Moving House – Be Back Soon!

By admin | Published: August 28, 2010

Hi all. So, as the title suggests i’m moving house – which means i’ll be without internet for a while. But naturally this will be top of my to-do list. So please bear with us, and we’ll bring you the latest news ASAP.

Thanks… see you soon!

Stephen, Paranormal Mysteries

(notyoubutste [at] gmail [dot] com)

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Infinite doppelgängers could explain quantum probabilities

By admin | Published: August 28, 2010

Doppelgängers cause mischief (Image: Lorenzo Dominguez/Getty)

newscientist.com - AN IDENTICAL copy of you is also reading this story. This twin is the same in every way, living on an Earth and in a universe that looks exactly like our own. And there may be an infinite number of them. Such doppelgängers could be a natural consequence of our present conception of the universe. Now, some physicists say they could pose a serious problem for quantum mechanics. But a possible fix may also be in sight, and it could help tie abstract quantum concepts to concrete physical causes.

In the uncertain, fuzzy world of quantum mechanics, particles do not have fixed properties until they are observed. Instead, objects that obey quantum rules exist in a “superposition” of all their possible states simultaneously. Schrödinger’s famous cat, for example, is both alive and dead until we take a peek inside the booby-trapped box in which it has been placed.

Because the probability that the cat will be found alive is based on a quantum event – the decay of a radioactive substance within the box – it can be calculated using a principle called the Born rule. The rule is used to transform the vague “wave function” of a quantum state, which is essentially a mixture of all possible outcomes, into concrete probabilities of particular observations (in this case, the cat being alive or dead). But this staple of quantum mechanics fails when it is applied to the universe at large, says Don Page at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

At issue is the possibility that there could be a multiplicity of copies of any particular experiment floating about the universe, just as there could be a multiplicity of yous. There could even be an infinite number of them if, as is thought, the early universe underwent a period of exponential growth, called inflation. Although this period ended very soon after the big bang in our observable region of space, inflation may have continued elsewhere, giving rise to a “multiverse”, an infinite space containing infinite copies of our Earth. “In an infinite universe, every possible thing would happen, and it would happen an infinite number of times,” says cosmologist Alex Vilenkin of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

Missing ingredient

Crucially, says Page, all of these copies pose a problem for the Born rule: it’s unclear how to calculate the probability of different outcomes for a given experiment without first adding some extra ingredient that accounts for the multitude of copies (arxiv.org/abs/1003.2419). “You can’t just plug in the Born rule and get answers that make sense,” he says (see “Identity crisis”).

Andreas Albrecht of the University of California, Davis, has dubbed the problem the “Born rule crisis”. The shortcoming means we could not, in theory, calculate the probability of the outcome of any new measurement of the universe, such as the mass of the neutrino. “It’s a deep failure of something, either of quantum theory or the multiverse,” Albrecht says. “If you’re a cosmologist, you should be worried,” he adds.

Others, like physicist Mark Srednicki at the University of California, Santa Barbara, are not convinced there is a crisis. He says adjustments for missing information are fairly routine in quantum physics and should not require an overhaul of the theory.

A deeper problem, he says, is that we still don’t understand what quantum probabilities really mean. “Quantum mechanics is now 100 or so years old, but it is still deeply mysterious,” he says. “Because the concepts are so divorced from human experience, we’re still not sure we’re thinking of them in the right way.”

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UFO Crash Reported Live from California

By admin | Published: August 27, 2010

Smoke Plume

unexplainable.net – UFO reports have been taking a dramatic turn lately with more witnesses describing events related to a sort of conflict between military forces and large black triangular craft.  Such craft were seen in Canada earlier this week allegedly being fired upon by helicopters and another was spotted near Fresno California crashed into the side of a mountain with military vehicles quickly surrounding it.  What uncertainty does this bear for the future?

When MUFON’s Jeffrey Gonzalez received a phone call on MUFON’s 24 hour hotline, what he heard sounded at first like one of the most historically significant UFO sightings since the Roswell incident, but carried with it a far more sinister undertone given other recent sightings of human conflict with these mysterious craft.

With witnesses screaming in the background, “It’s trying to take off, it’s trying to lift!”  Mr. Gonzalez learned that witnesses had seen a black triangular craft crashed into the side of a mountain at the location just north of Fresno.  Wasting no time, Gonzalez sprang into action and arrived at the scene where the witnesses had called from.  What he observed were three white lights coming from the hillside and several vehicles descending on the object through the rough terrain.  From his position on the mountain he then witnessed a light similar to an arc welder used to cut through metal and in automobile production.  Gonzalez speculates that the craft may have been undergoing repairs or being torn through by the welders in order to transport it in more easy to manage pieces.  By the light of day the investigator left behind reported seeing a peculiar stingray shaped vessel in front of an abandoned shack on the mountain accompanied by two massive burn marks on the hill.

If there is a conflict ongoing between military forces and these mysterious triangular aircraft several questions need to be addressed.  First, what is the nature of the conflict?  Is it a serious assault or could they possibly be part of some sort of clandestine training program or war game scenario?  Second, if the craft are not part of the US military and the conflict is as genuine as many witnesses are suggesting, what purpose do the triangular craft serve and who are their occupants?  Of course this is even assuming they have occupants.  And of course the most general and possibly most important question that is ever present remains, what are the craft doing?

The scene described has two possible scenarios that could lead up to it, and either one without additional disputing evidence seems at least possible at this point.  Either one, the craft was a test vehicle that underwent some sort of malfunction and was grounded for some reason, or two it was actually engaged in some sort of mission.  And if the second scenario is true, what happened to the occupants of the craft?  And will there be more looking for them soon?  Perhaps the most disturbing bit of evidence suggesting the second scenario might be true comes in the form of the witness testimony overheard by Gonzalez, “It’s trying to take off, it’s trying to lift!”  Unless it was in possibly hostile territory, why would it risk exposure and further malfunctions by trying to take off so quickly after having crashed rather than wait for assistance from the ground?

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Meteorite back-dates solar system 2 million years

By admin | Published: August 27, 2010

Space

scientificamerican.com – A new analysis of a meteorite shows that an inclusion within the carbonaceous stone is older than any known material in the solar system. The finding pushes back the estimated age of the solar system to 4.568 billion years, older than previous estimates by up to 1.9 million years.

A piece of the meteorite, known as Northwest Africa 2364, was purchased in 2004 in Morocco and is now part of a collection at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Ariz. About 150 miles south of Flagstaff, two researchers at the Arizona State University Center for Meteorite Studies in Tempe, Audrey Bouvier andMeenakshi Wadhwa, dated an especially primitive piece of the meteorite known as a calcium-aluminum-rich inclusion, or CAI. Their findings appeared online August 22 in Nature Geoscience.

Bouvier and Wadhwa measured the meteorite’s ratio of two lead isotopes, whose relative proportions change on geologic timescales. Each variety of lead is a decay product of uranium, but the two parent uranium isotopes have very different half-lives: uranium 238 decays to lead 206 with a half-life of about 4.5 billion years, whereas uranium 235 decays to lead 207 with a half-life of about 700 million years. So the relative abundances of lead 206 and 207 can be used—along with some calibration for initial uranium abundances—to determine the age of ancient objects.

The balance of lead isotopes in the Northwest Africa 2364 meteorite point to an age of 4,568,200,000 years, plus or minus a few hundred thousand years. Taking the measurement uncertainties into account, that is between 300,000 and 1.9 million years more ancient than the oldest CAIs found in other meteorites. The lead-derived age of Northwest Africa 2364, Bouvier and Wadhwa write, is “the oldest absolute age yet obtained for any Solar System material and is, therefore, the best estimate for the time of formation of the Solar System.”

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Pre-Crime Technology To Be Used In Washington D.C.

By admin | Published: August 26, 2010

Pre-Cogs

Law enforcement agencies in Washington D.C. have begun to use technology that they say can predict when crimes will be committed and who will commit them, before they actually happen.

The Minority Report like pre-crime software has been developed by Richard Berk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Previous incarnations of the software, already being used in Baltimore and Philadelphia were limited to predictions of murders by and among parolees and offenders on probation.

According to a report by ABC News, however, the latest version, to be implemented in Washington D.C., can predict other future crimes as well.

“When a person goes on probation or parole they are supervised by an officer. The question that officer has to answer is ‘what level of supervision do you provide?’” Berk told ABC News, intimating that the program could have a bearing on the length of sentences and/or bail amounts.

The technology sifts through a database of thousands of crimes and uses algorithms and different variables, such as geographical location, criminal records and ages of previous offenders, to come up with predictions of where, when, and how a crime could possibly be committed and by who.

The program operates without any direct evidence that a crime will be committed, it simply takes datasets and computes possibilities.

“People assume that if someone murdered then they will murder in the future,” Berk also states, “But what really matters is what that person did as a young individual. If they committed armed robbery at age 14 that’s a good predictor. If they committed the same crime at age 30, that doesn’t predict very much.”

Critics have urged that the program encourages categorizing individuals on a risk scale via computer mathematics, rather than on real life, and that monitoring those people based on such a premise is antithetic to a justice system founded on the premise of the presumption of innocence.

Other police departments and law agencies across the country have begun to look into and use similar predictive technologies. The Memphis Police Department, for example uses a program called Operation Blue CRUSH, which uses predictive analytics developed by IBM.

Other forms of pre-crime technology in use or under development include surveillance cameras that can predict when a crime is about to occur and alert police, and evenneurological brain scanners that can read people’s intentions before they act, thus

detecting whether or not a person has “hostile intent”.

It is not too far fetched to imagine all these forms of the technology being used together in the future by law enforcement bodies.

The British government has previously debated introducing pre-crime laws in the name of fighting terrorism. The idea was that suspects would be put on trial using MI5 or MI6 intelligence of an expected terror attack. This would be enough to convict if found to be true “on the balance of probabilities”, rather than “beyond reasonable doubt”.

The government even has plans to collect lifelong records on all residents starting at the age of five, in order to screen for those who might be more likely to commit crimes in the future.

Another disturbing possibility for such technology comes in the form of a financial alliance of sorts between Internet search engine giant Google and the investment arm of the CIA and the wider U.S. intelligence network.

Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct (Ad)

Google and In-Q-Tel have recently injected a sum of up to $10 million each into a company called Recorded Future, which uses analytics to scour Twitter accounts, blogs and websites for all sorts of information, which is used to “assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

The company describes its analytics as “the ultimate tool for open-source intelligence” and says it can also “predict the future”.

Recorded Future takes in vast amounts of personal information such as employment changes, personal education and family relations. Promotional material also shows categories covering pretty much everything else, including entertainment, music and movie releases, as well as other innocuous things like patent filings and product recalls.

Those detached from any kind of moral reality will say “If you’ve got nothing to hide then what is the problem with being scanned for pre-crime? If it keeps us all safe from murderers, rapists and terrorists I’m all for it”.

How far towards a literal technological big brother police state will we slip before people wake up to the fact?

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Ancient Bakery Found in Egyptian Desert

By admin | Published: August 26, 2010

Site

news.discovery.com - The smell of freshly baked bread wafted through Egypt’s western desert more than 3,500 years ago, according to new findings at the El-Kharga Oasis announced on Wednesday.

During excavation work for the Theban Desert Road Survey, a project to map the ancient desert routes in the Western desert, a team of Egyptian and US archaeologists from Yale University stumbled upon the remains of what appears to be an ancient bakery town.

About 1 km (0.6 miles) long from north to south and 250 meters (820 feet) wide from east to west, the settlement dates to the Second Intermediate Period (about 1650-1550 B.C.).

According to John Coleman Darnell, who led the Yale mission, archaeological evidence indicates that the site was an administrative center along the bustling caravan routes which connected the Nile Valley and the western oasis with points as far as Darfur in western Sudan.

Indeed, the archaeologists unearthed large mudbrick structures similar to  administrative buildings previously found in several sites in the Nile Valley.

But the most interesting features were the remains of a bakery. Making bread on a massive scale was the main occupation for the majority of the inhabitants, said Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The archaeologists unearthed two ovens and a potter’s wheel. This was used to make the ceramic bread molds in which the bread was baked.

The large debris dumps outside the bakery suggests that the settlement produced bread in such large quantities that it may have even been feeding an army, Hawass said in a statement.

Early studies on the site revealed that the settlement had quite a long life. It began during the Middle Kingdom (2134-1569 B.C.) and lasted to the beginning of the New Kingdom (1569-1081 B.C.).

However the site was at its peak from the late Middle Kingdom (1786-1665 B.C.) to the Second Intermediate Period (1600-1569 B.C.).

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Egyptian Loot in Scotland, says Uri Geller

By admin | Published: August 25, 2010

Uri Geller

wsj.com - When Uri Geller saw a rocky lump off Scotland’s eastern coast was for sale a couple of years ago, the famed spoon-bender says he knew he had to have it.

“I didn’t know why. I was somehow drawn to it,” Mr. Geller recalls. He put in a successful £30,000, or about $46,000, offer.

Today, the 63-year-old paranormalist says he now understands why he bought the uninhabited, 100 yard-by-50 yard Lamb Island. Buried inside, he says, is an Egyptian treasure including relics supposedly brought there by a pharaoh’s daughter some 3,500 years ago.

Mr. Geller was once one of the most famous people in the world in the 1970s, regularly appearing on television and baffling audiences with his spoon-bending exploits. He continues to draw a crowd, and his sudden interest in “The Lamb,” as it’s known locally, is raising eyebrows among skeptical Scots.

Tales of Scotland’s ties to ancient Egypt date back to the 15th century, but many regard them as a bit of nonsense. According to the legend, King Tutankhamen’s half-sister, Princess Scota, fell out with her family and fled to Ireland and then Scotland, thereby giving the country its name. Some say the alignment of the Lamb and two nearby islands closely mirrors the layout of the pyramids at Giza, near Cairo, not to mention the three main stars in the Orion’s Belt constellation.

“Tosh!” says Edinburgh-based historian and author Stuart McHardy. Mr. McHardy and other historians reckon the Egyptian connection evolved to provide Scotland with a fresh identity while English invaders were claiming the whole British Isles were named after Brutus, a Roman consul supposedly descended from the Trojan hero Aeneas.

“That, of course, meant we had to have an equally ‘ancient’ story,” Mr. McHardy says.

Many locals in the nearby town of North Berwick are baffled by the island’s new-found historical provenance. Previously, the salt-sprayed area was best known for witch trials in the 1590s and its sandy beaches, which Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have recreated in his novel “Treasure Island.”

The Egyptian treasure “isn’t even an old fisherman’s tale,” says Graham Kinniburgh, manager of a wine and whisky store on the town’s main street. He sells malt whiskies named after three other local islands, but not Mr. Geller’s Lamb.

“Before Uri came along I don’t think anybody had ever heard of all this Egyptian stuff,” says 55-year-old Drew McAdam, who grew up in North Berwick idolizing Mr. Geller. Inspired by Mr. Geller’s 1973 performance on the British Broadcasting Corp., Mr. McAdam himself now travels Britain and Europe bending spoons and performing other feats.

Mr. Geller got interested in the Lamb in 2008, when he saw on the Internet that it was for sale, and the idea of owning an island appealed to him. Not even the island’s status as a protected seabird colony ruffles his feathers: Mr. Geller is a vegetarian.

Buying property in Scotland, however, wasn’t all plain sailing. Some Scots best know the Israeli-born Mr. Geller, who lives in England, for claiming to determine the outcome of a Scotland versus England soccer match in 1996 by using his telekinetic powers to nudge the ball just as Scotland’s captain was about to strike a penalty kick. Scotland lost the game. “I received around 11,000 hate mails for that,” Mr. Geller says.

Now that Mr. Geller is the best-known landowner in this corner of Scotland, 26 miles east of the capital, Edinburgh, he is eager to improve his reputation.

On his first trip to North Berwick in March, Mr. Geller ran up a local landmark, a 613-foot-tall hill called “The Law,” in a bid to endear himself to locals.

He then lunched on a baked potato with ketchup at the Scottish Seabird Center. He impressed staff by apparently using his mental powers to bend some teaspoons, several of which are still in drawers in the center’s kitchen.

In the evening, he gave another performance, at one point producing mustard seeds that suddenly sprouted when he handed them to a member of the audience. “He had everybody eating out of his hand,” says Lynda Dalgliesh, who works at the center.

“He made a big impression on everybody, even my mother,” says Mr. McAdam, who Mr. Geller invited to perform.

The next day, Mr. Geller chugged the ten minutes to the island on a fishing boat to spend a night on the Lamb, among tens of thousands of seabirds and an English adventurer. “It was excruciatingly cold, with not a single flat spot to lay a sleeping bag,” Mr. Geller says.

Some local businesses are beginning to wake up to the island’s allure since Mr. Geller turned up. Some boat operators, for instance, take tourists around the Lamb and recount folklore surrounding the island.

“A wee bit of bulls— doesn’t hurt anybody,” says Dougie Ferguson, a 52-year-old skipper.

Another skipper, Cameron Small, says Mr. Geller’s purchase has generated enough interest for him to advertise trips around “Uri Geller’s Lamb Island.”

For his next trick, Mr. Geller hopes to really astonish the locals by locating the ancient trinkets he thinks are buried within the volcanic rock of the Lamb.

Using dowsing—a technique Mr. Geller says he previously used to detect oil deposits in the Gulf of Mexico—he reckons he has pin-pointed a place on his island where treasure might be buried.

He hopes to excavate if he can secure permission from the Scottish authorities—and only if it doesn’t offend the Lamb’s legions of gulls, cormorants and shags.

Rob Sinclair at the local council’s planning department says Mr. Geller doesn’t need legal approval to dig on his land. “But he might like to talk to our Council archaeologist about whether it would be worth his time and energy,” Mr. Sinclair says.

“I’m certain there are ancient Egyptian artifacts there,” Mr. Geller says. “It’s only a matter of time until we find them.”

And if there wasn’t any treasure on the Lamb before, there is now. Mr. Geller says he has strengthened the island’s mystical powers by burying a crystal orb that once belonged to Albert Einstein.

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O’Hare UFO Report Revisited

By admin | Published: August 25, 2010

O'Hare UFO (Cell Phone Pic)

chicagotribune.com - The purported UFO that pilots and other eagle-eyed professionals reported seeing almost four years ago, hovering above Gate C-17 at O’Hare International Airport, never went away.

Don’t get me wrong. The aviators, United Airlines ramp workers, managers and aircraft mechanics all said they witnessed the dark gray, metallic, disk-shaped UFO leave the restricted airspace over O’Hare with such tremendous force and velocity on Nov. 7, 2006, that it pierced a hole of crisp blue air in the cloud-covered sky.

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t receive e-mails or phone calls from UFO enthusiasts and researchers asking for an update to my exclusive Tribune story from New Year’s Day 2007.

The article was breaking news of a possible (or impossible) visit by extraterrestrials. It also disclosed efforts by theFederal Aviation Administration and United officials to claim that they knew nothing about the UFO reports, despite the witness accounts.

So I wasn’t surprised Tuesday when my old story was Googled widely after an appearance Monday night on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” by author Leslie Kean. Kean interviewed me several times for her new book, “UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record,” which is about reported UFO sightings by highly respected, reputable witnesses.

To find details of the incident online, Kean told Colbert, one need simply Google “Chicago O’Hare UFO,” which enough people did to send those words vaulting up Google’s list of most-searched terms early Tuesday.

Thrust back onto the UFO beat — my gig at the Tribune is transportation — my day became more bizarre when the online Weekly World News linked to a video of me discussing the incident. The video is an off-air chat I had back in 2007 with anchorman Jim Wagner of Tribune-owned CLTV while Wagner and I prepared to tape an interview on the O’Hare event.

Conspiracy theorists certain that the government routinely covers up evidence supporting real UFO sightings viewed the off-air banter as proof enough. Never mind that I hadn’t provided any confirmed information that I hadn’t already reported.

Yet to this day on YouTube, that video is still presented under the headline, “O’Hare UFO leaked news footage seconds before broadcast.”

Monday night with Colbert, Kean mentioned the original Tribune story, which with 1.6 million page views to date remains the single most popular story or column in the history of chicagotribune.com. In fact, by Tuesday evening, it had climbed atop the current list of most-viewed stories on the Web site.

After that story originally appeared, the FAA explained away the UFO spotting as a “weather phenomenon.”

“This thing was hovering over Chicago O’Hare airport at rush hour,” Kean said. “Lots of people saw it, (but) the U.S. government never said a word.”

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The Ghosts of Historic Hotels of the Rockies

By admin | Published: August 23, 2010

Crescent Hotel

melodika.net - Stay alert. There are ghosts roaming the halls, rooms, lobbies, dining parlors, basements and kitchens at some of the most historic and charming accommodations in Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, South Dakota and Montana. The Historic Hotels of the Rockies are home to a ghostly array of guests that include a murdered chambermaid, the daughter of Buffalo Bill Cody, a cigar-smoking patron and many more. Some ghosts are fleeting images, others like to shake things up a bit by playing the piano, rattling drawers or rolling dice. Not convinced? Hoteliers urge visitors to book a room and find out first hand if the tales are supernatural or just superstitious; either way guests will be intrigued by plenty of spirited fun.

“What would a historic hotel be without a ghost or two? Believe it or not, these amicable apparitions are part of the charm inherent in Historic Hotels of the Rockies. Ghost stories are a fun and spooky way to experience history,” said Jim Osterfoss, president of Historic Hotels of the Rockies.

Most visitors to Historic Hotels of the Rockies come for the ambiance and inimitable atmosphere. Rooms are decorated in the original style with antiques and fixtures, though some rooms offer something extra: Rooms 214 and 310 at the Pollard Hotel in Red Lodge, Montana have earned a bit of an eerie reputation over the years. Some believe this part of building is haunted. A woman in a yellow dress is often seen here and witnesses have reported smelling French perfume when no one is present. Room 310 is also a favorite haunt for a ghost at The Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico where Byron T. Mills, the former owner, has never seen fit to leave. Mr. Mills reportedly sits on the edge of the bed and also paces the floor. At the Hotel Alex Johnson in Rapid City, South Dakota it’s Rooms 803 and 804. In one room a ghostly guest likes to tickle the ivories at odd hours, while the other is inhabited by the gentle presence of a young girl named Brittany. Benign and beloved, these ghosts are as much a part of the atmosphere as the Victorian flourishes and furniture.

Located in designated historic neighborhoods and often situated near historic railways, trading posts and mining towns, member hotels have always been in the middle of all the action, which on occasion took a turn for the worse. At the Historic Plains Hotel in Cheyenne, Wyoming several ghosts are seen regularly, including one that was murdered by being pushed out a fourth floor window. Irma Cody, Buffalo Bill Cody’s daughter for whom the Irma Hotel in Cody, Wyoming is named, died of influenza in 1918 at the age of 35. She is said to appear as the Woman in White, roaming the halls on the second floor– and some reports say she is an aggressive presence in the kitchen. At the Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, a murdered chambermaid appears at night near the Devereux dining room and a young girl who died at the hotel in an accident is often seen playing on the staircase.

Innkeepers take a light-hearted view of their ghostly guests, “We are so haunted if we could get the ghosts to pay rent we’d be laughing all the way to the bank,” said Arthur Havers, owner of the Historic Elk Mountain Hotel in Wyoming. Havers has experienced some haunted happenings first hand. On his initial night at the hotel he awoke to see a woman dressed in Victorian fashion, a long dress with puffed shoulders. He thought he was dreaming, but later learned the woman is known as Mary, the stern-looking wife of the hotel’s founder, and she is often seen wandering about the property.

But not all ghosts reside inside. At the Delaware Hotel in Leadville, Colorado, the ghosts are right where one would expect to find them: the Evergreen Cemetery. Blue lights have been noted shooting in the tree tops overhead and a woman in white flies over the tombstones. Learn more about Leadville’s ghosts by taking Judge Neil Reynolds Evergreen Cemetery Ghost Walk. Tours leave the cemetery at 8:00 PM on October 30th. Reservations are required: 888-532-3845.

A stay at the Castle Marne in October is a prime location and time for paranormal explorations. The bed and breakfast has it’s own fleeting phantom, a little girl who lightly knocks on doors late at night then enters through the doors themselves, dissolving into a mist once inside. But Castle Marne’s proximity to downtown Denver makes it the ideal location to further explore the unusual. The Colorado Historical Society has an Organ Crawl of Historic Denver Organs, a Walking Tour of Curtis Park Historic District, an evening called Capitol Hill Horror Stories and an annual Halloween Cemetery Crawl planned. See www.coloradohistory.org for details.

If the ghosts at the Hotel Colorado weren’t spooky enough, take a lantern-led tour of Linwood Cemetery where Glenwood’s past is resurrected. Hear the haunting graveside tales of John “Doc” Holliday, Kid Curry, as well as the stories of miners, pioneers and even ladies of the evening. Tours are on weekends beginning October 15 through Halloween. Reservations are required. For tickets and details, see www.glenwoodhistory.com/events.htm (http://www.glenwoodhistory.com/events.htm).

Though notably ghost-free, the Nagle Warren Mansion in Cheyenne, Wyoming adds its own bone chilling twist to a season filled with frightful events. The B&B will host a murder mystery dinner, A Night To Dismember, on November 6. Guests are assigned a character prior to arrival and come to dinner dressed in costume. Once the hors d’oeuvres are served, the plot thickens throughout the four course dinner in the elegant dining room. Owner Jim Osterfoss promises that the mystery’s solution is even sweeter than the desserts.

For something truly horrific, don’t miss a trip to the New Sheridan Hotel in Telluride, Colorado. The Telluride Horror Show gets underway October 15. The three-day horror, sci-fi and fantasy film festival features film submissions that have titles like I Didn’t Come Here To Die and Someone’s Knocking At The Door. For horror fans, the festival is guaranteed to be truly ghoulish. See www.telluridehorrorshow.com for tickets and information.

Whether visitors are believers or not, a stay at any of the Historic Hotels of the Rockies is one that is sure to be filled with fascinating tales from the past. Since this is only a sampling of haunted hotel stories, be sure to check with the innkeeper or barkeep for even more tales of mysterious manifestations. Arthur Havers recommends bringing a bell, a book and a candle whether you’re visiting him and the Elk Mountain Hotel in Wyoming– or any of the Historic Hotels of the Rockies, just to ward off any lingering spirits that might be lurking about.

About Historic Hotels of the Rockies
An eclectic collection of 19 vintage properties, the Historic Hotels of the Rockies resurrect the glory days of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. For detailed information on each hotel, go to www.historic-hotels.com. For a press kit and other press releases, visit http://www.historic-hotels.com/press_room/hotel_news_mainview2 (http://www.historic-hotels.com/press_room/hotel_news_mainview2).

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Alien hunters ‘should look for artificial intelligence’

By admin | Published: August 23, 2010

The Allen telescope array will comprise 350 telescopes listening for ET signals (BBC)

BBC - A senior astronomer has said that the hunt for alien life should take into account alien “sentient machines”.

Seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has until now sought radio signals from worlds like Earth.

But Seti astronomer Seth Shostak argues that the time between aliens developing radio technology and artificial intelligence (AI) would be short.

Writing in Acta Astronautica, he says that the odds favour detecting such alien AI rather than “biological” life.

Many involved in Seti have long argued that nature may have solved the problem of life using different designs or chemicals, suggesting extraterrestrials would not only not look like us, but that they would not at a biological level even work like us.

However, Seti searchers have mostly still worked under the assumption – as a starting point for a search of the entire cosmos – that ETs would be “alive” in the sense that we know.

That has led to a hunt for life that is bound to follow at least some rules of biochemistry, live for a finite period of time, procreate, and above all be subject to the processes of evolution.

But Dr Shostak makes the point that while evolution can take a large amount of time to develop beings capable of communicating beyond their own planet, technology would already be advancing fast enough to eclipse the species that wrought it.

“If you look at the timescales for the development of technology, at some point you invent radio and then you go on the air and then we have a chance of finding you,” he told BBC News.

“But within a few hundred years of inventing radio – at least if we’re any example – you invent thinking machines; we’re probably going to do that in this century.

“So you’ve invented your successors and only for a few hundred years are you… a ‘biological’ intelligence.”

From a probability point of view, if such thinking machines ever evolved, we would be more likely to spot signals from them than from the “biological” life that invented them.

‘Moving target’

John Elliott, a Seti research veteran based at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, says that Dr Shostak is putting on a firmer footing a feeling that is not uncommon in the Seti community.

“You have to start somewhere, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” Dr Elliott told BBC News.

“But having now looked for signals for 50 years, Seti is going through a process of realising the way our technology is advancing is probably a good indicator of how other civilisations – if they’re out there – would’ve progressed.

“Certainly what we’re looking at out there is an evolutionary moving target.”

Both Dr Shostak and Dr Elliott concede that finding and decoding any eventual message from such alien thinking machines may prove more difficult than in the “biological” case, but the idea does provide new directions to look.

Dr Shostak says that artificially intelligent alien life would be likely to migrate to places where both matter and energy – the only things he says would be of interest to the machines – would be in plentiful supply. That means the Seti hunt may need to focus its attentions near hot, young stars or even near the centres of galaxies.

“I think we could spend at least a few percent of our time… looking in the directions that are maybe not the most attractive in terms of biological intelligence but maybe where sentient machines are hanging out.”

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