“a typical session with (her) proceeds as follows: she prepares her room with candles and perfumes, undresses, massages and caresses her client, and lets him touch her. often, the massage culminates in her masturbating the client to orgasm.” sounds benign enough, but is it therapy or just a clever new way to cash in? or both? we can assume the clients get pleasure from the experience but the anti argument goes they are really children mentally, and should be treated as such, without any thought to their sexuality. the question would be easier to answer in america where these same people can be executed. read the article on kuro5hin. any thoughts?

this site has kicked my ass today. along with the exhaustive information on the process of microscopy it contains galleries showcasing SO many interesting things photographed at microscopic scales. ever wonder what the pills you pop look like under the gellcap? or what the vision inducing narcotics you were so fond of as a youth look like themselves? or for that matter the anti depressant your taking at this very moment? how about the beer or coctails you swill? maybe items of religious significance? in any case their are things to see here that would make any abstract expressionist feel inadequate. also of interest is the fact that evidently computer component makers often fill empty space on the silicon with strange microscopic little pictures. who knew? there is so much to see here, take your time and dig, your sure to find something surprising. enjoy.

1) bush administration began planning iraq invasion the day he took office. you don’t say? (story here or here)

2) experts from a prominent think tank charge that the administration “systematically misrepresented” the threat posed by iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. really? (story here, or here. summary of findings here. “iraq’s arsenal only on paper” with images of said paper here. overview of entire debacle here)

3) powell admits no evidence of connection between iraq and terrorists. seriously? (story here or here)

4) u.s. quietly withdraws team of weapon hunters from iraq. no way. (story here, and here)

5) french law enforcement authorities have made vice president dick cheney the target of a criminal investigation for his role in a massive bribery scandal. good ol’ dick? couldn’t be. (story here, or here)

6) for the first time, the chairman of the independent commission investigating the sept 11 attacks is saying publicly that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented. is that right? (story here). in a related story condi rice does not want to testify under oath to the commission (story here). also related: in an extraordinary request, the bush administration asked the supreme court to let it keep its arguments secret in a case involving a man detained since just after sept 11. mmm hmmm. (story here)

7) patriot act II quietly signed into law. uh oh. (story here. read it.)

8) since the beginning of the war in iraq, the u.s. has sought not just to influence but to control all information, from both friend and foe. no shit? (story here)

9) when president bush travels around the u.s., the secret service visits the location ahead of time and orders local police to set up “free speech zones” or “protest zones,” where people opposed to bush policies are quarantined. you mean where the t.v. cameras cant see them? nah. (story here)

10) texas school success story which inspired the “no child left behind” program was a fraud. sensing a pattern here folks? (story here)

take a big whiff folks. mmm mmm mmm. good stuff.

the idea is interesting. another abstract theory based on higher mathematics which in dumbed down translation sounds reasonable enough. at least as reasonable, certainly, as the theory of black holes, with pin pricks of impossible density and unstoppable gravity, sucking in matter and light, bending space-time, depositing it all… where?! this article was great if for no other reason than to serve as a reminder that space is more truly unknown than any of us usually suppose. even though you’ve read about them, even though you “know” what a black hole looks like, having seen them hundreds of times in books, magazines, and of course disney’s movie, the plain fact is that they could VERY easily not exist. also i’m fairly certain this article provided the one and only occurrence of the sentence “black holes themselves remain mere theory, not fact” i’ve ever seen.

you might say, “seeing is believing! lets send a probe into one of those muthas! send a russian doll type probe with 5 or 6 portions which each record and broadcast the path of the portion before it! we’ll settle this once and for all! we’ll see whether it’s a hole or not, whether space-time actually warps…” but i’d have to say, “hold your horses.” the fact is the closest black hole (or gravastar, or giant undulating space blob, or whatever the hell it is our math predicts and our observations hint at) is about 1,600 light years away. we could send a probe, sure, only the signal it sent would be too weak to ever make it home, not to mention we’d never know if it were on target, still functioning, etc. and hell, by the time it was even an issue we could either be extinct, living under the iron fisted rule of a vicious venutian energy cloud, or… extinct (did i say that already?). so for all those reasons and a thousand others, our collective conception of what exactly these unseeable things are will have to be left to the theoreticians, and via the process of “trickle down reality” movies, magazines, and the discovery channel.

here are a couple more articles about gravastars: 1, 2.

first off, before i go on, let me just offer some images from the manuscript so you can get a sense of what the hubbub is about.
some images here with thumbnails, concentrated mainly on the illustrations. more of the same here. a larger group, with examples of the text can be found here. alright…

a recent article in nature has a computer scientist named gordon rugg demonstrating that what was always seen as a dizzying complexity, namely the unknown language used, could in fact be created very simply. he says,” i’ve shown that a hoax is a feasible explanation, now it’s up to believers in a code to produce evidence to support their ideas.” and what are their ideas? well, among the many there is predictably the “end times” prophetic message idea, encapsulated pretty well by this guy, who places this particular image from the manuscript over an image of our spiral arm galaxy to help illustrate his reasoning. there are other ideas, all explaining the text is encoded, some incorporating alien intelligence, some taking a more spiritual angle. in any case this is all beside the point to me, it being a “hoax” included.

if the manuscript is in fact written in a real, though lost language, cool. if it is of some outlandish origin, cool. if it is an elaborate hoax, as gordon rugg believes, explaining “english adventurer edward kelley produced the voynich to con rudolph II, holy roman emperor and collector of antiquities, out of a fortune in gold”, that’s cool too, maybe even better. the idea that some guy took it upon himself to create such a complex, wildly imaginative manuscript, complete with fake language in gibberish script, and has managed to keep it’s authenticity a question for five hundred years, is amazing to me. creating faux language and fake artifacts is an endeavor close to my heart. from an artistic standpoint, if this is indeed a bunch of hooey, it’s the coolest most bad ass hooey i’ve seen yet. bravo to whatever crackpot con-man artist came up with it.

for more historical info, as well as some more of the ideas put forth about it’s origin and purpose, check out this site. enjoy.

first off there is stardust, which managed the extremely difficult navigational feat of passing through the tail of a speeding comet 2 billion miles away. it gathered particles of the coma to bring back to earth, while simultaneously snapping the most detailed photos ever taken of a comet’s nucleus. to quote “Scientists believe in-depth terrestrial analysis of the samples will reveal much about comets and the earliest history of the solar system. Chemical and physical information locked within the cometary particles could be the record of the formation of the planets and the materials from which they were made.” stardust is expected to make it back home on january 15, 2006.

then of course there is spirit. every major news source has run the story today so you’re most likely already quite aware. it is the first successful mars mission since 1997’s pathfinder and is designed for geological testing, specifically to study the activity of surface water in mars’ distant past. minutes after touching down on mars’ surface the rover began snapping pictures, as more arrive they’ll be archived here. since the coverage will most likely disappear as of tomorrow here are some links offering more in depth information on the mission. the technical challenges and aims of the mission are explained in this movie which includes some nice cg animations. a step-by-step guide to the flight can be found here. complete mission coverage including lot’s of multimedia can be found here.

so until spirit’s sister rover, opportunity, lands at meridani planum on the 24th of this month, keep your fingers crossed. nothing brings funding like a perceived chance at political advantage, nothing hints at political advantage more than public opinion, and nothing shapes public opinion more than success and the resulting 24 hour barrage of news coverage. good luck automated space cadets.