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News Briefs 27-07-2009

By red pill junkieon

Peekaboo!!

  • Good news, comrades: The Russian Navy has declassified its records of encounters with UFOs. Read more here.
  • An orb… with a face?!
  • Beings of light in Argentina —What do you make of that photo?
  • Hubble snaps the sharpest image of Jupiter’s most recent scar left by the impact of a comet. Seems Hubble has received an offer from Perez Hilton to become the paparazzi of the Solar System.
  • No, that’s not a lost frame from Independence Day, that’s the shadow cast by the recent eclipse, in God’s POV.
  • 15 inventions that changed the world, thanks to the Apollo missions —were those part of Kubrick’s plot?
  • The Apollo missions: Brave, spontaneous, improvised, and at times VERY reckless. Would they be allowed to happen now?
  • What is buzzing Aldrin these days? Why, a monolith on Phobos, that is!
  • Going to Mars in just 39 days, thanks to i-Propulsion.
  • The Ornithopter Cometh: The world’s first successful flight of a self-powered, rudderless, flapping aircraft has been achieved by engineers from AeroVironment.
  • (Video) Jake Lloyd, the actor that played lil’ Anakin in Phantom Menace, is complaining about how George Lucas & Jar Jar ruined his teenage years —the Force is SO not with him.
  • The death of ‘Halo’ was the birth of ‘District 9’: Video interview with Peter Jackson about the upcoming movie that promises to change the paradigm of Sci Fi.
  • Peter says “Shock the monkey!“, but in India, they prefer to put it in a reform school.
  • Conservationists celebrate the discovery of an ‘extinct’ leopard eating a monkey. The monkey wasn’t too excited, understandably…
  • California suffers the invasion of terrifying jumbo squids… that are no threat to humans —better luck next time, MonsterQuest.
  • Eff the apples! An injection a day is what’s really going to keep your ticker healthy.
  • Ooooh! Rock me Amadeus! Two long-lost works by the Moe-Zzart discovered.
  • Among the sex & the scandal, Silvio Berlusconi’s recorded conversations yield an even more tantalizing story: that of 30 undeclared ancient graves.
  • 10 lost cities of the ancient world that you can still go visit —Who cares about Vegas, when you can visit Petra!
  • God bless the ancient idiots! Archaeologists discover five Roman shipwrecks untouched since they sank nearly 2,000 years ago.
  • Paleolithic CSI: We killed our cousins the Neanderthals —this might explain why Bigfoot is so eager to hide from us!
  • (Video) Philosopher Slavoj Žižek explains his ideas about Violence [Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5] —‘Violence: Big Ideas/Small Books’ [Amazon US & UK]

Thanks, Kat & Slavoj.

Quote of the Day:

“Think about the strangeness of today’s situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.”

Slavoj Žižek

red pill junkie
Agnostic gnostic, walking conundrum & metaphysical oxymoron (with emphasis in the 'moron' part), the mysterious RPJ leaves a double life: By day he serves as Grand Master of the International Sacred Order of Lucha Libre, but at night he pursues his life-long study of everything considered mysterious and/or 'paranormal' --a term he personally detests... When he's not exploring the web looking for his daily fix of Forteana, he can be found blogging, doodling, fooling around and offering his services as news administrator and writer at The Daily Grail. He also regularly participates in other websites and podcasts like Radio Misterioso and Where Did the Road Go? He impatiently awaits for the return of the mothership in Mexico City. absurdbydesign.com
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7 Comments

  2. Apollo Inventions
    The article on technologies invented for the space program was OK, but a little dry. Here’s a bit from an article I read in the early 90s:

    NASA, as a government agency, is not allowed to profit from what it creates, since it creates using taxpayer money. If NASA were allowed to profit, the path the space program took might have been very different. If NASA were allowed to keep the profits from the patents and licenses for its developments for manned space flight in just four technologies, (1) medical telemetry, (2) cryogenics, (3) microelectronics and (4) systems analysis software, then by the time Apollo 11 landed on the moon, NASA would have realized a 450% profit on the taxpayer funds it was allocated for the manned space flight program.

    I think that’s a more telling summary than just a list of some things that were developed. I also think it says a lot as to why government sponsored spaceflight is not successful in the long run, being boom and bust, and why private/commercial spaceflight, once it gets started, won’t even look back.

    No, I am not the brain specialist…..
    YES. Yes I AM the brain specialist.

    1. Royalties
      That angle of NASA using royalties of the inventions they come up with as a way to pay for their programs is really interesting.

      We all know that many of the technologies developed by the Military eventually trickles down to the private sector, where I presume many retired generals and admirals make a tonne of money. So that NASA could keep one or two royalties for what they invent would have bothered me at all.

      —–
      It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
      It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

      Red Pill Junkie

    1. How DO you avoid stubbing your toe in an invisible building?
      There are buildings on the moon, but ya can’t see ’em, ’cause they’re made of glass!

      I would love for there to be cities on Mars. It would be incredible. At this point, though, I’m probably not digging for Hoagland’s buried ruins, sailing Lowell’s canals, or hitting on Burrough’s naked Martian princesses (REALLY disappointed about that last one!). I am also betting that monolith on Phobos is a rock.

      The mysteries of the solar system await. We’re gonna have to get up close and personal to discover them, though. There were no monsters at the edge of the world, but I think the Grand Canyon and Mayan pyramids more than make up for it!

      1. Wonder Woman
        I bet Wonder woman had the same problem when she landed her invisible jet near the JLA headquarters 😉

        It’s interesting how the true exploration of Space will begin with Mars. After all, it was Mars what inspired many of the people who tried to come up with ways to travel between the planets: Robert Goddard and Von Braun all wanted to make a rocket that could go to Mars; but since they knew that would seem like a crazy endeavor, they changed their goal to something more feasible: the Moon.

        Now it seems that the astronauts want to lure us one more time with the Red Planet, and the mysteries that reside on its surface and that of its moons.

        I recently bought a DVD version of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (Blame Greg & Mac Tonnies for both posting that 4th-dimension clip); and in that TV program Sagan didn’t shy away from the fact that some features in Mars could be artificial. He even mentioned the famous Face in the update he made for the series in 2000, claiming he was almost convinced it was a feature carved by the winds and natural forces, but that it didn’t hurt to take a closer look at it.

        —–
        It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
        It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

        Red Pill Junkie

  4. Beings of light
    Sadly it seems they’re just ordinary people in the sunlight, and the exposure time (or photoshopping ?) did the rest. They’re just about to walk into the shadow, out of a sunlit area which is visible in the rock wall in the upper left corner, and on the ground behind them – where you can also make out their shadows.

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