.Taxi driver gets £250,000 tip from regular customer

Most taxi drivers thank their lucky stars if their customers tell them to keep the change, let alone add a few pounds to the fare.

But Don Pratt was able to retire from taxi driving altogether after one of his regular customers left him slightly more than the average tip – £250,000 in her will.

Mr Pratt, 65, spent 20 years ferrying pensioner Mary Watson to and from her local shops in Newquay, Cornwall.

He picked her up from her house and took her wherever she needed to go – until her death, aged 86, early this year.

But Mary left her favourite taxi driver one final large tip – £250,000.

Mary left Don her whole estate which included a small house and savings – worth more than £250,000.

Father-of-four Don, a taxi driver for 30 years, retired yesterday thanks to Mary’s last act of generosity.

He said: “She was always a good tipper in life and she’s was an even better tipper when she went.

“I knew Mary for 20 years. She was a very nice lady and was always very generous.

“We would always have a good chat while I ferried her around. One day she said to me ‘when I pass on I’ll look after you’.

“I took it with a pinch of salt at the time – I had no idea she was going to leave me a fortune.

“When I was told she had left everything to me I just couldn’t believe it. We were sad to hear she had passed but thankful she had left us this money.

“We are very grateful for her generosity. In nearly 30 years as a cabbie, this is certainly the biggest tip I’ve ever had.” …

via Taxi driver gets £250,000 tip from regular customer.

That’s  $369,650 U.S. dollars.

William Lyttle, aka the Mole Man of Hackney, dies

THE eccentric known as The Mole Man, who spent 40 years digging a 60-foot network of tunnels beneath his £1 million Hackney house, has died without repaying the £350,000 of taxpayers’ money he owes the council for saving it from collapse.

And town hall chiefs, who re-housed William Lyttle in a top-floor flat, have been landed with an even costlier repair bill after it was discovered the oddball pensioner had carried out some of his unorthodox “home improvements” there, too.

The 79-year-old had knocked a huge, tunnel-shaped hole in the dividing wall of the living room and kitchen of the flat in St Lawrence Court on the De Beauvoir estate.

He’d been moved to it in 2009 following his eviction in 2006 on safety grounds from his ramshackle, detached, four-storey, 20-room Victorian property in De Beauvoir on the corner of Stamford Road and Mortimer Road, De Beauvoir.

Before he was re-housed the council had put him up in a hotel at a cost of £45,000.

The body of the former electrical engineer, who gained worldwide fame and notoriety for his tunnelling exploits, is believed to have lain undiscovered at his flat for several weeks.

He is thought to have died from natural causes. A post mortem concluded there were no suspicious circumstances.

His dilapidated former home is still surrounded by scaffolding and corrugated sheeting costing the council £70,000 alone.

The structurally unsafe building had been on the brink of collapse and there were fears the road outside, which he had burrowed beneath, could cave in.

Before the operation to salvage it by pouring concrete into the tunnels, workmen had to remove skiploads of accumulated junk, including the rusty wrecks of four Renault Four cars, a boat, scrap metal, old baths, disused fridge freezers and old TV sets.

Contractors also had to take away 20 metric tons of spoil he had excavated.

The council had already been involved in a lengthy court battle with Mr Lyttle to recoup the cost of repairs as well as £10,000 legal costs.

His death could potentially further delay recovery of the money because the council will have to await the process of probate and whether My Lyttle has any heirs or other claims on his estate.

Police have been unable to trace his next of kin and have appealed to anyone who has information about his relatives to contact them.

via Hackney Gazette – Mole Man of Hackney dies.

Songbirds learn while asleep

Zebra finches learn their songs early in life even while asleep — similar to the way children learn how to speak, research significant to our understanding of the brain processes has revealed.

Biologists at Utrecht University (UofU), in the Netherlands, have concluded that their research will increase our understanding of the role of sleep in the formation of memory. Furthermore, language learning in children is improved when they are allowed to take a nap.

This discovery has important consequences for our understanding of the brain processes involved in learning and memory. It also makes songbirds a good model to study the role of sleep in human speech acquisition.

Human infants learning to speak show increased activation in a part of the brain that is comparable to that studied in young zebra finches.

In songbirds it had been shown previously that during sleep the brain has the same pattern of activity as during singing the day before, said a UofU release.

via Songbirds learn while asleep.

Tiny Art Museum Hidden Aboard Apollo 12 for Its Moon Landing

Neil Armstrong’s moon walk on the 1969 Apollo 11 mission was a small step for a man and a giant leap for mankind, but a small ceramic tile snuck aboard the Apollo 12 mission a few months later has turned out to be a giant leap for American art.

Believe it or not, one of the engineers who built the lunar module for the Apollo 12, the second moon landing, snuck aboard a tiny ceramic chip containing original artwork by six of the American art world’s biggest names, including Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg, creating a permanent miniature art museum on the moon.

The tiny tile holding all six pieces — which is only three-quarters of an inch by half an inch — was affixed to one of the legs on the lunar module.

Amazingly, its existence has been a secret known only by a select few people, including renowned New York artist Forrest “Frosty” Myers, who created the “Moon Museum” and contributed a drawing, and a deceased engineer who worked on the project and is only known by the cryptic name “John F.”

But now, the whole picture of how the mini museum made it to the moon is coming to light thanks to the PBS series “History Detectives,” which has its 8th season premiere on June 21.

The show features four history experts who track down the history of obscure artifacts sent in by readers.

In this case, series host and historian Gwendolyn Wright found out about this piece of history from Jade Dellinger, a Florida-based art curator who bought a reproduction of the tile via an online auction.

Wright admits she was skeptical about the tile’s provenance, but after all the research now admits it’s one of the “strangest, most exciting” experiences of her life.

“I will never think of the moon in the same way again,” Wright said. “This case truly surprised me. What I thought seemed impossible, at first, became an amazing story of art winning its place alongside science, and some playful innovation that is sure to intrigue history buffs, space lovers and art aficionados alike.”

via Tiny Art Museum Hidden Aboard Apollo 12 for Its Moon Landing.

NASA discovers crack in the middle of the Milky Way

For those of you following this year’s season of Doctor Who, this picture of the day makes for some rather disturbing viewing. It appears that the constellation Sagittarius is featuring a huge stellar bit of graffiti.

And it looks rather like the crack in the Universe that’s been following Matt Smith and Karen Gillan around this year’s story.

So what is this crack? it’s “the core of a thick, sooty cloud large enough to swallow dozens of solar systems and may be harboring beastly stars in the process of forming.”

That’s ominous – a star devouring gap in the middle of the night sky…

via NASA discover Doctor Who’s crack in the middle of the Milky Way | The Daily Dust | UK News | Good News.

UFO Hoaxer ‘TFH’ Creates Shockingly Realistic CGI Videos of UFOs and Disasters

A shaky camera turns on, out of focus in haste to capture something of terrible importance. The camera zooms in, and the image emerges in awful clarity: the space shuttle, destroyed and coasting in helpless orbit, the astronauts almost certainly dead. The impact debris coasts alongside the ruined shuttle in a funeral procession of atmospheric flotsam.

The most disturbing thing is that no story is explained. We see the destruction like a live news feed, without context, without explanation, and our imaginations paint the back story with our deepest fears: collision, terrorism, tragic accident.

With no commentary except the occasional audio interruption of the NASA controllers, the video feels like the pause in a historical retrospective, the quiet stillness between scripted voice-overs that lets the audience reflect on the tragedy. A moment of silence for the dead.The man who created the videos is known online as The Faking Hoaxer (TFH for short), and he has a talent for creating footage that earns the rarest of compliments: It feels real.

In an age where special effects are getting cleaner and more elaborate, this one steals their thunder by slipping past our increasing skepticism with decidedly low-tech methods.

The camera mimics the rushed fumbling of amateur news footage: It zooms in, focuses, zooms out, focuses again. We see it as we’ve seen so much disaster footage: shaky, perspective changing, nervous and painfully immediate, before it’s cleaned up and boiled down. It feels raw.

In one video, a badly damaged shuttle wing rotates slowly in orbit, partly blackened with scorch marks and punched through with jagged holes. The torn wing floats in contrast to the blue Earth in the background. Unlike the fertile oceans beneath, it’s become as silent and lifeless as space itself.

In another video, crash footage of Air Force One is displayed on a live news feed, depicting the presidential airplane down in a waterway, sitting silently with massive blast holes in it. While the video pans across the plane, talking heads fill the background with informational noise that doesn’t ever completely explain the situation.

The Faking Hoaxer says he imagines the scenarios and then works on them one by one, with very few tools: a Nikon D40 for the photos, a Canon HV30 for video elements, Autodesk 3D Studio Max for 3D modeling and Adobe Creative Suite 4 to put it all together.

Each video is created individually, but how long it takes depends on complexity. “It all depends how long or CGI intensive it is,” TFH says. “I can create a simple UFO hoax in less than an hour, but other more cinematic videos can take a few days.”

Themes typically revolve around flight: airplanes, UFOs, space shuttles and extraterrestrial exploration.

Especially with the more cinematic CGI videos, TFH says that music is a major part of how the video is crafted. “I search film soundtracks for the right piece or sometimes I hear a piece first and I create a video for it. The music I choose is because I like the style and it fits in with what I do and how I think.”

He doesn’t have any specific rules for the videos he creates, but he does have a rule not to create any video that is too graphic for people to watch.
“I always try to make my videos look real and not CGI, but I am starting to go more cinematic and hopefully this will lead to a short film.”While he seems a perfect fit for Hollywood, TFH is currently unemployed, taking a career break to look for something new and more creative and rewarding. Although his specialty has been UFOs and disaster footage, he doesn’t consider it his only talent.

“I have been doing FX for about two years now. I have always been a keen artist, and now I have moved into the ‘video art’ side,” he told AOL News. “It’s just part of what I do. It’s kind of cool to see what hasn’t been seen before in real life.”

He’s still sensitive of his work being promoted as real, even though the full video always bears his moniker and his “TFH” watermark clearly visible in the videos. In one he even made his full name visible on the wing of the space shuttle. …

via UFO Hoaxer ‘TFH’ Creates Shockingly Realistic CGI Videos of UFOs and Disasters.

Nice resume. Someone should hire him.

For Google, DNS log analysis essential in Aurora attack investigation

A Google employee clicked on a malicious link in an instant message, setting off a series of events that resulted in the infiltration of Google’s network for months and the ability to steal data from a variety of the search engine giant’s systems.

Heather Adkins, information security manager at Google, shed a few details about the Google Aurora attack disclosed by the company in January. The attacks, which targeted Google and about 20 other companies, were an advanced persistent threat, a carefully planned attack by an organized group of cybercriminals to infiltrate and steal data for a long period of time without being detected. Speaking to a packed conference venue onTuesday at the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) Conference 2010, Adkins explained how the company set up an incident response team, conducted its investigation and carefully analyzed mountains of DNS data to trace and determine the scope of the attack.

Adkins said only a few of the stages that the attackers undertook were unique. Most of the stages, from carrying out the social engineering attack to exploiting the zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6, were very common.

“It may not take a highly complex operation to infiltrate your network,” Adkins said. “It’s not really a question of how hard each stage was; it’s a question of the skill required, the availability of the tools and the difficulty of the technique.”

The Google APT operation began with reconnaissance work. Specific Google employees were targeted. The attackers gathered as much information as they could, gleaning much of the data posted by employees on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks. The cybercriminals then used a dynamic DNS provider to set up a Web server hosting a phony photo website. The Google employee received a link from a person they trusted and clicked on it, sending them to the malicious website, which instantly downloaded malware on their computer.

“These are not massive botnets that are targeted at the entire Internet for whoever stumbles upon them,” Adkins said. “It’s spread very thinly against targeted systems and the infrastructure that supports them is very small.”

Adkins said the malware itself was not particularly sophisticated. The cybercriminals set up a connection through a secure tunnel to the victim’s machine and used the employee’s credentials to gain access to other Google servers. The attackers can use a variety of methods to steal data, from the pass-the-hash technique, a toolkit designed to read Windows credentials stored in local memory, to saved passwords in remote desktop and keyloggers to record the victim’s keystrokes. Once they gained super-user privileges, they installed a backdoor onto the server to view and steal files and attempt to stealthily gain access to other systems.

Adkins said the kind of digital impersonation employed in the Google Aurora attack is difficult to detect. A security technology that Adkins declined to identify alerted the security team to the infiltration, setting the stage for the lengthy investigation.

Systems forensics, event logs and malware analysis is where Google found the most benefit, Adkins said. In the period after Google discovered the infiltration, the security team had become so sensitive that it had to be careful not to over analyze every single anomaly.

“You commonly won’t realize it’s an APT until you do some triage work,” she said.

After analyzing the MD5 signature of the malware, no one seemed to know about it, shedding the first clue that something was wrong. The security team also found the use of a hard coded DNS server. When the attackers conducted reconnaissance, they performed DNS queries, data which was useful in the investigation, Adkins said.

The team searched for hosts and the DNS queries, building a picture of the scope of the attack. Concentrated DNS queries in a specific place represented invasive operations, she said. Most traffic mainly reaches out to common sites. A warning sign is when traffic is detected going to a new website that was recently registered and no one had visited before.

“DNS query logs may be the only method you have to find new generations of malware,” she said. “The adversary will need to reach other systems to install that malware. We often look for the big [anomalies], but we have to monitor for the subtle too.” …

via For Google, DNS log analysis essential in Aurora attack investigation.

Radiocarbon dating verifies ancient Egypt’s history

Some of the items, among them seeds and papyrus, were more than 4,000 years old

Experts have used scientific dating techniques to verify the historical chronology of ancient Egypt.

Radiocarbon dating was used to show that the chronology of Egypt’s Old, Middle and New Kingdoms is indeed accurate.

The researchers dated seeds found in pharaohs’ tombs, including some from the tomb of the King Tutankhamun.

They write in the journal Science that some of the samples are more than 4,500 years old.

Radiocarbon dating of ancient Egyptian objects is nothing new.

But this time, the scientists say, they were able to use a very precise statistical technique to actually verify the Egyptian history.

“The very first dating done with radiocarbon was dating Egyptian material of known dates, to check that [the method] worked,” said Andrew Shortland from Cranfield University in the UK.

“Now, for the very first time, [we] managed to get radiocarbon techniques so good, that we can do it completely the opposite way around. We can say, from using radiocarbon, whether the Egyptian history is correct or not.

“Previously radiocarbon hasn’t had a voice on this because the errors had been so great. Now radiocarbon is able to distinguish between different ideas of reconstructing the history.”

The study brought together researchers from the UK, France, Austria and Israel.

They dated 211 various plants, seeds and papyrus samples, obtained from museum collections.

“The museums were all very helpful in providing material we were interested in—especially important since export of samples from Egypt is currently prohibited,” said Christopher Ramsey, the lead author of the study, from the school of archaeology at the University of Oxford.

“Fortunately, we only needed samples that were about the same size as a grain of wheat,” he added.

Thomas Higham, another member of the team who is also from the University of Oxford, explained that many items were found in ancient Egyptians’ tombs and other archeological sites “where we could independently determine their historical age”.

King Tut’s tomb

“For example, we used seeds and plant material from Tutankhamun’s tomb, which is very precisely dated. We also used seeds from a room underneath the Saqqara step pyramid dated to a specific year of the reign of King Djoser,” he said.

Djoser was one of the pharaohs of the third dynasty of the Old Kingdom.

The step pyramid of Djoser in Saqqara is believed to be the oldest stone pyramid in Egypt.

Dr Ramsey’s team was able to determine the exact period when this king reigned Egypt – from about 2691 to roughly 2625 BC, said the scientist.

The team found that this particular event took place earlier that previously thought.

“For the first time, radiocarbon dating has become precise enough to constrain the history of ancient Egypt to very specific dates,” said Dr Ramsey.

“I think scholars and scientists will be glad to hear that our small team of researchers has independently corroborated a century of scholarship in just three years.” …

via BBC News – Radiocarbon dating verifies ancient Egypt’s history.

US sailor returns after record-breaking 1,152 day trip

A sailor has returned to shore after spending more than three years at sea without touching dry land.

Reid Stowe, 58, docked in Manhattan after his 1,152 day voyage, and was greeted by his girlfriend and 23-month toddler who he had never seen.

Mr Stowe left in the 70-foot (21m) two-masted sailing boat in April 2007.

Guinness World Records say they are looking into the claim that the trip sets a new record for the longest voyage.

Mr Stowe originally set off with his girlfriend, Soanya Ahmad, 26, until she had to return to shore after suspecting she was pregnant.

The couple agreed that he would continue without her, despite it meaning that he would miss the birth of their son.

He said that seeing her go was the hardest part of his trip.

“Before we left, we had an agreement that if I had to get off for any reason, he would go on,” Ms Ahmad said.

“I knew if he came back and didn’t finish the voyage, he would just go back again. There was no way he wasn’t going to finish it.”

The vessel was built by Mr Stowe and his family 30 years ago, and named “Anne” after his mother.

While at sea, Mr Stowe says he spent his time repairing torn sails, painting, practicing yoga and writing a book.

He was able to send e-mails and make satellite phone calls.

Mr Stowe refers to his trip as a “voyage of love”.

“She’s done what no vessel in the world has done,” Mr Stowe said.

“She got worn out and beat down to death.

“I’ll tell you that boat will take me for another year and there is still a years worth of food on that boat…It’s a magical boat, it’s full of love.”

Charles Doane, editor of Sail magazine, said he believes that Mr Stowe set a new sailing record.

He said that the GPS satellite system that tracked the voyage provides evidence that the boat had not touched land during the trip.

via BBC News – US sailor returns after record-breaking 1,152 day trip.

Apple Sells 600,000 iPhones, Orders Suspended

If you were wondering why both Apple and AT&T melted down when taking orders for the iPhone 4 on Tuesday, we have the answer. Apple sold 600,000 of the things. According to Apple’s press release, “It was the largest number of pre-orders Apple has ever taken in a single day and was far higher than we anticipated, resulting in many order and approval system malfunctions.”

It wasn’t helped by AT&T’s new ordering system which, according to an AT&T insider was updated over the weekend with new fraud-prevention measures and then left untested before iPhone ordering opened. AT&T has issued a statement saying that on launch day, pre-order sales were “10-times higher than the first day of pre-ordering for the iPhone 3G S last year.” Now AT&T has “temporarily suspended” ordering for the iPhone 4.

You can still buy an iPhone 4 at Apple.com, although it appears you can only place orders for mail delivery. If you request an in-store pickup, the Apple.com ordering system will show you a list of nearby stores, but you cannot actually select one.

The crush of orders shouldn’t have come as a surprise to AT&T and Apple. All the iPhone 3G owners who held off buying the 3GS last year are now ready for an upgrade. The iPhone 4 got a terrific boost of pre-launch hype thanks to the April appearance of an iPhone prototype on gadget blog Gizmodo, which led to widespread mainstream media coverage. And AT&T has decided to let many 3GS owners upgrade early without penalty. You might think that this unholy combination would lead to a surge in demand, and you’d be dead right: On Tuesday there were 13 million visits to AT&T by customers checking their eligibility to upgrade.

What does this mean for you, the customer? Delivery dates have slipped again, this time to July 14th (launch day is June 24 and new orders were already delayed to July 2). And if you have already ordered, you may still be in for disappointment. Reports from Gadget Lab readers say AT&T is e-mailing customers to cancel their iPhone 4 orders, effectively forcing people to re-order and wait an additional three weeks for delivery. [UPDATE: AT&T got in touch. These cancelled orders are, in fact, just cancellations of duplicate orders some customers made when they didn't receive confirmations of their first orders.]

And this is in the United States. Countries that do not yet even have a launch date should be prepared for a long wait.

via Apple Sells 600,000 iPhones Despite ‘System Malfunctions,’ Orders Suspended | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.