bugliosi had no choice. You can't prosecute a collective psychotic episode. You've got to boil it down to a single dominant face and a single dominant motive. But, according to Manson and others associated with the Family, lots of crazy things were happening right then in the summer of 1969: big possible paranoia after Charlie killed Lotsapoppa (or so he thought), big possible paranoia over brother Bobby in jail, LSD in the air, guns in the ground, nasty drug deals, dire money needs, Strategic Air Command flying atomic bombs overhead, the Weathermen flying to Cuba to learn how to revolution, the thrumming background noise of the Black Panthers, stolen cars in the weeds, underage girls in the swimming hole, big acid-happy dinners with everyone gathered round, Charlie speaking in metaphors, riddles and paradoxes, unreal figments perhaps being taken too literally, Charlie scared someone's going to rat him out about Lotsapoppa, brains going round and round, big ideas coming out of the big collective mind, mass psychosis, and a different motive for every person there. And to the degree that this is true, Manson might fairly be considered an innocent man, just as he says he is, or, if guilty, then only as guilty as everyone else there; or, if guilty, then maybe absolutely guilty, his fear of someone snitching on him about the Lotsapoppa shooting perhaps leading him to want to bind everyone to him, by turning them into killers, too; or maybe Charlie had nothing to do with anything and it was all Watson's doing, revolving around a drug deal, which is what some people believe.

And maybe his version of that psychotic moment is all Charlie wanted to say to the jury. He knew he was done for. He knew it the minute he saw Aktins with the blood-dripping knife after the Tate murders. It was inevitable, and maybe even bittersweet, because he would be going home. "Too much freedom is detrimental to the soul," he says. "I should not have been out there. It was too fast for me."

Manson always says time means nothing to him, that "in the hallways of always . . . I live a thousand years in a second, man," so, taking him at his word, today is the day in 1934 when he was born, to a 16-year-old girl in Cincinnati. He never had a dad he knew, and the only mom he knew was an irresponsible drunk. He was raised in juvenile halls and reform schools, and was given an adult education by inmates in prison, although not a very good one. He turned out to be a terrible criminal, an inept pimp, a lousy car thief, a ham-fisted burglar, a guy who got busted every time he broke the law. Before the murders, it was all quite pathetic and laughable, really, and if you throw that at Manson today, even he, after a moment of considered silence, will say, "OK, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, I'll give you that one." And then he'll say, "But I'm not a person, have never been a person. I am an animal been raised a lifetime in cages." So much so that the child's game of thumb wrestling, he has never heard of it. "What's that?" he says, blinking. And that's his early history, all of it you need to know. You can imagine the rest of it. Just think the worst. Barely two decades of his long life spent as a free man.

Charles Manson in 1947.

These days, he's full of bluster about being as free in prison as anyplace else. "You're the one in prison, man." But on his 79th birthday, he calls me, the drawl in his voice low and distant, and says, "What do you think? Do you think this story will help me get out of here, only for a little while, before I go?" And right there is the human seam in Manson, split open and leaking, only for a little while, and it does kind of move your heart.

Better than anyone else, however, Manson has always understood that he doesn't belong in the outside world. Before he was released from prison in 1967, he told one of his jailers that he didn't want to go. But in 1971, at the end of his trial, with a death sentence looming, he still wanted to have his say before the jury, to mount the kind of defense only he could mount, and he feels Bugliosi somehow cheated him out of it by getting the court to deny his motion to be his own lawyer, and that's one of the things that still really frosts his kernels.

Today, inside the Corcoran visiting room, Star is wearing a paisley midi dress, looks very pretty, is very happy, while she busies herself with a paper towel, wiping clean a table of the sticky, smelly purple disinfectant that the prison uses. I'm glad Gray Wolf has lost his visiting privileges. He's kind of a control freak, glaring at Star with his big sunken eyes whenever she says something he doesn't like. I'm also not sure I like being around them both at the same time. They do whatever Charlie tells them to do, including carving X's into their foreheads. "Charlie gave us the honor of requesting that we cut our foreheads to make an X, 'for ATWA,'" Gray Wolf blogged, though how one correlates with the other is anyone's guess. Once, the three of us went to the redwoods together and tramped into a forest, where they stood near a cliff and kept beckoning me to come closer, come closer, the view is much better here, and all I could hear in the back of my mind was Charlie saying to me, "I'll take you. Put you in the grave. What're you going to do about that, jitterbug?" And, of course, it's not lost on me how much Star does look like a much prettier Susan Atkins, a.k.a. Sexy Sadie, who was the real nut job of the Manson Family. During her trial, she got on the stand and said, "[sharon Tate] kept begging and pleading and pleading and begging and I got sick of listening to it, so I stabbed her. . . . How can [that] not be right when it's done with love?" And talking about the murders, Star says, "Sharon Tate wasn't a movie star. Even now, nobody's ever really heard of her, even though she supposedly got killed by Charlie Manson, the most famous guy in the world. And that's the only reason anybody knows who she is. And still nobody knows who the **** she is."

Star looks up, and here is Charlie again, smiling his chipped-tooth, bad-dentures smile, with a pair of cool, yellow-tinted shades covering his eyes. He's pushing a wheelchair in front of him, using it for support, but it's probably all for show, part of some con against the system, because two minutes later, he's on his feet, doing the dragon-dance kung-fu thing he historically reserves for when the TV cameras are turned on.

He did it for Charlie Rose in 1986, Penny Daniels in 1987 and Geraldo Rivera in 1988. These were the golden years of his midlife media exposure. In interviews, he was a massive kinetic force, constantly parting his long, graying hair and fiddling with his beard, eyes all six-guns-a-blazing, rolling right over and owning some of his adversaries (Rivera was especially hapless), playing nice and thoughtful with others, and always raging with righteous indignation. He made for terrific TV. But after a booming, almost sexually aggressive chat with Diane Sawyer in 1994, the state of California banned the use of recording devices during prisoner interviews.

This upsets Manson greatly. It's the reason why you haven't heard from him lately. He tends to sulk about it. The main reason is the dance, the big set piece in so many of his on-camera appearances. It's the dance, more even than words, that he believes can best communicate his true feelings, thoughts and ideas. Without it, what's the point of talking to the media? And it really is quite astounding to see, him moving into it now, arms and legs circling around in baroque curlicues, forming jagged-glass shapes and otherworldly patterns and whorls. What it all means, I don't know. But, boy, is he dexterous.

Charles Manson during an interview with Geraldo Rivera.

Star has a few things on her mind. For one, that Manson-memorabilia collector. "He's attacking us and saying someone's going to come to my home," she says.

Charlie folds his hands together. "Are you still going to target practice?"

Star nods.

"Good. If they're bullying you, they're afraid. They're just a bunch of Internet fat mouths," he says. Although, of course, he's never been on the Internet in his life. Or on a computer.

He uses his shirt sleeve to wipe some sleepy-winker rheum out of his eyes, then puts his hand on mine, runs his fingers along my fingers, up my wrist, and up my forearm. He squeezes it a few times and says, "Man, you're a soft dude," which I make a joke out of, telling him I don't go that way. He shrugs. "Sex to me is like going to the toilet. Whether it's a girl or not, it doesn't matter. I don't play that girl-guy ****. I'm not hung up in that game."

Then he nods at Star and says, "I can get inside her from out here, just got to go slow." He shakes his head and leans in on me, easing up close. "Well, you know what I'd really like to have? I'd like to have some real *****. I'd like to have a little something to smoke. I'd like a good electric guitar. I'd like a good place to fart and ****. I'd like to have what you have." He's not threatening me, he's just saying, and it seems to be taking him back. "All the people sucking and ******* at the ranch, I couldn't turn any of them away. All I was looking for is some ***** and to play some music and dance. I took Susie off the bottom. Everyone said she's ugly, looks like a man. I said she's a beautiful piece of humanity. She paid me back. She hands me the bloody knife and says, 'I love you so much, I give you my life.' And Leslie, well, I boned her a few times. She had a big, fat old ugly, it was like sticking your **** out the window. Now that don't make her a bad person, but that's not what you want."

He scowls, in a mood, sitting with his legs open, his little round convict's belly hanging down in between.

"They all went out and killed, but, of course, I wouldn't do nothing," he goes on. "Do you expect me to go kill all those people? I was scared. I didn't want to go back to prison. Cockroaches do more for life than I do. I do . . . nothing." He stands up. "What a life, man.

One great big ******* piece of ****."

I look at Star. Normally, I'd chalk this talk up to one of Charlie's well-established dodges, leading you one way, only to let you know he really means the opposite. But her mouth is open and she's letting loose all these little butterfly groans of concern.

He again brings up the conversation he had with Tex, where Tex wanted to know what to do. He's still on his feet, shoulders pulling back, blood and rage rising to his face. He's right there. "Don't ask me what to do!" he roars, punching the air. "One thing you don't want to do is step on me. You don't want to do that. Man, you know what to do. Do it!"

The guards look over, wait until he calms, then go back to the TV.

"See," he says, "there's no conspiracy in that." Maybe. But I can see now how he may have gotten his point across to Tex and told Tex what to do without having to come right out and tell him. It's in his sudden fury, in the buffeting, concussive roar of his voice, in the silent goading chatter of his expressive body, that dance of his, which can say more for him than words.

He sits back down. I ask him where that talk with Tex took place. He goes silent. In the past, he's said he wasn't at Spahn when Tex and the girls drove off, that he was in San Diego and spoke to Tex on the phone, not returning to the ranch until much later.

By way of reminder, Star scoots forward and says, "You were on the phone."

Charlie looks at her, then at me, then at the wall and says, "I don't know, which is what I say when I'm trying to get out of stuff."

He lets a moment go by. Smiles that half-man, half-devil smile of his.

"I'm lazy," he goes on. "Out there, you can get somebody else to do whatever you want done. I'll do whatever I can to not do anything. When I do nothing, I survive. I just don't want to take responsibility. The mistake I made is I didn't go with them. Tex was scared. A mama's boy. The second night went better, because I had a hand in it. In the situation, not the murders. No, man, I wasn't there for that. But, oh, they made a mess of it the first night. If I'd been there, it would have been a much better scene. I feel I should have did it. I'd have did it right. There's no doubt in my mind."

He nods his head. "Tex always did what I said. He didn't have to. He could skip on the highway and leave, but when he came to the ranch, he did what I said. He'd just seen the man – me – for the first time in his life, and he wanted to walk like it, talk like it. He wanted to be it. And there I was, in the gutter, man. And he was coming along, and he had a nice truck, and my mistake was, I let him into my world for that truck. I was real smart. It cost me 45 years for a damn Dodge pickup truck."

Just another miscalculation in a long line of miscalculations that, in the present case, started with the shooting of Lotsapoppa and the slashing of Gary Hinman and ends with him in prison for life, not only for the Tate-LaBianca killings, but also, along with Spahn regulars Bruce Davis and Steve "Clem" Grogan, for the murder of ranch hand Shorty Shea, about which he says, "Yup, we killed Shorty. Chopped him up into pieces. But I didn't do anything. It was Bruce and Clem, and Tex was there. Bruce didn't know how to fight, so I showed him how to fight and then seen what they did out the back window of a car when I went away. I wasn't there." It's funny how he's never around for anything. "Yeah," he says. "Isn't that odd?" Sometimes he can be so transparent, which makes him look like nothing more than a goofy, klutzy small-timer who made some bad decisions that led to more bad decisions that led to murder and who then got caught up in an ambitious DA's dream about a mastermind Svengali with demonic visions of world domination. Some crook, some outlaw, some gangster, some desperado, probably the worst ever.

Charlie's eyes roll around a little. He's going back even further now. "You see somebody ******* somebody in the ass, and they're looking at you, saying, 'This is what you want to do. You'd like this.' It makes you sick to your stomach to see, but then you end up doing that too. You see this shiny white ass and, oh, my goodness. You don't remember right then where you got the idea to do it, but you learn and you go through changes. I was 17. I asked this guy, 'Let me stick my peter in your butt.' He said no way. I picked a razor blade up off the shower floor and said, 'If we get caught, I'll tell them I made you do it.' So, he let me do it. But I don't know.

Maybe he thought I was going to cut him. I didn't really even get it in but for a second or two and I came all over his butt."

This is the story of his life. And if that isn't an explanation of how it's gone from the very beginning, I don't know what is.

Star jumps to her feet and starts throwing food wrappers away. Charlie's poking holes in an avocado with a fork, taking his time, going all the way around, and hands half of it to Star when he's finished, and they both eat in silence. There's not much else that needs to be said right now.

One day, I get on the phone with Bugliosi – "Call me Vince," he says. In the 40 years since Helter Skelter made him a bestselling author, Bugliosi has written 12 other books, the most recent being Divinity of Doubt: The God Question, which makes for a nice full circle. He started off taking on Manson, the Antichrist, and is now arguing that God's existence can't be proved. And a good number of these books have been bestsellers. As Manson likes to say, Bugliosi's a winner. He got over. And these days, he's still pretty sharp. Like Manson, he does tend to wobble off onto tangents, mostly about various unfortunate medical matters, but, unlike Manson, he always comes back to the here and now.

So what about the Bobby Beausoleil copycat-killing motive, which is the one Manson seems to favor?

Bugliosi dismisses it out of hand. "Oh, that. Well, you don't stab people 169 times and murder seven people to get someone out of jail." He goes on: "I agree there wasn't one single motive, but here's my view. I think everyone who participated in the murders bought the Helter Skelter theory hook, line and sinker. But did Manson himself believe all this ridiculous, preposterous stuff about all of them living in a bottomless pit in the desert while a worldwide war went on outside? I think, without knowing, that he did not." He pauses. "I do think one reason why he didn't participate in the murders is because he thought that'd immunize him or insulate him from criminal responsibility. But, of course, if you're guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and there is a murder, then you're also guilty of that murder. This is boilerplate law."

L.A. County Deputy District Attorney, Vincent Bugliosii, in 1975.

Later on, while I'm in bed watching The Big Bang Theory on TV, Charlie calls again. I've taken to sometimes ignoring him. Maybe I'd rather spend time with Sheldon, Leonard and Penny than with Charlie Manson. Maybe I don't want to listen to another of his far-out spiels designed, no doubt, to take me someplace I don't want to go. Star and Gray Wolf have urged me to go with the flow and see where it leads. No way.

Tonight, though, I answer.

"Breath in and breath out, breath in and breath out," he says. "I'm the last breath on Earth, man. Some people here want me to sign a do-not-resuscitate order. I wrote on it, 'Why should I?' A lot of people want me to die. Bugliosi wants me to die before him, otherwise I've won." And so their battle continues, at least in Manson's mind.

After her visit with Charlie one Sunday, Star and I drive around desolate Corcoran, stop at Kings Drive-In for a milkshake, then head over to the big community park, the only verdant expanse in the area, and find a bench to sit on. "I do not give one **** whatsoever about 1969, personally," she says along the way. She starts thinking about Susan Atkins. "That ***** was ******* crazy. She was a crazy ******* *****. 'Oh, Charlie, I did this for you.' She didn't know what she was doing. That girl was just a piece of ****, a *****, and just plain ******* crazy psycho." She says this with such vehemence that I'm a little taken aback. I hadn't thought her capable of it, which just goes to show you.

It's cold on the bench, and she wraps her arms around herself.

Then she bobs her head and comes out with a little bit of a shocker, "a scoop," she calls it. "I'll tell you straight up, Charlie and I are going to get married," she says. "When that will be, we don't know. But I take it very seriously. Charlie is my husband. Charlie told me to tell you this. We haven't told anybody about that."

It's one thing to be here, doing what she's doing, visiting Charlie, buying him his quarterly goody box, getting him apple-cider vinegar for his fungus feet and going to target practice. In a way, I can see all of that. I've felt his hand on my skin, listened to him speak, seen him say more with his body than with his words. I know. But marrying the guy? Are you going to take his name?

"Yeah," she says. "My parents like Charlie. We were just talking and they said, 'If Charlie gets out, you guys can come stay here.

You could stay in the basement for a while, and you could maybe build your own little house down by the creek.'"

Will there be conjugal visits?

"No, California lifers no longer get them," she says. "If we did, we'd be married by now. You know, that's the only thing I want. I just want to be alone. I don't want to be always in that visiting room with people staring at me. But that's the only time I get to see him, in that room, with people staring. It's hard. But things change, you know. And who knows what could happen?"

Another day, another call from Charlie.

"Star, Star, baby on the floor," he says. "We started all over with this one. The other ones know it all now. I don't need to say anything. They're moving in colors."

The others being Squeaky and Sandy?

"Yeah."

This doesn't sound good, him viewing Star as some kind of project, a baby on the floor that he's starting all over with, teaching her from the ground up. It sounds like he has plans for her. And historically, his plans have never turned out well.

What about the marriage?

He snorts. "Oh, that," he says. "That's a bunch of garbage. You know that, man. That's trash. We're just playing that for public consumption."

It's not exactly a surprise to hear him say this. I've spoken to Manson a lot, and I know this is the kind of thing he does. And Star, too, I see, which is more of a surprise. But even that makes sense, once you understand that she's Charlie's baby on the floor, not Charlie's wife-to-be, but another one of his children, just like Squeaky and Sandy once were, with her just now taking her first little baby steps, him holding her hand and showing the way. At least, that's my perception of how it is. But we all know how perceptions are.

Star and Charles Manson

"I've always been pretty truthful with myself, as much as I can be under the circumstances," Manson says later. "But I'll never tell on nobody, not even me, man, so that's why I ain't never told nobody what really happened back then. I can't tell you right now. It wouldn't work if I did tell you, because it would change by morning. Everything is constantly changing, man. The mind is a universal thing. Charles Manson and Beethoven," he says before hanging up for the night. "It's just one little thought."

[MIKA27]

Stone-Tipped Spears Pre-Date The Human Race

Spears feel very much like a human weapon of war — so it’s surprising to find out that, in fact, the stone-tipped projectiles pre-date our species by a bewildering 85,000 years.

A team of archaeologists from University of California at Berkeley have uncovered remains of the oldest known stone-tipped throwing spears, and their analysis suggests they’re 280,000 years old. They were found at an Ethiopian Stone Age site known as Gademotta, and are reported in PLoS One.

But that age means that they’re far older than Homo sapiens — which either suggests we’re wrong about how long our race has existed, or that our predecessor species were smart enough to make weapons. Yonatan Sahle, one of the researchers, explains:

“Technological advances were not necessarily associated with anatomical changes.. The advances might have started earlier… High-quality raw materials were nearby, so those could have allowed for the full exp

ression of technological skills… [and there] was a mega lake at the site. It might have attracted stable occupations there, further fueling technological advances.”

It seems most likely, then, that intelligence existed before us that was enough to assemble some crude, stone-tipped weapons. Most likely, say the researchers, they were put together by Homo heidelbergensis — Heidelberg Men to their friends — who lived in Africa, Europe and western Asia from at least 600,000 years ago. And clearly had a little bit of an aggressive streak.

[MIKA27]

What Would You Do If You Found Out You Were A Psychopath?

One day in 2005, neuroscientist James Fallon was casually leafing through the PET scans of serial killers. As one does. He was doing research at UC Irvine and was trying to figure out which aspects of brain anatomy contribute to psychopathy.

He also had brain scans of all his family members on his desk for an unrelated Alzheimer’s study. But because he was in his spot-the-psychopath mode, when he accidentally started looking at his family’s scans he realised that someone in his clan was a psychopath. So he did what pretty much anyone would do. He breached the blinding of the study to figure out who in his family was . . . not quite right. And it turned out to be him.

Smithsonian reports that Fallon recognised his scan as “obviously pathological” because of low activity in key parts of the frontal and temporal lobes. Curious, to say the least, Fallon went on to have genetic testing which showed that he had a number of genes which have been shown to be related to violence, lack of morality, low empathy and other scary psychopath things.

But Fallon is a pretty socially normal dude. He says that he was not entirely shocked by the discovery because he has always felt manipulative and power-seeking urges within himself, but they tend to manifest in terms of intellectual competition like trying to win arguments or prove ideas. Which is pretty much what he does every day as a scientist, so good career choice there. Other than being “obnoxiously competitive” and doing “jerky things that piss people off,” Fallon doesn’t show a lot of psychopathic tendencies. To clear the air, he clarifies that “I’ve never killed anybody, or raped anyone.”

Fallon is happily married and since finding out about his brain anatomy is able to be even more aware of choosing to do the right thing, do good deeds, or take the high road. He also credits his parents’ consistent attention and affection during his childhood with allowing him to socialize normally. His case shows how many factors are involved in determining someone’s behaviour, and Fallon told Smithsonian that he is much less of a genetic determinist than he used to be. Because, yeah, you’d kind of have to be.

[MIKA27]

Did Giants Once Live in Giant Buried Cities Across America?

Many newspaper stories in the United States during the 1800s into the early 1900s were sensational, in all sense of the word. The tales are incredible and written in the era when journalism meant whatever sold papers, truth be damned. But the following stories all have to do with giants or underground cities, so they’re worth telling again.

The most famous of these reports appeared in the April 5, 1909 edition of The Arizona Gazette, entitled “Explorations in Grand Canyon.” Explorer G.E. Kinkaid discovered a huge underground “citadel” while rafting on the Colorado River. Exploring a tunnel that stretched “nearly a mile underground,” Kinkaid found this citadel, which was filled with tablets carved with some type of hieroglyphics, and home to a stone statue he described as resembling Buddha. Copper weapons lined the walls, but the most intriguing aspect of this ancient dwelling/worship place/tomb, were the mummies, all wrapped in a dark fabric. The mummies were supposedly more than nine-feet-tall. To feed the fire of conspiracy, and to keep anyone from finding the giants of the citadel themselves, the United States government allegedly closed that area of the canyon from public view.

But this well-known story of American giants isn’t alone.

The New York Times reported a nine-foot-tall skeleton of a man discovered in a mound near Maple Creek, Wisconsin, in December 1897. The Times also carried the story “Strange Skeletons Found” near Lake Delevan, Wisconsin, in its May 4, 1912 issue. The skulls of giant skeletons excavated from a mound had “a minute resemblance to the head of the monkey.”

But an April 9, 1885 story in The New York Times entitled: “Missouri’s buried city: A strange discovery in a coalmine near Moberly,” revealed a find that predated the supposed citadel in the Grand Canyon by 24 years. Moberly, the largest city in Randolph County, Missouri, had a population of 6,108 in the 1880s.

Coal miners, sinking a shaft 360 feet deep, broke into a cavern revealing “a wonderful buried city,” the article claimed. Lava arches stretched across the roof of the cavern, looming over the streets of an ancient city “which are regularly laid out and enclosed by walls of stone, which is cut and dressed in a fairly good, although rude style of masonry.”

Workers, along with Moberly city recorder David Coates and Moberly city marshal George Keating, inspected the site and found a 30-by-100-feet hall in the cavern filled with stone benches and hand tools. “Further search disclosed statues and images made of a composition closely resembling bronze, lacking luster,” the article read.

Explorers discovered a stone fountain in a wide court, still pouring “perfectly pure water” into its basin. But it was what lay beside the fountain that interested the people exploring the site. “Lying beside the foundation (of the fountain) were portions of the skeleton of a human being,” according to the article. “The bones of the leg measured, the femur four and one-half feet, the tibia four feet and three inches, showing that when alive the figure was three times the size of an ordinary man, and possessed of a wonderful muscular power and quickness.”

Its skull, the story reported, was shattered; bronze tools, granite hammers, metallic saws and flint knives were scattered all around.

“They are not so highly polished, nor so accurately made as those now finished by our best mechanics, but they show skill and an evidence of an advanced civilization that are very wonderful,” according to the article.

Explorers spent twelve hours in the buried city and resurfaced only after the oil in their lamps burned low. “No end to the wonders of the discovery was reached,” the article stated. “A further extended search will be made in a day or two.”

No record of the extended search could be found.

Dr. Tom Spencer, a professor in the department of History, Humanities, Philosophy and Political Science at Northwest Missouri State University, said that’s because after printing the story, the newspapers tried to forget it. “A lot of the time I think these stories were written based entirely off hearsay and little or no direct on-site reporting,” he said. “As the story grew, the details got more and more outrageous.”

He equates it to a childhood game where children sit in a circle and one child whispers a story into another’s ear and by the time the story completes the circle, it was completely different. “If you recall, sometimes the ‘finished story’ bore little resemblance to the original story,” he said. “My guess is one element of this story is factual – like the strange shaft formation or a long femur was found – and it became more and more embellished as it went around the journalistic circle at the time.”

So what happened to the fabulous buried city under Moberly, Mo.? “There were stories like this periodically at the time and they usually disappear quietly because someone goes to investigate and there’s nothing to it,” Spencer said. “In order to avoid the embarrassment the newspapers just don’t say anything else about it.”

However, Moberly resident John W. wants to find out for certain. “Myself and several friends have researched the article archived at The New York Times,” John said. “The article discusses coal miners finding a Crystal City with several advanced features as well as the bones of what can only be called a giant.”

John and his group plan to investigate the claim of an underground city. “We have found the mine. Our hopes are to take a field trip and find the underground city if we can access the mine,” he said. “We have driven by and the site exists. You can still see remnants of the old access road through the field. It would appear this mine has not been in use since the time period of the news article.”

Moberly calls itself “The Magic City.” Hopefully John and his crew can discover just how magic it is.

[MIKA27]

Russia: Riot police unit made up of identical twins

Riot police in the southern Russian town of Rostov-na-Donu have put together a squad formed solely of identical twins, it's emerged.

The armed unit was assembled after three pairs enlisted almost simultaneously, Russian NTV reports. Instructors apparently like the way they work together as teams. "I only have to look at him to know what he's going to do," one of the twins said of his brother.

But although their similarity can be useful, they aren't allowed to exploit it for personal gain. "Nobody has tried to take exams on behalf of his brother, as identical twins sometimes do at school," the TV correspondent said. "At least, the riot squad's officers think so." Apparently the unit is such a success that another pair of twins is about to join it.

[MIKA27]

AUUG Motion Synth

Turn your iPhone or iPod Touch into a fully-functioning instrument with the Auug Motion Synth ($70) — a combination grip for your device, eight-button synthesizer app, and a cloud-based service for sharing synth presets.

These combine to form a highly-capable synth instrument that lets you easily control music using the app's keys, and the motion of your hand, changing pitch and tone as you move. Use each of the buttons to play notes, control external synth hardware, even apply effects to your vocals. The grip lets you comfortably hold your phone, while interacting with the buttons, so you can play naturally, moving freely around the stage or studio.

[MIKA27]

Roadie Tuner

Whether you're a beginner just learning to play guitar, or a seasoned veteran who has seen his share of road gigs, the Roadie Tuner ($80) is just the tool you need to perfect your craft.

This automated robotic tuner will literally tune your guitar (or any other stringed instrument with geared pegs) for you, thanks to its sensors that are three times more accurate than the human ear. It will tune your guitar faster than most experienced players, helps you wind and unwind your strings, and will even let you quickly switch between tunings. Use the included iOS app to remember tuning settings, save custom tunes, visualize your tune, and keep track of the quality of your strings.

[MIKA27]

Samuel Adams Utopias Cigar

Chances are, if you consider yourself a beer-lover, you've heard of Samuel Adams Utopias— if not, we'll give you a minute to catch up.

This beer — meant to be served at room temperature and rated at about 28 percent alcohol by volume — is not for the faint of heart. And if you're lucky enough to get your hands on one of these coveted, limited bottles, there's no better complement to it than a Samuel Adams Utopias Cigar ($34). Seasoned in Utopias beer, these cigars draw rich nutty and fruit notes from the beer that combine nicely with the smooth, spicy taste of the tobacco. They're only available this November and December, so grab yours while they last.

[MIKA27]

Fluxmob Bolt

Keep your phone fully-charged — even when you're miles from the nearest wall outlet — with the Fluxmob Bolt ($60).

This handy device is one part wall charger for any USB-enabled device, and one part battery, so you don't necessarily have to worry about being connected to the power grid to get some juice. Simply plug it in when you have access to power, and let your phone or tablet charge — the built-in battery charges at the same time. Then, when you're out on the move and in need of a recharge, just plug your device into the box, and let it go (it's good for up to two charges).

[MIKA27]

Fresh effort to clone extinct animal

Scientists in Spain have received funding to test whether an extinct mountain goat can be cloned from preserved cells.

The bucardo became extinct in 2000, but cells from the last animal were frozen in liquid nitrogen.

In 2003, a cloned calf was brought to term but died a few minutes after birth.

Now, the scientists will test the viability of the female bucardo's 14-year-old preserved cells.

The bucardo, or Pyrenean ibex, calf born through cloning was an historic event: the first "de-extinction", in which a lost species or sub-species was resurrected.

The Aragon Hunting Federation signed an agreement with the Centre for Research and Food Technology of Aragon (CITA) in Zaragoza to begin preliminary work on the cells from the last animal, named Celia.

One of the scientists behind the cloning effort, Dr Alberto Fernandez-Arias, told BBC News: "At this moment, we are not initiating a 'bucardo recovery plan', we only want to know if Celia's cells are still alive after having been maintained frozen during 14 years in liquid nitrogen."

In addition to this in vitro work, they will also attempt to clone embryos and implant them in female goats.

"In this process, one or more live female bucardo clones could be obtained. If that is the case, the feasibility of a bucardo recovery plan will be discussed," Dr Fernandez-Arias, who is head of the Aragon Hunting, Fishing and Wetlands Service, explained.

Consultant biologist Juan Seijas (L) and Alberto Fernandez-Arias ® obtain tissue samples from Celia on 20 April 1999

The bucardo (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica) was a sub-species of ibex, with distinct physical and genetic characteristics to other mountain goats inhabiting the Iberian Peninsula. It was perfectly adapted to life in its mountain habitat, and to survive the extreme cold and snow of winter in the Pyrenees.

However, its population had been declining for years for several reasons, including hunting. In April 1999, researchers captured the last animal, a female named Celia. They obtained skin biopsies and froze the tissue in liquid nitrogen at a temperature of -196C (-321F).

The following year, Celia was killed by a falling tree in the National Park of Ordesa in north-east Spain. But a team including Dr Fernandez-Arias, Jose Folch and others were able to inject nuclei from Celia's preserved cells into goat eggs that had been emptied of their own DNA.

Then they implanted the eggs into surrogates - hybrids between Spanish ibex and domestic goats. Of 57 implantations, seven animals became pregnant and one was carried to term.

The baby bucardo was born in 2003 - the first successful "de-extinction". But the clone of Celia died a few minutes later due to a defect in one of its lungs. Earlier this year, Dr Fernandez-Arias related the story in a TEDx talk, as part of a meeting on de-extinction.

Even if the new effort succeeds in producing healthy clones, any future recovery plan for the bucardo would be fraught with difficulty - especially given the only frozen tissue is from a lone female.

One possible approach for bringing back the bucardo might be to cross a healthy female bucardo clone with a closely related sub-species - such as the Spanish ibex (Capra pyrenaica hispanica) or the Gredos ibex (Capra pyrenaica victoriae) - and then selectively breeding the offspring to enhance traits typical of the bucardo.

Several other possibilities could also be explored. For instance, researchers have been able to reverse the sex of female mouse embryos by introducing a key gene that makes them develop as males.

Other options

In addition, George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard University, explained that a technique known as Crispr opened up new opportunities in the field of endangered species conservation and de-extinction. The technique allows researchers to edit genomes with extraordinary precision.

Such "genome editing" techniques could be used to introduce genetic diversity in populations that are so closely related it poses a threat to their survival.

"In some cases, you have a hunch as to what diversity is needed. You might specifically want diversity in the major histocompatibility complex [a large gene family involved in immune responses]," Prof Church told BBC News.

"For example, part of the problem with the Tasmanian devil is that they are so closely related in terms of their immune system that they have problems rejecting the facial tumour cells that they spread by biting each other."

However, he said, such techniques might eventually offer a way to extensively edit the genome of an Asian elephant to make it more like a mammoth, using a genetic sequence from the extinct animals.

Commenting on plans for the bucardo cells, the Aragon Hunting Federation said it wanted to "develop initiatives in the field of ecology in order to defend the natural environment".

The sum provided to fund the research at CITA has not been disclosed.

[MIKA27]

'Walking Dead' zombie actress takes plea deal in Obama ricin plot

A Texas actress who played a zombie on the TV show "The Walking Dead" has struck a plea deal with federal prosecutors after being accused of trying to frame her husband for sending poison letters to President Obama and New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

Prosecutors filed notice in federal court in east Texas Thursday that Shannon Guess Richardson, 35, had accepted a deal.

In addition to a small part in "The Walking Dead," Richardson had minor roles in "The Vampire Diaries" and "The Blind Side," according to her profile in the movie database IMDb.

The investigation began in May after Obama, Bloomberg and Mark Glaze -- director of the Bloomberg-backed Mayors Against Illegal Guns group -- received letters containing the poison known as ricin, accompanied by a typed threat:

"You will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns," read the notes sent to Bloomberg and Glaze. "Anyone wants to come to my house will get shot in the face. The right to bear arms is my constitutional God given right and I will excersice [sic] that right til the day I die."

In a similar note to Obama, the sender alluded to having a wife and kids. After news of the poison letters broke, Richardson approached investigators to tell them that her husband had sent them.

Richardson's husband, Nathaniel David Richardson, denied involvement and said she was trying to end their marriage. Investigators turned their attention to the actress.

According to an affidavit filed by an FBI agent, Shannon Richardson failed a lie-detector test in a second interview and began to adjust her story -- now saying that she'd known her husband had sent the letters and had planted evidence of the poison on his things so he'd get caught.

Even stranger, a computer that the couple turned over to investigators showed that someone had searched for information about the Tupelo, Miss., ricin case, which had played out in national headlines a month earlier.

In the Tupelo case, an Elvis impersonator was initially arrested on suspicion of sending ricin-laced letters to the president and other officials before investigators let him go and arrested his rival, a taekwondo instructor, on suspicion of framing him. (Last week, officials unveiled new allegations that the jailed taekwondo instructor had kept trying to frame the Elvis impersonator even from behind bars.)

Whether the Tupelo case served as inspiration was unclear, but the outcomes were the same: Shannon Richardson, not her husband, was indicted for the poisoning attempts.

Investigators found that some computer files associated with the poison mailings had been accessed from the couple's home while Nathaniel Richardson was at work. On the day before Shannon Richardson's June arrest, she told investigators she had helped send the letters because her husband had forced her.

“I had theories [that] she wanted to get her face out there, and she wanted to destroy me," Nathaniel Richardson, who was not charged in the case, told ABC News in an interview conducted with his attorney. "She wanted to be an actress, she really did.”

Shannon Richardson's attorney told ABC News on Saturday that she had agreed to admit to her role in the plot in exchange for a sentence not to exceed 18 years in prison.

Ricin, which occurs naturally in castor beans, can take several forms and is potentially fatal when inhaled or ingested. There is no antidote.

[MIKA27]

These Awesome Aeroplanes Are Not Images From Iron Man 4

Some jet fighter photos look so perfectly choreographed and sharp that I automatically think they must be computer generated frames from some movie or game. These ones are very real.

When I see them, I hear someone in my head screaming “EVASIVE MANOEUVRE!”

I don’t know why the A-10C Thunderbolt II Warthogs from the 188th Fighter Wing, Arkansas Air National Guard need to make evasive manoeuvres, but it’s good to know these guys can pull some nice Gs on themightiest air tank killer ever created. Looks like fun.

[MIKA27]

This Robotic Sea Turtle Is Built To Find Hidden Treasure In Shipwrecks

Thanks to millions and millions of years of evolution, sea turtles work. They work well. They can swim stealthily around the ocean, sliding between chunks of coral if necessary. That in mind, it’s no wonder the sea creatures are the inspiration for the latest underwater robots.

The U-CAT hails from Estonia, but it’s bound for the bottom of the ocean. With flippers designed after sea turtles’, these little guys are have been built to fit into the narrowest nooks and crannies of underwater shipwrecks and take crystal clear pictures. “Conventional underwater robots use propellers for locomotion,” says Taavi Salumäe, the biomimetic robot’s designer, in a press release. “Fin propulsors of U-CAT can drive the robot in all directions without disturbing water and beating up silt from the bottom, which would decrease visibility inside the shipwreck.”

This isn’t the first robot to borrow from sea turtles, but their small size and relatively cheap construction bear big implications for the field of underwater archaeology. Meanwhile, watching them dance through the water is pretty mesmerising for the rest of us.

[MIKA27]

How Braille Was Invented

Braille was invented by a 19th-century man named Louis Braille, who was completely blind. Braille’s story starts when he was three years old. He was playing in his father’s shop in Coupvray, France, and somehow managed to injure his eye.

Though he was offered the best medical attention available at the time, it wasn’t enough — an infection soon developed and spread to his other eye, rendering him blind in both eyes. While a tragedy for him, had this accident not happened, we wouldn’t have braille today.

There was a system of reading in place for the blind at the time, which consisted of tracing a finger along raised letters. However, this system meant that reading was painfully slow and it was difficult to discerning by touch the relatively complex letters of the alphabet. As a result, many people struggled to master the embossed letter system.

Braille was invented by a 19th-century man named Louis Braille, who was completely blind. Braille’s story starts when he was three years old. He was playing in his father’s shop in Coupvray, France, and somehow managed to injure his eye.

Though he was offered the best medical attention available at the time, it wasn’t enough — an infection soon developed and spread to his other eye, rendering him blind in both eyes. While a tragedy for him, had this accident not happened, we wouldn’t have braille today.

There was a system of reading in place for the blind at the time, which consisted of tracing a finger along raised letters. However, this system meant that reading was painfully slow and it was difficult to discerning by touch the relatively complex letters of the alphabet. As a result, many people struggled to master the embossed letter system.

In 1821, Braille’s teacher, Dr. Alexandre Francois-Rene Pignier, invited a man named Charles Barbier to speak to a classroom of young blind students at the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. Barbier had developed a “night writing” system for the military using raised dots after Napoleon requested a system of communication that soldiers could use even in darkness without making any sound in the process.

Barbier’s system was too complex for the military and was rejected. However, it was thought that it might be useful for the blind, which led Dr. Pignier to invite Barbier to come demonstrate it.

As it stood, the Barbier invention wasn’t quite up to functioning as a system of touch-based reading and writing, being overly complex (using a 6×6 dot matrix to represent letters and certain phonemes). Further, this large dot matrix made it so unless you had very large fingertips, you couldn’t feel all the dots in a single matrix without moving your finger. Still, Braille was inspired and, as a young teenager, he began experimenting. He took a piece of paper, a slate, and a stylus, punching holes and attempting to find something that worked.

In 1825, Braille was just barely sixteen, but he thought he had hit upon something that was functional and superior to the existing embossed letter system. His original code consisted of six dots arranged in two parallel rows, each set of rows representing a letter.

This configuration was simpler than Barbier’s system, but still versatile enough to allow for up to 64 variations, enough for all the letters of the alphabet and punctuation. It was also easily adapted to languages other than French. Most importantly, rather than needing to trace out a whole letter, it was much easier to feel the configuration of dots, making reading for the blind significantly faster and easier.

Dr. Pignier was pleased with Braille’s work and encouraged his students to use Braille’s new system. Unfortunately when Dr. Pignier introduced The History of France written in braille for his students, he was dismissed from his position as headmaster, due to his insistence on pushing Braille’s system rather than the standard embossed letter system of the day.

Nonetheless, Braille himself became a teacher at the Institute and taught his code to the students who passed through, spreading the knowledge.

In 1834, when Braille was in his mid-20s, he was invited to demonstrate the uses of braille at the Exposition of Industry, which was being held in Paris that year, further spurring its popularity. By this time, Braille had also published a book about how to use the code. It was mostly written in embossed letters with braille thrown in to demonstrate its use.

Despite this, the National Institute for Blind Youth that Braille worked at still refused to officially adopt his system. It wouldn’t be until 1854, two years after Braille died and eight years after a school in Amsterdam started using it as their primary reading/writing system, that Braille’s former school finally adopted braille due to students overwhelmingly demanding the change. By the late nineteenth century, braille had been adopted throughout most of the world, excepting the United States, who held out until 1916.

Bonus Facts:

• These days, books for the blind in English are typically written in Grade 2 braille. It is a system that combines letters and substitutes letters for words. For instance, the letter “y” is used to represent the word “you” and the letter “b” represents the word “but”. In some respects, Grade 2 braille is a lot like “chatspeak” and takes shortcuts to make for an easier reading and writing experience. In addition to taking a shorter time to read, it also takes up less space, saving paper used on braille books.
  
• Today, English speaking blind children are mostly taught Grade 2 braille, though Grade 1 braille (every letter written out) is still sometimes taught in early elementary school. There is also a Grade 3 braille for any non-standard shorthands.
  
• Braille also developed a system known as decapoint. Decapoint configurations more closely resemble letters, making it easier for sighted people to read it. He even helped develop a machine that would make decapoint easier to write, so that the dots didn’t have to be hand-written with a stylus. It was called a “raphigraphe,” and it was developed with the help of Pierre-Francois-Victor Foucault in the late 1830s and early 1840s.
  

[MIKA27]

X-Men: Days Of Future Past Viral Trailer Suggests Magneto Killed JFK

50 years ago, the world lost US President John F Kennedy to an assassin’s bullet, but was that bullet in fact altered mid-flight by the rogue mutant known as Magneto? That’s the “conspiracy” we’re being let into with this new viral trailer for the awesome-looking X-Men: Days Of Future Past.

The trailer is part of a fake documentary that suggests that Erik Lehnsherr, also known as the metal-manipulating mutant Magneto, bent one of the bullets fired from the grassy knoll in order to hit JFK.

I can’t wait for this movie.

[MIKA27]

Comte de Saint Germain: Rosicrucian, Ascended Master, or Immortal?

Throughout the eighteenth century, there was an unusual character of apparent wealth, influence, and prosperity who was known to have come and gone amidst the royal courts of Europe. This man, whose heritage was often attributed to Transylvanian royalty, was considered a person of great interest and influence, advising the elite governing bodies by day, and dining with the rich aristocracies by night.

This man, known as the Comte de Saint Germain, carried with him an air of mystique the likes of which none during his lifetime had ever matched, or even neared. It was said by some that Saint Germain was an immortal, and that he had somehow uncovered the secrets to eternal youth. His friend Voltaire wrote describing him as ,”A man who knows everything and who never dies,” and Saint Germain was also loved particularly in the courts of Louis XV, who had been said to grant him space during his visits to the Chateau of Chambord.

Amidst allegations that he could live indefinitely, Saint Germain was also a man of obvious wealth, leading some to proclaim he had unraveled the secrets of transmutation via alchemical processes, and hence could have endless access to untold wealth. Though history remembers him as the enigma described here, who was this man in the truest sense, and if any of the claims about him were true, what abilities and resources had the Comte de Saint Germain actually possessed that promoted him to such legendary status?

Throughout his life, those who knew Saint Germain lauded and praised his abilities and seemingly endless amounts of knowledge.

Saint Germain, for instance, was described as a virtuoso on the violin, and a number of musical compositions do exist that are attributed to him. His involvement with secret organizations, which included Rosicrucianism, the Freemasons and Order of the Templars, the Society of Asiatic Brothers and the Knights of Light (which some accounts claim he co-founded), and even the infamous Illuminati, further promoted his appearance as some sort of nearly-divine esotericist. The Count had been known to have erected a laboratory everywhere he stayed, in addition to producing paintings and beautiful works of art. But perhaps the strangest among his many and varied character traits had been the Count’s diet: though he was known to frequently dine with friends, he would eat very little while in polite company, save only a diet consisting primarily of oatmeal, and allowing an occasional lean cut of chicken.

Jacques Sadoul

He is one of the oddest historical enigmas,” wrote the French historian Jacques Sadoul in his 1970 work, Alchemists and Gold. “At the present time, he is supposed to be living in a mansion in Venice!” Sadoul noted curiously, in yet another testament to Saint Germain’s alleged longevity. Sadoul wrote further of the Comte de Saint Germain that the seventeenth century British adept Eirenaeis Philalethes had been fingered as one possible identity of the famous immortal:

A well known fortune teller named Etteila even said that Eirenaeis Philalethes and Count de Saint Germain were one and the same individual. He declared in the Seen Degrees of the Hermetic Philosophic Work, published in 1786, ‘M. de Saint-Germain unites in his own person a perfect knowledge of the three classical sciences, and is the true and only author of Philalethes’Open Door into the Secret Palace of the King.’

However, according the Sadoul, this seemed unlikely. “Personally, I do not agree with this venturesome identification,” he wrote.

“The Count de Saint-Germain appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century, about a hundred years after Philalethes.

Nevertheless, it may be that he, like Nicholas Flamel, attained wisdom and, after a life of wandering, spent a long and serene old age in some secret refuge.”

Sadoul devoted an entire chapter on the Count in his work on alchemy, where he writes that Saint Germain’s actual historical existence begins in 1745 in London, where he was suspected of being a spy. Described as a middle aged man and an eloquent speaker, the name “Comte de Saint Germain” was likely a pseudonym, in that he is known to have related to his associate the Landgrave of Hesse that he called himself “Sanctus Germanus, the Holy Brother.” His more regal title was no doubt a derivative of this earlier proclamation. It is also known that Saint Germain had travelled to France by 1758, where Louis XV had him as guest, and and Madame de Pompadour described, again, a middle aged man, this time of around the age of fifty, “dressed simply but of good taste,” though wearing rings and other stone jewels for which he bore a legendary penchant.

The known life of Saint Germain ended at the Duchy of Schleswig, castle home of his friend Charles, the Landgrave of Hesse, where he supposedly died while his friend and host had been traveling; this occurred on February 27, 1784, at which time he would have presumably been nearing or in his eighties.

The crux of Sadoul’s examination regarding the Comte de Saint Germain deals with his alleged alchemical pursuits, however, as well as his possible association with Rose-Croix (Rosicrucianism). “It has even been said that Saint-Germain was Christian Rosenkreutz himself, the founder of the brotherhood, who, having discovered the Hermetic secret, acquired immortality and throughout history appeared under different identities, including that of Philalethes. Personally, I would not go so far,” Sadoul objects, “but it does seem entirely probable that Saint-Germain was one of the high emissaries of the Rose-Croix, and that it was the Masters of this secret and always mysterious Society who initiated him… In any case, if he was not himself an Adept [in alchemical arts], the Count de Saint-Germain was certainly a Hermetic emissary, for his story can be explained only in light of the Philosopher’s Stone.”

Dennis William Hauk, who maintains a website called Alchemy Lab, features perhaps some of the most extensive written material that examines the belief in alchemical work pertaining to the mysteries surrounding Saint Germain. Reginald Merton’s Comte Saint-Germain, which can be found there, explores most thoroughly the mysteries of Saint Germain, but in doing so, highlights perhaps even more revealing truths about the man than his alchemical aptitudes:

While he deliberately allowed his hearers to believe that his life had lasted inconceivably long, he never actually said so. He proceeded by veiled allusions.

“He diluted the strength of the marvelous in his stories,” said his friend Gleichen, “according to the receptivity of his hearer. When he was telling a fool some event of the time of Charles V, he informed him quite crudely that he had been present. But when he spoke to somebody less credulous, he contented himself with describing the smallest circumstances, the faces and gestures of the speakers, the room and the part of it they were in, with such vivacity and in such detail that his hearers received the impression that he had actually been present at the scene. ‘These fools of Parisians,’ he said to me one day, ‘believe that I am five hundred years old. I confirm them in this idea because I see that it gives them much pleasure — not that I am not infinitely older than I appear.’”

If what Gleichen wrote was indeed true, it would seem that Saint Germain had been fully aware of his own mystique, and that in the right company, perhaps he even elaborated on such points so as to purposefully weave into his personality a time-traveling anti-hero; a man who had seen more than any other mortal ever had, or could, and had perhaps attended such famous historical occurrences as the wedding at Galilee, among others. In truth, while we may never know his true origins, the Comte de Saint Germain was obviously a formidable mind–a genius, perhaps–and a mind that could have easily immersed himself among almost any group. Indeed, had the Count ever really wished to become an intelligence agent for some individual (or perhaps an organization, on count of his involvement with the Rose-Croix), it seems he was fully capable of forming friendships and alliances that spanned the halls and allegiances of a number of courts and palaces; arguably, he did a finer job than anyone of his era.

The true story of Saint Germain may never be fully known, though as an entirely speculative endeavor, one might surmise that his occult eccentricities and endless knowledge would have been poorly spent on mere charlatanism, especially for one who would be equally welcomed among countrymen and royalty alike. The mystical qualities he espoused were alluring, but perhaps were more simply an elaborate curtain to screen against his true motivations and intentions; it hadn’t seemed to be wealth the Count was after, and yet, to at least some reasonable extent, he seemed to possess all of it he needed. Indeed, following things logically, it begins to seem rather likely that the Comte de Saint Germain–who probably never shared with history his true name–could have been an intelligence agent of some sort… but for whom?

Or on the contrary, if it had not been the motivations of law and country that pushed him onward, perhaps instead it had been a deeper philosophy, and a belief in the individual and spiritual propensities held within every man. Merton again cites this desire to spread enlightenment and individuality that birthed the essence of immortality in Saint Germain… something he no doubt saw in each individual, rather than being an element to be physically pursued in life:

It was this immortality of the spirit that Saint-Germain tried to bring to a small group of chosen initiates. He believed that this minority, once it was developed itself, would, in its turn, help to develop another small number, and that a vast spiritual radiation would gradually descend, in beneficent waves, towards the more ignorant masses. It was a sage’s dream, which was never to be realized.

And thus, perhaps we find separate justification for Saint Germain’s alliances with the secret orders and rites, with whom he could freely promulgate the sacred order of man, apart from the seemingly nonsensical comings and goings of the man throughout his years on Earth. Rather than being the stuff of secrets for mere secrecy’s sake, the Hermetic traditions he immersed himself in were key to his own individual essence, and it was something he wished to share with others. Similar figures throughout history, including characters that range from holy men like Jesus and Siddartha, to political philosophers as varied as Machiavelli and Jefferson, have drawn similar appeal for their transcendental attitudes; it is a perennial tradition among such individuals, also, to view them as something greater than those around them, possibly ancient, immortal, or even alien. Gods, in essence… but the universal truths they carry both may be, and yet need not stem entirely from the ethers between life and death or spirit and cosmos, in order simply to be true.

Siddartha

In his life, Saint Germain was an incredible man, and a human being of incredible talent and diversity. His prowess still marvels us today, and his legacy, both as the Hermetic esotericist, and as the timeless comic trickster, live on well beyond the years he existed among us. In achieving that sole individuality the way that he did, he truly did accomplish the unthinkable; for if immortality were truly what he had sought in life, we might all agree now that in death, he quite obviously found it. Indeed, a man need not live forever simply to have a shadow of influence that remains well after the body who cast it has fallen. Saint Germain found true immortality, and of the lasting variety which requires those things beyond the body–perhaps even death–to fully comprehend.