Abandoned Places: Buzludzha

Forget Your Past

Buzludzha, Bulgaria

Meanwhile… in Bulgaria

.. Over the years I’ve visited my fair share of abandoned buildings.  They’ve always held a very strong attraction for me.  Somehow, their silent decaying facades offer the perfect blank canvas for an introverted imagination like mine… literally allowing me to conjure up vivid images of the past in my present.  Unfortunately, I fear that this may be the best opportunity I have to experience the reality of time travel in my life time, something that I’ve fantasised about incessantly since I was a small child.

Microsoft's universal translator warps voices into other tongues

Research software from Microsoft synthesizes speech in a foreign language, but in a voice that sounds like yours.


Researchers at Microsoft have made software that can learn the sound of your voice, and then use it to speak a language that you don't. The system could be used to make language tutoring software more personal, or to make tools for travelers.
In a demonstration at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus on Tuesday, Microsoft research scientist Frank Soong showed how his software could read out text in Spanish using the voice of his boss, Rick Rashid, who leads Microsoft's research efforts. In a second demonstration, Soong used his software to grant Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, the ability to speak Mandarin.

Movie Trailer: Prometheus - New International Extended Trailer

CYBERWAR: The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

Photo: Name Withheld; Digital Manipulation: Jesse Lenz

The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as “the principle,” marriage to multiple wives.

Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.
But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.
Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors.

The NSA has become the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever.

The Ourang Medan death ship

Columnist: Matt Forde

The straits of Malacca near Sumatra have long borne witness to the passage of trading ships. Ivory, fabrics, perfumes, glassware and precious stones have passed through the strait’s Pacific waters, stowed in countless cargo holds, eventually to settle in far flung places around the globe. Over the centuries, most of these merchantmen reached their destinations safely. However, the quiet peace was broken one day in June 1947 when a forbidding SOS message drifted across the airwaves: “All officers including captain are dead lying in chartroom and bridge.” read the message. “Possibly whole crew dead." This was followed by some indecipherable Morse code chatter, probably more SOS signals, and then one final grisly message... "I die." And then, silence.

The macabre distress call was picked up by numerous ships and Dutch and British listening posts who, through triangulation, identified the vessel as the Dutch freighter SS Ourang Medan and located its approximate position within the straits of Malacca. Of the two American merchant ships that heard the Ourang Medan’s grim message, the 6,507tn Silver Star was the nearest and she raced to the aid of the stricken vessel.

Negative subliminal messages work

BBC News-- People can perceive subliminal messages, particularly if the message is negative, according to a UK study.

In three experiments at University College London, participants were briefly shown masked words and asked to classify them as emotional or neutral.

The study, published in the journal Emotion, says being able to react to tiny cues helps us to avoid danger and may have useful marketing uses.

But critics say there is no evidence this would work outside a laboratory.

Places Of Power: Temple of Kali

Kali Temple Kolkata
Address :- Situated on Eastern bank on of Hoogli river.
City :- Kolkata
State :- West Bengal
Location :- East India
Calcutta has for ages being associated with the followers for Goddess Kali. The story-legend has it that while carrying Sati's burnt remains from Daksha's Yagna, Shiva dropped the right toe of Sati here. Sati's father had set up to perform a major yagna and everyone was invited except for his daughter and son-in-law, as he had never liked Shiva.

This is located in South Calcutta, on the banks of Hoogly whose presiding deity is Goddess Kali and was rebuilt in 1809 from which the present name Calcutta comes to the city and since then it has been an important pilgrimage site. The original building was renovated in 1971.

The large temple complex, built between 1847 and 1855, had as its centerpiece a shrine of the goddess Kali, but also had temples dedicated to the deities Shiva and Radha-Krishna. A scholarly and elderly sage was chosen as the head priest and the temple was consecrated in 1855. Within the year this priest died and his responsibility passed to his younger brother, Ramakrishna, who over the next thirty years would bring great fame to the Dakshineswar temple.