How to create the perfect fake identity.

Let me start off by saying that I’m making this whole thing up.

Imagine you’re in charge of infiltrating sleeper agents into the United States. The year is 1983, and the proliferation of identity databases is making it increasingly difficult to create fake credentials. Ten years ago, someone could have just shown up in the country and gotten a driver’s license, Social Security card and bank account — possibly using the identity of someone roughly the same age who died as a young child — but it’s getting harder. And you know that trend will only continue. So you decide to grow your own identities.

Call it “identity farming.” You invent a handful of infants. You apply for Social Security numbers for them. Eventually, you open bank accounts for them, file tax returns for them, register them to vote, and apply for credit cards in their name. And now, 25 years later, you have a handful of identities ready and waiting for some real people to step into them.

There are some complications, of course. Maybe you need people to sign their name as parents — or, at least, mothers. Maybe you need to doctors to fill out birth certificates. Maybe you need to fill out paperwork certifying that you’re home-schooling these children. You’ll certainly want to exercise their financial identity: depositing money into their bank accounts and withdrawing it from ATMs, using their credit cards and paying the bills, and so on. And you’ll need to establish some sort of addresses for them, even if it is just a mail drop.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

On a July day in Chicago, Google employees swarmed a conference room at the advertising agency Leo Burnett, carrying in couches and beanbag chairs to create a lounge. They gave away candy and showed off Google’s advertising technology. Throughout the day, they emphasized a single message: Google is a friend to ad agencies.

No, really.

Advertisers are grappling with the idea of Google, which spent many of its early years avoiding — and infuriating — advertising agencies, now shifting to embrace them.

During the last year, Google has built a 40-person group that is charged with courting agencies, trying to persuade them that their clients should buy ads on Google sites and use the search engine’s tools. The Google team — like any ad team — is visiting agencies to show off the company’s products, like video ads on YouTube and display ads from DoubleClick. Its representatives are even making regular visits to ad agencies, soliciting suggestions and fielding questions. (…)

Peter S. Fader, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, sees the Google approach as part of a master plan to get its corporate hooks into more of the agencies’ business.

“If Google were to just set up a shingle and say ‘Google ad agency,’ the traditional agencies will find a way to keep them out of clients’ offices,” Professor Fader said. Instead, he said, “they’re almost like a virus, going to work their way into specific agencies and replace the DNA of those agencies with a more analytic orientation while trying to maintain some of the client relationships.” (…)

When Google visits agencies, it typically brings in a gelato cart or a coffee bar. It has even built a replica of Google’s office kitchens. It offers free food and prizes of iPod Touches.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

We’ve all seen it in a movie: A small group of people are swimming in the sea. Someone gets hurt, blood touches water, and instantly sharks appear who then devour the party in a ruthless and very painful way. But how fast does the odor or taste of blood go in water? Am I right to believe that it takes a while for a shark a mile away to taste it?

As you probably know already, sharks are pretty well suited to this whole predation thing. They have excellent hearing in the low frequencies and can pick out the sound of something thrashing around in the water well over 1,000 feet away. They’re also outfitted with sensory cavities called the ampullae of Lorenzini, which register the faint electrical fields generated by living bodies. And then there’s the shark’s sense of smell, which though not quite as phenomenal as was once believed (you used to see a stat claiming that 70 percent of a shark’s brain was devoted to olfaction, which seems to have been a real overstatement) is still plenty acute: sharks can detect some chemicals at concentrations of around one part per 25 million, and experts claim they’ve seen sharks go nuts over a single drop of blood in a 2,000-gallon tank. (…)

A chemical (and for our purposes, blood) disperses in water via diffusion and mixing. Diffusion is a random and relatively slow process by which a concentrated group of molecules drifts apart, and in still water that’s the main way an odor would spread. But the ocean isn’t still, and so the primary determinants for how scents travel through seawater are the churning of waves and the flow of currents. For this reason, a shark’s standard response upon smelling something yummy is to swim into the prevailing current, as this will likely lead to the source; often it’ll home in by swimming in a series of decreasing spirals. The upshot is that while a shark would likely have to catch some breaks dispersalwise to identify the scent of blood a mile away from ground zero, at a distance of a quarter mile it’s got a decent shot at picking up some dinner.

OK, so: You and your pals are out in the ocean, bleeding away; the prevailing tidal current is somewhere around one meter per second, or 2.24 miles per hour. If a shark is upcurrent from you, it might take a while for the pertinent molecules to drift into its range. But if the shark happens to be fortuitously positioned a quarter mile downcurrent, the scent of blood could find its nostrils in a little under seven minutes. Midsize sharks have been clocked swimming at 24.5 mph, so conceivably if our specimen got a particularly good read it might take only a minute or so to locate you, giving us roughly an eight-minute gap between blood entering the water and shark cruising up with a bib on.

{ The Straight Dope | Continue reading }

Dave Dobson’s past is not a secret. Not technically, anyway - not since the relevant US government intelligence documents were declassified and placed in the vaults of the National Security Archive, in Washington DC. But Dobson, now 65, is a modest man, and once he had discovered his vocation - teaching physics at Beloit College, in Wisconsin - he felt no need to drop dark hints about his earlier life. You could have taken any number of classes at Beloit with Professor Dobson, until his recent retirement, without having any reason to know that in his mid-20s, working entirely as an amateur and equipped with little more than a notebook and a library card, he designed a nuclear bomb.

Today his experiences in 1964 - the year he was enlisted into a covert Pentagon operation known as the Nth Country Project - suddenly seem as terrifyingly relevant as ever. The question the project was designed to answer was a simple one: could a couple of non-experts, with brains but no access to classified research, crack the “nuclear secret”? In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, panic had seeped into the arms debate. Only Britain, America, France and the Soviet Union had the bomb; the US military desperately hoped that if the instructions for building it could be kept secret, proliferation - to a fifth country, a sixth country, an “Nth country”, hence the project’s name - could be averted. Today, the fear is back: with al-Qaida resurgent, North Korea out of control, and nuclear rumours emanating from any number of “rogue states”, we cling, at least, to the belief that not just anyone could figure out how to make an atom bomb. The trouble is that, 40 years ago, anyone did.

The quest to discover whether an amateur was up to the task presented the US Army with the profoundly bizarre challenge of trying to find people with exactly the right lack of qualifications, recalls Bob Selden, who eventually became the other half of the two-man project. (Another early participant, David Pipkorn, soon left.) Both men had physics PhDs - the hypothetical Nth country would have access to those, it was assumed - but they had no nuclear expertise, let alone access to secret research. (…)

Eventually, towards the end of 1966, two and a half years after they began, they were finished. “We produced a short document that described precisely, in engineering terms, what we proposed to build and what materials were involved,” says Selden. “The whole works, in great detail, so that this thing could have been made by Joe’s Machine Shop downtown.”

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

eBay.de | SCREEN USED Freddy Krueger Glove Nightmare Elm Street 5

The glove is built by Ryan Effner whome built all the gloves for Elm Street 5 and come from his personal collection. Sadly when Ryan died his family had to sell some of his personal collection of his work to raise funds. This is how this glove become obtained.

The Glove still has the “red” theatre blood stains on the leather tips just as did most of the gloves for the film. Also all soldering on this glove was done to precision no loose blades are present.

Another noticable appearence is the shape of the blades. Ryan cut and ground all his own blades on the part 5 gloves with a particular shape.

This glove is a left handed “mirror” steel bladed closeup stunt glove.

The glove by inspection looks to be built by the same templates as the hero unlike many other stunts. The blades on stunt glove are usually plastic but these are steel due to the glove was used in a closeup stunt where the stuntman needed to use his right hand as stated on the certificate.

This glove is number 1 of 2 metal bladed stunts, i have never seen or heard anything of number 2 so this is a real rarity.

The glove is in immaculate condition, signed by Ryan Effner inside the glove and dated 1989. Also at the bottom of the glove it is marked LEFT.


With this glove you get the certificate, a letter from Ryan Effners mother and a Ryan Effner leaflet. Also i am giving away a free Robert Englund signed index card with freddy character he drew.

PAYMENTS MUST BE RECIEVED WITHIN 3 DAYS OF AUCTION END

{ Yahoo Answers }

related { I live in georgia but i dont see Rusia no where not even sound but they says theres tanks should i be worried? i heard on the news that Russia has invaded but i dont see them no where whats going on???!!! | Yahoo Answers }

Paris Hilton has craftily manipulated the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival in an attempt to gain more publicity for a new documentary about herself.

The hotel heiress forced festival organizers to cancel two of three screenings of “Paris, Not France,” which is set to premiere Tuesday. Even a press screening was canceled.

Most movie mavens assumed Hilton was unhappy with her portrayal in the documentary and had sicced her lawyers on the producers, forcing them to scale back.

But Paris’ rep Jason Moore told Page Six: “We wanted to create more buzz - create some hype… We felt the impact would be more extreme if we had one screening.”

{ NY Post | Continue reading }

Many New York sushi restaurants and seafood markets are playing a game of bait and switch, say two high school students turned high-tech sleuths.

In a tale of teenagers, sushi and science, Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, who graduated this year from the Trinity School in Manhattan, took on a freelance science project in which they checked 60 samples of seafood using a simplified genetic fingerprinting technique to see whether the fish New Yorkers buy is what they think they are getting.

They found that one-fourth of the fish samples with identifiable DNA were mislabeled. A piece of sushi sold as the luxury treat white tuna turned out to be Mozambique tilapia, a much cheaper fish that is often raised by farming. Roe supposedly from flying fish was actually from smelt. Seven of nine samples that were called red snapper were mislabeled, and they turned out to be anything from Atlantic cod to Acadian redfish, an endangered species.

What may be most impressive about the experiment is the ease with which the students accomplished it. Although the testing technique is at the forefront of research, the fact that anyone can take advantage of it by sending samples off to a laboratory meant the kind of investigative tools once restricted to Ph.D.’s and crime labs can move into the hands of curious diners and amateur scientists everywhere.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

A Chicago man made the papers last month for suing a restaurant that allegedly served him a parasitic tapeworm along with his undercooked salmon.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

photo { Uncle Mike }

{ Harvey Cushing (1869-1939) is considered to be the father of modern neurological surgery… | ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

A once drug-addicted elephant fed heroin-laced bananas by illegal traders will return home after emerging clean from a three-year detox program.

Angry Argentine commuters torch train in rush hour.

Man who tried to amputate his own arm at a Denny’s restaurant thought he had injected air into one of his veins while shooting cocaine and would die unless he took drastic action.

Jealous lover flew into a rage and assaulted his girlfriend. The girl mistakenly dialed her boyfriend’s number on her mobile phone while she was making love to her ex-boyfriend.

Police were trying to determine Tuesday whether they were the victim of a hoax after the body they thought they found at a seaside resort was actually a life-sized doll.

Man who was driving drunk tried to bribe a police officer with a sandwich.

Riot police had to control fights among a crowd of almost 200 people as they tried to arrest a suspected thief wielding nunchaku.

Local man: Zodiac Killer was my stepfather.

An elusive serial killer, linked to 10 murders in south Los Angeles and Inglewood over nearly two decades, resurfaced early last year to kill again. The killer has targeted young Black women, except for one man.

Woman found dead in her blood-splattered condo after drinking too much water. The source of the blood remains a mystery.

Disposable diaper saved the life of an 18-month-old boy, breaking his fall from a third-floor apartment window.

Annie Leibovitz, the 58-year-old photographer who cried “Art!” when she took those creepy, porn-y pictures of underage actress Miley Cyrus for Vanity Fair and that racist, King Kong-ish shot of Lebron James on the cover of Vogue, is also so ethereal that she doesn’t even pay her bills.

The life of a jellyfish.

Cooking with Vincent Price.

In the first major oil deal Iraq has made with a foreign country since 2003, the Iraqi government and the China National Petroleum Corporation have signed a contract in Beijing that could be worth up to $3 billion.

China’s central bank is in need of capital, after snapping up roughly $1 trillion worth of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the last seven years.

Google applied for incorporation as a business 10 years ago Thursday. Here’s a quick snapshot of Google by the numbers along with some comparisons to Microsoft.

Monogamy gene found in people.

Experienced drivers perceive the road differently.

Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but how the brain is able to re-create it.

Scientists get death threats over Large Hadron Collider.

A new artificial intelligence system allows a robotic helicopter to teach itself how to fly and even do challenging stunts, just by watching other helicopters perform the same maneuvers.

The reason you can’t swat a fly is that, for a creature with a brain hardly deserving of the name, the fly is a marvel of calculating ability.

University of Texas and MIT researchers are developing an air traffic control system that can track multiple flight locations and changing weather conditions and help controllers optimize traffic flow and air safety.

Two men were arrested yesterday and face charges of stealing eight Torahs from a Queens synagogue.

L’asso selling its pasta sauce.

Unthinkable happens: Manhattan apartment prices fall. Related: New York’s most impressive real-estate flips.

Home foreclosures reach record high.

How to earthquake proof your wine cellar.

This is grenadine the way it was intended: bold red, sweet, with a bright pomegranate flavor.

For the first time the idea behind the work of art became more important than the physical object itself. Philosophers give ideas away for free, if you think about it.

Do we have to go gay to get the best head? To find out, we got a gay man and a straight man to get blowjobs from a gay man and a straight woman. We blindfolded both of our suckees and built a glory hole.

Why so many churches in Las Vegas?

20 memorable doctored photos.

A minor History of giant spheres.

MoMA to Warhol, 1956.

292 is the number of ways to make change for a dollar.

An exhaustive photographic and archival survey of the lives of the Mississippi Freedom Riders through their original mug shots.

Strong ghost.

AssVertising in Las Vegas.

Did the Royal Navy supply ships with “peg boys” for sex? Related: Butt Inspector.

Today i got two new hairdos, but i can only show you one. Related: Nino & Gino.

Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. Most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the result of creativity. (…)

When we’re creative, we feel we are living more fully than during the rest of life. (…) Perhaps only sex, sports, music, and religious ecstasy–even when these experiences remain fleeting and leave no trace–provide a profound sense of being part of an entity greater than ourselves. But creativity also leaves an outcome that adds to the richness and complexity of the future.

I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it’s complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an “individual,” each of them is a “multitude.”

Here are the 10 antithetical traits often present in creative people that are integrated with each other in a dialectical tension.

1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest. (…)

2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time. (…)

3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative individuals. But this playfulness doesn’t go very far without its antithesis, a quality of doggedness, endurance, perseverance. (…)

4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality. Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas as fantasies without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real and create a new reality. (…)

5. Creative people trend to be both extroverted and introverted. (…)

6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time. It is remarkable to meet a famous person who you expect to be arrogant or supercilious, only to encounter self-deprecation and shyness instead. (…) At the same time, they know that in comparison with others, they have accomplished a great deal. And this knowledge provides a sense of security, even pride.

7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping. (…) This tendency toward androgyny is sometimes understood in purely sexual terms, but psychological androgyny is a much wider concept referring to a person’s ability to be at the same time aggressive and nurturant, sensitive and rigid, dominant and submissive, regardless of gender. (…)

8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative. (…)

10. Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.

{ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi/Psychology Today | Continue reading }

To see each other truly, to love each other only, Without deceit, diversion, without shame or lies, With no desire eluding us, never remorsefully, To live as one, give the heart to every moment’s flight;

Se voir le plus possible et s’aimer seulement, Sans ruse et sans détours, sans honte ni mensonge, Sans qu’un désir nous trompe, ou qu’un remords nous ronge, Vivre à deux et donner son coeur à tout moment;

{ Alfred de Musset, Sonnet, 1849 }

photo { fake AA ad, Carroll Gardens, NY | stereohell | related: She’s got jungle fever }