What is back masking?
Backmasking is where embedded messages work both forwards and backwards. Possibly the best example is Led Zeppelins Stairway To Heaven track – when sung normally then reversed makes no sense whilst the original clearly seems to work in reverse.
I wonder why it’s always Satan who pops up in these things though?
Second backwards planet ‘discovered’
Astronomers have discovered a second exoplanet orbiting its star backwards, a day after the first “retrograde” exoplanet was spotted.
Using the Japanese Subaru telescope to observe planet HAT-P-7b, two teams, one led by Joshua Winn of MIT and another led by Norio Narita at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, have discovered the second exoplanet.
“It is funny that the two good cases for Really misaligned orbits, even retrOgrade orbits, have come at around the same Time.
“We don’t know if it’s a slOwly rotating star that we’re seeing edge-on, or a really rapidly rotating star that we’re seeing pole-on. It could be like the solar system — but reversed, oR it could be going pole over pole. Either way it’s cool,” Winn said.
However, both the teams disagree on the tilt of the exoplanet’s orbit.
While the US team’s measurements indicate that the planet either runs backwards along the star’s equator, at a tilt of about 180degrees, or it orbits the star’s poles, at a 90degrees tilt, the Japanese team claimed that the orbit is inclined by 227degrees with respect to the star’s equator.
Paraguayan Man Finds His Baby Son Alive After Opening His Coffin
Jose Alvarenga was told by doctors at a state hospital in Asuncion, the Paraguayan capital, that his son had been pronounced dead shortly after birth.
Hospital orderlies delivered the premature baby’s body, which had been placed in a temporary coffin, to Mr Alvarenga’s home fours hours later.
Shortly afterwards, the grieving father opened the coffin to bid an emotional farewell to the infant.
“I opened it to look at his remains and found that the baby was breathing,” Mr Alvarenga recounted. “I began to cry.”
Telegraph (thanks, Tammy)
Journalist hunts for acid-spitting Mongolian death worm
Armed with explosives, two men are heading to Mongolia’s desert to find the fabled acid-spitting and lightning-throwing Mongolian death worm. The worm is allegedly found in the country’s Gobi Desert and has never been documented but locals strongly believe it exists.
Measuring about 1.5m long, the worm apparently jumps out of the sand and kills people by spitting concentrated acid or shooting lightning from its rectum over long distances. New Zealand resident and journalist David Farrier will spend two weeks trying to verify the worm’s existence.
He and cameraman Christie Douglas will make a documentary about their adventure.
News.com.au (Thanks Kirsty)
The rise of Japanese rice-field art
Japanese farmers are creating dazzling displays in rice fields – but how do they do it?
The digital age meets the stone age in these pictures “painted” with different coloured crops in Japanese rice fields. Making giant pictures on the earth is an ancient art form. The Nazca people in pre-conquest Peru long ago created vast drawings of animals, geometrical shapes and lines, which some have refused to credit them with, and instead attribute to alien visitors. Other archaic designs that turn the earth into a picture surface include chalk figures engraved in British hillsides and the Great Serpent Mound made by native Americans in Ohio. Japan’s lovely new contribution to this ancient art is, however, unimaginable without modern technology.
I don’t mean that the farmers of the village of Inakadate where the rice pictures started in 1993 – they are now spreading through Japan – have somehow cheated. The images are created by laborious handicraft: kodaimai rice, which has purple and yellow leaves, is planted among green-leaved tsugaru roman rice to create the patterns. This takes loving care and it’s a real triumph of folk art, but computer imaging is used to work out how to plant such complex designs.
The reason ancient images engraved in deserts strike some people as being completely beyond the powers of “primitive” artists is not that it’s hard to draw a bird, say, but that it’s hard to survey the ground accurately enough to map your bird on a large scale on the ground. It makes us imagine they had help from above. In reality, the creators of the Nazca lines or Britain’s stone circles were simply brilliant at maths. But no one could ever calculate the precise pictures these Japanese farmers have planted without the aid of technology…
More images here (Thanks Kirsty)
UK Memory Championships 2009
Despite the fact that Derren is banned (apparently it’s “not fair on the others” if he competes) – the UK Memory Sports Council are delighted to once again be staging the UK Open Memory Championships in conjunction with the Staunton Memorial Chess Tournament.
Now in its third year, the UK Open Memory Championships promises to be bigger and better than ever with top competitors from across Europe converging on Simpsons-in-the-Strand for a weekend of tough mental combat.
Mathematical model for surviving a zombie attack
It is possible to successfully fend off a zombie attack, according to Canadian mathematicians. The key is to “hit hard and hit often.”
Oh yes, somebody actually did a study on mathematics of a hypothetical zombie attack, and published it in a book on infectious disease. So, while we still don’t know what to do if a deadly asteroid takes aim at Earth, an unlikely but technically possible situation, we now know what to do in case of a zombie attack.
“An outbreak of zombies is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead,” the authors wrote. “It is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble.”
Having spent a fair amount of time mixing science with beer in the wee hours while trying to finish a thesis, I’m guessing that at some point, a graduate student who had spent far too many hours tweaking a mathematical model of infectious disease in the basement of a Canadian university said something like this: “What would happen if we made it so they could come back to life?”
This was followed by the other math students in the basement gathering around the computer, happily creating a plausible model for the outbreak of infectious zombie disease, and then brainstorming on how to make their model relevant.
Wired (thanks, ReliegiousMarie)
Why We Get Lost in Books
Any avid reader knows the power of a book to transport you into another world, be it the wizard realm of “Harry Potter” or the legal intrigue of the latest John Grisham.
Part of the reason we get lost in these imaginary worlds might be because our brains effectively simulate the events of the book in the same way they process events in the real world, a new study suggests.
The new study, detailed in the July 21 issue of the journal Psychological Science, builds on previous work that links the way our brains process images and written words to the way they process actions we perform ourselves.
Examining these links could shed light on why some people enjoy reading more than others and how our reading abilities change with time. Essentially, some people might paint a more vivid mental picture of written prose than others.
US News (Thanks Tiram)
Backwards Indian cab driver becomes local celebrity “by driving everywhere in reverse”
An Indian taxi driver, Harpreet Dev, has become a mini celebrity in his home town of Bhatinda, in the state of Punjab, by driving everywhere backwards.
The 30 year-old’s reversing skills have become so famous in his homeland, he has even been issued with a special government licence to drive in reverse anywhere in the state, located in the county’s north.
His passion for driving backwards came about one night as he returned from a party in 2003 and his car developed a fault meaning only the reverse gear worked.
He then decided to take his Fiat Padmini, paint “Back Gear Champian” on the side, and redesign the gear box to have four gears in reverse and one forward.
He can now reach speeds of up to 50 mph while driving backwards.
Mr Dev is a regular sight – and sound – around the area’s dusty streets, as he uses an ambulance siren to warn unsuspecting drivers, and pedestrians, to avoid him.
“After five years of practice I have perfected the art of reverse driving,” he said, adding that he took “all the care I can to protect other drivers on the road”.
Telegraph (thanks, Ferkle)
