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Are you busy Saturday morning?
Keep
in mind, this could be a ploy for the government to track some of the
top super techies, especially younger one who are still on ego, love
the game and challenge ... or .... maybe I'm reading too many
conspiracies theories.
The Pentagon invites you to play its red balloon game New Scientist - December 4, 2009
Tomorrow morning, people across the US will start hunting for
10 weather balloons hidden across the country by the Pentagon's
research agency DARPA. The treasure hunt is designed to test how well
people can coordinate with one another online and will award $40,000 to
the first person to enter the GPS coordinates of all 10 balloons,
accurate to within a mile. The 2.5-metre-diameter tethered balloons
will be flown only in daylight, and taken down for the night. DARPA has
run competitions in the past to encourage the development of new
technology, for example the Urban Challenge for robotic cars. But the DARPA Network Challenge is instead about how people use existing technology to solve a task,
says Norm Whitaker, a project director at DARPA. "It's not really the
balloons we're looking for; we're looking for the techniques and the
capabilities that the internet has made possible," says Whitaker.
Happy birthday, internet: The challenge is both a celebration of
the internet's 40th birthday and a chance for the agency to learn more
about how people can mobilize and react to changes in their
environment, says Whitaker. "If we need to locate people or contact
them fast, how would we do that?" Whitaker points out that before the
internet, civil authorities would have turned to TV news bulletins to
get a message out about local floods, for example. But today, there are
faster alternatives. "With Twitter or Facebook, we can reach out to
people in a matter of seconds," says Whitaker. He expects people to use
tools like these to try to win.
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7 tales of cities lost or found MSNBC - December 4, 2009
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8 extinct species found alive and kicking MSNBC - November 30, 2009
Antarctica Served as Climatic Refuge in Earth's Greatest Extinction Event Science Daily - December 4, 2009
Animals fled to Antarctic to survive global warming Telegraph.co.uk - December 3, 2009
A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity New York Times - December 1, 2009
Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley ...
Feeding birds 'changes evolution' BBC - December 3, 2009
Oh dear, I'm in big trouble with feeding the backyard birds.Ana
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Want more interesting/weird/fun News check this out
https://www.fark.com/
I found these Farklines
- "In theory, climbing a tree is a great way to escape a bear attack. Of course, in theory, Communism works"
- "Al-Jazeera refuses to run PETA ads because they depict cruelty to
animals. Regularly scheduled news footage of beheadings and suicide
bombings still okay" - "Journalists dismayed that their shoddy reporting techniques and political bias have caused a credibility crisis in journalism"
- "Passengers sue airline for rough landing. Accountants calculating
cost-effectiveness of just letting the damn thing crash next time" - "Orlando airport allows passengers to buy $80 annual pass that will
guarantee no random security pat-down. What could possibly go wrong?" - "Poachers decide to steal sheep, grab the biggest one they can find in
the group. Realize after leaving that real sheep don't bark"
Source: Fark.com