THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT Written, directed, and starring Cory McAbee of The Billy Nayer Show, this space western musical uses flinty black-and-white photography, rugged Lo-Fi sets and the spirit of the final frontier to bring the film, set in the dirty, isolated vastness of outer space, to life. The film also stars Rocco Sisto and Gregory Russell Cook. THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT follows the adventures of an interplanetary trader (McAbee) through his Homeric intergalactic journey to provide the all-female population of Venus with a suitable singular male, all the while being pursued by the cold-blooded and childish killer, Professor Hess (Sisto), an enigmatic figure from his past. The film features an original soundtrack by the The Billy Nayer Show.

A place to keep post production materials for use of reference, an inactive job file. This morgue file contains free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use.

The term "morgue file" is popular in the newspaper business to describe the file that holds past issues flats. Although the term has been used by illustrators, comic book artist, designers and teachers as well. The purpose of this site is to provide free image reference material for use in all creative pursuits. This is the world wide web's morguefile.

The auditor told police the laptop had been stolen from the trunk of his car while he was at a bookstore coffee shop in suburban Washington. But when investigators confronted the auditor last week and questioned his account, the auditor changed his story, saying he had accidentally damaged the computer—then destroyed it and threw it away in a Dumpster to avoid embarrassment. Investigators are seeking to verify his new account. Either way, DEA agents are "livid," said one senior law-enforcement official who noted that, although the computer didn't contain informants' names, it included more than 4,000 pages of case-file data, including enough details about the informants' work that it could allow drug traffickers to figure out who they are.

(Shura's voice)
Sometimes when I am working late in my laboratory I have problems finding an OK radio station. On KNBC, at 740, there is a continuing reiteration of the day's news which I hear repeated almost verbatim every few hours, and I lose interest. And then, up the dial a little bit, I find Morten W. on KGO at 810. He is a knowledgeable scientist explaining such weird stuff as, for example, why green water is coming out of the water pipes over in Danville. He always explains such things well, but with a tone of superiority and arrogance that I find humorous rather than impressive. But when I go from 740 to 810, I pass a station at 770 or 780 that is devoted to the Bible and Christian fundamentalism, and finding that has proven to be a total treasure. A stanza that I learned in childhood comes to mind, "Whenever I go to Severn along the Erie Tract, I pass by a poor old farm-house whose shingles are broken and black." This religious farmhouse on the way to KGO along the AM dial is often my retreat from the boredom of both replayed news and omniscience.

It is here that I have learned much of what I know about creationism. Most of the speakers hold to the seven-day model of Genesis, a week of God's work, ending with an earth, the sun and, for all I can tell, the rest of the universe. Since this is the text of the Bible, and the Bible is the word of God, it serves well as a fait accompli explanation of our origins. Given the premise of divine origin, everything holds together remarkably well. Oh, there are a few things that are awkward, such as fossil records and partially decayed radioactivity, but if you accept the cosmology of creationism, then you can find ways of accepting and living with its troublesome contradictions. Once the shift is made from a process of reason to one of faith, everything can be made to fit your thesis. Things such as dinosaurs and uranium, things that give the illusion of ancient times, are also the products of that busy week, and all were the handiwork of the Creator.

Those who see themselves as being scientifically sophisticated will smile with patient and quiet amusement upon those whom they see as present-day champions of a Middle Ages philosophy. Those who wish to enter into a dialogue will support their arguments with the hard, cold facts of science, the rewards gained from the application of the "scientific method." And the creationists quite rightly argue back, that these scientists are defending their positions with the same blend of theory and observation that they themselves employ. Neither camp will gracefully admit that there are many embarrassing observations that are being ignored. In my lecturing at Berkeley, I enjoy the disruption that will inevitably follow some off-hand comment I might make concerning the arguments that favor the one-week origin that took place some maybe ten thousand years ago.

As a person who identifies himself with the scientist side rather than the creationist side of this polemic, I find myself quite irritated when I hear the theory of the big bang being accepted by the scientific community as an item of faith. This is the current myth in vogue that deals with the origin of the universe. One of the most predictable questions each of us has asked of our elders, at one time or another in our youth, is, "Where did I come from?" As individuals we cannot remember back to our birth -- our memories are sadly incomplete and we seek the input from others who may fill in the details. As a species we ask the same question over an immensely broader time base, "Where did we come from? Was there a beginning? What was there before that?"

Embarrassing stuff, here, since there is no available parent to help us find answers when the question is asked in cosmological terms. The religious fundamentalist says, God created us all out of his infinite good will, in early March, 8065 B.C. Or thereabouts. The learned astrophysicist says the big bang created us all in late September, 14.3 billion years B.C. Or thereabouts. There is no record of this event that is unambiguous, so the acceptance of the big bang myth is every bit as much an act of faith as is the acceptance of the Genesis myth. To keep things in perspective, I should capitalize Big Bang so that it looks as important as God...

The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed-- inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.

But the big bang theory can't survive without these fudge factors. Without the hypothetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed, because there would be no way for parts of the universe that are now more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same temperature and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation.

Without some kind of dark matter, unlike any that we have observed on Earth despite 20 years of experiments, big-bang theory makes contradictory predictions for the density of matter in the universe. Inflation requires a density 20 times larger than that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, the theory's explanation of the origin of the light elements. And without dark energy, the theory predicts that the universe is only about 8 billion years old, which is billions of years younger than the age of many stars in our galaxy.

What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory's supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centred cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles...

"This doesn't mean like, ‘The victory of the hippies' or something," said Grauerholz, who wrote a letter to the City Commission in support of the proposal. "Burroughs is not actually famous for accidentally killing his wife or being a narcotics addict or being homosexual ... he's famous for being a great writer, and because of that we know about these other things."

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. wondered aloud one day in 2002 whether someone could build an atomic weapon from parts available on the open market. His audience, the leaders of the government's nuclear laboratories, said it could be done.

Then do it, the Delaware Democrat, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, instructed the scientists in a confidential session. A few months later, they returned to the soundproof Senate meeting room with a workable nuclear weapon, missing only the fissile material.

"It was bigger than a breadbox and smaller than a dump truck, but they were able to get it in," Biden said in a recent speech. The scientists "explained how -- literally off the shelf, without doing anything illegal -- they actually constructed this device."

To the naked eye, Tommy Woodard's digital photograph appears to be nothing more than a pretty picture of trees in Provo Canyon.

But zoom in, he says, and the purple glow of a saucer hovering at an angle above the tree line starts to take shape.

Woodard, 22, a photo librarian with the Utah Film Commission, took the photo that he believes represents an unidentified flying object.

He was in the canyon Tuesday shooting still pictures for a possible film location, and began taking pictures for himself on his way out.

At the time, he didn't see anything out of the ordinary in his photograph. But later, after noticing a black speck in the frame, he zoomed in and "the closer I got, the more impressed I got by it," he said Thursday.

"I was kind of skeptical but it's pretty obvious when you zoom in," said the self-described "sci-fi" fan, whose friends and colleagues are similarly impressed.

• Sun: More activity since 1940 than in previous 1150 years, combined


• Mercury: Unexpected polar ice discovered, along with a surprisingly strong intrinsic magnetic field … for a supposedly “dead” planet


• Venus: 2500% increase in auroral brightness, and substantive global atmospheric changes in less than 30 years


• Earth: Substantial and obvious world-wide weather and geophysical changes


• Mars: “Global Warming,” huge storms, disappearance of polar icecaps


• Jupiter: Over 200% increase in brightness of surrounding plasma clouds


• Saturn: Major decrease in equatorial jet stream velocities in only ~20 years, accompanied by surprising surge of X-rays from equator


• Uranus: “Really big, big changes” in brightness, increased global cloud activity


• Neptune: 40% increase in atmospheric brightness


• Pluto: 300% increase in atmospheric pressure, even as Pluto recedes farther from the Sun

This may not seem startling to gamers, but it sure woke me up; I learned about it on Law and Order last Sunday.

A type of program called a"bot " can play a computer game "just like a human" and in the style of any chosen human, given enough skill on the part of the bot-maker.

It seems to me this surpasses virtual reality and approaches electronic cloning. After all, the bot can go on playing after the human has "died."

A bot can also exist which, like an art forgery, seems to have the style and habits of a certain human but actually emerged from the brain of a clever faker.

This seems to me like virtual virtual reality and electronic immortality of a sort. If a bot plays chess like Alekhine, in what sense can we call Alekhine totally "dead"?

More: computer tech in general as brought us to the stage where producing a photo of a crime or even a moving picture of it does not prove a damned thing anymore. "I saw it with my own eyes" has become a bad joke.

I begin to feel that Maybe Logic will soon replace the Aristotelian either/or, not because of my books or Korzybski's or von Neumann's. but because virtual reality and artificial intelligence have destroyed certitude and left us with only degrees of probability.

BTW, do you feel absolutely sure "Robert Anton Wilson" wrote this and not some gol-danged bot?

Hughes states: "If all of this sounds like the Brits could wake up one morning and just arbitrarily charge an American citizen with a so-called 'extraditable offense,' on the flimsiest kind of evidence, you're right to think so. It also means that the accused, a citizen of this republic, would get no full judicial review of his extradition process by a federal judge, a federal appellant court, or the U.S. Supreme Court."

He says once the treaty is approved by the Senate and signed by the president, "an American, will be at the mercy of an alien-based foreign government" with none of the usual constitutional protections.

DoubleType is an open source graphical typeface designer that builds TrueType font file. Written in Java, DoubleType runs on platforms supported by Java, including Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. Glyphs are stored in XML based file to aid collaboration using existing tools such as CVS. DoubleType allows efficient glyph design by combining existing glyphs and modules.

Innbetween is a mobile and autonomous faktion of transdisciplinary reality translators asking W H Y in the physical and mental environments of the global villages. With volatile and intoxicating samples of knowledge, imagination, curiosity and suspicion, they are currently concocting another Rotterdam in the shadow of the one-line skyline: a labyrinth innbetween insular ivory towers where the dictatorships of reason, order and apartheid haunt the emerging architectures of other possible realities. As invisible agents of individual agency, they pre-emptively combat the conditioning of the global terrorists who would assimilate all idiosycracies and places of coincidence into obedient and dependent cubes.

“Whatever the United States has done to prisoners in Iraq is nothing compared to what priests and nuns did to Catholic kids for decades while the Catholic hierarchy covered it up,” King said.

“Think of the thousands of kids in the U.S. and Ireland who were abused by priests and nuns — you wonder where the Vatican’s moral compass is.”

I went briefly into a cafe for vegans in San Francisco, the other day. A lady had her half-starved, shaking dog tied up outside--you know they're giving that dog some kind of vegan non-meat dogfood. I've seen that stuff advertised. I had an imaginary confrontation with her in my head. "Here you are, this person who's into protecting animals, probably a member of PETA, who advocates for gentleness with all things--and you're slowly starving that dog to death, girl! That dog has enzymes in its body specifically for meat. That dog is a goddamned meat eater. That dog is a carnivore, lady. If you were taking care of a sick tiger in some wildlife sanctuary hospital, what would you feed it? WOuld you give a goddamn tiger a SALAD? Get OVER yourself woman! Stop trying to superimpose your weird human subcultural values on animals! That dog is a carnivore NO LESS than a tiger! Give your dog some MEAT and..." Never mind what I said in my mind after that.