inkbluesky

megan fox’s ankle tattoo

Very attractive combination of orange moon and green starfish which you can see better on the 1204×499 size.

Hidden camera focuses on Alaska grizzlies

Only a lucky few humans are allowed each summer to get up close and personal with the McNeil River bears, but thanks to the wilderness equivalent of the “Big Brother” show, the animals are available to the world.

A bear cam set up in their favorite spot of the 114,400-acre McNeil River State Game Sanctuary shows them brawling over salmon, cooling off in the falls, sunbathing on the rocks and fattening up for the long, Alaska winter.

The state holds a lottery for about 250 people each year to visit the sanctuary 250 miles southwest of Anchorage to view the bears. The bear cam allows the less lucky to get a look, too, said Mike O’Meara, project manager for the Pratt Museum in Homer across Cook Inlet from the sanctuary.

“The first thing they have to say is ‘Oh, this is live.’ That intrigues them. Then they really get wrapped up in watching the bears. A lot of them are struck in how the bears interact and communicate with each other,” he said.

The bear cam is turned on from 5 a.m. until 11 p.m. and has eight presets to zoom in on where the animals are likely to be at any given hour. During the afternoon, an interpreter at the museum controls the solar-powered camera to get the best views.

Direct link to the internet cam at National Geographic.

Maybe it shouldn’t bother me, maybe corruption is just the new cool thing that is sweeping the nation like a fad. Interior Report: Indian trust officials violated ethics rules in contract awards

In a blistering report, the Interior Department’s top investigator says that senior officials who manage $3.2 billion in Indian trust funds pressured subordinates to award lucrative contracts to executives with whom the officials enjoyed close social ties.

According to the report, officials in the Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians (OST), based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, often partied with executives of an Albuquerque accounting firm, Chavarria, Dunne & Lamey LLC. The officials and executives played golf together and exchanged gifts of meals and drinks over an eight-year period. During this time, the report says, the Chavarria firm won $6.6 million in sole source contracts.

“Violated ethics rules”, what a cute way of saying that tax payers have been robbed and native Americans screwed over. Your average bank robbing street thug truly is stupid when they could just put on a suit and tie, run for office or get appointed to something and steal millions. At worse a high priced lawyer will get you off with a fine.

There is an update of megan’s other tattoo’s here  

do you think we’re being watched

New Terror Detainee Bill

U.S. citizens suspected of terror ties might be detained indefinitely and barred from access to civilian courts under legislation proposed by the Bush administration, say legal experts reviewing an early version of the bill.

A 32-page draft measure is intended to authorize the Pentagon’s tribunal system, established shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks to detain and prosecute detainees captured in the war on terror. The tribunal system was thrown out last month by the Supreme Court.

Administration officials, who declined to comment on the draft, said the proposal was still under discussion and no final decisions had been made.

Senior officials are expected to discuss a final proposal before the Senate Armed Services Committee next Wednesday.

According to the draft, the military would be allowed to detain all “enemy combatants” until hostilities cease. The bill defines enemy combatants as anyone “engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners who has committed an act that violates the law of war and this statute.”

Legal experts said Friday that such language is dangerously broad and could authorize the military to detain indefinitely U.S. citizens who had only tenuous ties to terror networks like al Qaeda.

“That’s the big question … the definition of who can be detained,” said Martin Lederman, a law professor at Georgetown University who posted a copy of the bill to a Web blog.

We can all agree that the bad guys should be detained, but who are the bad guys. There must be some very precise systematic way that someone can tell so that no innocent people are detained forever without a fair legal hearing, right? Marshals: Innocent People Placed On ‘Watch List’ To Meet Quota

You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they’re reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it.

The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they’re required to submit at least one report a month. If they don’t, there’s no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.

“Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft … and they did nothing wrong,” said one federal air marshal.

These unknowing passengers who are doing nothing wrong are landing in a secret government document called a Surveillance Detection Report, or SDR. Air marshals told 7NEWS that managers in Las Vegas created and continue to maintain this potentially dangerous quota system.

“Do these reports have real life impacts on the people who are identified as potential terrorists?” 7NEWS Investigator Tony Kovaleski asked.

“Absolutely,” a federal air marshal replied.

7NEWS obtained an internal Homeland Security document defining an SDR as a report designed to identify terrorist surveillance activity.

Aging is not what it used to be

The Keller family illustrates what may prove to be one of the most striking shifts in human existence — a change from small, relatively weak and sickly people to humans who are so big and robust that their ancestors seem almost unrecognizable.

New research from around the world has begun to reveal a picture of humans today that is so different from what it was in the past that scientists say they are startled. Over the past 100 years, says one researcher, Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago, humans in the industrialized world have undergone “a form of evolution that is unique not only to humankind, but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.”

The difference does not involve changes in genes, as far as is known, but changes in the human form. It shows up in several ways, from those that are well known and almost taken for granted, like greater heights and longer lives, to ones that are emerging only from comparisons of health records.

The biggest surprise emerging from the new studies is that many chronic ailments like heart disease, lung disease and arthritis are occurring an average of 10 to 25 years later than they used to. There is also less disability among older people today, according to a federal study that directly measures it. And that is not just because medical treatments like cataract surgery keep people functioning. Human bodies are simply not breaking down the way they did before.

crystal clear beach 1600

1996 - Beach volleyball officially became an Olympic sport.

1890-1906 - Abbot Kinney realized his dream of turning some rather nice seaside marsh land into a seaside resort that came to be known as the Venice of the Pacific - Venice Beach, California.

1806 - American explorers Lewis and Clark camped on Cottonwood Beach in Washougal, Washington.

Turing walking into energy, Powering Up, One Step at a Time 

British engineers are converting street vibrations into electricity and predict a working prototype by Christmas capable of powering facility lights in the busiest areas of a city.

“We can harvest between 5 to 7 watts of energy per footstep that is currently being wasted into the ground,” says Claire Price, director of The Facility Architects, the British firm heading up the Pacesetters Project. “And a passing train can generate very useful energy to run signaling or to power lights.”

Like solar and wind proponents, vibration harvesters argue that abundant, clean energy is all around us and goes to waste. The challenge is how to store the power efficiently so it provides a continual output even ifthe vibrations from footsteps or passing trains temporarily taper off.

I’m usually not much on making predictions, but if some of this tecnology is patented they’re probably going to make a fortune.

Talk about deceptive headlines, House Approves Minimum Wage Increase 

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid vowed Democrats would kill the hybrid bill, along with its 10-year, $300 billion-plus cost.

“The Senate has rejected fiscally irresponsible estate tax giveaways before and will reject them again,” Reid said. “Blackmailing working families will not change that outcome.”

Republicans countered that Democrats opposed the bill to keep the issue alive for the November elections.

Harry is right and the only thing that conservatives have to do to prove him wrong is separate the increase in minimum wage from the estate tax giveaway.  Myths and Facts about the Estate Tax

Increasing the Minimum Wage: Initiative

nothing but cool skies

If you are serious about pop culture and its history then Robert Risko’s caricature’s are not to be missed. Much of his work has already achieved iconic status.
Like many people I’m a fan of George Orwell’s novel 1984 so it was an eye opener to learn that he was influenced by a Russian writer named Yevgeny Zamyatin who wrote a twilight-zonish utopian novel called WE in 1921. In a perfect world

“IT IS WITH REGRET that I see, instead of an orderly and strict mathematical epic poem in honor of the One State-I see some kind of fantastic adventure novel emerging from me.” So laments D-503, mathematician and rocket designer, halfway through Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel “We.” Completed in 1921, but not published in Russia until 1988, half a century after Zamyatin’s death, it appears this month from the Modern Library in a new English translation by Natasha Randall.

Zamyatin’s vision of a totally controlled society, one in which unresisting citizens eat, sleep, work, and make love like clockwork-and in which thinkers and writers sing the glories of “the morning buzz of electric toothbrushes and . . . the intimate peal of the crystal-sparkling latrine”-was considered too dangerously satirical by the early Soviet state, and it was smuggled abroad in samizdat form. Written a decade before Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” its influence can be seen in George Orwell’s “1984,” and it has been hailed as a warning of the totalitarian dangers inherent in every utopian scheme. (Orwell, who believed Huxley had read “We,” wrote in 1946, three years before “1984″ was published, that Zamyatin’s “intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism-human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself” made the novel “superior to Huxley’s.”)

In my eyes the far left and the far right are pretty much the same thing and just use different buzz words. Much of what we’re seeing now in the political landscape reminds me of some dystopian vision rather then a democracy rum the way it should be. It is one thing to toss around some odd ideas around the dinner table about the way things should be, its altogether different to make those odd, hypocritical, and invasive notions into legislation. Even assuming the best intentions there is a point that trying to regulate the most personal behavior becomes worse then the behavior. Then there is the hiding behind the boogieman of national security to pass legislation that intrudes on freedoms that are supposedly to be worth killing and dying for. If Orwell or Zamyatin were in America today they’d lament that some people are trying to screw up such a good thing and hiding behind a wall of doubletalk to do it.

Shark Fins and Human Arms Made from Same Genes

The triangular shark fin that sends frightened swimmers scrambling to shore is made using the same genes that help form the arms and legs of humans, a new study reports.

Researchers found that about a dozen genes that help give rise to a shark’s median fins—those that run along its back and belly—also determine where paired side fins will form on its body. These genes are known to play important roles in the development of paired limbs in humans and other land animals.

The genes come from an ancient ancestor shared by sharks and humans.

I didn’t mind the idea at all that humans had ape-like ancestors, I even thought it was kind of cool, but its a little embarrassing to be related to JAWS.