Blog Heap of Links for the day 24 April 2009

"It was just a navigation mistake, the GPS went and the pilot got confused,"

abandoned their three children -- aged eight months to four years -- in a restaurant in Italy....

25-year-old Long Island woman was allegedly high on drugs Sunday night when she crashed her car.... injured [her] nine-year-old daughter... injured a cop who had the unenviable task of guarding her at a Bay Shore hospital... [and is giving a one-finger salute in the mugshot].

says she remembers Markoff as being "extremely brilliant. Our junior year in college before organic chemistry exams, we would study together. I had been studying all week. He would come in the morning, 9:00 in the library, sit down next to me, saying, 'I haven't opened a book, I don't know anything. Teach me something." ' Houston says Markoff was a serious partier. Still, she observed, "Everyone partied. But when he partied, he'd party. But he would also stay in a lot."

the Obama administration's attempt to justify a controversial "right-wing extremism" report by citing Timothy McVeigh, a counter-terrorism group has posted a video statement by a prominent Democrat investigator who contends the Oklahoma City bomb plot was hatched not by right-wingers but by Islamic jihadists.

US medical authorities expressed strong concern Friday about an unprecedented multi-strain swine flu outbreak that has killed at least 60 people in Mexico and infected seven people in the United States. "It's very obvious that we are very concerned. We've stood up emergency operation centers," Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spokesman Dave Daigle told AFP.

The Oklahoma Department of Human Services (DHS) is notifying more than one million state residents that their personal data was stored on an unencrypted laptop that was stolen from an agency employee. The computer file contained the names, Social Security numbers, birth dates and home addresses of Oklahoma's Human Services' clients receiving benefits from programs such as Medicaid, child care assistance, nutrition aid and disability benefits

Kevin Roose managed to blend in during his single semester at Liberty University, attending lectures on the myth of evolution and the sin of homosexuality, and joining fellow students on a mission trip to evangelize partyers on spring break. Roose had transferred to the Virginia campus from Brown University in Providence, a famously liberal member of the Ivy League. His Liberty classmates knew about the switch, but he kept something more important hidden: He planned to write a book about his experience at the school founded by fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell.

UK's Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at a high profile global warming hearing on Friday April 24, 2009 at 10am in Washington. Monckton told Climate Depot that the Democrats rescinded his scheduled joint appearance at the House Energy and Commerce hearing on Friday. Monckton said he was informed that he would not be allowed to testify alongside Gore when his plane landed from England Thursday afternoon. "The House Democrats don't want Gore humiliated, so they slammed the door of the Capitol in my face...."

While the Internet has dramatically changed lives around the world, its full impact will only be realised when far more people and information go on-line, its founders said Wednesday. "The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past," said Tim Berners-Lee, one of the inventors of the World Wide Web, at a seminar on its future.

He is one of the first in the nation to seek leniency from a judge after U.S.A. Attorney General Eric Holder announced last month that federal agents will now target marijuana distributors only when they violate both federal and state laws. However, Holder didn't say how the new approach would affect pending cases, and federal prosecutors have recommended a five-year prison sentence for Lynch.

An ancient script that's defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers. Computational analysis of symbols used 4,000 years ago by a long-lost Indus Valley civilization suggests they represent a spoken language. Some frustrated linguists thought the symbols were merely pretty pictures.... used between 2,600 and 1,900 B.C. in what is now eastern Pakistan and northwest India, belonged to a civilization as sophisticated as its Mesopotamian and Egyptian contemporaries. However, it left fewer linguistic remains. Archaeologists have uncovered about 1,500 unique inscriptions from fragments of pottery, tablets and seals. The longest inscription is just 27 signs long. ... used pattern-analyzing software running what's known as a Markov model, a computational tool used to map system dynamics. They fed the program sequences of four spoken languages: ancient Sumerian, Sanskrit and Old Tamil, as well as modern English. Then they gave it samples of four non-spoken communication systems: human DNA, Fortran, bacterial protein sequences and an artificial language.... When they seeded the program with fragments of Indus script, it returned with grammatical rules based on patterns of symbol arrangement. These proved to be moderately ordered, just like spoken languages. As for the meaning of the script, the program remained silent....