Searching for Big Foot

MANISTIQUE, Michigan (AP) -- Researchers will visit Michigan's Upper Peninsula next month to search for evidence of the legendary creature known as "Bigfoot" or "Sasquatch."

The expedition will focus on eastern Marquette County, said Matthew Moneymaker of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization.

"We'll be looking for evidence supporting a presence. ... We hope to meet local people who might have seen a Sasquatch or heard of someone else who had an encounter," Moneymaker told the Daily Press of Escanaba.

The legend of Bigfoot dates back centuries. But skeptics have challenged accounts of sightings, and practical jokers have staged hoaxes that have included grainy film footage of people dressed in costumes.

But Moneymaker said members of his organization have either glimpsed Bigfoot or gotten close enough to hear the creature in all but three of 30 expeditions in the United States and Canada.

The late Grover Krantz, a Washington State University professor who specialized in cryptozoology, the study of creatures that have not been proven to exist, believed Bigfoot was a "gigantopithecus," a branch of primitive man believed to have existed 3 million years ago.

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

-E. E. Cummings

A World Apart

To Charlie

Dear Charlie,

I’m going to miss you. I will cherish the memories of playing you in chess, tennis and any outside activity. Remember when you came out and played volleyball behind my dad’s house after being released from the hospital. You always had a laid back demeanor and an air of intelligence around you.

It touched me when you told me a few weeks back that you where looking at our wedding album, which you shot, and told me that it was a one of the best things you have ever done. Kelly and I can’t thank you enough for that and I couldn’t have known a better photographer.

You’ve impacted so many people throughout your life and each will have their own special memories of you. I’ll prize mine. Have the chessboard set when next we meet.


David Arroyo Gillett

TorrentSpy Now Tracking Visitors

A court decision reached last month but under seal until Friday could force Web sites to track visitors if the sites become defendants in a lawsuit.

TorrentSpy, a popular BitTorrent search engine, was ordered on May 29 by a federal judge in the Central District of California in Los Angeles to create logs detailing users' activities on the site. The judge, Jacqueline Chooljian, however, granted a stay of the order on Friday to allow TorrentSpy to file an appeal. The appeal must be filed by June 12, according to Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy's attorney.

TorrentSpy has promised in its privacy policy never to track visitors without their consent.

"It is likely that TorrentSpy would turn off access to the U.S. before tracking its users," Rothken said. "If this order were allowed to stand, it would mean that Web sites can be required by discovery judges to track what their users do even if their privacy policy says otherwise."

The Motion Picture Association of America, which represents Columbia Pictures and other top Hollywood film studios, sued TorrentSpy and a host of others in February 2006 as part of a sweep against file-sharing companies. According to the MPAA, the search engine was sued for allegedly making it easier to download pirated files. Representatives of the trade group could not be reached for comment.

The court's decision could have a chilling effect on e-commerce and digital entertainment sites, said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He calls the ruling "unprecedented."

EFF, which advocates for the public in digital rights' cases, is still reviewing the court's decision, but von Lohmann calls what he's seen so far a "troubling court order."

This is believed to be the first time a judge has ordered a defendant to log visitor activity and then hand over the information to the plaintiff.

"In general, a defendant is not required to create new records to hand over in discovery," von Lohmann said. "We shouldn't let Web site logging policies be set by litigation."

Many Web companies keep visitor logs, which can include Internet Protocol addresses, as well as other information. Some choose not to record this data, including EFF, von Lohmann said.

Source: ShoutWire.com

Connie Rice: Top 10 Secrets They Don't Want You to Know About the Debates

(10.) They aren't debates!

"A debate is a head-to-head, spontaneous, structured argument over the merits of an issue," Rice says. "Under the ridiculous 32-page contract that reads like the rules for the Miss America Pageant, there will be no candidate-to-candidate questions, no rebuttal to your opponent's points, no cross questions or cross answers, no rebuttals, no follow-up questions -- that's not a debate, that's a news conference."

(9.) The debates were hijacked from the truly independent League of Women Voters in 1986.

"The League of Women Voters ran these debates with an iron hand as open, transparent, non-partisan events from 1976 to 1984," Rice says. "The men running the major campaigns ended their control when the League defiantly included John Anderson and Ross Perot, and used tough moderators and formats the parties didn't like. The parties snatched the debates from the League and formed the Commission on Presidential Debates -- the CPD -- in 1986."

(8.) The "independent and non-partisan" Commission on Presidential Debates is neither independent nor non-partisan.

"CPD should stand for 'Cloaking-device for Party Deceptions' -- it is not an independent commission on anything. The CPD is under the total control of the Republican and Democratic parties and by definition bipartisan, not non-partisan. Walter Cronkite called CPD-sponsored debates an 'unconscionable fraud.'"

(7.) The secretly negotiated debate contract bars Kerry and Bush from any and all other debates for the entire campaign.

"Under what I call the Debate Suppression and Monopolization Clause of the contract, it is illegal for the candidates to debate each other anywhere else during the campaign," Rice says. "We need a new criminal law for reckless endangerment of democracy."

(6.) The debate contract effectively excludes all other serious presidential candidates from participating in the debates.

"This is what I call the Obstruction of Democratic Debate Rule, which sets an impossibly high threshold for third-party candidates... Where are we, Russia? Isn't Vladimir Putin wiping out democracy in Russia by excluding all opposing candidates from the airwaves during his re-election campaigns? Most new ideas come from third parties -- they should be in the debates."

(5.) All members of the studio audience must be certified as "soft" supporters of Bush and Kerry, under selection procedures they approve.

"It's not enough to rig the debate -- they have to rig the audience, too? The contract reads: 'The debate will take place before a live audience of between 100 and 150 persons who... describe themselves as likely voters who are soft Bush supporters or soft Kerry supporters.' We should crash this charade and jump up in the middle to declare ourselves hard opponents of this Kabuki dance."

(4.) These "soft" audience members must "observe in silence."

"Soft and silent... In what I'm calling the Silence of the Lambs Clause of this absurd contract, the audience may not move, speak, gesture, cough or otherwise show that they are alive and thinking."

(3.) The "extended discussion" portion of the debate cannot exceed 30 seconds.

"Other than the stupidity of the debate contract, what topic do you know that can be extendedly discussed in 30 seconds?"

(2.) Important issues are locked out by the CPD debate rules and party control.

"Really important but sticky or tough issues get axed, because the parties control the questions and topics," Rice says. "For example, in 2000, Gore and Bush mentioned the following issues zero times: Child poverty, the drug war, homelessness, working-class families, NAFTA, prisons, corporate crime and corporate welfare."

(1.) Fortune 100 corporations are the main funders of the CPD-sponsored debates, and the CPD's co-chairs are corporate lobbyists.

The CPD is run by Frank Fahrenkopf, a pharmaceutical industry lobbyist, and Paul Kirk, a top gambling lobbyist," Rice says. "And the biggest muliti-national corporations write the checks that fund the CPD -- Phillip Morris, Anheuser-Busch and dozens more. The audience may have to be silent and motionless, but the corporate sponsors can have banners, beer tents, Budweiser girls handing out pamphlets protesting beer taxes -- a corporate-sponsored circus to go along with the Kabuki Debates. Could we get a more fitting description of our democracy?"

Dark Matter

By Michael Lemonick

Last summer, astronomers used a really clever observing strategy to present the best evidence to date that dark matter, once dismissed as a hare-brained idea, really does make up most of the mass of the universe. The image above does it again, in a slightly different way.

What you're looking at is a giant cluster of galaxies that underwent a collision with another cluster just behind it (we just happen to be on the line of sight that includes both clusters). As the two passed through each other a billion or two years ago, their combined gravity sucked the dark matter in and around the visible galaxies toward the center of the cluster. In the collision's aftermath, the dark matter rebounded, but then slowed and piled up in the bluish ring you can see in the photo.

The ring, and the clump of dark matter you can see in the core of the cluster, aren't really blue. They aren't really visible at all (there's a reason they call it "dark matter.") They're simulations, based on the the fact that gravity distorts the passage of light: the very strong gravity of the dark matter has warped the images of more distant galaxies, and by measuring the amount and type of warping with great precision--something that would have been impossible without the Hubble Space Telescope--the astronomers can infer where and how much dark matter there is.

This simulation shows not only that it's there, but also, because it's clumped in ways the ordinary matter is not, that it's not made of some dark version ordinary matter--confirming what theorists have been saying for years.

The phenomenon that makes this all possible, by the way, known as gravitational lensing, was discussed by Einstein in a celebrated paper back in the 1930s. His conclusion, after explaining how it would work: we'll probably never actually observe this. The first gravitational lens was discovered in 1979, and lensing has since become one of the most powerful tools for probing the universe. For once, Einstein just didn't think imaginatively enough.

aljazeera

This is the new weapon used by insurgents in Iraq. The simplicity and accuracy of the weapon is frightening.