The Daily Drift

Punny, Very Punny

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Today in History

526   St. John I ends his reign as Catholic Pope.  
1643   Queen Anne, the widow of Louis XIII, is granted sole and absolute power as regent by the Paris parliament, overriding the late king's will.  
1652   A law is passed in Rhode Island banning slavery in the colonies but it causes little stir and seems unlikely to be enforced.  
1792   Russian troops invade Poland.  
1802   Britain declares war on France.  
1804   Napoleon Bonaparte becomes the Emperor of France.  
1828   The Battle of Las Piedras, between Uruguay and Brazil, ends. 1860   Abraham Lincoln is nominated for president.  
1864   The fighting at Spotsylvania in Virginia, reaches its peak at the Bloody Angle.  
1896   The Supreme Court's decision on Plessy v. Ferguson upholds the "separate but equal" policy in the United States.  
1904   Brigand Raizuli kidnaps American Ion H. Perdicaris in Morocco.  
1917   The U.S. Congress passes the Selective Service act, calling up soldiers to fight World War I.  
1931   Japanese pilot Seiji Yoshihara crashes his plane in the Pacific Ocean while trying to be the first to cross the ocean nonstop. He is picked up seven hours later by a passing ship.  
1933   President Franklin Roosevelt signs the Tennessee Valley Authority Act.  
1942   New York ends night baseball games for the rest of World War II.  
1944   The Allies finally capture Monte Cassino in Italy. 1
951   The United Nations moves its headquarters to New York city.  
1969   Two battalions of the 101st Airborne Division assault Hill 937 but cannot reach the top because of muddy conditions.  
1974   India becomes sixth nation to explode an atomic bomb.  
1980   After rumbling for two months, Mount Saint Helens, in Washington, erupts 3 times in 24 hours.

Non Sequitur

Oh, the (in)Humanity!

Venezuela is Running Out of Toilet Paper

 Venezuela is facing a dire crisis. The economy is in deep doo-doo and the government is now scrambling to wipe out the unexpected problem of ... toilet paper shortage:

First milk, butter, coffee and cornmeal ran short. Now Venezuela is running out of the most basic of necessities – toilet paper.
Blaming political opponents for the shortfall, as it does for other shortages, the government says it will import 50m rolls to boost supplies.
That was little comfort to consumers struggling to find toilet paper on Wednesday.
"This is the last straw," said Manuel Fagundes, a shopper hunting for tissue in Caracas. "I'm 71 years old and this is the first time I've seen this."
One supermarket visited by the Associated Press in the capital on Wednesday was out of toilet paper. Another had just received a fresh batch, and it quickly filled up with shoppers as the word spread.
"I've been looking for it for two weeks," said Cristina Ramos. "I was told that they had some here and now I'm in line."

Economists blame government price control that caused Soviet Union-like shortages of toilet paper and other basic commodities: More

The truth hurts

Company that oversees US "six-strikes" copyright shakedown has its company status revoked

The Center for Copyright Information -- a company established by the RIAA, MPAA and various ISPs -- to oversee the American six-strikes copyright enforcement status has had its company status revoked and faces fines and other penalties. It appears that they forgot to file their government paperwork and pay their fees; they promise that they'll be back online once it's sorted out.

The revocation means that CCI’s articles of organization are void, most likely because the company forgot to file the proper paperwork or pay its fees.
“If entity’s status is revoked then articles of incorporation / organization shall be void and all powers conferred upon such entity are declared inoperative, and, in the case of a foreign entity, the certificate of foreign registration shall be revoked and all powers conferred hereunder shall be inoperative,” the DCRA explains.
Unfortunately for the CCI, the DCRA doesn’t have a strike based system and the company is now facing civil penalties and fines.
It appears that company status was revoked last year which means that other businesses now have the option to take over the name. That would be quite an embarrassment, to say the least, and also presents an opportunity to scammers.
“When a Washington DC corporation is revoked by the DCRA, its name is reserved and protected until December 31st of the year the corporation is revoked. After December 31st, other business entities may use the corporations name,” the DCRA explains on its website.

“Six Strikes” Anti-Piracy Outfit Loses Company Status, Faces Penalties 

Denial-of-Service attacker tells Brian Krebs he's working for the FBI

by Cory Doctorow 

Last week, I blogged Brian Krebs's amazing piece on AsylumBooter, a cheesy denial-of-service-for-hire site apparently run by a 17-year-old Chicago-area honor-roll student named Chandler Downs, whose PayPal account was flush with more than $30,000 paid by people who'd launched more than 10,000 online attacks.
Now, Krebs has uncovered an even weirder booter story: Ragebooter is another DoS company, but this one is run by a guy who claims to be working part time for the FBI, and who says that the FBI has its own login to his site, and review all the IP addresses and other traffic data it logs.

Ragebooter.net’s registration records are hidden behind WHOIS privacy protection services. But according to a historic WHOIS lookup at domaintools.com, that veil of secrecy briefly fell away when the site was moved behind Cloudflare.com, a content distribution network that also protects sites against DDoS attacks like the ones Ragebooter and its ilk help to create (as I noted in Monday’s story, some of the biggest targets of booter services are in fact other booter services). For a brief period in Oct. 2012, the WHOIS records showed that ragebooter.net was registered by a Justin Poland in Memphis...
... “I also work for the FBI on Tuesdays at 1pm in memphis, tn,” Poland wrote. “They allow me to continue this business and have full access. The FBI also use the site so that they can moniter [sic] the activitys [sic] of online users.. They even added a nice IP logger that logs the users IP when they login.”
When I asked Poland to provide more information that I might use to verify his claims that he was working for the FBI, the conversation turned combative, and he informed me that I wasn’t allowed to use any of the information he’d already shared with me. I replied that I hadn’t and wouldn’t agree that any of our discussion was to be off the record, and he in turn promised to sue me if I ran this story. That was more or less the end of that conversation.

Poland gave Krebs the working personal number of an FBI agent identified as "Agent Lies," who put him onto the FBI's press contact, who stonewalled. Meanwhile, Ragebooter leaks a lot of info and there's some reason to believe that the FBI really does have its own back door.

Ragebooter: ‘Legit’ DDoS Service, or Fed Backdoor?

Man disguised as clown tried to break into home

A man disguised as a clown tried to break into a Madison County, Tennessee home early on Tuesday morning, according to the Madison County Sheriff’s Department. “He had the face painted a white color and some circles dark around,” said the woman who lives at the house.

Retirement is Bad For Your Health

If you're tired of being a working stiff and look forward to retirement, here's a study that will spoil your day: according to British think tank Institute of Economic Affairs, retirement is harmful to your health.

The study [...] found that retirement results in a "drastic decline in health" in the medium and long term.
The IEA said the study suggests people should work for longer for health as well as economic reasons. [...]
The study suggests there is a small boost to health immediately after retirement, before a significant decline in the longer term.
Retirement is found to increase the chances of suffering from clinical depression by 40%, while you are 60% more likely to suffer from a physical condition.
The effect is the same for men and women, while the chances of becoming ill appear to increase with the length of time spent in retirement.

Thank goodness that the world's economy has taken care of that pesky problem for many of us who now can't afford to retire! More

Five Warning Signs That You're Finally Getting Older

John Cheese at Cracked is 39, and starting to recognize the signs of aging. I can relate to several of these. I don't mind slang terms yet, but I find that it now takes a lot to impress me.

Eventually, you reach a point where you have heard virtually every debate point for every topic ever conceived by man. Nothing anyone says is new. Nothing anyone says is convincing the other side to "convert" to their line of thinking. Consider how long debates have been around between atheists and Christians, legalization and anti-drug groups, pro-lifers and pro-choicers, Democrats and Republicans, and on and on. So many of the talking points and debate styles overlap from topic to topic that you can damn near lip sync to them as they're being said. All debates have turned into a Nickelback album.

Maybe it says something about how much older I am that I don't even know what Nickelback sounds like. But he's got some good points in this list, in plenty of NSFW language. More

An Illustrated History Of Gas Masks

The gas mask has a history that dates back thousands of years, though it wasn't until World War I that it became nightmare fodder for Doctor Who and countless other stories. Here is a sometimes terrifying history of the gas mask, from its beginnings through the present day.

Random Celebrity Photo

Mustache Transplant

Mustache-challenged? Do you feel like less of a man because you cannot grow a proper upper lipholstery? Fear not! Head over to Turkey, where you can get a mustache transplant:

The procedure uses a technique called follicle-hair extraction, in which doctors remove clusters of hair from the more hirsute areas of the body and implant them along the lip or cheeks to magnify a mustache or beef-up a beard.
Performed under local anesthetic, the surgery takes around five hours and can cost up to $5,000, cosmetic surgeons say. Tourism agencies have begun offering "transplant packages" combining facial-hair operations with a shopping vacation in Istanbul or beachside retreat on the Mediterranean coast.

Joe Parkinson of The Wall Street Journal explains: Here.

Racial Tolerance Around the World

The map above is based on information from the World Values Survey, which does ongoing research. The data from a single question was used to gauge racist attitudes around the world. Two Swedish economists used the data for a study to determine if there was any correlation between economic freedom and racism in different countries.

Among the dozens of questions that World Values asks, the Swedish economists found one that, they believe, could be a pretty good indicator of tolerance for other races. The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors. Some respondents, picking from a list, chose “people of a different race.” The more frequently that people in a given country say they don’t want neighbors from other races, the economists reasoned, the less racially tolerant you could call that society. (The study concluded that economic freedom had no correlation with racial tolerance, but it does appear to correlate with tolerance toward homosexuals.)

Max Fisher used the raw data from the study to create the map. It has been pointed out that the survey results may be affected by cultural differences in answering survey questions honestly. At the Washington Post, you can enlarge the map and read more about the project. More

Genghis Khan and the climate

New research is suggesting that the rise of the Mongolian Empire might have been linked to natural variation in the climate cycle.

Archaeology and Paleontology

Ancient rolled scrolls readable thanks to new tech

Pioneering X-ray technology is making it possible to read fragile rolled-up historical documents for the first time in centuries. Old parchment is often extremely dry and liable to crack and crumble if any attempt is [...]

Actor Johnny Depp immortalized in ancient fossil find

A scientist has discovered an ancient extinct creature with ‘scissor hand-like’ claws in fossil records and has named it in honor of his favorite movie star. The 505 million year old fossil called Kooteninchela deppi [...]

Ziggy

Mesmerizing Sun Halo

Last Tuesday, residents of New York and the surrounding area were privy to a really amazing celestial treat; it's called a Sun Halo, and one spent some time today hovering over The Big Apple and making people wonder if Martians were finally invading.

A halo is a type of optical phenomenon that can happen around the sun or moon. It's also referred to as a 22-degree halo because it forms a ring exactly 22-degrees from the sun. In order for a Sun halo to happen, a thin veil of high-level clouds has to put some hexagonal ice crystals at exactly right spot.

Astronomical News

Opportunity Breaks NASA's 40-Year Roving Record

After nine years of hard Mars roving, Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has broken a 40-year-old extraterrestrial distance record.

Dust Devils Rip Up Mars' 'Etch A Sketch' Surface

In side-by-side comparisons of observations of the same Mars region years apart, the active Martian atmosphere acts like an Etch A Sketch, rubbing out dust devils' tracks only for them to re-form years later.

Did 'Star Trek' Give Rise to the Space Shuttle?

'Star Trek Into Darkness' warped into theaters Thursday, May 16. Is there a link between Starfleet and NASA's shuttle fleet?

Does Alien Life Thrive in Venus' Mysterious Clouds?

Venus might not be somewhere you'd expect to find life, but there's a chance that its sulfrous clouds could be hiding something.

When (Part of) Apollo 13 Reached the Moon

Even though Apollo 13 never landed on the moon, the upper stage of it's Saturn V rocket did.

Weather on the Outer Planets Only Goes So Deep

Weather on the Outer Planets Only Goes So Deep

What is the long-range weather forecast for the giant planets Uranus and Neptune? These planets are home to extreme winds blowing at speeds of over 1000 km/hour, hurricane-like storms as large around as Earth, immense [...]

Ten Terrifying Planets You Don't Want To Visit

Space exploration is a grand adventure. Its mystery has always captivated us and the inevitable discoveries to come will add to the many cosmological insights we already have. But let this list serve as a warning for any weary inter-solar travelers. The universe can be a very frightening place. I hope no one should ever find themselves stuck in one of these ten worlds.

Daily Comic Relief

Why Your Ears Pop

(And What To Do If They Don't)

Ear popping - also called ear clearing - is any of various maneuvers to equalize the pressure in the middle ear with the outside pressure, by letting air enter along the Eustachian tubes, as this does not always happen automatically when the pressure in the middle ear is lower than the outside pressure.

This need can arise in scuba diving, skydiving, fast descent in an aircraft, and being put into pressure in a caisson or similar pressure-bearing structure, or sometimes even simply traveling at fast speeds in an automobile. When that happens, learn how to fix it.

Teenage chemistry enthusiast won't be charged with felony, will go to space camp

Kiera Wilmot — the Florida 16-year-old who created a small explosion just outside her school before classes started by mixing cleaning solution and tin foil (she was just curious, nobody was harmed) — will not be charged with a felony, after all. Florida State Attorneys dropped the charges against Wilmot yesterday. After her case garnered national attention, she ended up with a lawyer who has defended her mostly for free. There's no word yet on whether she'll be allowed to return to the school that expelled her and pressed charges in the first place.
In the meantime, the Internet has created a nice happy ending here. Homer Hickam — the writer and former NASA engineer whose memoir is the basis of the movie October Sky — started a Crowdtilt campaign to send Wilmot and her twin sister Kayla to the Advanced Space Academy program at the U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala.. The cost of space camp can run upwards of $1200. Hickam paid for Kiera Wilmot to go and the Crowdtilt campaign raised the other $1200 for her sister, plus extra money for their travel expenses. The campaign hit its $2500 goal in just two days and is now up to $2920. Hickam says the extra money is going to the girls' mother.
A second Crowdtilt campaign raised more than $8000 for a Kiera Wilmot Defense Fund. Now that the charges have been dropped, that money will go into a trust, to pay the few legal expenses the family does have and to cover costs associated with Wilmot's education — especially since it's still unclear whether she'll be allowed back into the local public school.
Good job, Internet!

Scientists Managed to Clone Human Embryos

Donor egg held by pipette prior to nuclear extraction.

A significant, and undoubtedly controversial, milestone in stem cell therapy was reached yesterday. Scientists at the Oregon Health and Science University managed to achieve the Holy Grail of stem cell research: they've cloned a human embryo.

OHSU cell biologist Shoukhrat Mitalipov led a team of 23 scientists who methodically culled the lessons learned from stem cell research on amphibians, mice and rhesus monkeys — as well as from the abundant failures of others in the field. They devised a welter of new techniques to use the DNA of a fully formed skin cell in its most primitive embryonic form. [...]
In past efforts to coax such an assemblage of components to life, researchers have burned through dozens of donor eggs without getting any embryos even to the 16-cell stage at which stem cells become a remote possibility.
This time, the researchers said their methods were so efficient that they could create at least one embryonic stem cell line from each batch of eggs donated by 10 female volunteers. In one case, a single donor produced eight eggs of such exceptional quality that researchers were able to derive four embryonic stem cell lines.

Some hailed the development as an important advance in the paving the way to treat a range of diseases, but others feared that it's one step closer to cloning humans.
Melissa Healy of the Los Angeles Times has the post: Here.

Why science needs silly-sounding research

Earlier this week, scientists announced that they'd found evidence suggesting malaria-carrying mosquitoes are more attracted to the smell of human flesh than healthy mosquitoes. This research — which, I'm sure you'll agree, has some important implications — grew out of research that could be deemed very silly. In fact, this new finding was built on IgNobel-winning research published back in 1996, which found that malaria mosquitoes are attracted to the smell of stinky cheese. 

Here's 500 Years Of Rare Science Illustrations

Natural Histories: Extraordinary Rare Book Selections from the American Museum of Natural History Library brings together an extraordinary collection of works from the Rare Book Room and Rare Book Collections of the American Museum of Natural History's Research Library, spanning five centuries of anthropology, astronomy, earth science, paleontology, and zoology representing all seven continents.

Each highlighted work is accompanied by a short essay exploring its significance, what makes it rare - scarcity, uniqueness, age, binding type, size, value, or nature of the illustrations - and its place in natural history. 500 Years of Rare Science Illustrations.

Animal News

Look out! Invasive crazy ants displacing fire ants in southeast

Invasive “crazy ants” are displacing fire ants in areas across the southeastern United States, according to researchers at The University of Texas at Austin. It’s the latest in a history of ant invasions from the [...]

First Gray Whale Recorded in Southern Hemisphere

Is the sighting of a gray whale off Namibia a sign of climate change?

Kangaroo in plaster cast after breaking her arm

A kangaroo has her arm in plaster after breaking it in an accident at her zoo enclosure in Munich, Germany. Keepers brought in vets after noticing that poorly Helena - a red kangaroo - was clearly in pain and cradling her arm.

"She was holding her arm and looked in pain. We knew something must be wrong." said a zoo spokesman. "After tranquilizing her we discovered she had a fracture in her left arm which was reset and covered in a plaster cast,"

"It is not stopping her hopping around and playing with the other kangaroos. The support means she is no longer in pain. She is very lively and enjoys jumping around.

"A lot of visitors have asked us how she hurt her arm. We don't know but think she must have fell whilst playing. It will come off in a few weeks and we're expecting her to make a full recovery," they added.

Animal Pictures