Duct Tape Wall Tapings

He was a stand-up Marine, a beloved cop, and a local hero — until the government branded him part of the largest kid porn ring in history.

Where Have the Moon Trees Gone?

The trees were grown from seeds that astronaut Stuart Roosa took with him on Apollo 14's mission to the moon. Roosa had been a smokejumper -- a firefighter who parachutes directly into wildfires -- before becoming an astronaut.

Astronauts are allowed to bring a dozen personal items, with a maximum total weight of 1.5 pounds, on their missions. Typically they opt to carry coins, jewelry, stamps and other items suitable for souvenirs.

But a slice of fabric from the Wright brothers' original plane flew aboard Apollo 11, a piece of Captain James Cook's Endeavour ship was in the Apollo 15 lunar module, an astronomical apparatus built in Persia in the 17th century was onboard a Columbia shuttle, and Story Musgrave took a chunk of rock from Stonehenge on his 1990 flight.

When Roosa blasted off on Jan. 31, 1971, he took a six-inch metal cylinder containing seeds from redwood, loblolly pine, sycamore, Douglas fir and sweet gum trees. According to mission records, the seeds orbited the moon 34 times.

Back on Earth, the metal tube burst during decontamination procedures. There were fears the seeds were too damaged to germinate. But virtually all survived after being shipped to Forest Service labs, eventually resulting in hundreds of moon trees.

Some went to national landmarks like the White House and Independence Square in Philadelphia. Others went to local governments; the then-mayor of New Orleans, "Moon" Landrieu, put in a special request. Some were given to foreign heads of state. But plenty of the trees ended up in out-of-the-way places.

Williams says no one tracked where the trees were being sent and the location of most of them is still unknown. Williams' website encourages people to contact him with possible moon tree sightings.

"I really like the fact that these trees can be anywhere, and I'm sure there are a lot out there in local parks, small college campuses and next to buildings that people are walking by every day without realizing it," Williams said.

Most of the moon trees that have been reported have a marker of some sort; without identification, there's no difference between them and standard-issue Earth trees.

CNN.com - Showbuzz - September 12, 2002
De Niro searches science scripts
NEW YORK (AP) -- Robert De Niro and his Tribeca Film Institute partner, Jane Rosenthal, are looking for scripts with scientific or technological themes for possible development.

The scripts, due November 1, should have a leading character who is a scientist, mathematician or engineer. Each submission should include a feature-length script, a short synopsis up to two pages, and the writer's resume. Science fiction story lines won't be accepted.

Two writers will be chosen in the first year of the program, and will receive financial support and insight from filmmakers and science experts. At least one script will be read at the second annual Tribeca Film Festival in spring 2003, and the completed film will screen at the 2004 festival.

"What we're doing here is really looking for the next 'A Beautiful Mind,' 'Memento' or 'Good Will Hunting,"' said Doron Weber, program director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which is a partner in the program with Tribeca Films.

Scripts should be sent to the Tribeca Film Institute, 375 Greenwich Street, New York, NY 10013, Attention: Tribeca/Sloan Film Program.

From the http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/09/12/ar911.sept11.lottery.ap/index.htmlAssociated Press:

ALBANY, New York (AP) -- On the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks, a date known as 9-11, the evening numbers drawn in the New York Lottery were 9-1-1.

"The numbers were picked in the standard random fashion using all the same protocols," said lottery spokeswoman Carolyn Hapeman. "It's just the way the numbers came up."

Lottery officials won't know until Thursday morning how many people played those numbers or the total payout, she said.

For the evening numbers game, the New York Lottery selects from balls numbered zero to nine circulating in a machine at the lottery office. Three levers are pressed, and three balls are randomly brought up into tubes and then displayed.

-km

Ignore Laura Bush, kids. She has no idea what she's talking about. She's from TEXAS, for cryin' out loud -- they probably took the kids to executions for family time.



It's your world. Welcome to it.



km

9/11: ‘American Idol’ seizes the day
AT THE PLACE where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I have a dream” speech, where Marian Anderson was invited by the FDR administration to sing “America” after the Daughters of the American Revolution snubbed her for being black, the “American Idol” winner will make his or her appearance during the day-long ceremonies commemorating the first anniversary of the attacks — six days before the first single by the newly minted superstar is released.
The terrorists have won.

Scientific American: How to Build a Time Machine
Time travel has been a popular science-fiction theme since H. G. Wells wrote his celebrated novel The Time Machine in 1895. But can it really be done? Is it possible to build a machine that would transport a human being into the past or future?

Real Time
More than 200 years ago Benjamin Franklin coined the now famous dictum that equated passing minutes and hours with shillings and pounds. The new millennium--and the decades leading up to it--has given his words their real meaning. Time has become to the 21st century what fossil fuels and precious metals were to previous epochs. Constantly measured and priced, this vital raw material continues to spur the growth of economies built on a foundation of terabytes and gigabits per second.

something positive - a webcomic with chocolate sprinkles

Comic Book Resources - COLUMN by Mark Millar, 8/30/02

A baby-sitter two nights in a row is close to impossible in our family so I stuck on my old copy of The Matrix as a poor sub for a night out. It was the first time Gill had ever seen it and she actually managed to ruin it for me completely by pointing out a major plot hurdle the next two films really better explain. We're all living in The Matrix, right? We're all slaves to the robotic parasites who use our bodies as batteries while they distract us with our nice, glamorous lives in what we perceive to be the real world, right? Neo is The One who's going to free us from these evil robot masters and help us all wake up and reclaim our planet, right? So far, so good, but the world we reclaim is a post-nuclear nightmare, brother! No sun, no fun, no food, no nice clothes, no new comics every Wednesday or Thursday. Imagine everything and everyone you know suddenly switching off as you open your eyes in your little special effects pod and Lawrence bloody Fishburne is standing there with a nuclear winter blowing behind him, telling us he's saved humanity.

Thanks a lot, Morpheus, you big, fucking twat.

In fact, researchers have found evidence of a linkage between quantum mechanics and something called the Riemann function, a mathematical relationship deeply connected to the distribution of primes. Maybe the
particles of the number system are somehow intertwined with the particles of matter and energy.

... 98,711, 98,713, 98,717, 98,729, 98,731, 98,737, 98,773 ... The
counter keeps ticking off primes. Those, like 98,711 and 98,713 or 98,729 and 98,731, which are just two places apart (the closest two primes can be), are called twin primes. They pop up with amazing regularity, and mathematicians believe that there is an infinity of them.

The mysteries abound. While killing time during a boring lecture (or so the legend goes), the 20th-century mathematician Stanislaw Ulam discovered his “Ulam spiral’’: Build a grid of numbers starting with 1 at the center, moving up a square for 2 and then coiling counterclockwise. The primes inexplicably tend to line up along diagonals. Plot thousands of numbers this way, representing each with a tiny dot, and the diagonals crisscross like some tenuous crystalline structure, a scaffolding behind the stars in the numerical skies.

Maybe this is what the autistic twins in Oliver Sacks’ “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat’’ saw with their inner eyes. Sacks wrote of how he observed the brothers one day at a state mental hospital as they sat in apparent rapture exchanging six-figure primes that they seemed to pull from their heads.

The next day the doctor returned and offered them an eight-figure prime to play with. Once they overcame their astonishment, the twins were off, generating 10-digit primes. Sacks’ list did not go any higher so he was unable to check their work as they went on to spout seemingly impenetrable numbers as long as 20 digits. If only he had had the Agrawal-Kayal-Saxena algorithm.

Could the twins have been born with the neurological equivalent? Sacks speculated in his book that they were equipped with a “Pythagorean sensibility,’’ a special feeling for numbers, “a direct cognition — like angels.’’

The gift, if that is what it was, turned out to be exceedingly delicate.
Ten years later the two were separated and put in halfway houses. Though they learned important grooming skills and how to ride buses, Sacks reported, the ability to commune with numbers was apparently gone. They had become as clueless as the rest of us.

(FROM HERE TO INFINITY: AN OBSESSION WITH THE JOY OF PRIMES, By GEORGE JOHNSON, c.2002 New York Times News Service)