Free WiFi In New Orleans

People still wait for water and electricity, tens of thousand of buildings are uninhabitable, and 1,000 restaurants will not reopen, but Mayor C. Ray Nagin told a news conference today that New Orleans will deploy a free wireless internet network throughout town. The system will also will be used by law enforcement and for an array of city government functions, such as speeding approval of building permits. But, the main idea is to jump start the recovery by making living and doing business a little hospitable. It seems a little crazy, but it makes a sort of twisted sense.

Just this morning, the New York Times reported that "barely one-quarter" of the houses in New Orleans have electricity...
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Ronald Reagan's Greatest Laughs On Sale Now

He did get some laughs. A few of which have appeared right here. Here. And here. Now, you can buy them for your very own:

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all this is that - t-shirt candidate two

...click to blow up...
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all this is that - t-shirt candidate one

click to blow up!

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Another Republican Pleads Guilty To Putting His Hand In The Till

An eight-term California Congressman has admitted taking bribes in a sleazy kickback scheme with a defense contractor. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham pleaded guilty today to conspiracy, tax evasion charges, and mail and wire fraud. He's a Republican. Did you even need to ask?

At his tearful resignation press conference, he said, "I can't undo what I have done but I can atone," he said.

Under Republican caucus rules, Cunningham would have lost his chairmanship of the House Intelligence subcommittee on terrorism and human intelligence. "House Intelligence" seems more and more like an oxymoron every day.

The former Vietnam War flying hero was known as a hawk, often given to cranky outbursts.

Cunningham was fingerprinted and released on his own recognizance until a Feb. 27 sentencing hearing, where he could get 10 years in prison. He agreed to forfeit to the government his Rancho Santa Fe home, more than $1.8 million in cash, antiques, and rugs.

In a statement, prosecutors said Cunningham admitted to receiving at least $2.4 million in bribes paid to him by several conspirators through a variety of methods, including checks totaling over $1 million, cash, rugs, antiques, furniture, yacht club fees and vacations.

Cunningham joins the ever-growing list of G.O.P. leaders either in the hoosegow, or headed there: Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, and Scooter Libby.
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Separated At Birth? Mariah Carey's Siblings

click image to enlarge

Seeing Mariah Carey's photos this weekend in cheerleader outfits and spooky looking baby dolls, I realized she has a couple of brothers out there. Bert Lahr, David Crosby, and Mariah may well have been separated at birth.
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Alien Lore No. 45 - Dreamland/Area 51, With Its Pants Down

Area 51 also known as 'Dreamland' is located at Groom Lake, just outside the desert town of Rachel, Nevada. Of the Area 51 story, that much that is not in dispute. After that, it becomes extremely complicated. There are charges and countercharges, and thousands of pages have been written, from tales of thousands of alien cannibals living underground (Dulce and other places), down to hard-core skeptics, and the true believers who believe just about everything is a conspiracy.

Like Roswell, Area 51 is a mecca for UFOlogists, nutjobs, and tourists. Over the years the U.S government has allegedly bought up the surrounding area to stop the curious from seeing just what goes on there. It has become the subject of many pop-culture references. Area 51 has become accepted as a sort of folklore--whether anything happened there or not. Glenn Campbell wrote an Area 51 Viewer's Guide in the 90's, that is no longer available. I actually bought a copy. . .at this point, he is offering it for sale for $1,500. Glenn--I'll send you my copy and you can reproduce it via OCR...

Many have claimed that bizarre lights in the night sky can be seen near Area 51 and that flying vehicles buzz around performing impossible maneuvers, like figure eights and stopping dead in the air. The "strange lights" have been thought to change in size and brightness, sometimes disappearing completely, and reappearing in an entirely different place.

Area 51 is said to be surrounded by state of the art surveillance equipment, motion sensors, and is patrolled by security guards in unmarked jeeps. The border perimeter signs which state 'use of deadly force authorized'. If you passed these signs you would be arrested and fined up to a $1,000 and spend the night in jail. If you were to continue any further you would be legally shot and killed. This does not seem to have ever actually happened.

A lot of people believe this is the site where the crashed saucers from the Roswell Incident are kept for study and engineering. Scientists study crashed flying saucers and try and work out how the craft was built and powered. Then once this has been accomplished they try and incorporate it into their own designs. And then maybe fly the alien craft, or incredible facsimiles, around.

Bob Lazar says he worked at Area 51 in a section of the base called S-4 from 1988-1990 and has published a lot of material that has become the core of modern Ufology. He says he worked on nine different saucers while at the base. These flying disks were housed in hangers carved into the mountain side. Lazar also stated that his life was threatened after he allowed friends to watch test flights of the saucers. On one trip, he was arrested by security and threatened. He spoke out about his experiences, thinking that the government would never have the nerve to kill him if he went public. Any mysterious accidents he might have would only validate his claims.

Glenn Campbell for many years (until 1999) maintained the excellent UFOmind website and attempted to research and debunk or verify the many facts. Here is his final word (presumably) on Bob Lazar (if you treat this UFOlogy thing like a spectator sport, you might want to quit reading now, or you'll find out the ending. Glenn Campbell wrote in 2002:

"Lazar did not work with flying saucers in an underground hangar near Papoose Lake. He made the story up. Furthermore, he made it up by himself, without the help of any nefarious agency and probably without any deep motivation other than the pleasure of attracting attention and putting people on."

"The story evolved out of a long heritage of pre-existing underground alien base claims, which eventually infected the pilot and conspiracy theorist John Lear. Lear announced, in electronic bulletin board posts in the 1980s, that gray aliens were eating humans in deep underground facilities at Area 51. Lazar met Lear, heard his ramblings, and decided to give Lear what he wanted. Lazar took Lear's paranoid delusions and repackaged them in a much more intelligent and internally consistent rendition. Initially, Lear was the only audience, but he tipped off a Las Vegas TV station, and the frenzy began. The story soon spun out of Lazar's control, and, at least until the recent Art Bell appearance, Lazar seemed to sincerely want it to go away. "

"Lazar's limited knowledge of Area 51 came from secondhand sources, which are plentiful in Las Vegas. Lazar has never been to Area 51. His "S-4" is a relocated and reconfigured version of "Site 4", a real Top Secret radar testing facility west of Area 51. Lazar's saucers and their propulsion system seem plausible to anyone without a physics degree. They were constructed, in Lazar's head, with the same fastidious care that he has lavished on his real-life fireworks, jet cars and other mechanical projects. "Element 115" and its peculiar periodic neighbors were discussed in an article in Scientific American just before Lazar used it to fuel his craft. Lazar has always displayed an exceptional respect for detail and consistency, and he has an extraordinary ability to focus his attention on whatever his current project is, to the exclusion of everything else. His only deficiencies are moral (that is, if you consider lies and the exploitation of others to be somehow 'wrong')."

In the end, Campbell sums it up better than anyone else I have read:

"Those who believe in Lazar are going to continue believing, and those who don't will only say, "I told you so." The funny thing about oral traditions like this is that they continue to live and propagate regardless of the evidence and far beyond their original source. They spawn new stories, like the similar UFO claims of Bill house, aka "Jarod 2" (which is another fascinating personal journey). Lazar's story has grown much bigger than Lazar himself, and no one will ever be able to follow all of its threads. "

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Photograph Of Mimas, A Moon Of Saturn

Image by: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute - Click photograph to enlarge

A moon of Saturn, the Meteor-hammered Mimas, has been photographed by the Cassini spacecraft, now in the vicinity of Saturn. The heavily pockmarked moon is seen in front of Saturn's rings (the scale of the photo is roughly three miles per pixel).

Mimas is mainly ice. The 80 mile wide crater you see is called Herschel and covers nearly one-third the moon's diameter (yeah, it doesn't look like one-third to me either. But what am I going to do?, have someone else measure it?).

Herschel is six miles deep, with a central mountain rising three and a half miles above the crater floor (presumably the nipple-like protrusion, dead center, in the crater). Fracture marks from the impact can be seen on the opposite side of Mimas.

This image, from the Cassini narrow-angle camera, was taken on Oct. 13, 2005, about 442,000 miles from Mimas.

The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Cassini imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
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Painting: The Makeup Of President Bush's Operation Enduring Freedom Coalition

Click the painting to enlarge!
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SETI Shuts Down

Click image to enlarge

SETI@Home, a hugely popular distributed computing project, is being switched off on December 15. What is distributed computing? You take a problem, break it up (or, "chunk" it) into thousands of pieces, and then distribute and solve the pieces on individual computers...in this case hundreds of thousands of PCs.

The SETI project searches for signals from other civilizations. I have run it for years now. Anytime your computer is idle, Seti@home begins processing data from the SETI project. When the problem is finished computing, your PC uploads the results and downloads the next problem. What makes it so popular is the included screen saver that showed your PC's progress in solving the problem. It is compelling and well-done. The problems themselves are data from outer space, captured at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Your computer analyzes radio signals (e.g., noise from outer space), looking for patterns and regular occurrences. . .looking for our cousins out there in space. They built this screensaver to be a graphic indicator of the problem you are solving. Watching it makes you feel like you're contributing! It is fun to watch, and fun to be part of a global project. This was not some nut-job deal, but a legitimate scientific endeavor...even if some of us in the field tilt toward the wack-job end of things.

The SETI team is merging with the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. According to The Inquirer: "The workunit totals of users and teams will be frozen at that point, and the final totals will be available on the web."

A SETI spokesman said that "those who want to keep looking for aliens can do so, but they will also be able to donate computer time studying climate change or other BOINC projects." As if!

SETI is the first distributed computing project and has resulted in thousands of idle machines around the world doing something worthwhile and crunching trillions of numbers. It was fun while it lasted. It will be interesting to see the next distributed projects, and if they capture the public's imagination the way SETI has.
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President Ronald Reagan Glances Out The Window

"You glance out the window and the people are walking around Pennsylvania Avenue and you say, 'I could never say I am going to run down to the drugstore and get some magazines.' I can't do that anymore." President Reagan, 8/11/82, to The Time's Hugh Sidey that he sometimes feels trapped in the White House

"Sometimes I look out there at Pennsylvania Avenue and see people bustling along, and it suddenly dawns on me that probably never again can I just say 'Hey, I'm going down to the drugstore to look at the magazines,' " President Reagan, 12/09/82, discussing his feelings of confinement with a People reporter

"Sometimes I look out the window at Pennsylvania Avenue and wonder what it would be like to be able to just walk down the street to the corner drugstore and look at the magazines. I can't do that anymore." President Reagan, 12/16/82, discussing a regret with The Washington Post

"Sometimes I look out the window at Pennsylvania Avenue and wonder what it would be like to be able to just walk down the street to the corner drugstore and look at the magazines. I can't do that anymore." President Reagan, 12/16/82, shares thought with a radio interviewer
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"You find yourself remembering what it was like when on the spur of the moment you could just yell to your wife that you were going down to the drugstore and get a magazine. You can't do that anymore." President Reagan, 1/27/84 , telling Time magazine about being President
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Painting: Cyclops 2

Click image to enlarge. . .
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