Remember: New Glasses Before New Passport
Detained in Kenya for not looking enough like her passport photo, Canadian Citizen Suaad Haji Mohamud has been trapped in Kenya for 2 months while trying to return home to her adopted country.
She’s been declared a fraud by the Canadian government and may be deported back to war-torn Somalia, where she was born. She suggested she be fingerprinted, but after a couple of weeks, the government couldn’t come up with anything to match the new prints to. So now, she’s waiting on results of a DNA test that’s expected to take more than another week.
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…and the Gunslinger followed.
The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like eternity in all directions. It was white and blinding and waterless and without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway. Coaches and buckas had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.
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The Man in Black fled across the desert…
“The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like eternity in all directions.”
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The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
For those of you who don’t know, Lost Executive Producer J.J. Abrams bought the rights to The Dark Tower Series for a incredible 19 dollars (presumably in keeping with the recurring number in the books). Abrams is quoted as saying this in regard to the upcoming project’s status:
“Damon Lindelof and I talked to Mr. King. We got the rights for ‘ The Dark Tower’ as a film. Damon is obviously still on ‘Lost’, and we’ve been working on ‘Star Trek’ together. As soon as ‘Lost’ is done, hopefully we’ll begin tackling that.”
The plan is to make seven films out of the seven books in the series, a la Harry Potter.
Lindelof had this to say about the series’ potential:
“The Dark Tower is to me every bit as daunting an adaptation as the Lord of the Rings trilogy must have been for Peter Jackson, except we’ve got seven books we’re looking at. And the idea of doing that at the same time Carlton and I are bringing Lost to a close is simply not viable. There are always Dark Tower conversations, but the figuring out of what this will look like as a movie has not begun. If The Dark Tower were in the right hands, I would love to see seven movies executed just right. But you have to get people to see the first one to get them to come and see the second one.”
I think that with J.J. Abrams, The Dark Tower is in pretty good hands. Even if your not a fan of everything he has done, you cannot deny that he takes pride in all his projects and strives to make the best possible movie or TV show that he can.
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I’m an Ass Clown.
I'm an Ass Clown
I’m an ass clown. I forgot to wake up Jenn. She was 6 min late for work.
In my defense, I can’t remember shit. 😦
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Attractive Corpse (dot) com
Service available to the seriously suicidal.
Attractive Corpse offers the following services to its client:
* Method consultation
* Fashion and makeup (if appropriate) consultation
* Location scouting
* Location preparation (including music, lighting, etc., if desired)
* Suicide note editing and workshopping
* Scheduling assistance
* Complete dress rehearsal
* Post-discovery photography
Referrals are available to financial planners, psychological services, and religious representatives.
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A pink sliver of rat brain sat in a beaker.
The simulated brain – “The scientists behind Blue Brain hope to have a virtual human brain functioning in ten years… Dr. Markram began by collecting detailed information about the rat’s NCC, down to the level of genes, proteins, molecules and the electrical signals that connect one neuron to another. These complex relationships were then turned into millions of equations, written in software. He then recorded real-world data — the strength and path of each electrical signal — directly from rat brains to test the accuracy of the software.” Is it possible to digitally simulate a brain accurately? Can it only be analog? And are there quantum effects to be considered?
+ Some other AI/brain robot projects:
Blue Brain is controversial, and its success is far from assured. Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology, a scientist who studies consciousness, says the Swiss project provides vital data about how part of the brain works. But he says that Dr. Markram’s approach is still missing algorithms, the biological programming that yields higher-level functions…
Despite the challenges, the push to understand, replicate and even re-enact higher behaviors in the brain has become one of the hottest areas of neuroscience. With the help of a $4.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, IBM is working on a separate project with five U.S. universities to build a tiny, low-power microchip that simulates the behavior of one million neurons and ten billion synapses. The goal, says IBM, is to develop brainy computers that can better predict the behavior of complex systems, such as weather or the financial markets.
The Chinese government has provided about $1.5 million to a team at Xiamen University to create artificial-brain robots with microcircuits that evolve, learn and adapt to real-world situations. Similarly, Jeff Krichmar and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, Calif., have built an artificial-brain robot that learns to sharpen its visual perception when moving around in a lab environment, another form of emergent behavior, a form of spontaneous self-organization. And researchers at Sensopac, a project backed by a grant of €6.7 million ($9.3 million) from the European Union, have built part of an artificial mouse brain.
BONUS MEMRISTORS
- Memristor Minds, the Future of Artificial Intelligence
- New Memristor Makes Low-Cost, High-Density Memory
- Spintronic Memristors
- The Mysterious Memristor
- Understanding Memristors – “in which the memristor would be used as an analog device“*
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Walter Cronkite, RIP.
Walter Cronkite, the broadcast news legend who spoke the words “And now we have two Americans on the moon” 40 years ago this week died in New York today at age 92. Here is astronaut Neil Armstrong’s statement on Cronkite’s passing.
If you needed another reason to feel sad about the passing of the iconic television journalist Walter Cronkite today, this video is it. John Perry Barlow tweets, “True fact: Walter Cronkite was a hot drummer. Once saw him play with Mickey Hart, Mike Gordon, & Mutatator. Kept the one.” This video is proof. Cronkite appears around 1:55 in.
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Uh… transgender stormtrooper?… I’d hit it.
Here she is - the girl who has heard the worst pickup lines ever.
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Greatest Shirt Ever? Three Keyboard Cat + Moon
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The Best Phallic Image You Will See in the News Today
A week ago, when Oscar F. Mayer, retired chairman of the Oscar Mayer meats company and grandson of the Original Oscar, passed away at 95, he left instructions that the Wienermobile NOT appear at his funeral because “it would be too much of a spectacle.” Well, today, there was a bit of a spectacle as one of the iconic vehicles crashed into the side of a house in Racine, Wisconsin. There is a Wienermobile Blog written by the team of drivers but they have no statement there on this incident (yet).
Nice Wiener.
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Cigarrettes, whisky and wild, wild women.
Henry Allingham, the world’s oldest man, has died aged 113.
Henry Allingham, 1916
Born in 1896, Mr. Allingham became a teenager for the second time last month. He was a veteran of the Battle of Jutland in 1916.
A poignant memory from WWI: “The scenes he witnessed of soldiers waiting to go over the top at Ypres have stayed with him ever since. “They would just stand there in 2ft of water in mud-filled trenches, waiting to go forward,” he said. “They knew what was coming. It was pathetic to see those men like that. I don’t think they have ever got the admiration and respect they deserved.”
His face is a living memorial to the First World War, his solemnity a warning that the sacrifice of the fallen should never be forgotten.
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New ‘G.I. Joe’ Trailer Gives First Look at Cobra Commander.
Classic Cobra Commander
There’s a new Japanese trailer for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra making the rounds, and while it contains most of the same footage included in the previous trailer, this one does give us our first look at Cobra Commander (aka The Doctor), as played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in all his weird masked glory. In the screencap above, The Doctor is standing next to Destro (Christopher Eccleston) and the two are plotting to destroy the world and whatnot.
Perhaps it’s because this Japanese trailer cuts around a lot and doesn’t remain too long on any one scene that I’m digging it more than I did the domestic version. I think Paramount should just cut together a trailer featuring only Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow since those are easily the two coolest-looking characters, and their sword fight will most likely become a highlight of the film. I dunno … maybe this one will surprise us in some ways and let us down in others … but isn’t that what we’ve come to accept from all of these based-on-an-80s-toy-line-or-comic-book movies? G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra hits theaters on August 7.
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My Frys sound funny
Fox has announced that due to a refusal to meet salary demands, the upcoming new episodes of Futurama on Comedy Central will be replacing the entire principal voice cast, having failed to reach agreements with any of the core team of Billy West, Katey Sagal, John DiMaggio, Maurice LaMarche, and Tress MacNeil. On the plus side, the lame imitations your friends have been doing for years can now be put to the test in the open casting call for cheaper sound-alikes.
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What do you want, an armed guard to follow your kid around?
Why I won’t be at my high school reunion. A math geek reminisces about the joys of high school. As another who has much-less-than-pleasant memories of those years, this struck a nerve.
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Bunni.
Imagine if Animal Crossing had a long lost mutant sibling that coalesced out of a creative flurry in a mere four months. You’d have Bunni.
Bunni is a super adorable harvest moon/animal crossing flash game thing by Andre Spierings and Daniel Cook (the folks behind fishing girl).
Caveat: saving requires registration and is reportedly buggy.
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Time-lapse sim of Earth’s land mass movement
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Black Lung Rising.
Black Lung Rising. “When coal miners suffering from black lung reach the point where they can no longer dig coal and they meet guidelines such as working the required number of years exposed to coal dust, they become eligible to file a black lung claim to obtain monthly benefits to live on … When the decision is made to award a miner monthly benefits, the coal company has the right to appeal that decision, and often does.”
“Coal miners will tell you that they love their job. They come to terms with the dangers involved. They are loyal to their company and do the work needed to supply the fuel that lights up this country.
Mining Safety
“All they ask in return is that justice be served.”
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Girl Arrested for Swearing on 9-11 call
17 yr old Adrainne Ledesma calls 9-1-1 after her father had a stroke. The recording of 9-1-1 proves that she did swear before the operator picked up the phone. However then the operator started to lecture her on swearing and hung up on her.
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Psychotic Letters from Men.
“I’m dressed as a piece of chocolate because you’re allergic to chocolate. But I’m a piece of chocolate you can have!”
Proving that its not just women who write these stupid things. I already knew, Jenn has an ex who did the same thing, very pathetic. Its really fun to look at letters with your woman and just wet yourself laughing, then have sex0r on the letter because shes all hot for you after realizing what a dork her ex was.
I call it lowered expectations.
RobDurdle.com 
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