That Piano Cat

This is from my friend Gamayun.

Alien in the window: the hoax video + a still from the “real” one.

The video below is a hoax … but a “real” one was shown at the press conference.

Bryan Bonner, a member of the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society, … got together five members of the society Thursday night. “We started production about 8 p.m.,” he said.

“We rented ourselves a 4-foot-tall foam latex alien” from a costume shop, said Bonner, who saw the Romanek video six months ago. “We were going to buy one, but I didn’t want to blow the $230.” “They started rolling the video and moving the puppet up, down, around and sideways. They sent the video from the camera straight into a computer, and one of the computer geeks used 3-D animation graphics to make the puppet’s eyes seem to move, he said. “We gave him a couple little blinks.” The result was a ghost-like creature that looks slightly more animated than the one in Romanek’s video. “What they’re claiming would take thousands of dollars and a lot of time … we pulled the whole thing off for $90 and in five or six hours,” he said. Bonner said, “It’s so amazing that anyone would believe that video is a real space alien. And it’s so frustrating to see that they want to use city time and tax dollars on this.” - rmn

For higher resolution try this one where you can really see the eyes blink.

Here are two pics I captured from the higher res video. The second one shows the alien in the middle of a blink. The blinks happen very fast and look very realistic.

Pretty good. Jeff Peckman showed a different and longer supposedly real alien video filmed by Stan Romanek.

A video that purportedly shows a living, breathing space alien will be shown to the news media Friday in Denver.

Jeff Peckman, who is pushing a ballot initiative to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission in Denver to prepare the city for close encounters of the alien kind, said the video is authentic and convinced him that aliens exist.

“As impressive as it is, it’s still one tiny portion in the context of a vast amount of peripheral evidence,” he said Wednesday. “It’s really the final visual confirmation of what you already know to be true having seen all the other evidence.”

When Peckman went before city officials this month to discuss his proposed ET initiative, he promised to show the video. Peckman said the general public will have to wait to see it because it’s being included in a documentary by Stan Romanek.

“No one will be allowed to film the segment with the extraterrestrial because there is an agreement in place limiting that kind of exposure during negotiations for the documentary,” he said.

But people won’t have to wait too long to see it for themselves.

“There is an open, public meeting in about a month in Colorado Springs,” Peckman said. “We’ll hope to do one in Denver at some point, and then in a few months, there will be the documentary that anybody can have, and it’ll have the footage.”

An instructor at the Colorado Film School in Denver scrutinized the video “very carefully” and determined it was authentic, Peckman said.

Peckman, 54, said the video was among the reasons he was “compelled” to launch the proposed ballot initiative, which has generated news as far as South Africa.

“It shows an extraterrestrial’s head popping up outside of a window at night, looking in the window, that’s visible through an infrared camera,” he said. The alien is about 4 feet tall and can be seen blinking, Peckman said earlier this month.

In a statement, Peckman said “other related credible evidence” proving aliens exist will be shown at Friday’s news conference, too.

In 2003, Peckman authored an off-beat ballot initiative that would have required the city to implement stress-reduction techniques. The “Safety Through Peace” initiative failed, but garnered 32 percent of the vote. - rmnews

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The so-called proof that makes this video real was described by Peckman: “It starts out with a digital camera looking out across the room toward a window. There’s a couple of flashes of light. After a few seconds, there is a small head clearly rising above a sill, panning the room, blinking its eyes, all slowly. The skin of the alien’s oblong face, he said, is smooth, not wrinkled like the being in the popular film ‘E.T.’” - ct

Yeah, okay, here is a still from the press conference:

Photo by CBS 4

A still image of the video, handed out by presenters, shows the purported space alien, peeking over the window sill in the center of the photo.

So, this is supposed to be a still of the real one. The real aliens seem to have flatter heads. I find Peckman’s to be more freaky. Looks more like a reptilian alien… or perhaps a mushroom with eyes.

Fertility temple beneath Nile found

Archaeologists have discovered a portico, or covered entryway, of an ancient Egyptian fertility temple beneath the surface of the Nile River in Egypt.

According to a report in National Geographic News, a team of Egyptian archaeologist-divers found the portico in Aswan while conducting the first-ever underwater surveys of the Nile, which began earlier this year.

Speed traps — new way to avoid them

…We’re talking about the tech-driven cat-and-mouse game between law-enforcement agencies and motorists when it comes to setting and avoiding speed traps.

It all started, of course, with the radar guns used by police officers to detect speeders. Then came radar detectors used by motorists who wanted to skedaddle faster than posted speed limits.

Then police began using laser units which are more effective and more accurate than radar guns and so on and so on.

Now, the latest “upgrade” in this ongoing game of high-tech one-upmanship: Trapster. Trapster is a service developed and run by Pete Tenereillo of Carlsbad, California, and is essentially a cell-phone social network that allows motorists to hook up with one another for the purpose of issuing real-time alerts about the location of speed traps.

Trapster works like this: Go to the Web site, and sign up for a free membership. Then download the Trapster software to your cell phone or PDA. Tenereillo said that most current-generation cell phones, Blackberries and other PDA’s can accommodate the Trapster software.

Then, you’re ready to hit the road. And once you’re tooling down the highway, if you spot a state trooper or city cop lying in wait with a radar gun or laser unit, you just need to punch in “pound one” on your cell phone — or dial a toll-free number. Other users are then alerted on their cell phones or PDA when they approach the same speed trap …
“One great thing about that is that it’s hands-free,” says Tenereillo. “You don’t have to be looking at the phone or even be holding it to be notified of the speed trap — which, of course, is safer, because you don’t have to take your eyes off the road to be notified of the trap.”

The more sophisticated cell phones/PDAs can also display a map that displays the exact location of the speed trap. “But obviously, people should pull over if they’re going to look at the map,” Tenereillo added.

Trapster was launched in April, and while Tenereillo declined to comment on the exact number of subscribers, he did say the site is booming. “We’re going crazy, we’ve had so many people sign up that it’s been hard to keep up with,” he said. “We initially had some capacity issues as a result, so we had to re-do some of the architecture.”

Tenereillo said one thing that surprised him is that “about half of our initial subscribers were soccer moms. But, when you think about it, that makes sense, they’re in the car the most, and they take a lot of short trips, driving their kids to and from school, soccer practice, music lessons, etcetera — so they’re the ones getting the worst tickets, like for driving 53 [mph] in a 35 [mph] zone. Those are worse tickets than the ones you get out on the highway because judges show no mercy when it comes to speeding in residential neighborhoods or adjacent surface streets.” - cnn

Sapphire Energy turns algae into ‘green crude’ for fuel

A San Diego company said Wednesday that it could turn algae into oil, producing a green-colored crude yielding ultra-clean versions of gasoline and diesel without the downsides of biofuel production.

The year-old company, called Sapphire Energy, uses algae, sunlight, carbon dioxide and non-potable water to make “green crude” that it contends is chemically equivalent to the light, sweet crude oil that has been fetching more than $130 a barrel in New York futures trading.

Chief Executive Jason Pyle said that the company’s green crude could be processed in existing oil refineries and that the resulting fuels could power existing cars and trucks just as today’s more polluting versions of gasoline and diesel do.

“What we’re talking about is something that is radically different,” Pyle said. “We really look at this as a paradigm change.”

Sapphire’s announcement is the latest development from companies and researchers focused on finding ways to cut harmful emissions from the nation’s giant fleet of cars, trucks, trains and planes.

Beringia: Humans were here

Beringia is thought by a handful of renegade scientists to be a prehistoric homeland for aboriginal people who later spread across the Americas and the key to one of archeology’s greatest Holy Grails - figuring out how humans first got to this continent. This July, Jacques Cinq-Mars, a renowned archeologist living in Longueuil, is heading to Beringia - a vast territory that once spanned the Yukon, Alaska and Siberia - in hopes of resolving a controversy he unleashed nearly 20 years ago when he chanced upon a curious-looking cave in the Yukon’s Keele Mountain Range, perched on a ridge high above the Bluefish River.

Here, at a site known as the Bluefish Caves, Cinq-Mars’s team discovered something that would turn archeology on its ear and has fuelled debate ever since - a chipped mammoth bone that appeared to have been fashioned into a small harpoon point. Radiocarbon dating showed the bone to be 28,000 years old. The find stunned archeologists who had long presumed the first people to enter the Americas did so 13,000 years ago via a land bridge from Siberia after the end of the last Ice Age.

Until that point, routes from Alaska down into the Americas were blocked off by glaciers up to four kilometres thick, which would have cut off any possibility of migration for thousands of years. But scientists have unearthed a growing number of ancient human sites across the continent that date back much more than 13,000 years. How did those people get here? No one knows for sure.

Cinq-Mars, a retired former curator at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, believes the answers lie in the lost land of Beringia.

Named after 18th-century Danish explorer Vitus Bering, this territory emerged from under the sea when advancing glaciers locked up seawater and caused ocean levels to fall 120 metres. The 1,000-kilometre-wide land bridge that joined the two continents was so arid it remained a glacier-free oasis of grassland steppes that teemed with life at the height of the Ice Age.

People here lived alongside giant and outlandish animals - beavers the size of today’s bears, fearsome carnivorous bears that would have dwarfed today’s grizzlies, sloths as big as oxen, mastodons, lions and woolly rhinos and camels. - toth

Ancient Egyptian City Unearthed in Sinai

Archaeologists exploring an old military road in the Sinai have unearthed 3,000-year-old remains from an ancient fortified city, the largest yet found in Egypt, antiquities authorities announced Wednesday.

Among the discoveries at the site was a relief of King Thutmose II (1516-1504 B.C.), thought to be the first such royal monument discovered in Sinai, said Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. It indicates that Thutmose II may have built a fort near the ancient city, located about two miles northeast of present day Qantara and known historically as Tharu.

A 550-by-275-yard mud brick fort with several 13-foot-high towers dating to King Ramses II (1304-1237 B.C.) was unearthed in the same area, he said.

Hawass said early studies suggested the fort had been Egypt’s military headquarters from the New Kingdom (1569-1081 B.C.) until the Ptolemaic era, a period of about 1500 years.

The ancient military road, known as “Way of Horus,” once connected Egypt to Palestine and is close to present-day Rafah, which borders the Palestinian territory of Gaza.

Archaeologist Mohammed Abdel-Maqsoud, chief of the excavation team, said the discovery was part of a joint project with the Culture Ministry that started in 1986 to find fortresses along that military road.

Abdel-Maqsoud said the mission also located the first ever New Kingdom temple to be found in northern Sinai, which earlier studies indicated was built on top of an 18th Dynasty fort (1569-1315 B.C.).

A collection of reliefs belonging to King Ramses II and King Seti I (1314-1304 B.C.) were also unearthed with rows of warehouses used by the ancient Egyptian army during the New Kingdom era to store wheat and weapons, he said.

Abdel-Maqsoud said the new discoveries corresponded to the inscriptions of the Way of Horus found on the walls of the Karnak Temple in Luxor which illustrated the features of 11 military fortresses that protected Egypt’s eastern borders. Only five of them have been discovered to date. - ls

Condoleezza Rice enlists in Kiss Army fan club

Secretary of state meets Gene Simmons and bandmates in Stockholm hotel

he Kiss Army fan club has an enthusiastic new recruit: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Rice was in the Swedish capital Thursday for an international conference on Iraq. Kiss had a sold-out concert to play Friday.

“I was thrilled,” Rice said of her late-night encounter with Kiss frontman Gene Simmons and bandmates Paul Stanley, Eric Singer and Tommy Thayer in the executive lounge of the Sheraton Hotel where they signed autographs and handed out backstage passes and T-shirts to her staff. “It was really fun to meet Kiss and Gene Simmons,” she told reporters, noting that they seemed well-informed about current events. The band had asked if she could stop by after she finished dinner with the Swedish foreign minister and Rice readily agreed, she said.

Rice, a classically trained pianist, said she has eclectic musical tastes ranging from Beethoven to Bruce Springsteen.

Hard rockers such as Kiss are included in the mix, and Rice said her favorite Kiss tune is “Rock and Roll All Nite.”

But, Rice conceded, she has never seen the band in concert. - msnbc

Ma hubbard in the cupboard

A HOMELESS woman who sneaked into a man’s house and lived undetected in his wardrobe for a year was arrested in Japan yesterday.

The woman was only rumbled after the man became suspicious about food mysteriously disappearing from his kitchen.

Police found the 58-year-old woman hiding in the top compartment of the man’s wardrobe and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki Itakura said today.

The man had installed security cameras that transmitted images to his mobile phone after becoming puzzled by food disappearing from his kitchen.

One of the cameras captured someone moving inside his home after he had left, and he called police believing it was a burglar.

However, when they arrived they found the door locked and all the windows closed.

“We searched the house … checking everywhere someone could possibly hide,” Itakura said.

“When we slid open the shelf closet, there she was, nervously curled up on her side.”

The woman told police she had nowhere to live and first sneaked into the man’s house about a year ago when he left it unlocked.

She had moved a mattress into the small closet space and even took showers, Itakura said, calling the woman “neat and clean.” - sun

Monkeys control a robot arm with thoughts

Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.

The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology. Scientists expect that technology will eventually allow people with spinal cord injuries and other paralyzing conditions to gain more control over their lives.

The findings suggest that brain-controlled prosthetics, while not practical, are at least technically within reach.

In previous studies, researchers showed that humans who had been paralyzed for years could learn to control a cursor on a computer screen with their brain waves and that nonhuman primates could use their thoughts to move a mechanical arm, a robotic hand, a robot on a treadmill or a small vehicle.

The new experiment goes a step further. In it, the monkeys’ brains seem to have adopted the mechanical appendage as their own, refining its movement as it interacted with real objects in real time. The monkeys had their own arms gently restrained while they learned to use the added one. - iht