Eideard

DNA tests confirmed that a body found off the coast of Brazil is that of a priest who disappeared while flying over the Atlantic buoyed by hundreds of brightly colored party balloons, authorities said Tuesday.

The Rev. Adelir Antonio de Carli set off from the Brazilian port city of Paranagua on April 20 strapped to 1,000 helium-filled balloons in an attempt to raise money to build a rest stop and worship center for truckers.

But the 41-year-old Roman Catholic priest soon lost contact with his ground team, and the cluster of yellow, orange, pink and white balloons was found in the water a day later.

Tugboat workers discovered a body off Rio de Janeiro in early July that authorities believed belonged to the cleric.

Medical examiner worker Rosane Alves said Tuesday that tests comparing DNA samples from de Carli’s brother to the body confirmed their suspicions.

Some will call him a fool, but I’ll applaud that he didn’t die doing nothing.

Only recently, however, have economists turned their attention to vengeance and tried to measure it in the real world. In a working paper published last month, Naci Mocan, an economist, gathered information on 89,000 people in 53 countries to draw a map of vengefulness. What he found was that among the most vengeful are women, older people, the poor and residents of high-crime areas.

“There was a question of whether or not we can quantify vengeful feelings in a scientific fashion,” Mocan said. “It’s the first analysis of the issue looking at actual data.”

It turns out that personal attributes — age, income, gender — as well as the characteristics of one’s culture and country contribute to a person’s desire for revenge, Mocan said. “A feeling such as vengeance,” he said, “which can be considered primal, is nonetheless influenced by the economic and social circumstances of the person and the country he or she lives in.”
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Arthur C. Clarke’s health was failing fast, but he still had a story to tell. So he turned to fellow science fiction writer Frederik Pohl, and together the longtime friends wrote what turned out to be Clarke’s last novel.

“The Last Theorem,” which grew from 100 pages of notes scribbled by Clarke, is more than a futuristic tale about a mathematician who discovers a proof to a centuries-old mathematical puzzle.

The novel, due in bookstores August 5, represents a historic collaboration between two of the genre’s most influential writers in the twilight of their careers. Clarke, best known for his 1968 work, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” died in March at age 90; Pohl is 89.

“As much as anything, it’ll be a historic artifact,” says Robin Wayne Bailey, a former president of Science Fiction Writers of America and a writer. “This is a book between two of the last remaining giants in the field.”

Chris Schluep, senior editor at Random House Inc., who worked with Clarke on the book’s concept from the beginning, said the final manuscript maintained a “golden thread” of Clarke throughout but was a clear collaboration between both authors.

“It’s sort of a worthy exclamation point on two pretty incredible careers,” Schluep said.

I couldn’t agree more. Clarke and Pohl have been threaded through my reading for over 60 years, now.

NIST materials scientists Dan Fischer and Cherno Jaye

Titanium, a protean element with applications from pigments to aerospace alloys, could get a new role as an environmentally friendly additive for automotive oil, thanks to work by materials scientists from Afton Chemical Corporation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Researchers have established that a titanium compound added to engine oil creates a wear-resistant nanoscale layer bound to the surface of vulnerable engine parts, making it a credible substitute for older compounds that do not coexist well with antipollution equipment.

For years antiwear additives for high-performance oils have been phosphorous compounds, especially ZDPP, that work by forming a polyphosphate film on engine parts that reduces wear. Unfortunately phosphorus is a chemical poison for automobile catalytic converters, reducing their effectiveness and life span, so industry chemists have been searching for ways to replace or reduce the use of ZDDP.

Titanium is one candidate replacement. Mechanical tests of an organic titanium compound at Afton demonstrated that it provided superior wear resistance when added to a fully formulated engine oil, suggesting that oil chemists could use less ZDDP.

Measurements revealed that the antiwear enhancement comes from titanium chemically bound into the metal structure of the engine surface, forming a hard oxide, iron titanate…While considerably more work remains to be done, the results suggest that titanium could play an important role in future low-phosphorus lubricating oils.

Bravo! And an excellent example of profit and non-profit cooperative research.

A federal grand jury has indicted longtime Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, on charges of failing to disclose receiving gifts of services and construction work as part of a wide-ranging corruption inquiry involving public officials and corporations in his home state. The indictment accuses Mr. Stevens of failing to report on his financial disclosure forms receiving gifts of more than $250,000 — in labor and construction materials — from Veco Corp…

The 84-year-old senator has been running for re-election this year while he was under investigative scrutiny, a matter that had not gone unmentioned by Democrats. His opponent, Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, has been campaigning hard against the longest-sitting Republican member of the Senate, and Democrats have been touting this race as among its most competitive this year.

Mr. Stevens was first appointed to the Senate in 1968, and has served nearly six full terms. He also had been a United States Attorney in the 1950’s.

Federal officials said they did not know whether Mr. Stevens would surrender to authorities here or in Alaska for an arraignment.

He’s one of the most outstanding examples of corruption and cronyism that has divorced traditional American conservatism from the Republican Party. He’s beloved of those who stand for war and reaction, a bulwark of bigotry and arrogance on a global scale.

Blank British passports stolen from a security van would be worth £2.5m on the black market, police said today.

The Foreign Office admitted a serious breach of security when a van carrying the new passports destined for British embassies overseas was hijacked a short distance from the factory that made them.

A spokeswoman said 24 parcels containing passports and vignettes – the blank stickers for visa stamps – had been stolen from a van en route from the factory in Oldham to RAF Northolt near London.

Security arrangements for the movement of passports are normally overseen by the Home Office through a sub-contracted security firm.

However, because these passports were going to embassies, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) was responsible for delivery.

And they all did the perfect, punctual, piss-poor job we’ve come to know and revere!

Hermansen brothers

Dave Hermansen did not own a bird or a cage when he bought bird-cage.com, an online store, for $1,800 three years ago. He simply saw a Web site that was “very, very poorly done,” and begged the owners to sell it to him. He then redesigned the site, added advertising and drove up traffic. Last December, he sold it for $173,000.

Hermansen, 30, is among the latest wave of entrepreneurs who, like the day traders and real estate investors before them, are looking to make a lot of money without much effort.

They use little more than home computers and free software to buy Web sites that appeal to a small and specific niche. Then they fix up the sites with hopes of reselling them for far more than they paid…

While there is no data on how many people flip Web sites, the number of sites sold on eBay has doubled over the last three months, the company said. At SitePoint’s marketplace, a similar forum where users can auction off Web sites, sales have quadrupled in the last year.

Instead of selling goods and services, analysts said most flippers are looking into the easiest way to make a quick profit, by tapping into specialized advertising.

Useful detailed article about the process and how-to’s. Before bird cages, Hermansen owned, and sold, niche Web sites about paintball, remote-control toys and electric scooters. In 2005, he quit his job as a draftsman to flip Web sites full time.

I realize – looking around the Web – that good taste and effective design isn’t common; but, it’s not any more difficult to learn than acceptable digital photography or communications skills 101. KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid, still rules.

We doubt there’s anyone reading this site who hasn’t dreamed of going to space, of seeing the entire world floating in a black vacuum below, of joining the ranks of the incredibly few humans who’ve actually left the planet, and maybe of eating a few weightless M&Ms while taking it all in. Today, only the truly fabulously wealthy can fulfill such dreams, as it takes a cool $30-million or so to buy your way aboard a Russian voyage to the ISS. Within just years however, Virgin Galactic will change everything by driving the financial barrier to entering the last frontier down to just $190,000, and once efficiencies of scale kick in, even less than that.

The X Prize winning SpaceShip1 pioneered in innumerable fields, ranging from the specialized materials and construction processes employed in building the craft to its unique and highly efficient air-launch strategy from a high-flying ‘WhiteKnight’ mothership. We covered the first announcement of Virgin Galactic’s larger commercial follow-on to SS1 back in January, and now, dispelling ‘vapor-ware’ whispers in the best way possible, we’ve got pics of Virgin Galactic’s new WhiteKnightTwo launch mothership fresh out of Scaled Composites’ hangers in the Mohave desert.

Wow!

Each triangle marks someone killed in a road accident

Would you be surprised to learn that nine people died last year on the highway you take to work everyday? Or would you be shocked to see that six teenagers died within five miles of your home in fatal car accidents? With the help of the interactive maps developed by University of Minnesota researchers, you can learn those facts and more by simply typing in your address.

Researchers in the Center for Excellence in Rural Safety (CERS) have mapped out every fatality in the nation with details on each death, so now you can see the “dead man’s curve” on your commute or the “devil’s triangle” in your backyard. [macabre or what?]

“When drivers type in their most common routes, they’re shocked how much blood is being shed on it,” said Tom Horan, research director for CERS. “When it’s the route you or your loved ones use, the need to buckle up, slow down and avoid distractions and drinking suddenly becomes much more personal and urgent.”

Enter your address at http://www.saferoadmaps.org and you will see a map or satellite image of all of the road fatalities that have occurred in the area. Plus, users have the ability to narrow down their search to see the age of the driver, whether speeding or drinking was a factor, and if the driver was wearing a seatbelt.

This is a gas! It’s also getting enough media coverage that their servers are a bit overloaded.

He’s the guy on the right, holding the
whatever-it-is.

Holmes County,Florida– Principal David Davis led a “relentless crusade” against homosexuality at Ponce de Leon High School, a federal judge said in court documents filed Thursday….

“Davis embarked on what can only be characterized as a witch hunt,” wrote U.S. District Judge Richard Smoak, who blasted him for his “morality assemblies” and misunderstanding of the First Amendment.

The opinion came more than two months after Heather Gillman and the American Civil Liberties Union won a free-speech lawsuit against the Holmes County School Board – which actually was Davis’ complicit “alter ego,” Smoak wrote….

Students had begun showing support following the taunting of a gay student at school.

In response to the taunting incident, Davis told the gay student it wasn’t right for her to be homosexual and held a morality assembly, according to testimony.

Then, after an investigation into the “secret society” of gay pride at school, Davis suspended several students for supporting the girl. He told one suspended student’s mother “he could secretly send her daughter off to a private Christian school” and said “if there was a man in your house … you wouldn’t be having any of these gay issues,” according to the court.

Davis banned rainbows, pink triangles and a number of what he called sexually suggestive slogans. The slogans included “I Support Gays” and “God Loves Me Just the Way I Am.”

According to another source [here], this jerk, who is no longer serving as Principal, is teaching American Government at the same school.  Poor kids!