Official Center of the World, Felicity, California Felicity, California Time to recalibrate yourself. Drive just west of the border between Arizona and southern California, and stop in the Sonoran Desert -- one of the hottest and driest places in the U.S. Step inside the pyramid. Stand on the metal disk. The Center of the World disk. Jacques-Andre Istel has officially established the Center of the World here, and he has built a town around it to bolster his claim (The Center of the World is also said to be elsewhere, making it easier for those who wish to be centered). Mayor Istel is a gracious, well-mannered man with a vision. Jacques-Andre saw this barren wasteland while serving as a Marine in the Korean War. Mayor greets visitors. First, Jacques-Andre wrote a children's book which helped convince Imperial County, California, to legally recognize a spot on his property as the official Center of the World (it is also recognized as such by the Institut Geographique National of France). The Mayor needed a way to mark his Center.
How a 1,500-ton ocean liner turns into a cannibal-rat-infested ghost ship The UK is alarmed—or at least its press is. “A ghost ship carrying nothing but disease-ridden rats could be about to make land on Britain’s shore, experts have warned,” frets The Independent. The boat under discussion—the Lyubov Orlova—hasn’t been heard from since February and March 2013, shortly after the abandoned ship was cut loose from a tug line and went adrift. The headlines reflect guesses that recent storms have sent the Lyubov Orlova reeling toward the UK. How does an unmanned 1,565 ton (1,420 tonne) cruise ship just take off on its own like that? The reasons are pretty simple. In fact, ghost ships like Lyubov Orlova aren’t all that rare. The Lyubov Orlova, in its cruise ship days. As for why the ship’s crew would disappear, the reasons could be anything from piracy to psychiatric breaks to tax fraud (link in Italian)—or just straight-up abandonment. Some crew disappearances remain mysterious, though. Red square indicates estimated location as of Dec. 2013.
Kurt Vonnegut - The Shapes of Stories The Shapes of Stories by Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut grained worldwide fame and adoration through the publication of his novels, including Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, and more. But is was his rejected master's thesis in anthropology that he called his prettiest contribution to his culture. The basic idea of his thesis was that a story's main character has ups and downs that can be graphed to reveal the story's shape. The shape of a society's stories, he said, is the least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads. Let's have a look. Man in Hole The main character gets into trouble then gets out of it again and ends up better off for the experience. Boy Meets Girl The main character comes across something wonderful, gets it, loses it, then gets it back forever. From Bad to Worse The main character stats off poorly then gets continually worse with no hope for improvement. Which Way Is Up?
Free Energy Systems "Q: Then electricity is, in essence, a flow of electrons?A: Yes. Q: You say they are tapped. Where are they tapped from? What is the source of these free electrons? Q: The electrons of the conductor itself are being passed along, and this is the manifestation of the flow of electricity? Q: In what sense am I not correct? Q: Electrical energy will be present in everything. Q: Okay. Q: What qualities does the superconductor have that contributes to this accelerating of flow? Q: What creates a cycling magnetic pulse? Q: How do you create a gravity vacuum? Q: You said that a superconductor separates the electrons, thus exciting the flow. Q: How is that different from a normal electric flow? Q: Is this separation of electrons a key to this process? Q: What additional conditions or qualities contribute to the separating of electrons? Q: (L) What defines a superconductor? Q: So, there is no actual possibility for a true superconductor with absolutely zero resistance? Q: Well it is VERY cold...
Information Destruction Through History - Global Data Vault Information Destruction Through History Information the most valuable commodity in the world. All human progress depends on the accumulation and preservation of information. When information is lost, human progress suffers. This infographic displays some of the most significant loses of information human civilization has suffered. Throughout the ages, it has happened again and again. During the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990’s, the 17,000 volumes of the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo were directly targeted, along with the National Museum and National Library. In our estimate the equivalent of 34,524.8GB of information created by humans that we can quantify within reasonable certainty has been destroyed throughout our history. There are many well known accounts of destroyed libraries and houses of information that we were unable to include in this figure due to a lack of reputable sources on the amounts of information destroyed. And the destruction continues.
Dark Arts 17inShare Jump To Close We’re in a weird time for the way the future looks; somehow House of Cards can slyly introduce a floating text-message interface to their present-day political drama without so much as blinking, but most of our iconic near- and far-future worlds run on tracks laid down well before the ’90s. And it’s not just the recycling of every franchise from Star Trek to RoboCop: Avatar’s and Prometheus’ huge budgets couldn’t hide their indebtedness to the grandiose sci-fi storyboards of the ’70s. It’s an odd misalignment, considering that cyberpunk outran these operatic, alien worlds more than three decades ago. Save for a few exceptions — Neill Blomkamp’s biotech-heavy District 9, the straight-up horrifying Black Mirror — technophilic dystopias kind of fell off around the time of the last Matrix. Moore’s law is partially at fault — anyone who watched that video of Boston Dynamics’ WildCat robot knows what it feels like to realize the present is also the future.
Can a $70 Light Bulb Change Your Life?: Video How You Might Come to Believe You've Been Abducted by an Alien Unless, you know, you’ve actually been abducted. On a night in October 1957, a 23-year-old Brazilian farmer named Antonio Vilas-Boas, still out plowing the fields, looked up to see a strange red light in the sky. Then he noticed it was getting closer. It looked, he said, egg-shaped, with a spinning top. Three legs emerged from the craft as it descended upon the field where Vilas-Boas worked. He tried to flee by tractor. The engine died shortly thereafter, and Vilas-Boas took off on foot. Aboard the space egg, Vilas-Bolas was stripped naked, covered in gel, and carried through a doorway with strange red symbols written above it, which he later drew for investigators working on his case. According to Vilas-Boas, a female humanoid, much like the others in appearance but with larger blue eyes, long platinum-white hair, and bright-red underarm and pubic hair (no overalls for her!) In the early 1990s, Harvard psychiatrist John E. I have this Google News alert that tracks mentions of “UFO.”
The Sugar Daddy Scholarship Elliot is 45, gainfully employed, lonesome, and looking for a pretty young college girl to spend money on. Ideally he would serve as her benefactor and mentor; she would express gratitude through sexual favors. At the very least she’d accompany him to dinner on a Saturday night and, if she understood the arrangement, give him a peek of those lace knickers he bought her. If all went well between the sheets, he’d even offer to pay her college tuition. Elliot is fictional, but there are more than two million men like him registered as “sugar daddies” on the dating website SeekingArrangement, many of whom are seeking out cash-strapped college students. "Women hold 60 percent of bachelor degrees and drop out at a lower rate because they are less discouraged by financial burden compared to men," according to promotional material from SeekingArrangement. But Wade is trying to upend what he sees as the myths of sugar daddydom.
A Bird Flies South, and It’s News Photo DUXBURY, Mass. — The snowy owl seemed almost complacent, showing the confidence of a top predator whose bright yellow eyes suggested she might be sizing you up as a weaker combatant — or perhaps a large snack. She had been where no bird should safely be — Logan International Airport in Boston — and now, regal and imposing in brief captivity, she represented the latest of her kind to arrive in a remarkable and growing winter’s wandering to the Lower 48. Not only is the Boston area seeing the largest number of snowy owls ever recorded, they are popping up in territory far from their usual habitat near the Arctic Circle. Ecstatic bird watchers have spotted them perched atop the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and in Washington (where one made headlines for being struck by a bus), in Little Rock, Ark., and northern Florida — even in Bermuda. “This year’s been bizarre,” said Dan Haas, a birder in Maryland. Sighting one, especially in an unexpected place, can be thrilling for birders. Ms. Mr.
The Murders at the Lake Editor's note: This story has been serialized.Book I: The CopBook II: The DetectiveBook III: The LawyerBook IV: The Journalist Book V: The Inmate Prologue Every murder involves a vast web of people, from the witnesses and the detectives who first come to the scene, to the lawyers and the juries who examine the facts, to the families of the victims, who must make sense of the aftermath. The more traumatic the killing, the more intricate the web. In the summer of 1982 the city of Waco was confronted with the most vicious crime it had ever seen: three teenagers were savagely stabbed to death, for no apparent reason, at a park by a lake on the edge of town. A word about the reporting. I. Patrol sergeant Truman Simons was driving down Franklin Avenue, in downtown Waco, when the call came over the police radio. The call was urgent: a body had been discovered at Speegleville Park, near Lake Waco. Simons knew Waco well. The sergeant got on his hands and knees and crawled under the branches.
La complainte du progrès L’argent ne fait pas le bonheur. Et la croissance économique ne rend pas plus heureux. Passé un certain niveau de richesse, l’augmentation des revenus par habitant ne réduit pas les maux qui affligent nos sociétés modernes. Alors quoi ? En puisant des statistiques à plus de 200 sources et en compilant les études durant 30 ans, les deux épidémiologistes Richard Wilkinson et Kate Pickett ont découvert un lien très étroit entre les iniquités de revenus et les problèmes sociaux. « C’était estomaquant pour moi ! Le constat des chercheurs est frappant : « Plus la différence est importante entre les riches et les pauvres à l’intérieur de la société, plus il y a d’homicides, de prisonniers, de violence, d’obésité, d’adolescentes enceintes, de décrochage scolaire », énumère le fondateur de la firme de publicité Cossette, aujourd’hui professeur de publicité sociale à l’Université Laval. « Au fond, la pauvreté est toujours relative, explique M.
Brain During An Out Of Body Experience