(The National Counter Terrorism Center has) “access to all the databases of all the agencies. There is total sharing. But I’m concerned that they don’t have the easy ability to draw linkages between the various databases…

It’s not clear to me that at the National Counter Terrorism Center today… (the computer system) will automatically cross search all the intelligence and law enforcement databases it has. I want to find out whether that exist and I’m afraid that it doesn’t.”

– Senator Joe Lieberman on NPR Morning Edition with Renee Montagne this morning, doing a heck of a job beating the dead scare-monger horse before he’s bothered to gather the facts. (Italicized emphasis is Senator Lieberman’s emphasis, bold is mine.)

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Photo from: http://www.joystiq.com

Of course CNN talks about the applications suggested in big budget sci-fi movies like Avatar and the Matrix, and the perfunctory various medical applications.

But to be honest, if it follows the course of other technologies, I see the first practical commercial applications of the technology being applied to porn or games (or porn games, like these, because I’m betting the Japanese will be the first to make it work anyway). In fact,the manufacturers of the Emotiv Epoc claim to already have a device that allows the user to control games with their mind. How well this device actually works though hasn’t quite been established yet, with those viewing demos of the tech often less than impressed. But this is how the technology will end up being developed; by selling high-priced, low value toys and gimmicks to those eager early adopters.

Then, after enough people have telepathically pawed their digital harem of anime girls or bought the expensive peripheral with the Men Who Stare at Goats video game and want to do something else with it, it will filter down to other games, the controls will be refined, and then the technology will finally be cheap and reliable enough for it to be viable for giving the average amputee without unlimited funds the ability to scratch his or her own ass make their own pot of coffee in the morning.

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That’s what some homeless folks are saying they saw, and the cops they talked to said they were scared, but sober.

Hmmmmm. That’s how far from SFBR (the think tank that Tom Slick founded and home of the Southwest Primate Research Center)?

.

UPDATE: Loren Coleman has posted more details about the events in San Antonio, including photos of possible hand/foot prints,  over at Cryptomundo.com

For an excellent Slick biography, check out Loren Coleman’s Tom Slick and the Search for the Yeti.

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Because it’s Thursday Friday cat is in your PC, stealing your RAMZ.

IBM and Stanford University have reportedly modeled the complete cerebral cortex of a cat using the Blue Gene supercomputer.

No word yet on whether the computer gets upset and pees in front of your door if you don’t spend enough time playing solitaire with it.

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It’s not Thursday. It’s not even Friday. But here is a random link, just to get your week started up right.

From the Mental Floss article on the best “message in a bottle” stories we have this  story of a message on a balloon.

With Luft Balons and Message in a Bottle already in the post, I resisted the temptation to make a Synchronicity crack too… but if you really feel you need more 80s euro-rock there is always Falco. (Sorry, I just couldn’t resist the temptation to listen to more German pop after listening to Nena while posting this up.)

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So…  I guess I really have to admit that the Thursday blog has turned into an Every-Other-Friday blog as of late. I had a good friend who used to say “a bad excuse is better than no excuse.” Right now, though, my only excuse is “I’ve been crazy busy and preoccupied.”

Lame, I know. But an excuse, nonetheless.

So for this edition of the links of the week I only bring you one; a story of widows in the Indian state of Jharkhand beaten, dragged through the streets, and forced to eat human excrement for being “witches”. The grand irony, of course, is that “spirits” supposedly possessed other women in the village, alerting them to the practice of witchcraft in their midst. But this somehow isn’t considered a form of sorcery or witchcraft in and of itself.

It’s very odd, the way the human animal does these things. It strikes me as especially odd considering a conversation that I was having last night with an online gaming friend. An ethnic Hmong, he comes from a very different background, spiritually, than the charismatic Pentecostal Christian family I was raised in. But despite these differences, we were able to find a great deal of spiritual common ground when the conversation turned in that direction.

It was refreshing, in that way that only spirited conversation can be, to see that there was still some spark of that youthful hope I once held that all problems could be solved if we only spent enough time talking, seeking common ground, and truly trying to understand one another. Of course, now that I’m old and cynical, I know that that is not usually the case. These recent, and many older, incidents of violence against witches (or Jews, or Christians, or Buddhists, or Sunni, or Shiite, or adherents of the Baha’i faith, or “insert group of your choice”) prove that. But it was as nice to have that small spark reignited as it was repugnant to watch the video of these women being degraded.

Humanity has an immense capacity for both love and hate, cruelty and kindness. Which will you choose in your day-to-day?

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"And in this frame, if we blow it up enough, we can clearly see all the way to the coast and this blip here, this is Patty's brother, out on the ocean, jumping the shark."

This Thursday, I’m just wondering… is MK Davis the Andy Kaufman of the Bigfoot world? Is the Bluff Creek Massacre story his slow-burn version of wrestling Freddie Blassie?

I really hope so. I’d love to be able to actually sit back and comfortably chuckle at the strangeness of it all.

I mean, personally, I see the same twisted logic in the “Why doesn’t John Green just tell us what is on his back if not a camera?” argument from Davis supporter David Paulides that I see in the Gilbert Gottfried inspired  “Did Glen Beck rape and murder a young girl in 1990?” meme.

For those not familiar, the joke originated with a celebrity roast of Bob Saget where Gottfried asked why Saget never denied rumors that he had raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. A rumor that never existed until Godfrey created it, and that the comedian quickly followed with a proclamation that, while he himself didn’t believe it was true, it was curious that Saget never denied it.

The creative mind behind the Glenn Beck riff on this joke is skewering a tactic Beck often employs himself. That is, blind siding a guest with a ridiculous charge that he claims not to believe; but that he wants the guest to refute.

It would be great if Davis and friends were doing the same. Simply skewering the Bigfoot world’s sacred cows and inserting some levity in a field that sometimes takes itself too seriously, instead of jumping the shark after doing some undeniably worthwhile work stabilizing the PG footage.

Laughter is, after all, the best medicine.

But methinks the truth may be that MK needs something just a little bit stronger.

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No, this isn't a lifelike model of those pig monsters that Robot Chicken made for Spore.

Just, wow…

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Photo from Yahoo images, Henry Ray Abrams, AFP

I have been remiss in my Thursday duties of late. I realize this and I’m sorry. I’ll say only that “real life” (i.e. the stuff you have to do to pay those pesky bills) has been very busy of late and beg your pardon for my slacking.

But I’m here, a day late and a dollar short as my dad would say, and I’ve got some interesting links. And by interesting I mean disturbing, sad, disgusting, and amusing.

Let’s start with the disturbing (sad and disgusting would also work here), and my requisite call for the tightening of rules relating to stun gun use, as two California police officers taser a legless double amputee.

Next we have the sad tale of Sticky the kitten, found wrapped in duct tape in North Philadelphia. Apparently brotherly love doesn’t extend to our four legged brethren.

On the disgusting front we have the story of a New Jersey police officer acquitted of animal cruelty charges related to his molestation of a number of cows (evidence of which was uncovered during a probe of sexual misconduct with minors). Between this and the tasering, makes you wonder if maybe our kitten wasn’t the work of some bored off-duty cops looking for a laugh.

Finally, Snohomish County, Washington cops aren’t making any new friends among the sorts of guys who like to eat at strip club buffets because “it’s a good value.” Police there have arrested five “bikini baristas” accused of exposing their breasts and buttocks to patrons of the Grab-n-Go Espresso looking for a little more than the standard morning pick-me-up.

They are also being charged with prostitution for allowing patrons to grope them for tips (hey, GRAB-n-GO… it’s right there in the name!) While they might have been violating some health codes with their whipped cream shows (this is why I bring a thermos of coffee to work with me), the prostitution charge seems more than a bit harsh for capitalizing on the kind of objectification that has occurred since the first barmaid tied on an apron.

So, that’s it for this day late and dollar short Thursday feature. Miles and I will be in Tyler, TX this weekend for the TBRC’s Texas Bigfoot Conference. This year’s line-up includes such luminaries as Loren Coleman, Peter Matthiesen, Esteban Sarmiento, John Bindernagel, John Mioncynzski, and Bill Dranginis, among others.

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So instead go check out this new MMO under development by Funcom (the folks who brought us the Age of Conan MMO). Set in the modern world, it’s based on the premise that, besides the everyday world we all know, a Secret World of demons, monsters,  and shadowy secret societies and conspiracies exists and exerts a very real influence on the “real” world.

You can read more about it, from folks who know more about it than I do, at Kotaku here, here, and here.

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