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Friday, June 3, 2011

The World's Most Creative Marriage Proposal? A Graffiti Mural Time Lapse.


Uploaded by on May 30, 2011
They actually make guys like this?

28-year-old Jeff Gurwin flouted the silly on-one-knee tradition and proposed to girlfriend Caitlin Fitzsimons, 27, by having a mural painted on Avenue A and Second Street.

Check out my brother's grocery coupon app! He's the guy who made the video for me. www.bit.ly/instantcoupons

Japan firm develops 'sun-chasing' solar panels

From: http://www.physorg.com/


Takashi Tomita, a Tokyo University professor and researcher for Japanese electronics giant Sharp, displays an innovative solar power panel using moving mirrors that follow the sun throughout the day, at a preview in Tokyo, on June 3.


A new Japanese solar power device can generate twice the electricity of current models thanks to moving mirrors that follow the sun throughout the day, according to its developers.
 
Smart Solar International, a Tokyo start-up that also has an office in California, will start producing the system in Japan in August, hoping it will be adopted in tsunami-hit areas along the northern Pacific coast.
Sample sales are set to begin in October, with overseas sales targeting especially Asia and the Middle East set for 2014 or earlier.

The device features a row of aluminum mirror bars that can slowly rotate as the sun moves across the sky and reflect its light back onto a central tube that is packed with high-performance, multi-layered .
Its inventors say the system requires far less silicon -- the most expensive component, which is imported mostly from China at the moment -- than the conventional larger flat panels.

The tube has a system to prevent overheating, which reduces the efficiency of power generation, and the excess heat can be used to heat water.

"You can get both electricity and heat from the same device," said Takashi Tomita, a former Sharp Corp. executive who heads the spin-off from the University of Tokyo's Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology.

Demand for renewable energy is set to grow in Japan since the March 11 quake and tsunami crippled a on the northeast coast, causing the worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl 25 years ago.
The centre-left government has announced a major energy policy review that would promote solar and other alternative energies.

"We must send our product to the (disaster) regions first," said Tomita, also a professor at the University of Tokyo's research centre.

"I want to ship this as early as possible to convenience stores and to other facilities where people congregate."
In coming years, Tomita hopes to sell the system abroad.

"Southeast Asia needs a source of energy as demand keeps growing," Tomita said, pointing out that countries including Vietnam and Thailand do not have much oil and gas, unlike Indonesia or Brunei.
The company also aims for sales in India and the Middle East.

Next week Smart Solar plans to exhibit a parabolic mirror version of the system at the Intersolar trade fair in Munich, Germany.
(c) 2011 AFP

Unbreakable: Eight codes we can't crack

(Image: Time Life Pictures/Getty)
The capture of the Enigma code machine 70 years ago changed the course of the second world war. But the secret codes broken by this event were not history’s toughest ciphers. Plenty of codes are uncracked and, as MacGregor Campbell discovers, their solutions may provide the key to murders or even buried treasure
MURDER

Somerton Man's poetic mystery

A well-dressed man found dead on an Australian beach in 1948 wrote an indecipherable scribble in a book of Persian poetry
Read more
TREASURE

Beale's buried treasure

Three coded messages published in 1885 hold the location of treasure buried in Virginia – or was it a hoax? We still don't know
Read more
PUZZLE

The MIT time-lock puzzle

A giant of internet cryptography has devised a code that he says will take 35 years to solve – with a mystery prize sealed in lead
Read more
CIA SECRET

Kryptos, a monument to CIA secrecy

What is the secret of a sculpture at CIA headquarters? Two decades and tens of thousands of attempts haven't broken it
Read more
MEDIEVAL MYSTERY

The Voynich manuscript

A medieval tome is filled with illustrations of medicinal plants, astrological diagrams, naked nymphs – and indecipherable script
Read more
MUSICAL MESSAGE

Elgar's unread message

The composer Edward Elgar wrote a message to a friend in 1897 – in code. She never understood it, and nor has anyone else
Read more
THE ENIGMA CODE

The second world war's last Enigma

The second world war Allies captured a German Enigma code machine 70 years ago – but many messages have never been decoded
Read more
ZODIAC

Who was the Zodiac killer?


The 1960s serial murderer Zodiac may have told the world his or her identity – but no one has been able to decrypt the message
R

When Cassini Met Nine Inch Nails

Analysis by Ian O'Neill

Space-music-cassini
What do you get when you mix space exploration with an industrial rock band? If you're thinking a bunch of Klingons trying their hand at slash metal, you're not the only one. However, if you asked designer/director Chris Abbas a very different blend of space music would result.
Using archival footage from the Cassini Solstice mission, which continues to dazzle us earthlings with incredible imagery from the Saturnian system, and a tune from the band Nine Inch Nails, a rather surprising -- and atmospheric -- experience awaits:

CASSINI MISSION from cabbas on Vimeo.

CASSINI MISSION from Chris Abbas on Vimeo.

Accompanying his video, Abbas has included an inspiring account of his motivation behind creating "Cassini Mission":
I truly enjoy outer space. It's absolutely amazing that we now have the ability to send instruments out into the void of the universe to observe all sorts of interesting things. Asteroids! Moons! Planets! Dark matter! This is the perfect opportunity for a Carl Sagan quote:
"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
The footage in this little film was captured by the hardworking men and women at NASA with the Cassini Imaging Science System.
As with many of the "Space Music" articles we include on Discovery News, the excellent "Cassini Mission" epitomizes the crossovers between music and space exploration. Space is a human endeavor, so it's always a pleasure to bring the spirit of humanity into space.
Video credit: Chris Abbas. Including footage from NASA's Cassini mission and music by Nine Inch Nails. Video used with permission.

If you don’t wake up, you lose your money

From: http://uberhumor.com/

Underground Website Lets You Buy Any Drug Imaginable



Making small talk with your pot dealer sucks. Buying cocaine can get you shot. What if you could buy and sell drugs online like books or light bulbs? Now you can: Welcome to Silk Road.

About three weeks ago, the U.S. Postal Service delivered an ordinary envelope to Mark’s door. Inside was a tiny plastic bag containing 10 tabs of LSD. “If you had opened it, unless you were looking for it, you wouldn’t have even noticed,” Mark told us in a phone interview.

Mark, a software developer, had ordered the 100 micrograms of acid through a listing on the online marketplace Silk Road. He found a seller with lots of good feedback who seemed to know what they were talking about, added the acid to his digital shopping cart and hit “check out.” He entered his address and paid the seller 50 Bitcoins — untraceable digital currency — worth around $150. Four days later, the drugs (sent from Canada) arrived at his house.

“It kind of felt like I was in the future,” Mark said.


Silk Road, a digital black market that sits just below most internet users’ purview, does resemble something from a cyberpunk novel. Through a combination of anonymity technology and a sophisticated user-feedback system, Silk Road makes buying and selling illegal drugs as easy as buying used electronics — and seemingly as safe. It’s Amazon — if Amazon sold mind-altering chemicals.

Here is just a small selection of the 340 items available for purchase on Silk Road by anyone, right now: a gram of Afghani hash; 1/8 ounce of “sour 13″ weed; 14 grams of ecstasy; .1 gram tar heroin. A listing for “Avatar” LSD includes a picture of blotter paper with big blue faces from the James Cameron movie on it.
The sellers are located all over the world, a large portion from the United States and Canada.



But even Silk Road has limits: You won’t find any weapons-grade plutonium, for example. Its terms of service ban the sale of “anything who’s purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction.”

‘It’s Amazon — if Amazon sold mild-altering chemicals.’
 
Getting to Silk Road is tricky. The URL seems made to be forgotten. But don’t point your browser there yet. It’s only accessible through the anonymizing network, TOR, which requires a bit of technical skill to configure.
Once you’re there, it’s hard to believe that Silk Road isn’t simply a scam. Such brazenness is usually displayed only by those fake “online pharmacies” that dupe the dumb and flaccid. There’s no sly, Craigslist-style code names here. But while scammers do use the site, most of the listings are legit. Mark’s acid worked as advertised. “It was quite enjoyable, to be honest,” he said. We spoke to one Connecticut engineer who enjoyed sampling some “silver haze” pot purchased off Silk Road. “It was legit,” he said. “It was better than anything I’ve seen.”


Edgarnumbers is selling these 2C-B "blue bees" tablets. Price: 1.15 bitcoins ($10) per tablet.

Silk Road cuts down on scams with a reputation-based trading system familiar to anyone who’s used Amazon or eBay. The user Bloomingcolor appears to be an especially trusted vendor, specializing in psychedelics. One happy customer wrote on his profile: “Excellent quality. Packing, and communication. Arrived exactly as described.” They gave the transaction five points out of five. 
“Our community is amazing,” Silk Road’s anonymous administrator, known on forums as “Silk Road,” told us in an e-mail. “They are generally bright, honest and fair people, very understanding, and willing to cooperate with each other.”

Sellers feel comfortable openly selling hard-core drugs because the real identities of those involved in Silk Road transactions are utterly obscured. If the authorities wanted to ID Silk Road’s users with computer forensics, they’d have nowhere to look. TOR masks a user’s tracks on the site. As for transactions, Silk Road doesn’t accept credit cards, PayPal or any other form of payment that can be traced or blocked. The only money good here is Bitcoins.
Bitcoins have been called a “crypto-currency,” the online equivalent of a brown paper bag of cash. Bitcoins are a peer-to-peer currency, not issued by banks or governments, but created and regulated by a network of other bitcoin holders’ computers. (The name “Bitcoin” is derived from the pioneering file-sharing technology Bittorrent.) They are purportedly untraceable and have been championed by cyberpunks, libertarians and anarchists who dream of a distributed digital economy outside the law, one where money flows across borders as free as bits.
To purchase something on Silk Road, you need first to buy some Bitcoins using a service like Mt. Gox Bitcoin Exchange. Then, create an account on Silk Road, deposit some bitcoins, and start buying drugs. One bitcoin is worth about $8.67, though the exchange rate fluctuates wildly every day. Right now you can buy an 1/8 ounce of pot on Silk Road for 7.63 Bitcoins. That’s probably more than you would pay on the street, but most Silk Road users seem happy to pay a premium for convenience.
‘It kind of felt like I was in the future.’
Since it launched this February, Silk Road has represented the most complete implementation of the Bitcoin vision. Many of its users come from Bitcoin’s Utopian geek community and see Silk Road as more than just a place to buy drugs. Silk Road’s administrator cites the anarcho-libertarian philosophy of Agorism. “The state is the primary source of violence, oppression, theft and all forms of coercion,” Silk Road wrote to us. “Stop funding the state with your tax dollars and direct your productive energies into the black market.”
Mark, the LSD buyer, had similar views. “I’m a libertarian anarchist and I believe that anything that’s not violent should not be criminalized,” he said.

1UP of Canada is offering 1/8 ounce of "the infamous Jack Herer." He writes: "This is just classic stuff, well grown, well cured, well smoked." Price: 7.42 bitcoins ($64)

But not all Bitcoin enthusiasts embrace Silk Road. Some think the association with drugs will tarnish the young technology, or might draw the attention of federal authorities. “The real story with Silk Road is the quantity of people anxious to escape a centralized currency and trade,” a longtime bitcoin user named Maiya told us in a chat. “Some of us view Bitcoin as a real currency, not drug barter tokens.” 
 
Silk Road and Bitcoins could herald a black market eCommerce revolution. But anonymity cuts both ways. How long until a DEA agent sets up a fake Silk Road account and starts sending SWAT teams instead of LSD to the addresses she gets? As Silk Road inevitably spills out of the bitcoin bubble, its drug-swapping utopians will meet a harsh reality no anonymizing network can blur.

If Only Shopping Was This Fun All The Time



Uploaded by

This is a funny video of people shopping. Actually pretty cool too, these people are the shiznit.

Gorgeous video explains why there’s no such thing as a jellyfish

Meredith Woerner It's wrong to lump all the ocean's jelly-like creatures into one category "jellyfish." So this video from the wonderful The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute breaks down all the glorious varieties of these magical sea beasts.
From MBARI:
By all accounts, jellyfish are creatures that kill people, eat microbes, grow to tens of meters, filter phytoplankton, take over ecosystems, and live forever. Because of the immense diversity of gelatinous plankton, jelly-like creatures can individually have each of these properties. However this way of looking at them both overstates and underestimates their true diversity. Taxonomically, they are far more varied than a handful of exemplars that are used to represent jellyfish or especially the so-called "true" jellyfish. Ecologically, they are even more adaptable than one would expect by looking only at the conspicuous bloom forming families and species that draw most of the attention. In reality, the most abundant and diverse gelatinous groups in the ocean are not the ones that anyone ever sees.
Report Jellyfish sightings here!

Kid Gives Greatest Speech After Learning To Ride A Bike (Video)


EMBED-Kid Gives Speech After Learning To Ride A Bike - Watch more free videos

Soldier Leaves His Baby Daughter A Note Before Going To Afghanistan

Soldier Leaves His Baby Daughter A Note Before Going To Afghanistan

Before departing for a tour in Afghanistan, First Lieutenant Todd Weaver left a note to his 9 month year old daughter. Todd Weaver was killed on September 9, 2010 by an improvised explosive device. The letter to his daughter reads:
Dear Kiley, My Sweetie:

Although you may not remember me, I want you to know how very much your Daddy loves you. I left for Afghanistan when you were 9 months old. Leaving you was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. You are so very special to me sweetie – you are truly a gift from God. The best day of my life was the day you were born. Every time I saw you smile my heart would just melt. You were my sweetie – my life was not complete until you were born.
I am so sorry I will not be able to see you grow up. But remember, your Daddy is not gone. I am in heaven now smiling down on you every day. You are so very lucky to have such a wonderful Mom to take care of you. Make sure you are good for her and help her out whenever you can. Always remember to say your prayers at night and be thankful for all your many blessings. Never forget how important and special you are to so many people. We love you so very much. When you get older and start school, do your best and try to learn as much as you can about the world you live in. Always be nice and caring to others and you will discover that the world will be nice to you. But when things aren’t going your way, never forget that God knows what is best for you and everything will work out in the end.
You have such a bright and beautiful future ahead of you. Have fun. Enjoy it. And remember, your Daddy will always be proud of you and will always love you. You are and will always be my sweetie.
With very much love,
Your Daddy

Van Damme Friday - How to Order the JCVD Watches

by Jean-Claude Van Damme on Monday, May 30, 2011 at 9:44am


The new JCVD watches are only available to buy from the website jcvd-watches.com and we ship worldwide!
Please create your account on http://www.jcvd-watches.com/category.php?id_category=10 to order your watch now!

Waleed Al-Telbany - Team JCVD
JCVD New Watch Collection - Limited launch offer strarting friday, may 20th