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Douglas Adams’ speech at Digital Biota 2, Cambridge U.K., September 1998.

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions. Curiously enough, quite a lot of these have come from sand, so let’s talk about the four ages of sand.

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From CBC News World.

Part 1: What Afghanistan wanted and how the U.S. responded
Part 2: Is the U.S. a terrorist state?
Part 3: Differing perspectives: Robert Kaplan and Noam Chomsky
Part 4: Can trust be restored?
Part 5: Clash of civilizations

A former NASA astronaut who has walked on the moon has said aliens are not only real but have visited Earth several times

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A website dedicated to computer generated modified cars. There are some excellent fake 3D images created from ordinary photos of cars. There’s also a tutorial explaining how it’s done (courtesy of Will).

Visit site

This was a long and laborious task.. It took a lot of research, coming across some extremely useful websites and a little bit of coding to get the job done.

I’ll write a full report on this later on but for now, here’s how we did it for purplemass:

1. Converted our Serendipity blog to a Movable Type format, ensuring the data was saved in UTF-8
2. Import data into WordPress (edited the MT import file)
3. Some posts ended having the wrong authors – this was changed manually

Members of China’s armed police demonstrate a rapid deployment during an anti-terrorist drill held in Jinan, capital of east China’s Shandong Province July 2, 2008, roughly one month ahead of the Beijing Olympics.(Xinhua/Fan Changguo Photo)

From news.xinhuanet.com

Seymour Hersh says Democratic Party leaders signed on to secret war against Iran (from therealnews.com

In an article in the “New Yorker”, Seymour Hersh says that the president got up to 400 million dollars in a “Presidential Finding” and that top democrats were involved. An unidentified source told Hersh: “The finding was focused on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change.” The funds were requested at the same time that a US National Intelligence Estimate late last year stated that Iran had halted any kind of Nuclear Weapons program they may have had by 2003. Despite the report the Bush administration and many in congress continue to talk about Iran as a nuclear threat. In an interview with CNN, Hersh talked about Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney: “They believe that their mission is to make sure that before they get out of office next year, either Iran is attacked or it stops its weapons program,” As well, a non-binding resolution with bipartisan support is moving quickly through the house. The resolution calls on the White House to ban the export to Iran, of refined petroleum or gasoline and for “stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran,” and would give the President free reign in dealing with Iran including a naval blockade.

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By Greg Miller from ScienceNOW Daily News

More than a year after taking a hallucinogenic drug in a carefully controlled experiment, most people rate the experience among the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives, researchers report online today in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. Such findings are helping to renew interest in research with hallucinogens, a field whose reputation long suffered from the psychedelic excesses of the 1960s.

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The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.

by Seymour M. Hersh from newyorker.com

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

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