Dear Alanis Morissette, This is irony.

Julian Assange's Attorney Angry Over Leaked Documents

Incriminating police files were published in the British newspaper that has used him as its source for hundreds of leaked US embassy cables.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/lawyers-cry-foul-over-leak-of-julian-assange-sex-case-papers/story-e6frg6so-1225973548657

Pimp my Tree

Too much seasonal spirit

An Abu Dhabi luxury hotel that boasted an $11m Christmas tree decorated with gold and gems has admitted it may have taken the holiday spirit a bit too far.

A statement from the Emirates Palace hotel said it regretted "attempts to overload" the Christmas tree tradition by adorning it with premium bling including gold, rubies, diamonds and other precious stones from a hotel jeweller.

The tree was unveiled last week with full fanfare in a hotel that features its own gold bar vending machine and a one-week $1m package that includes private jet jaunts around the Middle East.

But the hotel management apparently had second thoughts after questions arose about whether the opulent tree was innocent good cheer or unfortunate bad taste.

full @ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/19/abu-dhabi-hotel-christmas-tree

FW: Note to self: "password" is a common password.

from my friend Sam

The Top 50 Gawker Media Passwords

Readers of Gizmodo, Lifehacker and other Gawker Media sites may be among the savviest on the Web, but the most common password for logging into those sites is embarrassingly easy to guess: "123456."

So is the runner-up: "password."

On Sunday night, hackers posted online a trove of data from Gawker Media's servers, including the usernames, email addresses and passwords of more than one million registered users. The passwords were originally encrypted, but 188,279 of them were decoded and made public as part of the hack. Using that dataset, we found the 50 most-popular Gawker Media passwords.

More at http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/12/13/the-top-50-gawker-media-passwords/

Lunar Eclipse Falls on Winter Solstice, plus meteor shower

Multiple astronomical events are lining up for a rare display of synchronization tonight as a total lunar eclipse overlaps with 2010's winter solstice.

Depending on the location, late night December 20 or early morning December 21, the full moon will be darkened by Earth's shadow as our planet passes between it and the sun. December 21 is also the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, after which the days will begin to grow longer. Coupled with the lunar spectacle, it means we're in for an especially dark eve.

According to The AP, North and Central America should both be able to view the entire eclipse, which is estimated to take about 3.5 hours. Total eclipse will begin at 11:41 p.m. PST on Monday, or 2:41 a.m. EST on Tuesday -- so obviously West Coasters will have a better chance to catch the magnificent sight without dragging around heavy eyelids and needing an extra dose of espresso the following morning. If you want to set an alarm to catch a brief glimpse of the amber moon, NASA recommends 3:17 a.m. EST for the optimal impression.

According to AolNews.com, NASA reports that this is the first time an eclipse has coincided with a solstice since December 21, 1638, and the next one won't come around again until 2094. The extravaganza in the sky doesn't end there, however, as the Ursids meteor shower will also be taking place.

CityStateTime.com reports that this particular annual show is rarely witnessed compared to its brighter counterparts, but stargazers will have an especially exceptional chance to view the display this year because of the eclipse's darkened sky.

Wired: ‘Unprecedented’ Drone Assault: 58 Strikes in 102 Days

It may take years, but some researcher will travel to Pakistan's tribal areas and produce a definitive study on what it's been like to live amidst an aerial bombardment from American pilotless aircraft. When that account inevitably comes out, it's likely to find that 2010 — and especially the final quarter of 2010 — marked a turning point in how civilians coped with a drone war that turned relentless.

Even as the Obama administration's assessment of its war strategy nodded to the primacy of the CIA's drone campaign, Predators underscored the point. Over the past two days, four Predators or Reapers fired their missiles at suspected militants in North Waziristan, with three of the strikes coming early today.

They represent a geographic expansion of the drone war. Today's strikes come in Khyber, an area abutting Afghanistan's Nangahar province, that's been notably drone-free. It has become an area for militants fleeing military action in South Waziristan to take succor.

They also bring the drone-strike tally for this year up to 113, more than twice last year's 53 strikes. But those figures don't begin to tell the whole story.

According to a tally kept by the Long War Journal, 58 of those strikes have come since September: There has been a drone attack every 1.8 days since Labor Day. LWJ's Bill Roggio says the pace of attacks between September and November (there was a brief December respite, now erased) is "unprecedented since the U.S. began the air campaign in Pakistan in 2004." (By contrast, in 2008, there were just 34 strikes.)

Both Roggio and the New America Foundation have found that the overwhelming majority of this year's strikes have clustered in North Waziristan: at least 99, by Roggio's count.

That torrid pace of attacks should make it beyond debate that the drones are the long pole in the U.S.'s counterterrorism tent, even if the drone program is technically a secret. The Pakistanis haven't sent their Army into North Waziristan to harass al-Qaeda's haven in the mountainous, Connecticut-sized region, waving off U.S. pressure to invade.

Without a ground force to rely on, the CIA argues, the only option for fulfilling the administration's goal of crushing al-Qaeda is a missile strapped to a surveillance aircraft. During the presidential campaign, Obama said he would pursue al-Qaeda in Pakistan unilaterally if he deemed the Pakistanis intransigent. No one expected he meant he'd do so from the skies.

full @ http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/12/unprecedented-drone-strikes-hit-pakistan-in-late-2010

Robot Chicken High-Fives Palpatine in Final Star Wars Spoof

Robot Chicken High-Fives Palpatine in Final Star Wars Spoof

In Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode III, Emperor Palpatine is less the universe's evil incarnate and more the overwhelmed multigalactic CEO encumbered with ambitious yet hapless employees like Darth Vader. Matt Senreich talks about making George Lucas laugh and searching for a new sci-fi franchise to parody.

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/12/robot-chicken-star-wars-episode-3

How cold is it ?

"Invisible" LOLCat Pictures

http://www.buzzfeed.com/bizzybee712/the-best-invisible-lolcat-pictures-k16

FW: Let it Dough!

http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/let-it-dough/

Thought you'd appreciate this - Season's Greetings in cookie form. Enjoy!

-Sam

I'm not goofing off. I'm optimizing my creative energies.

People who watch funny videos on the internet at work aren't necessarily wasting time.

They may be taking advantage of the latest psychological science—putting themselves in a good mood so they can think more creatively.

http://www.healthnewsdigest.com/news/psychological0/A_Positive_Mood_Allows_Your_Brain_to_Think_More_Creatively.shtml

From HealthNewsDigest.com

A Positive Mood Allows Your Brain to Think More Creatively
Dec 16, 2010 - 8:17:15 PM

(HealthNewsDigest.com) - People who watch funny videos on the internet at work aren't necessarily wasting time. They may be taking advantage of the latest psychological science—putting themselves in a good mood so they can think more creatively.

"Generally, positive mood has been found to enhance creative problem solving and flexible yet careful thinking," says Ruby Nadler, a graduate student at the University of Western Ontario. She and colleagues Rahel Rabi and John Paul Minda carried out a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. For this study, Nadler and her colleagues looked at a particular kind of learning that is improved by creative thinking.

Students who took part in the study were put into different moods and then given a category learning task to do (they learned to classify sets of pictures with visually complex patterns). The researchers manipulated mood with help from music clips and video clips; first, they tried several out to find out what made people happiest and saddest. The happiest music was a peppy Mozart piece, and the happiest video was of a laughing baby. The researchers then used these in the experiment, along with sad music and video (a piece of music from Schindler's List and a news report about an earthquake) and a piece of music and a video that didn't affect mood. After listening to the music and watching the video, people had to try to learn to recognize a pattern.

Happy volunteers were better at learning a rule to classify the patterns than sad or neutral volunteers. "If you have a project where you want to think innovatively, or you have a problem to carefully consider, being in a positive mood can help you to do that," Nadler says. And music is an easy way to get into a good mood. Everyone has a different type of music that works for them—don't feel like you have to switch to Mozart, she says.

Nadler also thinks this may be a reason why people like to watch funny videos at work. "I think people are unconsciously trying to put themselves in a positive mood"—so that apparent time-wasting may actually be good news for employers.

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So nice they named it twice

When it's 100 degrees in New York City, in Los Angeles it's 72 .
When it's 18 degrees in New York City, in Los Angeles it's 72.
There are 6 million interesting people in New York City.
In Los Angeles, there are 72.

Beats slicing into a Tauntaun

from my friend Harry

http://www.geekalerts.com/star-wars-usb-hand-warmers/

Washington Crossing the Delaware re-enactment on Sunday

The annual memorial recreation of Washington Crossing the Delaware River is a great event for the entire family.
Come and reflect on the historic activities of 1776 and witness this great commemorative event.

The Crossing of the Delaware takes place on Christmas day, but there is a Dress Rehearsal this Sunday, Dec 12, 11am-3pm

The annual dress rehearsal:
Not only do General Washington and his troops cross the Delaware River in uniform just as they do on Christmas day, but additional activities and demonstrations take place throughout the historic village.

The event/village activities will occur from 11am to 3pm, with the crossing time occurring around 1:00 pm. River crossings are contingent upon safe conditions for participants. If the river/conditions do not allow for the crossing, do not hesitate to join us anyway as speeches, activities, and demonstrations will still occur to commemorate this great event. During the crossing, visitors are to remain behind the rope line. On the day of the dress rehearsal, admission is charged.

http://www.ushistory.org/washingtoncrossing/

WikiLeaks mirror sites

NYDailyNews.com:

WikiLeaks sparks 'mirror' sites, making the controversial leaked cables easier to access than ever

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2010/12/08/2010-12-08_wikileaks_sparks_mirror_sites_making_the_controversial_leaked_cables_easier_to_a.html

=====

"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

- John Gilmore, Time magazine, 6-Dec-1993

John Gilmore is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_(activist)

You will hate me for sending you this link...

http://verydemotivational.memebase.com/

a friend replied:

You're right... I hate you.

Well, on the "OMG my productivity level just went underground" kind of a way.

Otherwise... I love your e-mails. I love this one. I didn't want to work today ANYWAY.

Air Force Uses PlayStation Processors to Build Supercomputer

Gamers might think Xbox is the best system for playing war games, but can it be transformed into a supercomputer for use by the U.S. military? Sony's PlayStation 3 can.

In what might be called supercomputing-on-the-cheap, a U.S. Air Force research laboratory in upstate New York strung together more than 1,700 PlayStation 3 processors and created the fastest interactive computer currently utilized by the Department of Defense.

Nicknamed the Condor Cluster, the supercomputer allows the military to perform fast analysis of large high-resolution imagery captured by satellites. The PS3 cluster is capable of performing 500 trillion operations every second, which is about a third of the speed of the third fastest computer in the world–the IBM Roadrunner computer used by the Department of Energy.

But the Roadrunner cost about $120 million to build. The PS3 cluster only $2.3 million.

full @ http://www.allgov.com/Unusual_News/ViewNews/Air_Force_Uses_PlayStation_Processors_to_Build_Supercomputer_101202

Harry Potter’s Grave becomes Tourist Site in Israel

No, not that Harry Potter. This Harry Potter, of Birmingham, England, served in the British Army and was stationed in Israel, where he was killed, at the age of 18, on July 22, 1939, during an ambush by anti-colonial Arab rebels.

Despite not being the fictional hero of J. K. Rowling's enormously successful novels, Potter's grave in the Commonwealth Cemetery in Ramla has become quite the tourist attraction, thanks in part to the local tourist board's promotion of it.

The cemetery, which contains the remains of 4,500 British soldiers killed during the two World Wars and the period in between, is located in an industrial zone and can be visited six days a week.

Potter's last letter to his parents, which arrived the day after they learned of his death, began, "Dear Mother, I am getting on alright. I expect to be home for Christmas. If I am not, it is a bit of bad luck."

-David Wallechinsky, Noel Brinkerhoff

Grave of Real-Life British Soldier Harry Potter Killed 71 Years Ago Becomes an Official Tourist Attraction in Israel (Daily Mail)

Harry Potter's Grave Draws Tourists to Small Israeli Town (by Tia Goldberg, Associated Press)

So you like to quote movies ?

Here's a handy link to put in your Favorites folder.

http://www.script-o-rama.com/table.shtml
Click on the movie script title and the full text of the screenplay should magically appear.

Teacher has "eyes" in the back of his head.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/12/02/new.york.camera.head/index.html

Phylogenetics for Facebook?

a little mad scientist fun for all...

Phylogenetics for Facebook ?
By Allison Proffitt

December 2, 2010 | A pattern-matching puzzle created by bioinformaticians at McGill University lets players sort genetic code. The game, called Phylo, takes advantage of the human brain's efficiency at recognizing and sorting patterns to tackle multiple sequence alignments.

Aligning genetic sequences is traditionally done computationally, but what is a huge computational problem, is a bit easier for the human brain. "There are some calculations that the human brain does more efficiently than any computer can, such as recognizing a face," explained lead researcher Jérôme Waldispuhl of the School of Computer Science in a McGill press release. "Recognizing and sorting the patterns in the human genetic code falls in that category."

Players don't start from scratch, but instead refine data that has already been aligned. "By taking data which has already been aligned by a heuristic algorithm, we allow the user to optimize where the algorithm may have failed," the game creators explain on the site.

All alignments were made available through UCSC Genome Browser and contain sections of human DNA which have been speculated to be linked to various genetic disorders, such as breast cancer. Every alignment is received, analyzed, and stored in a database, where it will eventually be re-introduced back into the global alignment as an optimization. Players can choose which disease they'd like to work on, or be assigned to a random level.

Players don't need to understand (or even care about) phylogenetics though. Rather than strings of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs, players align four colored squares on a grid. Each row of colors represents a sequence from a certain species. Sequences can be moved horizontally and spaced out, but not rearranged or deleted.

The goal is to line up columns of colors that represent alignments between the two or more sequences. There will, of course, be gaps in sequences and spots where the two rows don't match. The goal is to find the best tradeoff betwen aligning color and creating gaps. Players try to manually find the best alignment and beat the computer's original alignment score. The first level aligns two sequences, and sequences are added as players advance.

Researchers released the game on Monday after testing. They hope the create a Facebook, iPhone, and Android application versions of the game. Until then, Phylo can be played at http://phylo.cs.mcgill.ca.

"She's dead. Wrapped in plastic."

November 30, 2010

A Series Homage Lovingly Wrapped in Plastic

By MIKE HALE

By 11 p.m. on Wednesday (10 p.m., Central), the people who catalog such things will have already ferreted out and posted the many homages to "Twin Peaks" in "Dual Spires," the new episode of "Psych" on USA that will have just ended.

The allusions appear nearly nonstop, from the obvious — a girl's body wrapped in plastic, a sheriff named after an American president, a damn fine cup of cider — to the slightly more subtle, like silent drape runners, the letter J and Chris Isaak's voice on the soundtrack.

"Psych," a resolutely silly comedy-mystery starring James Roday as a fake-psychic police consultant, makes a practice of referring to old movies and television shows, and has frequently joked about "Twin Peaks." But "Dual Spires" goes past affection to obsession, which seems appropriate when you're saluting one of the weirdest television series ever to survive for 30 episodes in prime time.

Mr. Roday and Dulé Hill, as the crime fighters Shawn and Gus, travel to the strange town of Dual Spires and are caught up in the mystery of who killed Paula Merral. (The name is an anagram of Laura Palmer, the dead girl of "Twin Peaks.") The "Psych" opening has been redone in somber "Twin Peaks" style, with images from Southern California rather than the Pacific Northwest — a seagull replaces the thrush — and the "Psych" theme song has been rerecorded by Julee Cruise, the chanteuse of the "Twin Peaks" roadhouse.

A clutch of "Twin Peaks" actors, including regulars like Ray Wise, Sheryl Lee, Sherilyn Fenn and Dana Ashbrook, has been reunited for "Dual Spires," and the episode's best moments involve their spoofing the parts that made them famous. In one moment that's actually spooky — something you don't expect from the jokey, often tinny "Psych" — the camera pans up from the face of Paula Merral to the face of the coroner, and it's Ms. Lee, the original Laura Palmer, in effect looking down at her own corpse.

It might seem like a long way down from "Twin Peaks" to "Psych," and it's a little irritating how "Dual Spires" milks laughs from the overwrought reactions of the townspeople to Paula's death. While it may strike some contemporary viewers as hokey, not many things on television have been as brilliantly constructed or portrayed as the crescendo of grief in the "Twin Peaks" pilot.

"Twin Peaks" expands in the memory, however; it's easy to forget that the atmosphere of dreamy menace and the pitch-perfect sendup of 1950s-'60s soap opera — "Peyton Place" in the cocaine age — were largely absent after the two-hour pilot directed byDavid Lynch, who created the series with Mark Frost. By Episode 3 the weirdness had set in, that supernatural-surreal vaudeville that defined the show while dragging it down; Mr. Lynch would perfect it later in the underrated film "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" and particularly in "Mulholland Drive."

The "Psych" episode, billed as a 20th-anniversary tribute, comes 20 years to the day after the 16th episode of "Twin Peaks" (17th, if you count the pilot). That was the one that answered the question of who killed Laura Palmer, after which there was really no reason to keep watching. Someone involved with "Psych" was watching, though: "Dual Spires" includes references to really obscure, late-second-season stuff like Windom Earle and the Black Lodge.

Tribute episodes have some value for gluttonous fans and idea-starved writers — witness the recent elaborate salutes by "Castle" and "Supernatural," just days apart, to "The X Files," the best American television show of the 1990s and one that's hard to imagine without the previous existence of "Twin Peaks." The best thing about "Dual Spires" would be for it to drive viewers back to the "Twin Peaks" pilot, which is available from iTunes and on the "Definitive Gold Box Edition" DVD set. (Other Season 1 DVD packages do not include the pilot.) It's the only way really to appreciate the fleeting scene in "Dual Spires" of a woman (Catherine Coulson, as it happens) carrying a log.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/arts/television/01psych.html?_r=1

"She's dead. Wrapped in plastic."