Dowbrigade

An
absolutely terrifying article in the New York Times exposes the felonious
details of what happens to that stolen credit card and personal financial
information we’ve been hearing so much about. It is a whole world
of wanton and open criminal activity, protected by the anonymity of
the internet and the difficulty of serving paper on servers in the
lawless
frontier of the former Soviet Union.

"
Want
drive fast cars?" asks an advertisement,
in broken English, atop the Web site iaaca.com. "Want live in premium
hotels? Want own beautiful girls? It’s possible with dumps from Zo0mer." A "dump," in
the blunt vernacular of a relentlessly flourishing online black market,
is a credit card number. And what Zo0mer is peddling is stolen account
information – name, billing address, phone – for Gold Visa cards and
MasterCards at $100 apiece.

It is not clear whether any data stolen from CardSystems Solutions, the payment processor reported on Friday to have exposed 40 million credit card accounts to possible theft, has entered this black market. But law enforcement officials and security experts say it is a safe bet that the data will eventually be peddled at sites like iaaca.com – its very name a swaggering shorthand for International Association for the Advancement of Criminal Activity.

from the New
York Times

Tomorrow, barring delay or mishap, a U.S. filmmaker,
an international association of space buffs and Russian aerospace organizations
will use a leftover Soviet ballistic missile to put the first "solar
sail" into orbit.

This unusual device, which looks like a 6,500-square-foot flower with
eight triangular, mirrorlike petals, does not use wind, as Kepler predicted.
Instead, it hopes to show that sunlight’s gentle push might one day enable
a spacecraft to reach speeds far greater than anything achieved by a
mere rocket. Deployed, the petals are about 1 1/2 times the size of a
basketball court.

The Dowbrigade remembers reading about, and dreaming
of, solar sail craft as a boy in the 60′s. We never dreamt we would actually
see one go up…..

from the Washington
Post

Robotic scientists in China have succeeded in ‘controlling’
live mice.

Experts at the robot research centre in Shandong Technology
University controlled white mice by stimulating micro-electrodes on their
heads.

The mice obeyed computer-generated commands to, in succession, "turn
left", "turn right" and "move forward".

Project manager Su Xuecheng said animal robot research is the merger
of electronic communication and biology, creating a new scientific discipline.

Scientists believe it will eventually lead to new ways of curing disabilities
as electronic signals are used to replace damaged nerves.

CIA Issues Call for Chinese-speaking cats……

from Ananova

Wishing
We Were There….

Catwalk queen Naomi Campbell hit the runway in Brazil
this week, adding her unique brand of glamour to Rio Fashion Week.

The legendary supermodel strutted her stuff with some of the South American
country’s equally sizzling up-and-comers to give the world a peek at
the hottest trends in beachwear for 2006.

Naomi displayed a pair of distinct looks for TNG at the label’s Museum
of Modern Art show, including a diaphanous hooded dress and a linen kaftan
worn with a denim micro mini and gladiator heels.

And fashionistas will be keeping their eyes peeled for more sultry
summer styles over the next few days Rio’s fashion extravaganza
doesn’t wrap
up until Sunday.

from Hello Magazine

DAWSON, Yukon Territory – The folks here still roll
their own cigarettes, drink hard and gamble in a casino where ragtime
is played on a stand-up piano.

These days the town is down to a population of 1,200
and the municipal government is bankrupt despite a growing tourism industry
and artists’ colony. But some things never change in the remote Yukon.

This area used to be known as the Wild West. Dawson,
which many residents still call Dawson City, still is. Just the other
day, a man burned down a garage at the local Royal Canadian Mounted Police
headquarters, destroying a jet boat, for no apparent reason.

One hotel in town is rumored to be haunted and another
follows an old tradition by serving drinks mixed with pickled human toes
(the establishment says they are dehydrated and preserved in salt) donated
by people in their wills or by the unfortunate who suffer frostbite in
the winter. (Those who imbibe are installed in the "Sourtoe Cocktail
Club.")

"One thing about the Yukon, you check your past
at the door," said Bob Hilliard, 53, Dawson’s leading saloon piano
player, who is better known as Barnacle Bob. "There are a lot of
personal histories here best left outside the territory. All I can say
is Yukon me, I con you."

Mayor Everitt is now the subject of a Royal Canadian Mounted
Police investigation, and he has publicly admitted to the Canadian Broadcasting
Company to having submitted a bar bill of more than $2,000 for payment
by the city that was written on a cocktail napkin and signed by a waitress.
His explanation to CBC was that it was "a promotional thing."

"In a city, a guy like me would be considered a
bum and rich people would have little to do with me," said Bill
Donaldson, 41, who is better known here as Caveman Bill, since he lives
in a cave across the river from town. "Here I can shoot the breeze
with anybody and they’ll listen to me, and if you didn’t know us you
wouldn’t necessarily know who was the rich guy and who was the bum. We
look the same."

This sounds like our kind of place. We may
have to case the joint as a possible retirement hideout in case things
go
sour in Ecuador where, as all old South American hands know, the political
climate can change as fast as an armored personnel carrier can get from
the Presidential Palace to the International Airport in Quito.

from the New York Times

As we returned from the
neighborhood sports bar where
we went to watch the Light Heavyweight World
Championship title fight between Antonio
Tarver and Glen Johnson, which it turned out they couldn’t get on any
one of their 37 screens, we heard a rather remarkable claim on Sports
Talk Radio. 

The fight was on HBO,
and of course the Dowbrigade is too cheap to give RCN 20 MORE
dollars
on
top
of their
already
extortionate
connectivity charges, but unfortunately even the Best Sports Bar in
Watertown turns into a meat market on Saturday night,

Anyway, this lady calls the station and asks if
anybody had noticed that every time the San Antonio Spurs have won
the NBA title, the University of Virginia has won the NCAA Men’s Lacrosse
title. 100% of the time. Both ways. Perfect correlation. And,
of course, this year the Virginia Cavaliers did it again. The hosts dismissed
her derisively as a kook.

Our interest piqued, we decided to investigate.  It
turns out the claim is true, but the sample is small. On both occasions
that the Spurs won the NBA championship, 1999 and 2003, UVA won the lacrosse
title. The Cavaliers won the NCAA Men’s title in 1972 as well, but
as the ABA Spurs didn’t move to San Antonio until 1973 and didn’t join
the NBA until 1976, we guess that doesn’t count.

So take the money you were going to spend on lottery
tickets this week and bet it on the Spurs. The Dowbrigade makes it his
pick of the week, and you can take that to the bank…

NBA finals page

Iraqi
firemen try to extinguish a burning oil truck, after it was struck by
a suicide car bomb attacker in Baghdad, Iraq Friday, June 17, 2005. The
suicide car bomber slammed into the loaded fuel tanker, killing two people
and injuring another six, after missing an Iraqi army patrol, police
said.

(AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

When we first saw this dramatic photo in our morning
paper, our first thought was "Where can we get one of those Mondo Cool
mirrored fireman’s helmets"?. Didn’t Darth Vader have a helmet like this in one of the early Star Wars movies? We still remember our first
fireman’s helmet – red, of course – and how uncomfortable it was to
sleep in. We
refused to take it off for a week. Finally, Norma Yvonne made us put
it on the shelf with the rest of our 9/11 memorabilia…..

photo and story from AP

RICHMOND,
Va. (June 17, 2005) – People with bigger brains are smarter than their
smaller-brained counterparts, according to a study conducted by a Virginia
Commonwealth University researcher published in the journal "Intelligence."

The study, published on line June 16, could settle a long-standing scientific
debate about the relationship between brain size and intelligence. Ever
since German anatomist and physiologist Frederick Tiedmann wrote in 1836
that there exists "an indisputable connection between the size of
the brain and the mental energy displayed by the individual man," scientists
have been searching for biological evidence to prove his claim.

"For all age and sex groups, it is now very clear that brain volume
and intelligence are related," said lead researcher Michael A. McDaniel,
Ph.D., an industrial and organizational psychologist who specializes in
the study of intelligence and other predictors of job performance.

Yeah, well, then how come Zippy the Pinhead is so smart
and Quentin Tarentino is so dumb?

from a University of Virginia press release

It
was born with four eyes, two noses, two mouths and two tongues, but it’s
just one cat.

A two-faced female kitten, named Gemini, was born late Sunday night. The
kitten is owned by Lee Bluetear of Glide.

"It’s like it’s got one head. Up at the front is where it’s split," Bluetear
said. "Right at the front (the faces) are basically independent."

The two mouths appear to flow into one throat, Bluetear said.

"The vets and I both agreed that she probably has one brain," she added.

So far, Gemini is alive and well, much stronger and drinking more milk
than its first days.
"Everybody is totally amazed that this thing exists," Bluetear said.

That includes Roseburg veterinarian Alan Ross, who examined Gemini on Tuesday.
"With the three of our veterinarians here, we have a combined total of
50 years of experience," Ross said. "We have never seen anything like this."

from the Oregon
News-Review

THE Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has
criticised the new web-based media for "paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent
nonsense and dangerous bigotry". He described the atmosphere on the world
wide web as a free-for-all that was "close to that of unpoliced conversation".

Egads! Unpoliced conversation! Somebody call the conversation
police! No wonder the the Puritans preferred the austere solitude of
the New England woods to this kind of pre-enlightenment thinking at the
top of the Church of England. As to the previous part of his pronouncement,
we are
beginning to suspect that the COE is behind whover has been taking remote
control screen shots of of computer while we were enganged in "research"
involving Bit-torrent and Community Standards in Matters of Indecency….

from the Times of London

A
lost Leonardo fresco and tantalizing hints that remnants may still exist
– hidden behind a wall in a Florence palazzo – has the art world abuzz.

For 30 years, art work detective Maurizio Seracini has been searching
for Leonardo da Vinci’s lost fresco.

And now Seracini has found a breakthrough in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio.
A small cavity in a wall may hold the key to a long lost secret, he says.

"Now we have to go beyond that wall and see with other technologies
what is there to be possibly seen as well as analyzed," Seracini
says.

The cavity lies behind murals by Georgio Vasari, an admirer of da Vinci,
where an inscription on a flag says, "Search … find!"

Other artists reproduced da Vinci’s "Battle of Anghiari" using
the master’s drawings, but the original fresco has not been seen since
1563.

from the MSNBC