visionary apple co-founder steve jobs dies at 56

from msnbc: Steve Jobs saw the future and led the world to it. He moved technology from garages to pockets, took entertainment from discs to bytes and turned gadgets into extensions of the people who use them. Jobs, who founded and ran Apple, told us what we needed before we wanted it. "To some people, this is like Elvis Presley or John Lennon. It's a change in our times. It's the end of an era," said Scott Robbins, 34, a barber and an Apple fan. "It's like the end of the innovators." Apple announced his death without giving a specific cause. He died peacefully on Wednesday, according to a statement from family members who were present. He was 56.

update: apple met with palo alto police days before death*

nasa to recruit fresh batch of astronauts

from theregister.co.uk: Ever wanted to get into space, armed with your three PhDs or test pilot's licence, but nothing suitable comes up in the Jobcentre search? Well luckily for you, NASA is hunting for a new class of astronauts - but, be warned, new recruits may wait a long time to get into space.

dhs warns that hackers may be motivated by #occupywallstreet

from mediaite: The “Occupy Wall Street” protests have been a way to fuel people’s anger at Wall Street, and the Department of Homeland Security is concerned such high-profile events may inspire hackers to once again target big financial institutions. Members of the group Anonymous have been seen at the protests, and those who have work the infamous Guy Fawkes mask have been arrested due to an obscure New York law banning masked gatherings. But a few days ago, hackers managed to collect the personal information of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. So Homeland Security issued a warning to big businesses that they could be next.

"While the DHS warning doesn’t mention Wall Street protests in particular, it did say that 'publicized events' like Occupy Wall Street may motivate the group. Nevertheless, the agency wouldn’t weigh in on the ways it might monitor Anonymous’s involvement in Occupy Wall Street. 'We don’t have any role in someone’s right to public protest,' said a DHS official.

One member of the protests quoted in the above article expressed his doubts at the effectiveness and outcomes of Anonymous’ actions, but it’s clear its members only represent a fraction of the protestors.

i survived comet elenin 2011

Comet Elenin disappeared without a whimper from the media, when predictions about a Sept 26th alignment went unfulfilled! Was it strictly a disinfo campaign? Is the threat over? Where are the "I Survived Elenin 2011" t-shirts? Clyde Lewis writes an article, "Elenin's Requiem," a title that may be a bit premature? Lewis points out Earth has yet to pass through Elenin's tail in November and will be at closest approach on October 11th. Marshall Masters hosts a program on Elenin and the Hopi Blue Star Kachina Prophecy, which helps explain some anomalies--such as discrepancies in Elenin's reported size--with possible rational explanation. The video's contributions such as dielectric properties of hydrogen cyanide, which Elenin is composed and what may happen to comets as they encounter solar system's ecliptic, make it a worthwhile 40 minutes! The video makes clear with a FEMA-type danger meter there's still concern in weeks ahead! Masters fascinated by Hopi Prophecies, examines the topic at length. It's good stuff!

quantum access time travel and 9/11

DARPA conducted top secret time travel experiments under banner Project Pegasus, according to Andrew Basiago, who reveals his involvement as a child in the late sixties and early seventies. Alfred Lambremont Webre reports in an Examiner article, "Secret DARPA time travel program may hold key to understanding the deep politics of 9/11," Basiago attests former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in the early seventies as attache to the project, learned of 9/11 thirty years prior to the event. Basiago reveals images of 9/11 were stored "...using chronovision to capture remotely and record on film a vast amount of footage of past and future events". Basiago also claims in a related April 19, 2010 radio interview, Rumsfeld changed the location of his office in the Pentagon a short time prior to 9/11!

Webre, has written, other articles in series on time travel available for reading here. You can get more information on time travel here. The present writer remains open, wondering if Webre is primarily a disinfo agent to muddy the waters? Or, is there a growing secret world or breakaway civilization, leaving us in the dust? It's an interesting read either way!

uvb-76: inside the russian short wave radio enigma

from wired: From a lonely rusted tower in a forest north of Moscow, a mysterious shortwave radio station transmitted day and night. For at least the decade leading up to 1992, it broadcast almost nothing but beeps; after that, it switched to buzzes, generally between 21 and 34 per minute, each lasting roughly a second—a nasally foghorn blaring through a crackly ether. The signal was said to emanate from the grounds of a voyenni gorodok (mini military city) near the village of Povarovo, and very rarely, perhaps once every few weeks, the monotony was broken by a male voice reciting brief sequences of numbers and words, often strings of Russian names: “Anna, Nikolai, Ivan, Tatyana, Roman.” But the balance of the airtime was filled by a steady, almost maddening, series of inexplicable tones.

The amplitude and pitch of the buzzing sometimes shifted, and the intervals between tones would fluctuate. Every hour, on the hour, the station would buzz twice, quickly. None of the upheavals that had enveloped Russia in the last decade of the cold war and the first two decades of the post-cold-war era—Mikhail Gorbachev, perestroika, the end of the Afghan war, the Soviet implosion, the end of price controls, Boris Yeltsin, the bombing of parliament, the first Chechen war, the oligarchs, the financial crisis, the second Chechen war, the rise of Putinism—had ever kept UVB-76, as the station’s call sign ran, from its inscrutable purpose. During that time, its broadcast came to transfix a small cadre of shortwave radio enthusiasts, who tuned in and documented nearly every signal it transmitted. Although the Buzzer (as they nicknamed it) had always been an unknown quantity, it was also a reassuring constant, droning on with a dark, metronome-like regularity.

But on June 5, 2010, the buzzing ceased. No announcements, no explanations. Only silence.

supercomputer predicts revolution through 'culturomics'

from singularity hub: A new type of software has been shown to predict revolutions by mining news reports around the world. Retrospectively mining the news for the past 30 years the software indicates points at which the likelihood for a revolution is high. When put to the test – bingo! – the software showed spikes just before the recent Egyptian and Libyan upheavals. It was also able to sift through world news to retrospectively pinpoint Osama Bin Ladin’s location to within 200 km. In the emerging science of ‘culturomics’ that tracks cultural trends through the written word, the software was the first to demonstrate that news coverage can be used to predict future events.

The software sifted through news reports from nearly every country in the world. Major sources were from the global news databases such the US government-run Open Source Center which provides foreign open source intelligence, Britain’s equivalent BBC Monitoring, as well as the New York Times’ archive that dates back to 1945. In all, the body of data included over 100 million news articles. The story elements were woven together into a mind-boggling web of 100 trillion relationships. To crunch the massive amount of data the SGI Altix supercomputer Nautilus was enlisted. Its 1024 Intel Nehalem cores give it a total processing power of 8.2 teraflops (trillions of floating point operations per second).

The strategy for pulling out relevant information included two main techniques. ‘Sentiment mining’ involves counting the number of words in a document that are categorized as positive, such as “good” or “nice,” or negative, such as “terrible” or “horrific.” Changes in the tone of a regions’ news documents over time correlates with the sentiment of the people in that region. A major dip in tone, as when the frequency of negative terms rapidly increases, means the natives are getting restless. An unprecedented dip could spell revolution. The second technique, called ‘full-text geocoding,’ matches sentiment to geographic locations.