The Last Sup(erimposed)per

A brand-spanking new theory about Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper is apparently causing websites to crash like mad under high demand. Slavisa Pesci, described as a "information technologist and amateur scholar" in the linked article, has superimposed a reversed image of the original and says he sees certain things in the resultant image. People all over the world are mobbing the websites with the image.

MILAN (Reuters) - A new theory that Leonardo's "Last Supper" might hide within it a depiction of Christ blessing the bread and wine has triggered so much interest that Web sites connected to the picture have crashed.

The famous fresco is already the focus of mythical speculation after author Dan Brown based his "The Da Vinci Code" book around the painting, arguing in the novel that Jesus married his follower, Mary Magdelene, and fathered a child.

Now Slavisa Pesci, an information technologist and amateur scholar, says superimposing the "Last Supper" with its mirror-image throws up another picture containing a figure who looks like a Templar knight and another holding a small baby.

"I came across it by accident, from some of the details you can infer that we are not talking about chance but about a precise calculation," Pesci told journalists when he unveiled the theory earlier this week.

Pesci says he can see what appears to be a child cradled in the arms of one figure, the hint of a goblet in front of Christ and other items of interest. In the interests of internet scholarship I took an image of the Last Supper, copied it and flipped it, then superimposed it. I have no idea if this is what Pesci did or what he has up on his websites - they are all down. But it matches at least some of what is described in the article. I am embedding a smaller image, but clicking the image should bring up a full sized one. This is a straight superimposition, no alterations. The flipped layer is at 50% transparency, nothing else has been done to the image.

Click for larger

This could prove to be a useful tool in the coming days. Bwahahaha.

UPDATE: I've just uploaded the full size image to Flickr - this post is causing problems for the server, apparently. Clicking the photo should shunt you to Flickr or you can download the image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluecrabboulevard-photoalley/. Please consider crediting Blue Crab Boulevard if you use the image. It is not copyrighted and is generated from a Wikipedia photograph.

So Much For The Rain Forests

And so much for claims that global warming true believers care about the Earth. The Malaysian rain forests are disappearing very, very rapidly. Logging is happening at an astonishing pace and the cleared land is being replanted. With palm oil plantations to provide "environmentally conscious" Westerners with biofuels. They're raping the planet to save it, don't you know. Oh, and the nomadic tribes that once inhabited the rapidly disappearing forests? Let them die. They have less than two years left at the rate it is going.

One of the last nomadic tribes on earth is threatened by rampant commercial logging and palm oil plantations for bio-fuel, a Malaysian government report said yesterday.

For 20 years the Penan people from the jungles of Serawak have mounted a peaceful campaign to protect their ancestral lands, only to be driven back by soldiers, police and contractors.

Earlier this year, as police firing shots in the air tore down the latest blockades of bamboo tied with grass, Penan leaders said that if the loggers were not stopped their jungle would be entirely destroyed within two years.

Now at last they have received some official backing. "Claims made [by Penans] on ancestral land are often not considered by the relevant authorities and those who clear the forest areas and commence logging and oil palm activities," said the report, recommending that the land code be reviewed to include customary rights.

It may already be too late for the Penan. The rainforests of Serawak are millions of years old but have been decimated by the Malaysian logging companies which, campaigners say, have felled trees at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world.

According to the British charity Survival, the rights of the Penan over the land are "openly violated".

That is one inconvenient truth, folks. The fashionistas of the First Church of the Presumptuous Assumption of Global Warming®, led by Pope Goreus I could care less about the Penan or the Malaysian rainforests. "Do something," they demand. Well, raping the planet has never been easier. Now it is fashionable. Gorezilla can get people to pat themselves on the back and drive around in the environmentally disastrous Prius fueled with biofuel derived from the former lands of a soon-to-be-extinct people and feel good about it. Who's zooming who?

Good News For Britain

Britain has been suffering through a very wet summer. Flooding is widespread with rivers out of their banks and villages submerged. But there is good news from Holland for the folks suffering through the wet spell. A man there has just built an ark and wants to bring it to Britain.

No, he really did build an ark.

Most of us, on learning that a substantial flood was heading our way, would probably haul the telly and the family photos upstairs before fighting for sandbags and bottled water. Not so Johan Huibers.

Instead, he reached for the Book of Genesis and his toolbox. The result is a DIY display of genuinely Biblical proportions.

What a shame he was not in Gloucestershire last week.

You would probably fit the entire population of Tewkesbury in here were it not for the elephants, the lions, the zebras and the rest of the animals - not to mention a steady stream of tourists.

Like me, these punters have seen reports that an eccentric Dutchman has just built Noah's Ark in Holland.

Like me, they are rather astonished to discover that, well, yes he has.

And the next time the Rivers Thames, Don or Severn break their banks, local residents might even see Johan and his cross-section of the animal kingdom floating past.

Because this evangelical father-of-three wants to take his 230ft wooden tub from its present home in a backwater of the Dutch canal system across the North Sea to Britain and the wider world.

"Next month, we tow the ark to Rotterdam," he tells me, "But it would be my dream to take it to Britain."

Right about now he'd be a welcome sight, in Britain or in Texas. Huibers is a devout member of the Dutch Reformed Church, which shouldn't be a surprise. And the reporter tries to poke at his faith a bit. But if you read through, you'll see why the reporter only made half-hearted attempts at that: Huibers, it seems, takes vacations. In various third world countries. Where he builds houses and schools for victims of natural disasters.

He doesn't bring it up but I later discover that he has spent many family holidays in the Third World building homes for victims of natural disasters.

On one trip, he built a technical school at an orphanage in Ethiopia.

Next up: a full sized replica. This one is a miniature copy, only 230 feet long. That would be exactly half size, according to the Bible.

Pistol Packing Preacher Pinches Pilferer

This is amusing. A minister, who just happens to be a former police officer, helped nab a car thief who had stolen the car of one of his parishioners. The crime fighting pastor, James Kilgore, always carries a gun and a set of handcuffs in his fanny pack.

James Kilgore, pastor at Taft Free Will Baptist Church, said he always keeps a gun and handcuffs in his fanny pack. They came in handy on Tuesday, when one of his elderly parishioners left Bible study to find his car had vanished.

Kilgore and Walter Brenton, 72, drove around looking for Brenton's 1986 Ford Crown Victoria, and spotted the alleged thief driving it a few blocks away.

The pastor followed the driver until he crashed, tackled him as he crawled out of the car and then handcuffed him until police arrived on the scene.

Ronald Lee Allen, 46, of Taft, was arrested on suspicion of grand theft auto and being in possession of stolen property, said Kern County sheriff's Sgt. Martin Downs.

Kilgore was a member of the Bakersfield police department at some point before becoming a minister. The police, incidentally, do not encourage civilians to try this, but even they admit it worked out well. As for the pastor's congregation, they are likely to be a little more careful around him. Especially if he's wearing the fanny pack.

(As an aside here, the police officer who ran my carry class told us that police officers assume that any man wearing a fanny pack is using it to pack heat. Just thought I'd share that with anyone who thinks they are being clever using one of those fanny pack holsters.)

Australia’s Newest Crime-Fighting Technique

The owner of a small fish and chips shop in Victor Harbor, Australia, down near Adelaide, has perfected the newest in crime-fighting methods. When an armed man made an attempt to hold the shop up, the owner battered him. No, not battered as in beat him up, battered as in battered and fried. And if the oil hadn't missed, he would have perfected the extra-crispy holdup man.

"The hot oil missed but the batter hit the offender and he fled empty handed," South Australian police said in a statement.

Police said the attempted armed robbery happened on Thursday evening at the quiet seaside retirement town of Victor Harbor, near the South Australian state capital of Adelaide.

What goes with golden brown fried robber?

Irresponsible

The NASA panel report I posted about last night has now been released. Mike Carney from USA Today's On Deadline has the relevant section posted:

Finding: Interviews with both flight surgeons and astronauts identified some episodes of heavy use of alcohol by astronauts in the immediate preflight period, which has led to flight safety concerns. Alcohol is freely used in crew quarters. Two specific instances were described where astronauts had been so intoxicated prior to flight that flight surgeons and/or fellow astronauts raised concerns to local on-scene leadership regarding flight safety. However, the individuals were still permitted to fly. The medical certification of astronauts for flight duty is not structured to detect such episodes, nor is any medical surveillance program by itself likely to detect them or change the pattern of alcohol use.

The panel recommends that NASA establish specific policies for the "safe and responsible use of alcohol." Also, the report says NASA should ensure that existing policies are enforced, including those that prohibit the use of alcohol before flights or in crew quarters.

The allegations remain anonymous. But I would seriously like to know why these charges were not made earlier and in public. If the people making the allegations were so concerned at the time the events supposedly happened, then why did these people not resign on the spot? A flight surgeon has absolutely no business allowing an unfit astronaut to fly. Any doctor who would not immediately go over the head of a local manager who made a bad call on this is wrong. Any astronaut who would not refuse to fly with a safety hazard is also wrong.

Is it too much to ask that people stand up for what they really believe in? This is one of those things that will be used by the modern day Luddites to justify cutting the space program. That holds true whether the allegations are true or not. If astronauts did engage in the behaviors described, they endangered others and the whole program. If doctors and other personnel did not stop such behavior, they endangered others and the whole program. If the allegations are false, they merely endanger the entire program. This is a lose-lose-lose situation.

Aliens Bombard Iowa

It would appear that even the heartland isn't safe from the practical jokes of aliens. They dropped large chunks of pure white ice on the city of Dubuque, Iowa. One fifty pound chunk went through the roof of a house and landed in the television room.

Authorities were unsure of the ice's origin but have theorized the chunks either fell from an airplane or naturally accumulated high in the atmosphere — both rare occurrences.

"It sounded like a bomb!" 78-year-old Jan Kenkel said. She said she was standing in her kitchen when an ice chunk crashed through her roof at about 5:30 a.m. Thursday. "I jumped about a foot!"

She traced the damage to her television room, where she found a messy pile of insulation, bits of ceiling, splintered wood and about 50 pounds of solid ice.

Karle and Mary Beth Wigginton, who live a block away, heard a loud "whoosh" coming through the trees. They discovered several large chunks of ice in front of their home and some smaller ones in the yard and in the street.

"I could see where branches were shredded, which told me it was definitely coming out of the sky," Karle Wigginton said.

He estimated the original chunk of ice was the size of a basketball. "It was pure white," he said. "The main parts I picked up were very smooth."

Elizabeth Cory, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said investigators would contact Kenkel to try to determine the source of the ice.

"It is very uncommon for something like this to come from an aircraft," Cory said. "That is really unusual if it is pure white ice, especially at this time of year."

As if the Midwest needed more ice falling from the sky.

Explosion Kills Three At Mojave Spaceport

An explosion at the Mojave spaceport facility has killed three and sent three others to the hospital with serious injuries. The accident at the facilities of Scaled Composites LLC, Burt Rutan's space company, occurred during testing of propulsion system components.

The blast Thursday at a remote test facility belonging to Scaled Composites LLC critically injured three other employees working on a propellant system for the vehicle.

The company, headed by maverick aerospace designer Burt Rutan, made history in 2004 when its SpaceShipOne became the first private manned rocket to reach space. Since that milestone, Rutan has partnered with British billionaire Richard Branson to build a fleet of commercial vehicles dubbed SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic.

The accident occurred during a test of the flow of nitrous oxide through an injector in the course of testing components for a new rocket motor for the SpaceShipTwo. The chemical was at room temperature and under pressure, Rutan said.

Stuart Witt, the airport's general manager who was in his office when the explosion happened, said the airport is home to several commercial space startups and is constantly buzzing with rocket and engine testing.

"What we do is inherently risky," Witt said. "These are not the days we look forward to, but we deal with it."

It is, of course, to early to say what this will do to the private space sector or SpaceShipTwo. The system being tested had been tested previously without incident. Scaled Composites is not releasing any further information about the accident while they investigate the cause.

Crocodile Tears From TNR

Howard Kurtz writes about the "Scott Thomas" kerfluffle today and has a quote from TNR editor Franklin Foer that is stunningly hypocritical:

As conservative bloggers yesterday continued to challenge the veracity of Beauchamp's accounts, Foer said: "It is really unfortunate that someone like Scott, who was really only trying to tell his particular story, has become a pawn in the debate over the war and the Weekly Standard's efforts to press an ideological agenda."

Foer is, of course, the one who made Beauchamp a pawn in the first place. In an effort to smear all soldiers, Foer published what can only be described as an ideologically-driven account of things Beauchamp supposedly did. I talked about this whole thing with my son - and he believes Beauchamp took a small incident and embellished them into the tall tales that TNR chose to publish. He bases that on his combat experience. As he put it: "You can tell a story two ways, one to make the soldier look like a psycho, the other to make the soldier look like a hero." Beauchamp chose the former and TNR was happy to run with it.

Foer does his best to whip up sympathy for Beauchamp but it sounds hollow:

The magazine's editor, Franklin Foer, disclosed in an interview that Beauchamp is married to a New Republic staffer, and that is "part of the reason why we found him to be a credible writer." Foer also said Beauchamp "has put himself in significant jeopardy" and "lost his lifeline to the rest of the world" because military officials have taken away his laptop, cellphone and e-mail privileges.

Wah. Well, Beauchamp chose to write as he did and TNR chose to publish it - without any pre-publication fact-checking. Foer admits they are now trying to check it. Responsible journalists used to wait until they were reasonably sure of the facts before sending the story out to the public. TNR obviously does not do that - by their own admission. Given TNR's past history with publishing falsified stories, that is a startling admission. It also indicates a disastrous corporate culture within TNR that will cause them real trouble, real soon.  

Get Out Of Jail Cards

I have not followed the case of two border patrol agents accused of killing a drug trafficker then covering it up. I know a lot of people have and are quite upset about the entire thing. But Al Kamen reports on what could be a disastrous move by some in Congress to address what they see as a wrong.

 The Constitution, as everyone knows, gives complete, unfettered power to the president to pardon criminals. But now Congress is trying to get into the act, working to issue "Get Out of Jail" cards, good for one year, to people it deems wrongly incarcerated.

The House on Wednesday night passed an amendment to an appropriations bill that would deny any money to "enforce" the conviction and the sentences of former Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, who were convicted and sentenced to 11 and 12 years, respectively, for shooting a Mexican drug smuggler and covering it up. That would mean the Bureau of Prisons couldn't keep them in prison, where they've been since January pending appeal.

Anti-immigration groups have championed their cause and the amendment, by GOP Reps. Ted Poe (Tex.), Tom Tancredo (Colo.) and Duncan Hunter (Calif.). If passed by the Senate and signed by President Bush, it would free the pair for at least the next fiscal year. (The amendment would have to be passed each year thereafter.) The goal, we're told, is to get the agents out of jail pending what the three members hope will be a successful appeal.

The problem isn't the merits of the case against the two agents - as I said I am not familiar with it enough to have a good opinion. The problem here is the possible uses of amendments like this in the future. The Constitution grants the power to pardon strictly to the executive branch. If Congress can get around that and usurp even a portion of that power, there is a whole, ugly can of worms being opened. As Kamen points out:

(Bruce) Fein said he "researched this a bit and can't find a time when Congress tried to nullify the effect of court sentence" and "tried to assume some of the pardon power of the president. The logic [of the amendment] could be extended to allow them to stop investigations into members of Congress, to allow Congress to give itself a special shield."

I have often pointed out that the Democrat's leadership in Congress is guilty of "driving short", or not looking at the future repercussions of their policies. Don't think conservatives can't do the same thing. This is a bad idea, regardless of the good intentions of Poe, Tancredo and Hunter. We should all be worried about Congress being able to issue itself get out of jail cards.

Free Auntie Aziz

A group of "students" has reoccupied the Red Mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan, demanding that the government release their cross-dressing leader, Maulana Abdul "Auntie" Aziz. Pakistani troops are apparently already moving in on the agitators.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 27 — Radical students retook the Red Mosque in this normally sleepy capital city on Friday, forcing a government-appointed cleric to flee and demanding the release of their pro-Taliban leader, who was arrested earlier this month during a showdown that ultimately claimed more than 100 lives.

The action raised the possibility of another siege at the mosque, just weeks after the government dispatched hundreds of elite commandos in a successful but bloody effort to take control of the building.

A chaotic situation unfolded on the streets outside the mosque complex Friday, with an angry crowd of hundreds watching as young men climbed onto the roof to chant jihadist slogans and repaint parts of the building red, after the government had painted it a soft yellow. The men also hung the Red Mosque's old, signature black flags from the building's minarets, and threatened to take over a nearby market.

Earlier, a group of extremist activists had blocked a cleric recently appointed by the government to lead the mosque from delivering his Friday sermon–traditionally the focal point of the Muslim holy day.

President Pervez Musharraf has his hands full at the moment with the situation in the so-called tribal areas, this isn't helping. Then again, the last uprising at the Red Mosque did not get much in the way of public support, it is possible that the radicals are overplaying their hand.