Doppelgangers

dop·pel·gäng·er

ˈdäpəlˌgaNGər/

noun

an apparition or double of a living person.

"he has a doppelgänger named Donald, his invented twin brother"

Twisted Sifter does it again with 15 pix of doppelgangers. Astounding to say the least.

I’m not a look-alike! is an ongoing project by François Brunelle (featured previously). For the last fourteen years the photographer has been taking black and white portraits of unrelated doppelgängers and he has found and photographed over 230 look-alikes to date. Most people have found him and his project through his website and social media.

You can't make this up. :)

The Deep Web

4% of the web comprise the internet us normal rubes are used to, the web accessible via Safari, Explorer, Chrome and Opera, among significant others, to do our usual thing whether it be email trolling, social networking a la Facebook or Google + or buying stuff from Amazon and Apple but  the other 96%, the dark side of the web, can only be seen via browsers like Tor, a tool allowing us to see the mysterious and illegal though the mechanism of anonymity and tech, courtesy the US Navy.

Inception

Tor was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. It was originally developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, for the primary purpose of protecting government communications. Today, it is used every day for a wide variety of purposes by normal people, the military, journalists, law enforcement officers, activists, and many others.

Overview

Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.

Seen below is a pretty cool graphic doing the iceberg thing showing just how vast the deep web truly is.

The ‘Surface Web’, also known as the ‘Visible’ or ‘Searchable’ web, while significantly large at over 8 billion pages, only cracks the surface when it comes to the size of the Internet.  The ‘Deep Web’, (also known as the ‘Invisible Web’, ‘Deepnet’, ‘DarkNet’, ‘Hidden Web’ and ‘Undernet’) refers to the content on the Internet that is not capable of being indexed by standard search engines, leaving the content ‘hidden’. The Deep Web houses over 96% of the content on the web that is publicly accessible.

According to CompletePlanet:

• Public information on the Deep Web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined World Wide Web.
• The Deep Web contains 7,500 terabytes of information, compared to 19 terabytes of information in the surface Web.
• The Deep Web contains nearly 550 billion individual documents compared to the 1 billion of the surface Web.
• More than an estimated 200,000 Deep Web sites presently exist. Sixty of the largest Deep Web sites collectively contain about 750 terabytes of information – sufficient by themselves to exceed the size of the surface Web by 40 times.

Interesting to say the least.

A brief follow up

Looking at the foreign policy fubar from the financial perspective brings up the possible death of the petrodollar with the Ukraine CF being the prime driver of same, courtesy the US, with help from Europe and the Neocons.

Several months ago, when Russia announced the much anticipated "Holy Grail" energy deal with China, some were disappointed that despite this symbolic agreement meant to break the petrodollar's stranglehold on the rest of the world, neither Russia nor China announced payment terms to be in anything but dollars. In doing so they admitted that while both nations are eager to move away from a US Dollar reserve currency, neither is yet able to provide an alternative.

This changed in late June when first Gazprom's CFO announced the gas giant was ready to settle China contracts in Yuan or Rubles, and at the same time the People's Bank of China announced that its Assistant Governor Jin Qi and Russian central bank Deputy Chairman Dmitry Skobelkin held a meeting in which they discussed cooperating on project and trade financing using local currencies. The meeting discussed cooperation in bank card, insurance and financial supervision sectors.

And yet, while both sides declared their operational readiness and eagerness to bypass the dollar entirely, such plans remained purely in the arena of monetary foreplay and the long awaited first shot across the Petrodollar bow was absent.

Until now.

According to Russia's RIA Novosti, citing business daily Kommersant, Gazprom Neft has agreed to export 80,000 tons of oil from Novoportovskoye field in the Arctic; it will accept payment in rubles, and will also deliver oil via the Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline (ESPO), accepting payment in Chinese yuan for the transfers. Meaning Russia will export energy to either Europe or China, and receive payment in either Rubles or Yuan, in effect making the two currencies equivalent as far as the Eurasian axis is conerned, but most importantly, transact completely away from the US dollar thus, finally putin'(sic) in action the move for a Petrodollar-free world.

Read the rest of this in depth article from Zerohedge to see just how stupid the US has been regarding FP.

A potential Jeopardy Question :)

Every once in a while, yours truly stumbles upon a  piece whose title captures the essence of finding out about something that's actually pretty interesting while remaining totally irrelevant to the day to day conducting of anyone's life on planet earth. To that end, I give you...

Researchers identify a pheromone in the urine of male tilapia fish that stimulates spawning in females

The social behavior of Mozambique tilapias (Oreochromis mossambicus) native to southern Africa is very complex. The strict hierarchic ranking among males is fought out in so-called courtship arenas. With their mouths, male tilapias make excavations in the sand in the middle of an arena with the aim of attracting females to spawn in these nests. At the same time, they act aggressively to keep other males away. Dominant males have been observed to urinate more often and squirt larger quantities of urine in the water during fights compared to their subordinate rivals. The urine contains pheromones that reduce aggressive behavior in other males. The compounds also lure females to the nest and modify their hormonal status by accelerating oocyte maturation. Thus the pheromones help to synchronize female spawning and external fertilization by the males and so to increase the odds of reproductive success.

Any questions and... Have a great Labor Day weekend. :)

Stupidity Bomb

Stupidity Bomb or, ..."W's" Iraq incursion, better known as Shock & Awe, has come full circle in both BRT's Lurching toward catastrophe as well as in an ironic piece posted by Vox, an awesome news site admired by yours truly.

WE'RE BOMBING THE GUNS THAT WE DIDN'T MEAN TO GIVE ISIS BECAUSE WE DIDN'T GIVE GUNS TO THEIR ENEMIES BECAUSE THEN ISIS MIGHT GET GUNS

It gets better

The absurdity runs deep: America is using American military equipment to bomb other pieces of American military equipment halfway around the world. The reason the American military equipment got there in the first place was because, in 2003, the US had to use its military to rebuild the Iraqi army, which it just finished destroying with the American military. The American weapons the US gave the Iraqi army totally failed at making Iraq secure and have become tools of terror used by an offshoot of al-Qaeda to terrorize the Iraqis that the US supposedly liberated a decade ago. And so now the US has to use American weaponry to destroy the American weaponry it gave Iraqis to make Iraqis safer, in order to make Iraqis safer.

It keeps going: the US is intervening on behalf of Iraqi Kurds, our ally, because their military has old Russian-made weapons, whereas ISIS, which is America's enemy, has higher-quality American weapons. "[Kurdish forces] are literally outgunned by an ISIS that is fighting with hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. military equipment seized from the Iraqi Army who abandoned it," Ali Khedery, a former American official in Iraq, told the New York Times.

When looking at this, one sees the utter failure of US foreign policy on all fronts from the Ukraine fubar to Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq, along with abject obedience to Israel, an initiative that has not only killed at least a million people and forced evacuation of millions more but also has cost trillions of dollars to implement while supporting a mission that has been an absolute disaster to the long term well being of America. The question to ask now is, how do we take back America from corrupt and inept politicians who kowtow to monied interests in order to remain in office to the detriment of a once great nation that actually stood for something of value back in the day.

Swarm

Bot swarms, the stuff of Sci Fi, is no longer fiction as seen in this short clip showing how 1000 bots execute group behavior in similar fashion to any organism capable of acting as a group entity doing a specific task. Very cool tech without question.

Ants, schooling fish and flocking birds all have something in common – they can achieve things by working together that they could never do on their own. With that in mind, researchers are now looking into ways of allowing "swarms" of communicating robots to accomplish tasks that are difficult or even impossible for single robots. Harvard University recently performed an unprecedented demonstration of that behavior, in which a batch of over 1,000 tiny Kilobots arranged themselves into a variety of pre-assigned two-dimensional shapes.

Photobomb :)

:)

The disaster that keeps on giving

Fukushima, the disaster that keeps on giving, no longer rates news coverage by the mainline press because radiation is silent and  invisible, something to be ignored until the inevitable impact of same makes it's ugly face known to all things relating to life on planet earth.

Wall St. Journal, Aug 7, 2014 (emphasis added): [Shunichi Tanaka, chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority] said [Tepco] needs to get its priorities straight when it comes to work to decommission [...] Fukushima Daiichi [...] “The biggest risk is the trench water. Until that matter is addressed, it will be difficult to proceed with other decommissioning work,” [Tanaka] said on Wednesday at his weekly news conference. “It appears that they are getting off track,” he told reporters. Tepco has been trying to remove some 11,000 metric tons of water that contains dangerous radioactive materials such as uranium and plutonium from a trench that runs from the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s No.2 reactor building. […] “What if another tsunami hits the plant and the highly contaminated water in the trench is discharged… ?” Mr. Tanaka asked reporters.

And this

American Genetic Association, Aug 14, 2014: [S]tudies are now beginning to reveal serious biological effects of the Fukushima radiation [...] A series of articles summarizing these studies has now been published in the Journal of Heredity. These describe widespread impacts, ranging from population declines to genetic damage [...] Common to all of the published studies is the hypothesis that chronic (low-dose) exposure to ionizing radiation results in genetic damage and increased mutation rates [...] Hayashi et al. 2014 [...] documented the effects of radiation on rice [...] After three days, a number of effects were observed [...] Taira et al. 2014 [...] examined the response of the pale grass blue butterfly [...] They found size reduction, slowed growth, high mortality and morphological abnormality 

Any questions?

Armed to the Teeth

The cops are armed, armed with military grade tech, you know, choppers, assault rifles, grenade launchers and armored vehicles, complete with personal body armor for the cops who will run the vehicle in question. Next may come gatling or 50 cal machine guns, M1 tanks and drones, lots and lots of drones, some of which may be equipped with weapons like laser guided bombs & missles, like those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, courtesy the arms merchants and government because military surplus gear makes money, right? Homeland Security, the prime driver of all things related to arming cops to the teeth, makes it rather foreboding does it not?

FERGUSON, Mo. — For four nights in a row, they streamed onto West Florissant Avenue wearing camouflage, black helmets and vests with “POLICE” stamped on the back. They carried objects that doubled as warnings: assault rifles and ammunition, slender black nightsticks and gas masks.

They were not just one police force but many, hailing from communities throughout north St. Louis County and loosely coordinated by the county police.

Amerika with a K seems apt if you ask me.

Addendum - from Cato Liberty

Why armored vehicles in a Midwestern inner suburb? Why would cops wear camouflage gear against a terrain patterned by convenience stores and beauty parlors? Why are the authorities in Ferguson, Mo. so given to quasi-martial crowd control methods (such as bans on walking on the street) and, per the reporting of Riverfront Times, the firing of tear gas at people in their own yards? (“ ‘This my property!’ he shouted, prompting police to fire a tear gas canister directly at his face.”) Why would someone identifying himself as an 82nd Airborne Army veteran, observing the Ferguson police scene, comment that “We rolled lighter than that in an actual war zone”?

Any questions?

Of Cathedrals & Tech

The great cathedral builders would relate to this gem without issue. As seen in Twisted Sifter, artist Eric Standley takes tech to another level with work like this. 

Eric Standley (featured previously) is an artist and educator (associate professor of studio art at Virginia Tech) whose ongoing series of 3D laser cut paper art is found at the intersection of art, tech, history and mathematics.

Standley’s stacked paper sculptures can take up to six months to plan. Many of his artworks involve more than 100 sheets of stacked paper, every layer a meticulously drawn vector design. The ‘paper architect’ must account for structural elements, overlaps, curves and unsupported arches.

Once satisfied with his design, Standley uploads his complex vector drawings to a laser-cutting machine. The cutting process itself can take up to 60 hours to complete. 

Below is a gallery of Standley’s newest artworks since we last featured him on the Sifter. For more, be sure to visit his official website at eric-standley.com.

Exquisite says it all. Seen below is another gem.

One of the good guys :)

Amazing pix of one of the good guys, a bluebottle fly larva that's exceedingly precise at what it does. 

To whit

A coloured scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of the head of a maggot or the larva of a bluebottle fly (Protophormia sp.) with tiny teeth-like fangs extending from its mouth. The maggots of this fly are used medicinally to clean wounds. The maggots are sterilised and placed in the wound, where they feed on dead tissue and leave healthy tissue untouched. Their saliva contains anti- bacterial chemicals which maintain sterility in the area. Maggots are used on ulcers and deep wounds away from organs or body cavities, most often being used to treat diabetic ulcers on the feet.

Leeches are another one but one does not need to see that critter up close, for now. :)

NK Timelapse - To the Max :)

Enter Pyongyang from JT Singh on Vimeo.

NK Timelapse to the max. Enjoy

Freedom of the Press

This map, courtesy Reporters Without Borders, depicts the level of freedom the 4th estate has in the world. Needless to say, the lighter the color, the freer the press.

Smooth Running

Microsoft has some very cool tech as seen by their many contributions to Siggraph, the place to go to see the latest and greatest in CG, a conference yours truly has gone to on numerous occasions (the parties rock). :) To whit:

We present a method for converting first-person videos, for example, captured with a helmet camera during activities such as rock climbing or bicycling, into hyper-lapse videos, i.e., time-lapse videos with a smoothly moving camera. 

Works for me. :)

Had to put in the tech version as the research MS has done on this is incredible.

The precursor to this is Photosynth, awesome tech that brings 3D to 2D photos.

You can run but you can't hide

"You can run but you can't hide." - Joe Louis aka the Brown Bomber

Joe Louis by van Vechten

Great Whites - up close & natural

Looking at Great Whites from a cage after baiting them to come to the cage is artifical to the max as the behavior of same has been altered by chumming the water to get them close enough to photograph. With the Woods Hole SharkCam, the first real glimpse into how Great Whites conduct their lives can be done without question. :)

The Visual Microphone

Without question, the NSA, CIA, FBI and significant others will cap on this tech in a NYC second.

They recovered intelligible speech from a video of a potato chip bag that was shot at a distance of 15 feet behind soundproof glass. The team also obtained useful audio signals from videos of aluminum foil, the surface of a glass of water, and the leaves of a potted plant.

The researchers, led by Abe Davis, a graduate student at MIT, will present their findings at the Siggraph computer graphics conference to be held next week in Vancouver, Canada.

Hal can relate to this, right? :)

Evolution - In Real Time

The Voyage of the Beagle is enchanting. Darwin's thought process in starting to formulate the notion of evolution to explain how live evolves, is a revelation, a glimpse into the creative process every "artist" goes through when working out a new idea whether it be evolution, a jazz composition or the design of a new building. In this light, a terrific article tiled, In Darwin's Footsteps, an amazing discovery, made by researchers Peter and Rosemary Grant, proves that evolution can happen in real time.

Their goal, as they relate in their new book, “40 Years of Evolution,” was to study finches in the genus Geospiza — the birds that gave Darwin some of his first inklings of evolution by natural selection — and to try to reconstruct part of their evolutionary history. Instead, they made an amazing discovery.

After several years of meticulous measurements, the Grants and their students realized that the finches’ dimensions were changing before their eyes. Their beaks and bodies were evolving and adapting from year to year, sometimes slowly, sometimes strikingly, generation after generation. The researchers were watching evolution in real time, evolution in the flesh.

Seen below are pictures of finches who reside on Daphne Major, a volcanic island in the Galapagos.

Water water everywhere...

BRT has long believed GW is real, now, researchers further substantiate this fact not only by tracking increased CO2 levels detected in the air and oceans but also by tracking increased levels of water vapor in the atmosphere, another prime driver of GW, produced only by us and not Earth, the planet we all call home. :)

A new study from scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and colleagues confirms rising levels of water vapor in the upper troposphere – a key amplifier of global warming – will intensify climate change impacts over the next decades. The new study is the first to show that increased water vapor concentrations in the atmosphere are a direct result of human activities.

Click here to get the full report.

Something is different this time.

Something is different this time. This is the worst Ebola outbreak in recorded history, and this particular strain appears to be spreading much more easily than others have. So far, 1,323 people have been infected in the nations of Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. Of those 1,323 victims, a whopping 729 of them have died. But a number that is even more alarming was buried in the middle of a Reuters report on Friday. According to Reuters, “more than 100 health workers” that have been fighting Ebola in Africa have contracted the virus themselves. Considering the extraordinary measures that these health workers take to keep from getting the disease, that is quite chilling. We are not just talking about one or two “accidents”. We are talking about more than 100 of them getting sick. If Ebola is spreading this easily among medical professionals in biohazard body suits that keep any air from touching the skin, what chance are the rest of us going to have if this virus gets out into the general population?

12 Monkeys comes to mind when reading about Ebola as this amazing film gives you the willies, you know, the creeping feeling of dread one gets regarding a possibly catastrophic event happening, something totally out of anyone's control, something truly frightening like an Ebola type virus getting out into the wild, able to kill with horrific efficiency. Yours truly is certainly not panicking as of yet but keeping a watchful eye on this rapidly evolving situation is not such a bad idea. Seen below is the life cycle of this most dangerous of diseases.

Something different applies here as well.

"If the situation continues to deteriorate, the consequences can be catastrophic in terms of lost lives but also severe socio-economic disruption and a high risk of spread to other countries," she said, as the WHO formally launched a $100 million response plan that includes deploying hundreds more health care workers.

Click here to get the CDC's take on Ebola.

The Internet Must Go

Informative and witty, this tells why NN is vital to the National Interest.

The baying of hounds

Condemning Putin without hard evidence regarding MH-17 is dangerous at best because Russia "ain't" Iraq, Libya, Iran or Syria. It's a nation armed to the teeth with nukes and the ability to deliver them with great efficiency to anywhere in the world without issue. In BRT, the mantra yours truly tries to abide by as best as possible is: vetting. How good is the content yours truly is quoting? Is it kosher, is it viable, can it stand up to scrutiny, something "W" violated to the max when gaining hard US intel in order to sell an illegal war to America. The same thing is now happening in the Ukraine where no hard evidence as to exactly what happened to MH-17 has been released, only conjecture, hearsay and invective. 

To whit

Blood on Putin's Hand

The world may have averted its gaze towards Israel and Gaza, but this week the rumbling warfare in eastern Ukraine has been erupting into something growing daily more dangerous.

Three Ukrainian planes have been reported shot down with missiles, scores of soldiers and separatist fighters killed, and an apartment block destroyed by an air strike, though it is disputed who fired the missiles that killed 11 people inside.

Meanwhile the Russian bear, still pretending to be an innocent party despite blood dripping from its paws, has begun stealthily rebuilding its forces on the border.

Now we may well have witnessed the kind of shocking event that happens when heavy armaments are placed in the hands of untrained and desperate militias.

Notice the word REPORTED, not fact but hearsay.

It's gets better.

It's Putin's Missile!

And here’s the spin war verdict: the current Malaysia Airlines tragedy – the second in four months – is “terrorism” perpetrated by “pro-Russian separatists”, armed by Russia, and Vladimir Putin is the main culprit. End of story. Anyone who believes otherwise, shut up.

Why? Because the CIA said so. Because Hillary “We came, we saw, he died” Clinton said so. Because batshit crazy Samantha “R2P” Power said so – thundering at the UN, everything duly printed by the neo-con infested Washington Post. [1]

Because Anglo-American corporate media – from CNN to Fox (who tried to buy Time Warner, which owns CNN) – said so. Because the President of the United States (POTUS) said so. And mostly because Kiev had vociferously said so in the first place.

Right off the bat they were all lined up – the invariably hysterical reams of “experts” of the “US intelligence community” literally foaming at their palatial mouths at “evil” Russia and “evil” Putin; intel “experts” who could not identify a convoy of gleaming white Toyotas crossing the Iraqi desert to take Mosul. And yet they have already sentenced they don’t need to look any further, instantly solving the MH17 riddle.

It doesn’t matter that President Putin has stressed the MH17 tragedy must be investigated objectively. And “objectively” certainly does not mean that fictional ”international community” notion construed by Washington – the usual congregation of pliable vassals/patsies.

But two questions, one...

A  simple search at reveals that MH17 was in fact diverted 200 kilometers north from the usual flight path taken by Malaysia Airlines in the previous days – and plunged right in the middle of a war zone. Why? What sort of communication MH17 received from Kiev air control tower?

Kiev has been mute about it. Yet the answer would be simple, had Kiev released the Air Traffic Control recording of the tower talking to flight MH17; Malaysia did it after flight MH370 disappeared forever.

and 2, what if it wasn't a missile? Conjecture perhaps but not without merit

I recommend to click on the little picture to the left. You can download this photo as a PDF in good resolution. This is necessary, because that will allow you understand what I am describing here. The facts speak clear and loud and are beyond the realm of speculation: The cockpit shows traces of shelling! You can see the entry and exit holes. The edge of a portion of the holes is bent inwards. These are the smaller holes, round and clean, showing the entry points most likely that of a 30 millimeter caliber projectile. The edge of the other, the larger and slightly frayed exit holes showing shreds of metal pointing produced by the same caliber projectiles. Moreover, it is evident that at these exit holes of the outer layer of the double aluminum reinforced structure are shredded or bent – outwardly! Furthermore, minor cuts can be seen, all bent outward, which indicate that shrapnel had forcefully exited through the outer skin from the inside of the cockpit. The open rivets are are also bent outward.

The picture

In conclusion...

If we now consider the armament of a typical SU 25 we learn this: It is equipped with a double-barreled 30-mm gun, type GSh-302 / AO-17A, equipped with: a 250 round magazine of anti-tank incendiary shells and splinter-explosive shells (dum-dum), arranged in alternating order. The cockpit of the MH 017 has evidently been fired at from both sides: the entry and exit holes are found on the same fragment of it’s cockpit segment!

Isn't it time to find out what really happened to Malaysian Flight MH17 before it's too late. Before the hounds of hell are unleashed as they were in 1914. Something to consider if you ask me.

Addendum: A shelved BBC video showing a reporter interviewing villagers who saw a jet approach MH17. Interesting to say the least.

Click here to read the transcript. Maybe the politicos of the US should look at this before rushing to judgment. Sounds like a viable plan to me.

And one last link from Zerohedge describing Russia's take on the MH17 tragedy. Worth reading without question.

Addendum II: Flight 17 Shoot-Down Scenario Shifts

Contrary to the Obama administration’s public claims blaming eastern Ukrainian rebels and Russia for the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, some U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded that the rebels and Russia were likely not at fault and that it appears Ukrainian government forces were to blame, according to a source briefed on these findings.

This judgment – at odds with what President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have expressed publicly – is based largely on the absence of U.S. government evidence that Russia supplied the rebels with a Buk anti-aircraft missile system that would be needed to hit a civilian jetliner flying at 33,000 feet, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The baying of hounds indeed.

Reaping the Whirlwind

Reaping the whirlwind applies here thanks to the feckless Hobby Lobby decision, courtesy the SC. Seems satanists are demanding the same rights as fundamental christians but this time, on a woman's right to choose along with the unrestricted worship of Satan.

Because medicine and scientific fact are the tenets of satanists’ faith, then medically inaccurate and coercive counseling laws present a substantial burden, according to Greaves. This is pretty much what Ruth Bader Ginsburg was talking about in her dissent when she said the justices had “ventured into a minefield.” It just so happens that these are satanists making a faith claim under the legal precedent, and not, you know, a company that produces soy milk and hates birth control. But it’s the same idea.

Hobby Lobby's a Pyrrhic victory without question. Corporations as people and the shattering of the corporate veil, will keep this version of the supremes up to their eyeballs in a CF of their own making, something akin to what our esteemed congress is doing in terms of inept governance.

It's not the Flying Spaghetti Monster but, as per all religions, the belief system's the same.