Mystery In White

From the Toronto Star:

Gown in Lake Ontario spurs theories: Jilted bride? Ad prop? Art project?
January 19, 2007
Joe Fiorito

Flotsam is floating wreckage and jetsam is that which has been thrown overboard; which of these is the wedding dress?

I have two friends, Edda Dolcetti and Peter Lenardon. They live in the west end, in a house full of her paintings, his photos, and art made by their friends. I have known them since Fort William; years and years.

They like to go prowling around the city with their cameras in the early morning, or of an evening when the light is right. They were on the boardwalk near the Humber River just before the snow fell when ... oh, let them tell the story.

Edda: "I was taking photos of the swans. They change all the time. They're wonderful to study. And the sun; when the light is right you get the reflection along the water's edge. I wanted to get a shot when I noticed this big white billowing thing in the water. At first I thought it was a garbage bag."

Pete: "I hoped it wasn't a body."

Edda: "It was a wedding dress. I could see it was puffy. The bow was at the top and the bodice was down. It was floating in the water, just far enough away that we couldn't reach it. I had my camera out. It was beautiful to shoot. I wanted to get closer. Pete got a stick of driftwood and dragged it to the shore."

Pete: "I dragged it artfully. If you gave it a swirl, it spread out." Who knew there was a technique for the dragging of wedding dresses through the lake?

Edda: "I couldn't stand the thought of it in the water. There was no veil, but we could see there was a headpiece and long gloves."

These things were too far out to retrieve.

Edda: "This guy came by as I was taking pictures of the dress. He said, `Hmm, good.' I guess he thought I'd thrown it in. He just said, `Hmm, good,' and walked away. I wanted to save the dress. It was so alluring in the water."

Pete: "Plus, we just got a new washing machine."

Isn't this why anyone buys a new clothes washer? Just in case a wedding dress drifts up on shore?

Edda: "Pete put the dress in a bag he'd found, and squeezed out as much water as he could. The dress was all sandy; when we got home I put it in a basin and rinsed all the sand out. Then I put it in the washer, on the delicate cycle, with some Woolite."

The wedding dress came out beautifully, and it is now hanging in their basement.

Edda: "It's taffeta, with a drop waist. There's lace and beading; you have puffy sleeves with rosettes, and a bustle with cascading bows and a long train. There is deep scalloped lace at the hem.

"The bodice has teardrop pearls, and the lace on the bodice is floral. The taffeta is synthetic. I don't know if it's polyester, but it's not real silk. There's no designer label. But it doesn't matter that it's synthetic; it's quite well-made. There is a lining, and some netting to keep the shape. I think it's a size 6. I can tell. I work with patterns."

Her mother was a seamstress.

Pete: "There's a photo of Edda when she was 5 years old, sitting at her mother's sewing machine. She made all her own Barbie clothing."

Edda: "Ha, ha; couturier Barbie. I made it all."

More to the point, she also made her own wedding dress, using three kinds of silk, with hand-painted panels; she is a first-rate painter, and she was painting on silk at the time. She still has that dress in her closet.

But what is the true story of the wedding dress in the lake? Edda: "It could be romantic. It could not be. I don't necessarily want to find out, but I do want to know that everything is okay. You shouldn't be throwing things like this in the lake."

Was it cast into the water by a woman whose marriage went sour in a hurry? Is this the dress of a bride who was jilted at the altar? Was it used as a prop in some crass advertising shoot? The too-clever handiwork of art students echoing Ophelia?

Or might this be evidence of some hip, new, previously unreported trend: the post-wedding ditching of the finery off the deck of a party boat hired by the happy couple?

Of this latter possibility Edda said, "I can't see it. I would never waste something like this." Pete thinks it was art students. I am inclined to consider sorrow.

What will Edda do, now that the salvaged dress is perfectly clean, undamaged and resplendent, hanging safely in their basement? "I don't know. That's a good question. I'd give it to someone, I would; some young girl might want to use it. But wedding dresses are so personal ..."

Pete: "A bride puts this on, she could step into a story."

But what is the true story of the wedding dress in the water?

--

A nugget of a story here, I think . . .

Drunk man rescued from chimney

From the Toronto Star:

January 19, 2007

Tamara Cherry
Staff Reporter
A drunk Toronto man who spent five freezing hours in a stranger’s chimney Thursday morning was simply trying to enter the home after no one answered his knocks at the front door, police say.

The 35-year-old man left his friend’s Muskoka Lakes cottage in the middle of the night to “relieve himself,” Ontario Provincial Police said.

Stumbling back through the dark, he unknowingly ended up at an empty neighbouring cottage. Imagine his surprise, then, when he found the door locked and no one answering his knocks.

“Upset and determined to get in, he climbed onto the roof and slid down the chimney, the wrong chimney,” Bracebridge OPP said.

On his way down, the inebriated man became stuck at the bottom of the chimney, where he spent about five hours in freezing conditions before contractors working near the cottage heard his cries for help shortly after 9 a.m.

They initially thought someone had fallen into Lake Rousseau, OPP said. “They checked the water, but were surprised to discover the cries were coming from an intoxicated man stuck down the chimney.”

After climbing on the roof and finding the victim stuck with his arms above his head, the workers lowered a rope down the flue and managed to pull the freezing man out.

This will likely go down in the history books as “one of the strangest occurrences Bracebridge OPP officers, Township of Muskoka Lakes firefighters and paramedics have ever attended,” OPP said.

“It’s simply a miracle the victim escaped relatively unscathed without need of medical attention.”

Because the man had no criminal intent in entering the home, no charges will be laid, police said.

'Half-human, half-animal' found in jungle

From the Toronto Star:

January 18, 2007
Ker Munthit
Associated press

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia – A woman who disappeared in the jungles of northeastern Cambodia as a child has apparently been found after living in the wild for 19 years, police said Thursday.

The woman – believed to be Rochom P'ngieng, now 27 years old – cannot speak any intelligible language, so details of her saga have been difficult to confirm.

"She is like half-human and half-animal," said Mao San, police chief of Oyadao district in Rattanakiri province. "She's weird. She sleeps during the day and stays up at night."

The father of Rochom P'ngieng, a member of the Pnong ethnic minority, said he recognized his daughter by a scar on her back and her facial features, according to Mao San. The father is a village policeman named Sal Lou.

Rochom P'ngieng, then eight years old, disappeared one day in 1988 when she was herding buffalo in a remote northeastern jungle area, said Chea Bunthoeun, a deputy provincial police chief.

She was discovered this month after a villager noticed that food disappeared from a lunch box he left at a site near his farm.

"He decided to stake out the area and then spotted a naked human being, who looked like a jungle person, sneaking in to steal his rice," said Chea Bunthoeun.

The villager gathered some friends and the group managed to catch the woman on Jan. 13.

"Her parents had already lost hope of finding her since she went missing for so many years. The father cried and hugged her when he met his daughter," Chea Bunthoeun said.

Since being found, the woman has had difficulty adjusting to normal life, apparently because of her long stay in the wild, said Mao San.

Authorities want medical experts to take DNA samples from the parents and the woman to see if they match. The woman's parents have given verbal consent for such a test, he said.

The phrase of the day is "Feraliminal Lycanthropizer"

Great article on the Fortean Times website about sonic weapons -- loads of interesting material pertaining to military applications, ghost hunting and behavior modification, but I was struck by this passage in particular:

"The link between periods of insanity and exposure to specific infrasound frequencies forms the basis for the ‘Feraliminal Lycanthropizer’, a device claimed to stimulate atavistic animality, sexual excitement, and a loss of inhibitions in its target. As described in an essay published in Dainty Viscera magazine, the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer creates two infrasound frequencies – 3Hz and 9Hz – which, combined, generate a lower, third frequency of 0.56Hz. The machine also uses a combination of four subliminal, looped, audio tape recordings – playing both forwards and backwards – outside the normal audible pitch."

Freaky.

Ancient warrior found in permafrost

Via news.com.au:

From correspondents in Moscow

January 10, 2007 11:48pm

RUSSIAN archaeologists have uncovered the 2000-year-old remains of a warrior preserved intact in permafrost in the Altai mountains region, the official Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily says.

The warrior was blond had tattoos on his body. He was wearing a felt coat with sable fur trimmings and was buried in a wooden frame containing drawings of mythological creatures with an icepick beside him, the paper said.

Local archaeologists believe the man was part of the ruling elite of a local nomadic tribe known as the Pazyryk. Numerous other Pazyryk tombs have been found in the area.

“This is definitely a very serious discovery. It's incredibly lucky that the burial was in permafrost so it was very well preserved,” Alexei Tishkin, an Altai archaeologist, was quoted as saying.

More Dead Birds -- Now In Australia

First Texas, now Australia. This is getting weird . . .

Mystery as thousands of birds fall from sky

• Amanda O'Brien
• January 10, 2007

THOUSANDS of birds have fallen from the skies over Esperance and no one knows why.

Is it an illness, toxins or a natural phenomenon? A string of autopsies in Perth have shed no light on the mystery.

All the residents of flood-devastated Esperance know is that their "dawn chorus" of singing birds is missing.

The main casualties are wattle birds, yellow-throated miners, new holland honeyeaters and singing honeyeaters, although some dead crows, hawks and pigeons have also been found.

Wildlife officers are baffled by the "catastrophic" event, which the Department of Environment and Conservation said began well before last week's freak storm.

On Monday, Esperance, 725km southeast of Perth, was declared a natural disaster zone.

District nature conservation co-ordinator Mike Fitzgerald said the first reports of birds dropping dead in people's yards came in three weeks ago. More than 500 deaths had since been notified. But the calls stopped suddenly last week, reportedly because no birds were left.

"It's very substantial. We estimate several thousand birds are dead, although we don't have a clear number because of the large areas of bushland," Mr Fitzgerald said.

Birds Australia, the nation's main bird conservation group, said it had not heard of a similar occurrence. "Not on that scale, and all at the same time, and also the fact that it's several different species," chief executive Graeme Hamilton said. "You'd have to call that a most unusual event and one that we'd all have to be concerned about."

He expected birds would return to the area once the problem - natural or man-made phenomenon - was fixed but said it was vital the cause was identified.

The Department of Agriculture and Food, which conducted the autopsies, has almost ruled out an infectious process.

Acting chief veterinary officer Fiona Sunderman said toxins were the most likely cause but the deaths could be due to anything from toxic algae to chemicals and pesticides.

Dr Sunderman said there were no leads yet on which of potentially hundreds of toxins might be responsible. Some birds were seen convulsing as they died.

Michelle Crisp was one of the first to contact the DEC after finding dozens of dead birds on her property one morning.

She told The Australian she normally had hundreds of birds in her yard, but that she and a neighbour counted 80 dead birds in one day. "It went to the point where we had nothing, not a bird," she said. "It was like a moonscape, just horrible.

"But the frightening thing for us, we didn't find any more birds after that. We literally didn't have any birds left to die."

Soft Body Armour

From Wired News:

Think of things that can protect you against knives and bullets. Kevlar? Yes. Steel plates? Sure. Pancake syrup?! Probably not high on your list. Well, prison guards and other uniformed types may soon be armored with viscous stuff that would make Mrs. Butterworth proud.

The material, a mix of liquid polymers and silica (tiny sandlike particles), is called shear thickening fluid. Left alone, it’s a free-flowing goo; when something hits it at high velocity, the bits cluster into a rigid barrier. After the force of impact dissipates, it reverts to a gel. Protective-gear maker Armor Holdings is integrating STF into bullet-proof vests. That means fewer layers of anti-ballistic fabric, making them lighter, more comfortable, and cheaper. The company aims to start selling to prisons later this year. Other perilous pursuits will soon benefit as well: British startup d3o Lab is rolling out STF-enhanced ski wear, skateboard shoes, and goalie gloves. Whether you’re in Sun Valley or San Quentin, Mrs. Butterworth’s got your back.

Dozens of birds dead in Texas city

January 08, 2007

Associated Press

AUSTIN, Texas – Police shut down 10 blocks of businesses in the heart of downtown today after dozens of birds were found dead in the streets, but officials said preliminary tests showed no air quality problems and the area reopened around 1 p.m.

As many as 60 dead pigeons, sparrows and blackbirds were found overnight along Congress Avenue, a main route through downtown. No human injuries or illnesses were reported.

"We do not feel there is a threat to the public health," said Adolfo Valadez, the medical director for Austin and Travis County Health and Human Services.

He said preliminary air-quality tests showed no dangerous chemicals, though the dead birds would be sent for further testing to rule out viruses or poison.

Experts at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society said the most likely cause was a deliberate poisoning of the troublesome blackbirds, also called grackles, which is more common than people think. It's also legal, with local permits, said Greg Butcher, director of bird conservation at the Audubon in Washington.

Austin officials were smart to take it so seriously, though, Butcher said, because birds' "requirements for life are pretty similar to our requirements for life" so they can serve as an early warning for risks to human health.

On Congress Avenue, just beyond the state Capitol steps, emergency workers donned yellow hazardous-material suits this morning, and dozens of fire trucks and ambulances were parked nearby.

Workers collected dead birds off the roadway and tested for possible environmental contaminants and for any gas or chlorine leaks, said police spokeswoman Toni Chovanetz. At least one bird carcass was being tested locally for other possible causes, and others were shipped to Texas A&M University.

Valadez said the tests, expected to take several days, would look for signs of poisoning or viral infections, though he said officials do not think bird flu is involved.

Depatterning

From the Toronto Star:

Brainwashed `guinea pig' seeks more damages
Canadian victim of CIA experiment in '50s tries to launch class-action suit against Ottawa

January 08, 2007

Dene Moore
CANADIAN PRESS

MONTREAL–Janine Huard says she was a young mother of four with mild post-partum depression when she checked herself in for psychiatric treatment at a Montreal hospital more than five decades ago.

Huard says what happened after that still haunts her today and she will be in a federal courtroom this week seeking to launch a class-action lawsuit against the Canadian government for Cold War-era brainwashing experiments carried out on her and hundreds of other patients.

"I was a guinea pig," she said.

On and off for more than a decade at McGill University's renowned Allan Memorial Institute, Huard says she received massive electroshocks and was fed more than 40 experimental pills a day.

Huard, who will be 79 at the end of the month, says she was drugged and subjected to so-called "depatterning," during which repetitive recordings were played in her ear for weeks on end, one of them telling her she was of no use to her family.

"I came out of there so sick that my mother had to live with me for 10 years," Huard says. She says she lost memories and suffered from migraines.

The ordeal came at the hands of Dr. Ewan Cameron, an Edinburgh-educated, New York-based doctor who pioneered "psychic driving," by which he believed he could erase the memories of patients and rebuild their psyches without psychiatric defect.

The idea intrigued the CIA, which recruited Cameron to experiment with mind control techniques beginning in 1950. The McGill experiments were jointly funded by the CIA and the Canadian government.

Cameron gave patients LSD and subjected them to the massive and multiple electroshock treatments. Some underwent sleep deprivation or total sensory deprivation. Others were kept in drug-induced comas for months while speakers under their pillows broadcast messages for up to 16 hours a day.

The CIA eventually settled a class-action lawsuit by test subjects, including Huard.

The allegations have not been proven in court. A federal court hearing is scheduled to begin Wednesday to decide whether to approve a class-action suit.

In 1994, 77 of the mostly unwitting Canadian patients were awarded $100,000 each from the federal government, but only those who suffered "total depatterning," meaning they were rendered to a childlike state.

More than 250 others were denied compensation. In 2004, a federal appeal court overruled that decision and awarded a former patient the $100,000.

Federal lawyers have argued that too much time has passed for patients to appeal a federal panel decision.

Have to look up more about this "depatterning".

Untangling the mystery of the Inca

From Wired News:

Incan civilization was a technological marvel. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1532, they found an empire that spanned nearly 3,000 miles, from present-day Ecuador to Chile, all served by a high-altitude road system that included 200-foot suspension bridges built of woven reeds. It was the Inca who constructed Machu Picchu, a cloud city terraced into a precarious stretch of earth hanging between two Andean peaks. They even put together a kind of Bronze Age Internet, a system of messenger posts along the major roads. In one day, Incan runners amped on coca leaves could relay news some 150 miles down the network.

Yet, if centuries of scholarship are to be believed, the Inca, whose rule began 2,000 years after Homer, never figured out how to write. It's an enigma known as the Inca paradox, and for nearly 500 years it has stood as one of the great historical puzzles of the Americas. But now a Harvard anthropologist named Gary Urton may be close to untangling the mystery.

His quest revolves around strange, once-colorful bundles of knotted strings called khipu (pronounced KEY-poo). The Spanish invaders noticed the khipu soon after arriving but never understood their significance – or how they worked.

Once, at the beginning of the 17th century, a group of Spaniards traveling in the central Peruvian highlands east of modern-day Lima encountered an old Indian carrying khipu that he insisted held a record of "all [the Spanish] had done, both the good and the bad." Angered, the Spanish burned the man's khipu, as they did countless others over the years.

Some of the knots did survive, though, and for centuries people wondered if the old man had been speaking the truth. Then, in 1923, an anthropologist named Leland Locke provided an answer: The khipu were files. Each knot represented a different number, arranged in a decimal system, and each bundle likely held census data or summarized the contents of storehouses. Roughly a third of the existing khipu don't follow the rules Locke identified, but he speculated that these "anomalous" khipu served some ceremonial or other function. The mystery was considered more or less solved.

Then, in the early 1990s, Urton, one of the world's leading Inca scholars, spotted several details that convinced him the khipu contained much more than tallies of llama sales. For example, some knots are tied right over left, others left over right. Urton came to think that this information must signal something. Could the knotted strings also be a form of writing? In 2003, Urton wrote a book outlining his theory, and in 2005 he published a paper in Science that showed how even khipu that follow Locke's rules could include place-names as well as numbers.

Urton knew that these findings were a tiny part of cracking the code and that he needed the help of people with different skills. So, early last year, he and a graduate student, Carrie Brezine, unveiled a computerized khipu database – a vast electronic repository that describes every knot on some 300 khipu in intricate detail. Then Urton and Brezine brought in outside researchers who knew little about anthropology but a lot about mathematics. Led by Belgian cryptographer Jean-Jacques Quisquater, they are now trying to shake meaning from the knots with a variety of pattern-finding algorithms, one based on a tool used to analyze long strings of DNA, the other similar to Google's PageRank algorithm. They've already identified thousands of repeated knot sequences that suggest words or phrases.

Read more

Indonesian "Lost World"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4688000.stm

Science team finds 'lost world'

An international team of scientists says it has found a "lost world" in the Indonesian jungle that is home to dozens of new animal and plant species.

"It's as close to the Garden of Eden as you're going to find on Earth," said Bruce Beehler, co-leader of the group.

The team recorded new butterflies, frogs, and a series of remarkable plants that included five new palms and a giant rhododendron flower.

The survey also found a honeyeater bird that was previously unknown to science.

The research group - from the US, Indonesia and Australia - trekked through an area in the mist-shrouded Foja Mountains, located just north of the vast Mamberamo Basin of north-western (Indonesian) New Guinea.

The researchers spent nearly a month in the locality, detailing the wildlife and plant life from the lower hills to near the summit of the Foja range, which reaches more than 2,000m in elevation.

"It's beautiful, untouched, unpopulated forest; there's no evidence of human impact or presence up in these mountains," Dr Beehler told the BBC News website.

"We were dropped in by helicopter. There's not a trail anywhere; it was really hard to get around."

He said that even two local indigenous groups, the Kwerba and Papasena people, customary landowners of the forest who accompanied the scientists, were astonished at the area's isolation.

"The men from the local villages came with us and they made it clear that no one they knew had been anywhere near this area - not even their ancestors," Mr Beehler said.

Unafraid of humans

One of the team's most remarkable discoveries was a honeyeater bird with a bright orange patch on its face - the first new bird species to be sighted on the island of New Guinea in more than 60 years.

The researchers also solved a major ornithological mystery - the location of the homeland of Berlepsch's six-wired bird of paradise.

First described in the late 19th Century through specimens collected by indigenous hunters from an unknown location on New Guinea, the species had been the focus of several subsequent expeditions that failed to find it.

On only the second day of the team's expedition, the amazed scientists watched as a male Berlepsch's bird of paradise performed a mating dance for an attending female in the field camp.

It was the first time a live male of the species had been observed by Western scientists, and proved that the Foja Mountains was the species' true home.

"This bird had been filed away and forgotten; it had been lost. To rediscover it was, for me, in some ways, more exciting than finding the honeyeater. I spent 20 years working on birds of paradise; they're pretty darn sexy beasts," Dr Beehler enthused.

The team also recorded a golden-mantled tree kangaroo, which was previously thought to have been hunted to near-extinction.

Mr Beehler said some of the creatures the team came into contact with were remarkably unafraid of humans.

Two long-beaked echidnas, primitive egg-laying mammals, even allowed scientists to pick them up and bring them back to their camp to be studied, he added.

The December 2005 expedition was organised by the US-based organisation Conservation International, together with the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.

The team says it did not have nearly enough time during its expedition to survey the area completely and intends to return later in the year.

The locality lies within a protected zone and Dr Beehler believes its future is secure in the short term.

"The key investment is the local communities. Their knowledge, appreciation and oral traditions are so important. They are the forest stewards who will look after these assets," Dr Beehler told the BBC.

A summary of the team's main discoveries:

• A new species of honeyeater, the first new bird species discovered on the island of New Guinea since 1939
• The formerly unknown breeding grounds of a "lost" bird of paradise - the six-wired bird of paradise (Parotia berlepschi)
• First photographs of the golden-fronted bowerbird displaying at its bower.
• A new large mammal for Indonesia, the golden-mantled tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus pulcherrimus)
• More than 20 new species of frogs, including a tiny microhylid frog less than 14mm long
• A series of previously undescribed plant species, including five new species of palms
• A remarkable white-flowered rhododendron with flower about 15cm across
• Four new butterfly species.

The Mathematics of Invisibility

The mathematics of cloaking from PhysOrg.com

The theorists who first created the mathematics that describe the behavior of the recently announced "invisibility cloak" have revealed a new analysis that may extend the current cloak's powers, enabling it to hide even actively radiating objects like a flashlight or cell phone.

[...]