Mysterious Statue Once Featured at Machu Picchu

The site at Machu Picchu where archaelogists believe a state of an Inca emperor once stood.

A mysterious stone statue, possibly the portrait of the great Inca emperor Pachacuti, once stood in Machu Picchu, according to archival research.

Likely placed against a round stone wall on one of Machu Picchu’s terraces, the statue had already disappeared by the time American explorer Hiram Bingham climbed the steep jungle slope to be faced with an archaeological wonder exactly a century ago on July 24, 1911.

Bingham, who has been credited as one possible inspiration for the “Indiana Jones” character, saw “a remarkably large and well-preserved abandoned city ” perched some 8,000 feet in the clouds “in a wonderfully picturesque position,” he wrote in the March 26, 1914, issue of Nature.

Surrounded on three sides by the gorges of the Urubamba River (also called the Vilcanota River), and tucked between two massive mountain peaks — the Huayna Picchu and the Machu Picchu — the vine-covered ruins of “the lost city of the Incas” were never really lost at all.

“Machu Picchu was never lost to the locals and certainly not to the huaqueros [treasure hunters and tomb-robbers] who looted the site before Hiram Bingham was born,” American explorer and researcher Paolo Greer told Discovery News.

“I really believe that Bingham was one of the best things that happened to Machu Picchu. He actually stopped the looters who had sacked the ruins for decades before he arrived,” Greer said.

The stone statue was lost to such plundering, said Greer.

“According to old documents, it was last seen in Machu Picchu in the 1860s. Then, possibly around 1880, it fell victim of the local treasure hunters,” he said. …

via Mysterious Statue Once Featured at Machu Picchu : Discovery News.

I hope they didn’t melt it down. It would be great if this treasure is still around somewhere.

The Werewolf Religion

… “The Werewolf Cathedral teaches one to merge with the base instincts. We acknowledge that we are Human beings but that we are animals. We do not seek to separate the two as many in the past have attempted. We feel that many ideologies have caused man to lose touch with his animalistic nature and survival instincts. Therefore the Werewolf is used as an archetype to represent man as an animal. The Werewolf is the perfect exemplar of the unified instinct and intellect, the beastly nature and the “humanistic” nature of man. To put it simply The Werewolf is a symbol of a person who has become in tune with there instincts as our ancestors were. Some may find this to be dangerous however our ancestors, who many consider to be primitive and barbaric, were not going around causing global warfare, murdering millions of people in a second with nuclear technology, and committing holocaust in the way that modern society and “civilized” man have.

We believe that man is a predatory animal, and that by unifying his intellect with his instinct he becomes more empowered to fulfill that which he wills to do. We believe that Social Darwinism is the true way nature operates, whether man finds this to be cruel or not makes no difference in regards to it’s truth. We believe in dealing with the world the way it is, not how it should be. It must be stressed however that we do not condone the racist aspect of Social Darwinism that was promoted in might is right, we see it from a non racist persceptive.

We acknowledge there is the possibility of an afterlife however we believe that focusing more on the next life then this one causes one to let life pass them by. If the quality of an afterlife is dependant on this one then we should remain focused on this one and how it operates in truth, not how we are told, rather then a afterlife we have no proof even exist. We also believe that people should not be forced to believe or disbelieve in spirituality. For those that do we have a set of occult practices we follow, even these however can be viewed as purely psychological techniques for self empowerment and practiced by the atheist or agnostic Werewolf.

*The Werewolf Cathedral considers anyone that believes in transformation of a man into a Long Chaney Jr style wolfman, with hairy face and fangs, to be a pseudo Werewolf. Being a Werewolf is a mentality and an ideology. Lycanthropic Transformation is about union of intellect with instinct. So that the two complement each other, rather than being at odds with one another. We are not concerned with role players, pretentious wannabes, and other such individuals. If that is what you are looking for, look elsewhere!” …

via Home – The Werewolf Cathedral.

The NSA Is Building An Artificial Intelligence System That Can Read Minds

Ever watching and listening: a control room at NSA headquarters.

James Bamford – The New Thought Police – The NSA Wants to Know How You Think – Maybe Even What You Think

The National Security Agency (NSA) is developing a tool that George Orwell’s Thought Police might have found useful: an artificial intelligence system designed to gain insight into what people are thinking.

With the entire Internet and thousands of databases for a brain, the device will be able to respond almost instantaneously to complex questions posed by intelligence analysts. As more and more data is collected—through phone calls, credit card receipts, social networks like Facebook and MySpace, GPS tracks, cell phone geolocation, Internet searches, Amazon book purchases, even E-Z Pass toll records—it may one day be possible to know not just where people are and what they are doing, but what and how they think.

The system is so potentially intrusive that at least one researcher has quit, citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability. …

Known as Aquaint, which stands for “Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence,” the project was run for many years by John Prange, an NSA scientist at the Advanced Research and Development Activity. Headquartered in Room 12A69 in the NSA’s Research and Engineering Building at 1 National Business Park, ARDA was set up by the agency to serve as a sort of intelligence community DARPA, the place where former Reagan national security advisor John Poindexter’s infamous Total Information Awareness project was born. [Editor’s note: TIA was a short-lived project founded in 2002 to apply information technology to counter terrorist and other threats to national security.] Later named the Disruptive Technology Office, ARDA has now morphed into the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).

A sort of national laboratory for eavesdropping and other spycraft, IARPA will move into its new 120,000-square-foot home in 2009. The building will be part of the new M Square Research Park in College Park, Maryland. A mammoth two million-square-foot, 128-acre complex, it is operated in collaboration with the University of Maryland. “Their budget is classified, but I understand it’s very well funded,” said Brian Darmody, the University of Maryland’s assistant vice president of research and economic development, referring to IARPA. “They’ll be in their own building here, and they’re going to grow. Their mission is expanding.” …

via The NSA Is Building An Artificial Intelligence System That Can Read Minds | PBS.org

Art And Ads That Can Be Seen From Space

KFC claims in a press release that their giant portrait of Colonel Sanders, built in 2006, is “the world’s first brand visible from outer space.”

via What On Earth? Art And Ads That Can Be Seen From Space : The Picture Show : NPR.

KFC – Kentucky Fried Chicken is the first company’s logo which is visible from space. The logo measures 87,500 feet and it’s made by tiles and this logo is located in the middle of Nevada desert next to the super secret Area 51 base. The stunt marks the revamp of the KFC logo which now featuring more streamlined image of Colonel Sanders. The -face from space- took more than 3000 hours to complete and it consists of 65,000 one-foot by one-foot painted tile pieces that were assembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle: 6,000 red, 14,000 white, 12,000 eggshell, 5,000 beige and 28,000 black. Video…

reader comment:

“... what if the first extraterrestials we meet are giant space chickens? this is a serious breach of diplomatic relations. when those space chickens ask to meet our leader, who they assume will be the Colonel, they are going to be very angry when they discover we eat chicken. KFC has probably doomed us all”

via Typepad.com

Probability of ET Life Arbitrarily Small, Say Astrobiologists

The Drake equation is one of those rare mathematical beasts that has leaked into the public consciousness. It estimates the number of extraterrestrial civilisations that we might be able to detect today or in the near future.

The equation was devised by Frank Drake at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1960. He attempted to quantify the number by asking what fraction of stars have planets, what fraction of these might be habitable, then the fraction of these on which life actually evolves and the fraction of these on which life becomes intelligent and so on.

Many of these numbers are little more than wild guesses. For example, the number of ET civilisations we can detect now is hugely sensitive to the fraction that destroy themselves with their own technology, through nuclear war for example. Obviously we have no way of knowing this figure.

Nevertheless, many scientists have attempted to come up with a figure with estimates ranging from a handful of ET civilisations to tens of thousands of them.

Of the many uncertainties in the Drake equation, one term is traditionally thought of as relatively reliable. That is the probability of life emerging on a planet in a habitable zone. On Earth, life arose about 3.8 billion years ago, just a few million years after the planet had cooled sufficiently to allow it.

Astrobiologists naturally argue that because life arose so quickly here, it must be pretty likely to emerge in other places where conditions allow.

Today, David Spiegel at Princeton University and Edwin Turner at the University of Tokyo say this thinking is wrong. They’ve used an entirely different kind of thinking, called Bayesian reasoning, to show that the emergence of life on Earth is consistent with life being arbitrarily rare in the universe.

At first sight, that seems rather counterintuitive. But if Bayesian reasoning tells us anything, it’s that we can easily fool ourselves into thinking things are far more likely than they really are.

Spiegel and Turner point out that our thinking about the origin of life is heavily biased by the fact that we’re here to observe it. They point out that it’s taken about 3.5 billion years for intelligent life to evolve on Earth.

So the only way that enough time could have elapsed for us to have evolved is if life emerged very quickly. And that’s a bias that is entirely independent of the actual probability of life emerging on a habitable planet.

“In other words, if evolution requires 3.5 Gyr for life to evolve from the simplest forms to sentient, questioning beings, then we had to find ourselves on a planet on which life arose relatively early, regardless of the value of [the probability of life developing in a unit time],” say Spiegel and Turner. #

When you strip out that bias, it turns out that the actual probability of life emerging is consistent with life being arbitrarily rare. In other words, the fact that life emerged at least once on Earth is entirely consistent with it only having happened here.

So we could be alone, after all. …

via Probability of ET Life Arbitrarily Small, Say Astrobiologists – Technology Review.

Ettinger, father of cryonics movement, dies; placed in deep freeze

left: Robert Ettinger sits by dozens of photographs of people currently being cryopreserved at CI. Right: Andy Zawacki, one of just two full–time employees at the Cryonics Institute (CI) in Clinton Township, checks the liquid nitrogen levels of cryostats, the tanks that store bodies of the deceased who hope to one day be brought back to life as technology advances. – link

One of the founders of a movement to store people’s bodies at very low temperature after death in hopes that future technology would allow for revival and curing of aging and disease has died of respiratory failure. He was 92.

Robert Ettinger — the Clinton Township man widely regarded as the father of the cryonics movement — has become the 106th patient at the organization he founded, the Cryonics Institute, housed in a nondescript industrial park off Interstate 94 in Clinton Township.

The five-day process — which involved packing Ettinger’s body on ice, profusing with chemicals to limit freezer damage and slowly cooling to the temperature of liquid nitrogen — began within minutes of his death on Saturday afternoon to assure the least amount of damage. He is expected to be ready to be submerged upside down in a tank, known as a cryostat, filled with liquid nitrogen by Thursday, according to his son, David Ettinger.

“He really has been viewed as the inspirational leader of the cryonics movement, and thousands of people around the world have looked up to him and will be upset that’s gone but hopeful that he will be back,” said Ettinger, who was with his father when he died over the weekend.

Robert Ettinger was 14 years old when he read a science fiction story that spawned the idea that today is known as cryonics.

The story, “The Jameson Satellite,” relayed how a professor sent a corpse into the earth’s orbit for indefinite preservation. Millions of years later, aliens found the body, took the brain out and put it in a mechanical body. Ettinger thought the author missed the point of his own story.

“Why wait for aliens?” Ettinger told The Detroit News in 2009. “Why not do it ourselves?”

Ettinger served in World War II, where he was injured in Germany. He spent months in the hospital and discovered science was accelerating the concept of cryonics. He wrote to scores of people in Who’s Who of America, trying to persuade them to get behind the concept and do something about it.

When he got no response, he self-published a book in 1962 called “The Prospect of Immortality.” Two years later, Doubleday published the book, which was eventually translated into several languages, including French, German, Dutch and Italian.

“I thought the premise was so logical,” said Ettinger, who taught physics and math at Wayne State University and Highland Park Community College.

Ettinger founded the Cryonics Institute in 1976, first located in Detroit. He also founded the Immortalist Society, an organization devoted to education and research relating to cryonics and life extension. …

via Metro and State | Ettinger, father of cryonics movement, dies; placed in deep freeze | The Detroit News.

The Government Just Admitted For The First Time It Is Using Cell Phone Data To Track Your Location

A group of Senators questioned the general attorney for the National Security Agency Tuesday about whether U.S. intelligence agencies are using cell phone geo location data to track U.S. citizens without their knowledge.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the leader of the National Counterterrorism Center Matthew Olson told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that: “There are certain circumstances where that authority may exist.”

The response came after repeated questions by Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore) whether the government has authority to “use cell site data to track the location of Americans inside the country.”

Olson admitted the possibility, said “it’s a very complicated question,” and told the committee the intelligence community is working on a memo to better answer the question.

The letter will be presented at the committees next hearing in September. …

via The Government Just Admitted For The First Time It Is Using Cell Phone Data To Track Your Location.

Related:

For several years, AT&T and T-Mobile have installed TruePosition software on their phones to tell police where customers are if they’re in danger.

According to Wired, TruePosition grabs about 60 million locations annually from 911 calls, and the company has recently branched out into homeland security across the globe.

Using their “location intelligence” or LOCINT software, officials may collect information on known phones of employees working in sensitive areas like airports or power plants. Called a “geofence” the network is rigged so that any unknown phone within its radius sets off an alarm.

The network can also ping officials if a known number enters a certain district — like a terrorist arriving at an airport. It’s will also monitor the calls and texts of everyone the suspect calls, and who they call, and so on.

TruePosition sells to cell phone carriers, but is “cagey about whether whether the U.S. government uses its products.”

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/liberty-media-trueposition-selling-technology-abroad-2011-7#ixzz1TKwtdaOE

Fossils from ‘Cradle of Humankind’ may be new pre-human species

The birth of our genus has long been a conundrum for paleoanthropologists, to say the least. Only a few scattered and fragmentary fossils older than two million years have been argued to belong to the genus.

Now, the fossil remains found in a cave in South Africa in April 2010 could represent an evolutionary link between apes and our earliest human ancestors.

Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, and his colleagues believe the almost-complete fossilised skeleton belonged to an intermediate form between the primitive australopiths and our genus, Homo.

The fossils of a female adult and a juvenile male – perhaps 12 or 13 years old – were uncovered in an eroded limestone cave at Malapa, about 25 miles northwest of Johannesburg.

The site is in a region already so famous for its ancient human fossils that it is often referred to as the ‘Cradle of Humankind’.

Berger believes Malapa may hold the key to one of the most significant, least understood chapters in the human evolutionary journey: the origin of the first species enough like us to be called human-a member of the genus Homo.

“This is where that story may have begun,” National Geographic News quoted him as saying.

The fossils included an australopith’s little brain (with some curiously modern features), apelike shoulders, and arms adapted to climbing in trees-attached to a bizarrely modern hand with the precision grip of a toolmaker.

According to the researchers, the adult female’s foot presents an even odder melange; her mostly modern ankle is connected to a heel bone more primitive than that of A. afarensis-Lucy’s species-which is at least a million years older.

“It really is a jaw-dropping find,” said Carol Ward, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Missouri who studies the evolution of apes and early hominins (a term for humans and other nonape primates; some researchers prefer the older term, hominid).

“We have no other collection of fossil skeletons, until the Neanderthals just over 100,000 years ago, that are so articulated, so complete,” added Ward. (ANI) …

via Fossils from ‘Cradle of Humankind’ may be new pre-human species | TruthDive.

Where Is Now? The Paradox Of The Present

Adam Frank- The night sky is a time machine. Look out and you look back in time. But this “time travel by eyesight” is not just the province of astronomy. It’s as close as the machine on which you are reading these words. Your present exists at the mercy of many overlapping pasts. So where, then, is “now”?

As almost everyone knows, when you stare into the depths of space you are also looking back in time. Catch a glimpse of a relatively nearby star and you see it as it existed when, perhaps, Lincoln was president (if it’s 150 light-years away). Stars near the edge of our own galaxy are only seen as they appeared when the last ice age was in full bloom (30,000 light-years away). And those giant pinwheel assemblies of stars called galaxies are glimpsed, as they existed millions, hundreds of millions or even billions of years in the past.

We never see the sky as it is, but only as it was.

Stranger still, the sky we see at any moment defines not a single past but multiple overlapping pasts of different depths. The star’s image from 100 years ago and the galaxy image from 100 million years ago reach us at the same time. All of those “thens” define the same “now” for us.

The multiple, foliated pasts comprising our present would be weird enough if it was just a matter of astronomy. But the simple truth is that every aspect of our personal “now” is a layered impression of a world already lost to the past.  …

Buddhism, with its emphasis on contemplative introspection, has developed a sophisticated presentist stance concerning the nature of reality. “Anyone who has ever mediated for anytime” the abbot of a Zen monastery once told me “finds that the past and future are illusions.”

Yes, but …

The reality that even light travels at a finite speed forces us to confront the strange fact that, at best, the present exists at the fractured center of many overlapping pasts. …

via Where Is Now? The Paradox Of The Present : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR.

Age-related brain shrinking is unique to humans

The brains of our closest relatives, unlike our own, do not shrink with age.

The findings suggest that humans are more vulnerable than chimpanzees to age-related diseases because we live relatively longer.

Our longer lifespan is probably an adaptation to having bigger brains, the team suggests in their Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper.

Old age, the results indicate, has evolved to help meet the demands of raising smarter babies.

As we age, our brains get lighter. By 80, the average human brain has lost 15% of its original weight.

People suffering with age-related dementias, such as Alzheimer’s, experience even more shrinkage.

This weight loss is associated with a decline in the delicate finger-like structures of neurons, and in the connections between them.

Alongside this slow decline in its fabric, the brain’s ability to process thoughts and memories and signal to the rest of the body seems to diminish.

Researchers know that certain areas of the brain seem to fare worse; the cerebral cortex, which is involved in higher order thinking, experiences more shrinkage than the cerebellum, which is in charge of motor control.

Yet despite the universality of ageing, scientists do not fully understand why our brains experience this continuous loss of grey matter with age.

Intriguingly, the brains of monkeys do not seem to undergo the same weight loss, raising the question of whether it is a distinctively human condition. …

the estimated 5-8 million years of evolutionary history that separate chimps from humans have made all the difference in the way that the species age. …

via BBC News – Age-related brain shrinking is unique to humans.