New Ladybug Tucks Head Like Turtle

This new ladybug, discovered by a graduate student, can tuck its head into it's throat like a turtle. Read more

Rarest dog genetically vulnerable

Rarest dog genetically vulnerable

Populations of the world's rarest dog, the Ethiopian wolf, are genetically fragmenting, scientists have found. BBC Nature

• Race to save world's rarest wolf
• Vaccine hopes for Ethiopian wolf

The Gharial

Good News For The Critically Endangered Indian Crocodile?

This strange looking creature, with its immensely long and delicate snout is the gharial (Gavialis gangeticus). Until very recently it thrived throughout the Indian sub-continent but now it numbers less than a few hundred in the wild. It seems destined for extinction, like so many other species. Is there a future for the gharial on earth?

How To: Fish in the desert

In the United Arab Emirates, a freshwater lake has appeared in the middle of the desert. The oasis is beautiful and full of life, and it's risen 35 feet since 2011. It's also probably accidentally man-made.
Hydrologists believe the lake formed from recycled drinking water (and toilet water). The nearby city of Al Ain pumps in desalinated sea water, uses it for drinking and flushing the toilet, cleans it in a sewage treatment plant, and then re-uses it to water plants. All of that water ends up in the soil and, at the lake site, it comes back up.
The water is clean, writes Ari Daniel Shapiro at NPR. Don't worry about that. Instead, the major side-effect of the lake is change, as scientists watch the desert ecosystem that used to exist on the site decline, and a new one rise to take its place. It's a great story that shows how complicated discussions about ecology can be. On the one hand, you're losing something valuable. At least in this one spot. On the other hand, you're definitely gaining something valuable, too.

"With every species that we lose, it's like rolling the dice. The whole ecosystem could crash down," Howarth says.
But Clark, with the U.S. Geological Survey, says he's not so worried about the desert ecosystem. He says the lake is tiny compared to the vast amount of desert in this part of the world. "If I look through the binoculars, there's, like, seven different kinds of herons. There's greater cormorants. There's ferruginous ducks, which are another very rare worldwide species," Clark says. "There's about 15 of them out here."
This year, three types of birds bred at this lake. They've never been able to breed before in the United Arab Emirates. But this lake, and the others like it, have changed all that. There are fish appearing in these lakes as well. Fish eggs cling to the feet and legs of the herons. So as the birds shuttle between old and new lakes, the eggs fall off and hatch. That's how you get fish in a desert.

Read the full story at NPR

Capturing Birds In Flight

A shot of a bird in flight has always been a challenge to photographers. Seeing a perfect print image only serves to make them eager to create the same result. Photographing a bird in flight presents one problem, but capturing that one special bird-in-flight shot that's in focus and has good composition plus good light can represent a whole set of problems.

Everyone has his share of good flight shots where the bird may be just a tiny bit soft. Those are easy. But, how do you get a great flight shot?

Animal Pictures

The Daily Drift

 "Nuff Said!"

Some of our readers today have been in:

Cebu City, Philippines

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia

Lima, Peru

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Lahore, Pakistan

Bangkok, Thailand

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Johor Bahru, Malaysia

Cape Town, South Africa

Ampang, Malaysia

San Juan, Puerto Rico

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Today in History

97		To placate the Praetorians of Germany, Nerva of Rome adopts Trajan, the Spanish-born governor of lower Germany.
1553		Michael Servetus, who discovered the pulmonary circulation of the blood, is burned for heresy in Switzerland.
1612		A Polish army that invaded Russia capitulates to Prince Dimitri Pojarski and his Cossacks.
1806		Emperor Napoleon enters Berlin.
1809		President James Madison orders the annexation of the western part of West Florida. Settlers there had rebelled against Spanish authority.
1862		A Confederate force is routed at the Battle of Georgia Landing, near Bayou Lafourche in Louisiana.
1870		The French fortress of Metz surrenders to the Prussian Army.
1873		Farmer Joseph F. Glidden applies for a patent on barbed wire. Glidden eventually received five patents and is generally considered the inventor of barbed wire.
1891		D. B. Downing, inventor, is awarded a patent for the street letter (mail) box.
1904		The New York subway officially opens running from the Brooklyn Bridge uptown to Broadway at 145th Street.
1907		The first trial in the Eulenberg Affair ends in Germany.
1917		20,000 women march in a suffrage parade in New York. As the largest state and the first on the East Coast to do so, New York has an important effect on the movement to grant all women the vote in all elections.
1922		In Italy, liberal Luigi Facta's cabinet resigns after threats from Mussolini that "either the government will be given to us or we will seize it by marching on Rome." Mussolini calls for a general mobilization of all Fascists.
1927		Fox Movie-tone news, the first sound news film, is released.
1941		In a broadcast to the nation on Navy Day, President Franklin Roosevelt declares: "America has been attacked, the shooting has started." He does not ask for full-scale war yet, realizing that many Americans are not yet ready for such a step.
1962		Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev offers to remove Soviet missile bases in Cuba if the U.S. removes its missile bases in Turkey.

Non Sequitur

Frankenstorm

Hurricane Sandy is roaring through the Caribbean and is expected to inch up the East Coast of the US, landing in New York City early next week. A winter storm is brewing in the west, and is expected to reach New York City early next week. A mass of Arctic air is rushing down from the north, and is expected to reach New York City early next week. What happens when these weather events collide? The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dubbed it "Frankenstorm." And according to NOAA forecaster Jim Cisco, it won't be just New York that will be affected: the storm may cover a large part of the East Coast and reach inland as far as Ohio.

Coastal areas from Florida to Maine will feel some effects, mostly from the hurricane part, he said, and the other parts of the storm will reach inland from North Carolina northward.

"It will get broader. It won't be as intense, but its effects will be spread over a very large area," the hurricane center's chief hurricane specialist, James Franklin, said Thursday.

One of the more messy aspects of the expected storm is that it just won't leave. The worst of it should peak early Tuesday, but it will stretch into midweek, forecasters say. Weather may start clearing in the mid-Atlantic Nov. 1 and Nov. 2 in the Northeast, Cisco said.

"It's almost a weeklong, five-day, six-day event," Cisco said Thursday from NOAA's northern storm forecast center in near Washington. "It's going to be a widespread serious storm."

Read more about Frankenstorm. here

The TSA is now giving tips to terrorists

Sometimes I feel like people are being too mean to the TSA. (NOT)
Then one read stories like this, from the Washington Post the other day:

Flight enthusiasts, however, recently discovered that the bar codes printed on all boarding passes — which travelers can obtain up to 24 hours before arriving at the airport — contain information on which security screening a passenger is set to receive.
Details about the vulnerability spread after John Butler, an aviation blogger, drew attention to it in a post late last week. Butler said he had discovered that information stored within the bar codes of boarding passes is unencrypted, and so can be read in advance by technically minded travelers.
Simply by using a smartphone or similar device to check the bar code, travelers could determine whether they would pass through full security screening, or the expedited process.

A security expert points out that the whole idea behind random screening is that the terrorists don’t know what to expect. Well, now they do!
John Butler, of the blog PunkInflight, who discovered this, explains how it works:

The problem is, the passenger and flight information encoded in barcode is not encrypted in any way. Using a web site I decoded my boarding pass for my upcoming trip.

M1PUCK/COLWMR YXXXXXX PHXEWRUA XXX 294RXXXFXX 11F>30B
WWXXX BUA 0E016 3

So, here you see my flight information for my United flight from PHX to EWR. It is my understanding that this is similar to digital boarding passes issued by all U.S. Airlines; so the same information is on a Delta, US Airways, American and all other boarding passes. I am just using United as an example. I have X’d out any information that you could use to change my reservation. But it’s all there, PNR, seat assignment, flight number, name, ect. But what is interesting is the bolded three on the end. This is the TSA Pre-Check information. The number means the number of beeps. 1 beep no Pre-Check, 3 beeps yes Pre-Check. On this trip as you can see I am eligible for Pre-Check. Also this information is not encrypted in any way.

Butler goes on to explain the horrifying implications:

What terrorists or really anyone can do is use a website to decode the barcode and get the flight information, put it into a text file, change the 1 to a 3, then use another website to re-encode it into a barcode. Finally, using a commercial photo-editing program or any program that can edit graphics replace the barcode in their boarding pass with the new one they created. Even more scary is that people can do this to change names. So if they have a fake ID they can use this method to make a valid boarding pass that matches their fake ID. The really scary part is this will get past both the TSA document checker, because the scanners the TSA use are just barcode decoders, they don’t check against the real time information. So the TSA document checker will not pick up on the alterations. This means, as long as they sub in 3 they can always use the Pre-Check line.

Seriously, no one at TSA thought about this?
Does anybody have an old pre-printed boarding pass – one you printed at home – that you can send?
That’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into, TSA.

The truth hurts

Romney wanted to institute a fee on the blind

The more I read of this man...the scarier he becomes.

Mitt Romney often hits president Obama for calling for tax increases on the wealthiest Americans. But a Democratic source forwards to this rather lengthy list of fees Romney raised in Massachusetts. He was struggling to close a budget gap without raising taxes; but many of which citizens of the state saw them as hidden tax increases nonetheless - buzzfeed

Romney surrogate: Powell supported Obama because he’s black

The Not-So-Subtle Racism that is Romney

I always find it interesting that Mormons, a people who have spent 150 years fleeing oppression, far too often find it far too easy to be aggressively bigoted towards others.
The Mormon animus towards gays and lesbians is legendary.  The Mormons hate us.  And are happy to spend millions to rip away our civil rights and force us to live under Mormon doctrine.
But the Mormons don’t like blacks either.  They think women are second class.  And they have a really special appreciation for Jews, who they think need to be mass converted in Mormonism, posthumously, against their will.  Especially if they’re Holocaust victims. (Though they also, crassly, converted Obama’s dead mother only months before the 2008 election, and without his permission or even knowledge.)
They’re persistent in their prejudice as well. The Mormons, who often promise to stop forcibly converting dead Jewish Holocaust victims to Mormonism against the wills of their own family and the Jewish community at large, just keep doing it.  Sometimes to the same person.  Poor Anne Frank has been forcibly converted to Mormonism nine times.  That we know of.

And the Racist Hits Just Keep on Coming from Team Romney

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the subtle racism that’s been coming from Mitt Romney throughout this campaign just keeps coming.

This time, its crazy old John Sununu, who’d probably rather be yelling at some (black) kid to get off his yard, telling a TV audience that the only reason Colin Powell is endorsing Barack Obama is because they’re both black.  That seems intended to remind the TV audience that Obama is NOT QUITE LIKE YOU AND ME (unless, of course, you and I are both black, then you’re not voting for Romney anyway, so Sununu and Romney aren’t terribly concerned about your vote – and in any case, the repugican cabal has moved on from its passing interest in token members of the black community – now they like Latinos).
Of course, it never crossed Sununu’s mind that maybe Colin Powell supports President Obama because Mitt Romney is a bullshitter.  Or maybe Sununu simply meant that because Colin Powell is black, he’s particularly smart and realizes that Mitt Romney is a weak, flip-flopping phony:

“I’m not quite sure which Governor Romney we would be getting with respect to foreign policy,” the former secretary of state said on CBS’s This Morning. “I don’t sense he’s thought through these issues as thoroughly as he should have. He gets advice from his campaign staff that he then has to modify as he goes along.”

Romney photoshops image to exaggerate crowd size, gets own name wrong

ROMNMNEY 2012

Zeke Miller at Buzzfeed made a great find.
It seems that Team Romney  - actually Mitt Romney himself – sent out a photo on Instagram touting one of his “big” rallies.  The only problem is that the photo is clearly a really bad photoshop (or, as Zeke generously suggest, perhaps a really really awfully done panorama).
You can go over to Buzzflash and see all the spots where the photo is obviously faked, but my favorite is this below.  I took the photo, reversed it so you can see the Romney banner, then blew it up to make it more easily readable – and what does it read?

“ROMNMNEY 2012.”

“ROMNMNEY 2012″.
Now, for the entire photo that Romney sent out.  First,  here’s the “real” photo that I reverse-engineered by getting rid of the obvious photoshoppping, followed by the “original” that Romney sent out. I have them both left justified so you can see the difference.

Original Romney crowd without Photshopping (my mock up).

Fake photo Romney sent out.

A wee bit of a difference.
I do a lot of panoramic photography, and have for years.  I use some decently expensive software, but have also used Photoshop, and cheaper stuff.  I’ve never seen any automatic panoramic software do this bad a job.  There’s no way the software wouldn’t recognize, for example, the obvious support beam and cement base – it duplicated it, rather than merged them.  Highly unlikely that this was a software accident.
Oh, and one more thing: Those are rocks, or something similar, at the bottom of the photo and to the right.  How convenient that they look like additional heads in the crowd.

The truth be told

The U.S. isn't turning into Greece

Greece is turning into us. Turning its back on its citizenry in order to make the banksters fat and happy...

As the head of Greece largest oncology department, Dr. Kostas Syrigos thought he had seen everything. But nothing prepared him for Elena, an unemployed woman whose breast cancer had been diagnosed a year before she came to him.

By that time, her cancer had grown to the size of an orange and broken through the skin, leaving a wound that she was draining with paper napkins. “When we saw her we were speechless,” said Dr. Syrigos, the chief of oncology at Sotiria general hospital in central Athens. “Everyone was crying. things like that are described in textbooks, but you never see them because until now, anybody who got sick in this country could always get help.” - nytimes

Unusual and Fascinating Coins and Currency

In a continuing series on coins and currency, Dark Roasted Blend has a roundup of weird designs and stories about money. When the USSR was formed, and again when it crumbled, new money was designed for various areas that you may never have heard of. For example, Transnistria is a strip of land bordering Ukraine that is not recognized as a country, but it issues its own currency anyway. The former Yugoslavia has such inflation between 1988 and 1994 that the Dinara unit was issued in bills of 500 billion! And then there's the weird coins of Somalia that you just have to see. More

Man Gets Back £51,000 He Stole

Apparently being a thief pays. 19 years ago bank manager Otto Neuman stole £150,000 in cash, gold bars, and gold coins from his own branch. When he was caught there was only about £51,000 left in cash and the gold recovered. In a bureaucratic twist of events the bank did not claim the money because their insurance company covered their losses. The insurance company also did not claim the money because the gold they recovered had increased enough in value (since it was stolen) that it covered their money spent covering the bank.
Herbert Eichenseder, Neuman's lawyer, has confirmed that an Austrian court has now ordered, some 19 years after the events, that Neuman is to be returned the £51,000 he stole.
Mr. Eichenseder said: "I really didn't believe what the court were telling me but I checked it and it was correct. I had to go into the archives in our cellar to find the details of the case as it was already 19 years old - and I managed to track down the man's details and contacted him to tell him the news. To say that he was surprised was an understatement, but he provided his bank account details and the money has now been transferred."

More

The Classics

Ford Pick Up Woodie

Introducing World's Strongest Beer

Meet the World's new strongest beer- a beer called Armageddon. With 65% alcohol, this drink is 130 proof. The beer is the creation of the Scottish brewery Brewmeister.
A spokesman said: "Despite being 65%, the beer has a lot of flavour - malty, hoppy, slightly sweet and lots of yeast still in the beer... ...Be careful though, smelling it is probably enough to put you over the limit!"
That 65 percent alcohol by volume trumps the previous champion, a beer made by BrewDog, which was at 55 percent. They were able to achieve such a high percentage by freezing the beer, removing some of the ice that forms, while leaving much of the unfrozen alcohol (because water and alcohol freeze at vastly different temperatures).
The beer is for sale in 330ml bottles at £40.00, but there is a two week back order due to high demand.

More

The Interesting Origins Of Some Of Our Favorite Foods And Drinks

In the world today, you can have anything from a snack right up to a banquet-style feast delivered to your door by simply picking up the phone or clicking your mouse.

For many, this choice of food and drink and this type of advice can trigger questions such as 'where does such come from?' or 'how do they actually make this or that?.' Everybody knows that milk comes from cows and eggs from hens, but where does some of our favorite food and drink actually originate from?

Simulated Mars mission to study space food

In March 2013, six people will spend four months on Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano simulating a Mars mission. Funded by the NASA Human Research Program, HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) is focused on what future astronauts might eat during long space adventures like a trip to the red planet. More than 700 people with a variety of science/tech/space/health backgrounds applied to participate in the study. Science journalist Kate Greene, a former editor at Technology Review, was one of those selected to be an astronaut "analog." Kate says, "In particular, we are examining the hypothesis that astronauts cannot live by rehydrated foods alone: we will be cooking and baking with shelf-stable ingredients as astronauts on future Mars missions might." Kate will be writing about her experience in various places, including her blog. "Simulated Mars Mission"

Unique Water Towers From Around The World

A water tower is an elevated structure supporting a watertank constructed at a height sufficient to pressurize a water supply system for the distribution of potable water. Many water towers were constructed during the Industrial Revolution; some are now considered architectural landmarks and monuments, and may not be demolished. Some are converted to apartments or exclusive penthouses.

Awesome Pictures

Halloween in Charlotte, North Carolina

Although it is unclear whether Charlotte, North Carolina, is any more obsessed with Halloween than other cities, there are some interesting people there who take Halloween very seriously. Creative Loafing featured four of those people and the ways they celebrate the holiday. Drew Badger, pictured, is a haunted house consultant who also organizes the local Zombie Walk, among other ghoulish activities.

Drew Badger was only 10 when he inadvertently gave his first haunted house consultation, in 1977. His elementary school was holding its annual Halloween carnival, which included the "Tunnel of Terror." The "really lame attraction," Badger recalls, was comprised of taped-together refrigerator boxes and witches and ghosts made by first- and second-graders. So, Badger and his friend decided to fix it up.

"I cut a hole in one of the boxes, and my buddy got a bowl of ketchup," Badger says. "We smeared it on our arms and when the next group — a group of fifth-grade girls — got to the hole, we reached through and screamed and yelled. They screamed and yelled and got outta there. Within five minutes, we had a line out the door. Something must have clicked in me at that point."

Also meet a man who makes giant monster costumes, a guy who drives a spooky hearse for fun, and a woman who had a Halloween "shotgun" wedding. More

Woman stole coffins from undertaker for Halloween party

A woman who stole three coffins from an undertaker for her Halloween party is facing jail in Kielce, Poland.

Baffled funeral director Tadeusz Prusek said: "We've been neighbors for years.

"I was going to the party anyway and if she'd just asked I would have let her borrow them."

Michalina Illakowicz, 28, denies theft.

More here.

The White House of Horrors

The White House has plenty of history, and plenty of former residents. Some are said to still be there, despite having died long ago.

After moving into the White House in 1945, Harry Truman wrote to his wife Bess about their spooky new abode: “I sit here in this old house … all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway and even right in here in the study. The floors pop and the drapes move back and forth—I can just imagine old Andy [Jackson] and Teddy [Roosevelt] having an argument over Franklin [Roosevelt].”

Some White House ghosts stand head and shoulders above others. Read the reports of the most common specters haunting the president's home.

Could Your Stuff Be Haunted?

Ghostbusting The Creepiest Antiques

You can buy practically anything on the Internet, so why not ghosts? For shipping convenience, the ghosts have attached themselves to objects - often dolls, clowns, and idol figurines, or Ouija boards.

But wearables like clothes and jewelry, art like paintings and photographs, as well as household objects like wooden boxes, furniture, and musical instruments seem to be popular places for lost souls to take up residence. Really, if you believe a spirit, or 'energy,' can attach itself to an object, then any antique could be haunted.

Horror Films You Didn’t Realize Were Based on True Stories

More horror films than you know were based on, or inspired by, real life events. Wes Craven himself told the story of what inspired Nightmare on Elm Street: a series of Southeast Asian men who died while having nightmares. One of them was a 21-year-old who refused to sleep.

Everybody in his family said almost exactly these lines: ‘You must sleep.’ He said, ‘No, you don’t understand; I’ve had nightmares before — this is different.’ He was given sleeping pills and told to take them and supposedly did, but he stayed up. I forget what the total days he stayed up was, but it was a phenomenal amount — something like six, seven days. Finally, he was watching television with the family, fell asleep on the couch, and everybody said, ‘Thank god.’ They literally carried him upstairs to bed; he was completely exhausted. Everybody went to bed, thinking it was all over. In the middle of the night, they heard screams and crashing. They ran into the room, and by the time they got to him he was dead. They had an autopsy performed, and there was no heart attack; he just had died for unexplained reasons.

But that's just one of ten horror stories behind the movies you'll find at Flavorwire.

Ghost Photography of the 19th Century

The spiritualist movement rose at about the same time photography was invented. Therefore, it was no wonder that the earliest use of trick photography was to show evidence of spirits that one could communicate with -for a small fee. Buzzfeed has a collection of quite a few of these "spirit" pictures. More

Real Live Apeman 1937

This is a photo of an apeman captured in the jungles of Brazil in 1937.  

Or not.

Dog saves choking owner's life by slapping her on back

A dog is supposed to be a man’s best friend but a woman from Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, has an extra special relationship with her beloved pet after it saved her from choking to death. Aysha Perry was settling down to watch some evening TV with a plate of chicken while Sheba, a Japanese Akita, was asleep in the kitchen. The 18-year-old then began choking with a piece of chicken stuck in her throat. Aysha helplessly tried to reach for her phone but was struggling to breathe and thought she was going to die.
Sheba’s protective instincts kicked in and the bitch bounded into the living room to aid her struggling owner. Aysha said: “She whacked me on the back with one of her huge front paws and the piece of chicken flew out. I was at home on my own and genuinely thought I was going to die. I’ve only had her for two weeks, she must have heard me choking and came running in. My flat mate wasn’t home so there was no one else around to help me.

“I was on the floor trying to get to my phone when she came running in. It’s a good job she has such big paws otherwise I don’t think it would have dislodged the chicken.” Aysha wasn’t aware of four-year-old Sheba’s life-saving skills but has done some research into the Akita breed. She added: “They are quite an unpredictable breed and were used for bringing down bears. She could obviously sense I was in distress.”

Aysha said she has since repaid the favor after four-and-a-half year old Sheba got her paw stuck in a fence. “I don’t think we are quite even yet but have definitely got a special relationship. After she helped get the chicken out of my throat she began licking my face to make sure I was okay. I think she deserves some recognition because it was a very heroic act. I don’t know anyone else whose dog would do something like that.” Japanese Akitas are known for their ‘fierce protectiveness towards their human companions’.  Enthusiasts claim mothers in Japan, in ancient times, relied heavily on their pet Akitas to take care of their very young children. In 1931, the Akita was officially declared one of Japan’s national treasures.

Fox with a conscience returns stolen handbag

The hunt is on for a ‘thief’ who stole a handbag from a woman. The suspect is described as 1.25 ft high, with pointed ears, hairy and red. Jeremy Clark, 38, has told how he was at home in Maple Drive, Burgess Hill, West Sussex, when he spotted a fox making off with his wife's handbag - then return it to her.
He was preparing to go to hospital with his wife, Anna, 35, when the cunning carnivore made his move. He said: “We were in the [estate's] car park and he looked at me for a few seconds before letting out this feeble yelp. “Next thing I knew he had my wife’s handbag in his mouth and was running towards the bushes.”

Jeremy screamed at the fox to drop the bag but he scuttled off out of sight. He added: “Anna had everything in there: her phone, money, purse, keys and letters. I couldn’t believe the fox had just taken it – it was mad. I thought that was it.”

But a few minutes later the guilty looking fox crept back into the car park with his bushy tail between his legs. In his mouth was Anna’s bag which he dropped at her feet before running off.  Jeremy added: “I have no idea why, we couldn’t believe it. We see the fox around quite a bit. I think people feed it.”

Bird of Fire

Let me introduce you to the most interesting bird in the world, the ʻĀkohekohe (Palmeria dolei). This critically endangered bird is only found on the island of Maui in Hawaii. There are about 3,800 individuals in two separate populations on Maui. It has distinctive calls from the "whee-o, whee-o" to the "tjook, tjook, chouroup" and even a rarely heard "hur-hur-hur-gluk-gluk-gluk".
The bird, sadly, is on the decline. Deforestation of the ʻĀkohekohe's natural habitat is one factor. Another is due to the bird's unique colors, it is very desirable to collectors and poachers. Competition from nonnative species that have been introduced to the ecosystem has also hurt the ʻĀkohekohe. Finally, in the 1900s mosquitoes were introduced to the Hawaiian Islands and the diseases they carry have been deadly to these magnificent birds.
Conservation efforts are under way and the species is under the protection of the Federal Endangered Species Act.

More

Animal Pictures

The Daily Drift

Happiness is ...

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Today in History

1774		The first Continental Congress, which protested British measures and called for civil disobedience, concludes in Philadelphia.
1795		When General Paul Barras resigns his commission as head of France's Army of the Interior to become head of the Directory, his second-in-command becomes the army's commander-Napoleon Bonaparte.
1825		The first boat on the Erie Canal leaves Buffalo, N.Y.
1881		Three Earp brothers and Doc Holliday have a shootout with the Clantons and McLaurys at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona Territory.
1905		Norway signs a treaty of separation with Sweden. Norway chooses Prince Charles of Denmark as the new king; he becomes King Haakon VII.
1918		Germany's supreme commander, General Erich Ludendorff, resigns, protesting the terms to which the German Government has agreed in negotiating the armistice. This sets the stage for his later support for Hitler and the Nazis, who claim that Germany did not lose the war on the battlefield but were "stabbed in the back" by politicians.
1942		Japanese attack Guadalcanal, sinking two U.S. carriers.
1942		U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Hornet is sunk in the Battle of Santa Cruz Island, in the South Pacific.
1950		A reconnaissance platoon for a South Korean division reaches the Yalu River. They are the only elements of the U.N. force to reach the river before the Chinese offensive pushes the whole army down into South Korea.
1955		The Village Voice is first published, backed in part by Norman Mailer.
1957		The Russian government announces that Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the nation's most prominent military hero, has been relieved of his duties as Minister of Defense. Khrushchev accused Zhukov as promoting his own "cult of personality" and saw him as a threat to his own popularity.
1958		The first New York – Paris transatlantic jet passenger service is inaugurated by Pan Am, while the first New York – London transatlantic jet passenger service is inaugurated by BOAC.
1970		Gary Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury first appears.

Non Sequitur

Plotting against America

That's what the a good number of repugican leaders, including Paul Ryan, did. 

On January 20, 2009 repugican leaders in congress literally plotted to sabotage and undermine U.S. economy during president Obama's inauguration. - daily kos

Isn't plotting against your own government, treason?

Pro-Romney firm buys voting machine company, raises alarms

This news may raise alarms, but it shouldn’t surprise … it’s what these guys do. Dan Froomkin at the Huffington Post:

A private equity company run by fervent supporters of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney bought the third-largest voting machine company in the country last July, raising concerns about the appearance of impropriety, if not the possibility of impropriety itself. Apprehension that Romney supporters could be literally buying votes has been burbling on left-wing blogs since Freepress.org, an alternative website based in Columbus, Ohio, reported late last month about H.I.G Capital’s purchase of Hart Intercivic [sic].
H.I.G. Capital is a Miami-based private equity fund that manages $8.5 billion in capital. Hart Intercivic is a company exclusively in the business of manufacturing and programming voting systems.

Because the names are so similar, here’s a scorecard. Hart InterCivic is a manufacturing company; it’s all they do. H.I.G Capital is a private equity fund that purchases companies; it’s all they do. (Hm, a buyer of companies and a maker of things. Guess who’s king in that world?)
After the expected (and totally necessary) disclaimer from the H.I.G. ”crisis communications consultant” — already? think they’re gearing up for a fight over this? — that H.I.G. is not up to no good, Froomkin tells why they might be (up to no good):

H.I.G. Capital’s co-founder, Anthony Tamer, previously worked at Bain & Company…. Eight of the company’s managing directors came from Bain as well. Tamer and his wife are major Romney donors … And Tamer has plenty of company at H.I.G. Although it isn’t a particularly big firm, H.I.G.’s directors have collectively given so much money to Romney that their company is the sixth biggest contributor to all Romney committees, as calculated by opensecrets.org.

Why does this matter? Aside from the obvious reasons, Ohio:

One of the jurisdictions with Hart Intercivic equipment is Hamilton County — which includes Cincinnati, the third-largest city in the hotly contested swing state of Ohio.

There’s plenty more; do read on. A number of experts are interviews for this rather complete article.

How to think about this? Of course, this could just be your innocent dinosaur-eats-dinosaur deal, corp-on-corp feeding, in which the only motive is the feast (i.e., making more money). And there are a number of sources in the article that do raise the “don’t jump to conclusions” flag.
Still, others are quite suspicious. Think about it — repugicans. Voting machines. Bain. Ohio. Cause for concern? Many say yes.
Me, I start wondering — at what tipping point will the toxic combo of repugican cheating, a narrow Romney win, and much suspicion, cause the real left to be told by our faux-left Democratic friends, “Don’t you dare think of Romney as not the rightful president”? Not that I don’t think the election isn’t still in the bag; it’s just that the bag has gotten smaller.
About this last point, more later. For now, watch the Hamilton County (Cincinnati) vote total on election night. And if Obama’s vote count is low enough to pull his state-wide total into the loss column, watch the media say a whole lot of nothing about the possibility of a ballot-box fix.

Mitt Romney’s mortal enemy: Arithmetic

Politico’s Playbook observes that for all of the repugican bluster about an imminent Romney victory, the numbers just don’t add up:

MORNING MINDMELD : As an antidote to the (perhaps) irrational repugican exuberance that seems to have seized D.C., we pause for the following public-service announcement. To be President, you have to win states, not debates. And Mitt Romney has a problem. Despite a great debate and what The Wall Street Journal’s Neil King Jr. on Sunday called a polling “surge,” Romney has not put away a single one of the must-have states. President Obama remains the favorite because he only needs to win a couple of the toss-ups. Mitt needs to win most of them. A cold shower for the repugican cabal: Most polling shows Romney trailing in Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire and Iowa – by MORE than Obama trails in North Carolina. Glenn Thrush and Jonathan Martin reminded of us of the 2008 primary analogy: Whatever else Hillary Clinton had, Barack Obama had the math. And math, not momentum, gets you the big house, the bulletproof car, the cool plane. We now resume our regularly scheduled Playbook.

And Nate Silver’s latest tally over at FiveThirtyEight backs this up.
Nate shows Romney with 48.9% of the popular vote, to Obama’s 50.0%, but once you factor in the electoral vote, which is how you actually win a presidential election, Romney has a 31.9% chance of
winning and Obama a 68.1% chance.

By looking at the graphs on Nate’s site, you can see that Romney’s “surge” stopped around October 13 or 14, a few days after the VP debate, and a few days before the second presidential debate. From that date on, for the past ten days, Obama and Romney have remained stagnant in the popular vote, each retaining their share of the vote, while Obama’s chances of winning have steadily risen from 61% to 68%.
Jonathan Chait argues in NYMag that Romney’s “I’m winning, I’m winning!” is all a bluff. And let’s face it, it’s not like it would be the first time that Mitt Romney tried to convince folks that the truth has a liberal bias.
Also, this might explain why Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck freaked out after the third presidential debate the other night.

@glennbeck: I am glad to know that mitt agrees with Obama so much. No, really. Why vote?
@AnnCoulter: I highly approve of Romney’s decision to be kind and gentle to the retard.

I quote them because they’re both egotistical enough to not care if they’re spilling the beans, and hurting their own party, by telling the truth.  And both said things you don’t generally say if you think you’re winning the election.
Also, I’m intrigued that Romney surrogate Marco Rubio, the new darling of the repugican cabal, disagreed publicly the other day with Mitt Romney over his China policy, suggesting that Romney would “hurt American businesses.”

Appearing on CBS’ Face The Nation Sunday, Rubio told Schieffer regarding labeling China a currency manipulator: “A trade war is not the right way to approach it and I think that if you label them a currency manipulator, that’s what it may result in, it would hurt American businesses.”

That’s not the kind of thing you say, two weeks before the election, when you think your guy has a chance at winning. It’s especially not the kind of thing you say, criticizing the business acumen of your party’s candidate whose main argument for the presidency is his business acumen.
It’s the kind of thing you say when you think your guy has already lost, and your setting yourself up as Not-Mitt-Romney for the 2016 presidential elections.

Source confirms Romney using orange spray-on tan

Even Romney’s Tan Isn’t Sincere

Buzzfeed confirms what most of us already knew, but now they have a source: In spite of denials from the Romney campaign, Mitt is in fact using a spray-on tan before big events like television appearances.
So, yes, the Romney campaign even lied about Mitt’s tan.

A knowledgeable source tells BuzzFeed the answer is in a bit of cosmetic technology used commonly by celebrities: spray tanning. The repugican nominee has made a habit of spray tanning before major speeches, debates, interviews, and other events that have a chance of getting wide TV coverage, the source said. He pays for the process out of pocket — sparing his campaign the expense, and the task of masking it on public campaign finance reports — and steers clear of public salons where he could be recognized. Instead, he gets misted down in the comfort of his own home or hotel suite.
The Romney campaign flatly denied that the candidate spray tans: “Not true,” spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in response to an inquiry….
But Romney’s darker-than-usual complexion at the forum was actually the product of an exceptionally fresh spray tan, the source said.

Buzzfeed goes on to say that for tanning professionals, the fake-tan was obvious.

Violet Beauregarde wants her gum back.

“Oh, for sure he had a spray tan,” Jimmy Coco, a celebrity tanner from Los Angeles, told BuzzFeed while looking at pictures of the candidate. “I just see the sort of red hue that you get from some of the spray tanning places… The ears are white. That is a giveaway. If you look at Obama, he’s all one tone. A lot of times, what they do when they’re giving a spray tan, they’ll put a cap on and their cap will cover the ears.”

It was also obvious to our own in-house tanning expert, Gabe Ortíz, who noted: ”even his tan isn’t sincere.”
That’ll be the last time Mitt tries any of Mr. Wonka’s experimental three-course-meal chewing gum.

Did you know ...

There are hints of a post-debate Obama bounce

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A dinosaur thief arrested

The call to bring the Robin Hood tax to the U.S.!

That Nevada early voting favors Obama

You can love long and prosper: the Trekkie dating site

That Disney decides the Jungle Book will no longer destroy the jungle to be made

An Open Letter to Ann Coulter

John Franklin Stephens

The following is a guest post in the form of an open letter from Special Olympics athlete and global messenger John Franklin Stephens to Ann Coulter after this tweet during the last Presidential debate.
Dear Ann Coulter,
Come on Ms. Coulter, you aren’t dumb and you aren’t shallow.  So why are you continually using a word like the R-word as an insult?
I’m a 30 year old man with Down syndrome who has struggled with the public’s perception that an intellectual disability means that I am dumb and shallow.  I am not either of those things, but I do process information more slowly than the rest of you.  In fact it has taken me all day to figure out how to respond to your use of the R-word last night.
I thought first of asking whether you meant to describe the President as someone who was bullied as a child by people like you, but rose above it to find a way to succeed in life as many of my fellow Special Olympians have.
Then I wondered if you meant to describe him as someone who has to struggle to be thoughtful about everything he says, as everyone else races from one snarkey sound bite to the next.
Finally, I wondered if you meant to degrade him as someone who is likely to receive bad health care, live in low grade housing with very little income and still manages to see life as a wonderful gift.
Because, Ms. Coulter, that is who we are – and much, much more.
After I saw your tweet, I realized you just wanted to belittle the President by linking him to people like me.  You assumed that people would understand and accept that being linked to someone like me is an insult and you assumed you could get away with it and still appear on TV.
I have to wonder if you considered other hateful words but recoiled from the backlash.
Well, Ms. Coulter, you, and society, need to learn that being compared to people like me should be considered a badge of honor.
No one overcomes more than we do and still loves life so much.
Come join us someday at Special Olympics.  See if you can walk away with your heart unchanged.
A friend you haven’t made yet,
John Franklin Stephens
Global Messenger
Special Olympics Virginia
EDITOR’S NOTE: John has previously written powerful opinion pieces on the R-word. Read one here.

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Today in History

1415		An English army under Henry V defeats the French at Agincourt, France. The French had out numbered Henry's troops 60,000 to 12,000 but British longbows turned the tide of the battle.
1760		George III of England crowned.
1854		During the Crimean War, a brigade of British light infantry is destroyed by Russian artillery as they charge down a narrow corridor in full view of the Russians.
1916		German pilot Rudolf von Eschwege shoots down his first enemy plane, a Nieuport 12 of the Royal Naval Air Service over Bulgaria.
1923		The Teapot Dome scandal comes to public attention as Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana, subcommittee chairman, reveals the findings of the past 18 months of investigation. His case will result in the conviction of Harry F. Sinclair of Mammoth Oil, and later Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, the first cabinet member in American history to go to jail. The scandal, named for the Teapot Dome oil reserves in Wyoming, involved Fall secretly leasing naval oil reserve lands to private companies.
1940		German troops capture Kharkov and launch a new drive toward Moscow.
1944		The Japanese are defeated in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the world's largest sea engagement. From this point on, the depleted Japanese Navy increasingly resorts to the suicidal attacks of Kamikaze fighters.
1950		Chinese Communist Forces launch their first-phase offensive across the Yalu River into North Korea.
1951		In a general election, England's Labour Party loses to Conservatives. Winston Churchill becomes prime minister, and Anthony Eden becomes foreign secretary.
1954		President Eisenhower conducts the first televised Cabinet meeting.
1958		The last U.S. troops leave Beirut.
1960		Martin Luther King, Jr., is sentenced to four months in prison for a sit-in.
1983		1,800 U.S. troops and 300 Caribbean troops land on Grenada. U.S. forces soon turn up evidence of a strong Cuban and Soviet presence–large stores of arms and documents suggesting close links to Cuba.

If Great Literary Works Had Been Written by Lawyers

Legal humorist Kevin Underhill imagined a horrifying world in which the greatest works of Western literature were composed by attorneys. At the link, you can read selections from Shakespeare's  A Midsummer Night's Hearing Before the U.S. Patent Examiner and Herman Melville's Moby Dick, or, The "Whale" (A Narrative About, But Not Necessarily Limited to, the Species Enumerated at 50 C.F.R. sec. 224.101(b)(xiv).
Here's the beginning of John Milton's Paradise Lost, New Business Found:

Of Mankind's first inconvenient slip and Fall
Upon the ice, and the party whose petition
Brought the hourly bill into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of joy, till a Judgeship may
Sustain us, and inspire more blissful work,
Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top
Of downtown's height, didst inspire
That Partner who first sowed the holy seed
Of business and brought forth the fabled green
From out of Chaos; or, if oral argument
Delight thee more, and thy advocate that holdeth
Fast unto the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my most friv'lous brief,
That with no better voice will never soar
Above appellate mount, though it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or headnote.

More

Drug dealer called police to arrest him

A drug dealer called the police and gave them his own description before handing himself in, a court has heard. Alexander Lafferty, 19, rang Central Scotland Police and described a drug dealer operating near the Raploch Community Campus. Stirling Sheriff Court heard that when officers arrived Lafferty was there waiting for them. He later told police he wanted to be jailed due to stress. Sheriff Wyllie Robertson remanded him in custody for reports.
Prosecutor Ann Orr said an operator at the force's Stirling headquarters received the call from a man who said he wanted to report a drug dealer, who turned out to be himself. The depute fiscal said: "He said he wanted to report that there was a male near the Raploch Community Campus with a bag of 500 Valium tablets and was selling them. He gave a description of a male wearing a grey jumper and a blue top." The court was told that officers went to the campus on Drip Road in Stirling, and found Lafferty standing in a doorway, wearing a grey jumper and blue Adidas T-shirt and holding a bag containing 15 blue tablets.

Mrs Orr said he was searched and police found 33 smaller bags on his person, containing another 485 tablets. The court heard the tablets were later tested and confirmed to be 500 Valium tablets with an estimated street value of £500. Miss Orr said that during a police interview Lafferty had confirmed he had called the police, saying he wanted them to come and search him, and that he had done so with the intention of "getting the jail or a remand at least". He said he wanted to be jailed due to stress, and when he was asked what was causing that he said "hunners of different things". Appearing from custody, Lafferty from Raploch in Stirling, pleaded guilty to being concerned in the supply of a controlled drug.

Frazer McCready, defending, said: "He phoned the police and told them about a drug dealer, and it was him. It is probably the easiest case that Central Scotland Police have ever had to solve." Mr McCready told Sheriff Wyllie Robertson: "He tells me he wanted to be sent to Polmont (Young Offenders' Institution) and I told him your Lordship would be glad to oblige." Sheriff Robertson deferred sentence for a criminal justice report and psychiatric reports. He told Lafferty he would be remanded in custody until 19 November. Lafferty replied "Excellent. Thank you Sir", before being led to the cells.

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Soundtrack to history: 1878 Edison audio unveiled

 
It's scratchy, lasts only 78 seconds and features the world's first recorded blooper.
The modern masses can now listen to what experts say is the oldest playable recording of an American voice and the first-ever capturing of a musical performance, thanks to digital advances that allowed the sound to be transferred from flimsy tinfoil to computer.
The recording was originally made on a Thomas Edison-invented phonograph in St. Louis in 1878.
At a time when music lovers can carry thousands of digital songs on a player the size of a pack of gum, Edison's tinfoil playback seems prehistoric. But that dinosaur opens a key window into the development of recorded sound.
"In the history of recorded sound that's still playable, this is about as far back as we can go," said John Schneiter, a trustee at the Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady, where it was played Thursday night in the city where Edison helped found the General Electric Co.
The recording opens with a 23-second cornet solo of an unidentified song, followed by a man's voice reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "Old Mother Hubbard." The man laughs at two spots during the recording, including at the end, when he recites the wrong words in the second nursery rhyme.
"Look at me; I don't know the song," he says.
When the recording was played using modern technology during a presentation Thursday at a nearby theater, it was likely the first time it had been played at a public event since it was created during an Edison phonograph demonstration held June 22, 1878, in St. Louis, museum officials said.
The recording was made on a sheet of tinfoil, 5 inches wide by 15 inches long, placed on the cylinder of the phonograph Edison invented in 1877 and began selling the following year.
A hand crank turned the cylinder under a stylus that would move up and down over the foil, recording the sound waves created by the operator's voice. The stylus would eventually tear the foil after just a few playbacks, and the person demonstrating the technology would typically tear up the tinfoil and hand the pieces out as souvenirs, according to museum curator Chris Hunter.
Popping noises heard on this recording are likely from scars left from where the foil was folded up for more than a century.
"Realistically, once you played it a couple of times, the stylus would tear through it and destroy it," he said.
Only a handful of the tinfoil recording sheets are known to known to survive, and of those, only two are playable: the Schenectady museum's and an 1880 recording owned by The Henry Ford museum in Michigan.
Hunter said he was able to determine just this week that the man's voice on the museum's 1878 tinfoil recording is believed to be that of Thomas Mason, a St. Louis newspaper political writer who also went by the pen name I.X. Peck.
Edison company records show that one of his newly invented tinfoil phonographs, serial No. 8, was sold to Mason for $95.50 in April 1878, and a search of old newspapers revealed a listing for a public phonograph program being offered by Peck on June 22, 1878, in St. Louis, the curator said.
A woman's voice says the words "Old Mother Hubbard," but her identity remains a mystery, he said. Three weeks after making the recording, Mason died of sunstroke, Hunter said.
A Connecticut woman donated the tinfoil to the Schenectady museum in 1978 for an exhibit on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Edison company that later merged with another to form GE. The woman's father had been an antiques dealer in the Midwest and counted the item among his favorites, Hunter said.
In July, Hunter brought the Edison tinfoil recording to California's Berkeley Lab, where researchers such as Carl Haber have had success in recent years restoring some of the earliest audio recordings.
Haber's projects include recovering a snippet of a folk song recorded a capella in 1860 on paper by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, a French printer credited with inventing the earliest known sound recording device.
Haber and his team used optical scanning technology to replicate the action of the phonograph's stylus, reading the grooves in the foil and creating a 3D image, which was then analyzed by a computer program that recovered the original recorded sound.
The achievement restores a vital link in the evolution of recorded sound, Haber said. The artifact represents Edison's first step in his efforts to record sound and have the capability to play it back, even if it was just once or twice, he said.
"It really completes a technology story," Haber said. "He was on the right track from the get-go to record and play it back."

On The Table With One of History’s Most Infamous Surgeons

Before the use of ether revolutionized surgery in 1846, Dr. Robert Liston was the premiere surgeon at his teaching hospital in London. In those days, surgery was a last resort, patients had to be restrained, and speed was essential. Liston was very good at what he did.

Richard Gordon, a surgeon and medical historian, calls Liston the “fastest knife in the West End.” His style may have seemed careless, but in the age before anesthesia, speed was essential to minimizing the patient’s pain and improving their odds of surviving surgery. Slower surgeons sometimes had pain-wracked and panicked patients wrestle free from their assistants and flee from the operating room, leaving a trail of blood behind them. Only about one of every 10 of Liston’s patients died on his operating table at London’s University College Hospital. The surgeons at nearby St. Bartholomew’s, meanwhile, lost about one in every four.

Liston’s quick hands were so sought after that patients sometimes had to camp out in his waiting room for days waiting for their turn to see him. Liston tried to see every last one of these patients, no matter their condition. He especially loved treating those cases that his fellow surgeons had dismissed as beyond help, which earned him a reputation among colleagues as showy.

Read more about Dr. Liston and the way surgery was done in the 19th century. More

Who Were The Most Dangerous Scientists In History?

The recent Italian court ruling that respected seismologists are guilty of manslaughter and should serve six years in prison for failing to predict the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake has sent shockwaves through the scientific community. The decision has been widely decried by the scientific community as poorly thought out bordering on ridiculous.

Science has more than its fair share of detractors and enemies who feel threatened or maligned by it. Much of what science has achieved has been used for ill or had negative consequences over the centuries, so can we now expect others to be condemned for failing to anticipate the future?

How Scientists Recreated Neanderthal Man

A team of scientists has created what it believes is the first really accurate reconstruction of Neanderthal man, from a skeleton that was discovered in France over a century ago. In 1909, excavations at the La Ferrassie cave in the Dordogne unearthed the remains of a group of Neanderthals.

One of the skeletons in that group was that of an adult male, given the name La Ferrassie 1. These remains have helped scientists create a detailed reconstruction of our closest prehistoric relative.

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