Best Essay Answers

 

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Puddles Found On Mars?

 

 

There appears to be a little contraversy over the images, but it looks like the real thing -- you can even see ripples in the water and small stones through it.

A new analysis of pictures taken by the exploration rover Opportunity reveals what appear to be small ponds of liquid water on the surface of Mars.

The report identifies specific spots that appear to have contained liquid water two years ago, when Opportunity was exploring a crater called Endurance. It is a highly controversial claim, as many scientists believe that liquid water cannot exist on the surface of Mars today because of the planet’s thin atmosphere.

If confirmed, the existence of such ponds would significantly boost the odds that living organisms could survive on or near the surface of Mars, says physicist Ron Levin, the report's lead author, who works in advanced image processing at the aerospace company Lockheed Martin in Arizona.

Update: Looks like they're wrong. According to this site, it's probably just silt:

 

It's pretty easy to debunk this... just start off with a raw blue-biased 257 of the area... find a nearby rock imaged in 456'o-colour, and then use it as a baseline for balancing up the 257... do that and you get something a bit like this, not scientific, not accurate, but makes the cool clear, blue waters of Barsoom evaporate faster than Paris Hilton's hopes of another early release...

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12026-mars-rover-finds-puddles-on-the-planets-surface.html

Lost Chapter From HG Wells' Time Machine

Apparently there was a whole chapter on the Grey Man which was cut because it was too depressing... here's a snippet:

"I traversed one day and stopped again, hoping to find colossus gone and some vestige of my victim; but, I should judge, the giant centipede did not trouble itself about bones. At any rate both had vanished. The faintly human touch of these little creatures perplexed me greatly. If you come to think, there is no reason why a degenerate humanity should not come at last to differentiate into as many species as the descendants of the mud fish who fathered all the land vertebrates. I saw no more of any insect colossus, as to my thinking the segmented creature must have been. Evidently the physiological difficulty that at present keeps all the insects small had been surmounted at last, and this division of the animal kingdom had arrived at the long awaited supremacy which its enormous energy and vitality deserve. I made several attempts to kill or capture another of the greyish vermin, but none of my missiles were so successful as my first; and, after perhaps a dozen disappointing throws, that left my arm aching, I felt a gust of irritation at my folly in coming so far into futurity without weapons or equipment. I resolved to run on for one glimpse of the still remoter future—one peep into the deeper abysm of time—and then to return to you and my own epoch. Once more I remounted the machine, and once more the world grew hazy and grey.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Grey_Man

Crashes Worse Than Breakups

http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/115.gif

Star Trek: Encounters

 

 

Why do Star Trek games have to suck?
Klingon Academy was good. The rest... weren't. Birth of the Federation was OK... but this one is almost unplayable.
Control is hard, the missions are long (with no save points!) and the graphics aren't very good -- all you have to do is render a couple of space ships guys!

A disappointment. But I'm a Trekkie so I'll still play it ;) 

http://startrek.bethsoft.com/games/encounters-overview.html

Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids

 

 

A very strange book and a true feat of paranoia.

It runs the gamut from really cool, breathtaking research into the Priory of Scion, the Trilateral Commission, and the US's history of economic imperialism -- but then it devolves rapidly into reporting second hand allegations from flaky authors like David Ike (the Reptilians are running the show) to Zacharia Stichin (the Annunakai created us as slaves). No proof or hard evidence is offered, this is left to the reader to decide.

Ultimately the book fails because of the more weird, purely speculative work included and this unfortunatly gives the good research in the book discredit.

For example, did you know:

In early 1963 a special study group was selected to study the hypothetical problems of peace just as government think tanks such as the and and Hudson Institutes studied war. The fifteen members of this group have never been publicly identified, but it reportedly included highly regarded historians, economists, sociologists, psychologists, scientists, and even an astronomer and industrialist. The group met about once a month at various locations around the nation.
But its principal meetings were at Iron Mountain, a huge underground corporate "nuclear hideout" near Hudson, New York, site of the Hudson institution, widely regarded as a CFR think tank. Here, in case of nuclear
attack, were housed redundant corporate offices of Rockefeller-controlled Standard Oil of New Jersey, the Morgan bank, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, and Dutch Shell Oil, then headed by Bilderberger founder Prince Bernhard...

The Iron Mountain "boys" listed hese possible substitutes for the "functions of war":
—a comprehensive social-welfare program
—a giant, open-ended space research program aimed at unreachable
targets (missions to Jupiter, etc.)
—a permanent, ritualized, ultra elaborate disarmament inspection
system (as in Iraq and Bosnia)
—an omnipresent, virtually omnipotent international police force (a
UN peacekeeping force as in the Persian Gulf War or the Balkans)
—an established and recognized extraterrestrial menace (UFOs and
alien abductions)
—massive global environmental pollution
—fictitious alternate enemies (Saddam Hussein, Muammar Quaddafi,
Slobodan Milosevic, and whoever follows them)
—programs generally derived from the Peace Corps model (the Job
Corps, Volunteers in Service to America)
—a modern, sophisticated form of slavery (addressed above)
—new religions or other mythologies (New Age theologies, cults, etc.)
—socially oriented blood games (the National Football League,
World Wrestling Federation)
—a comprehensive program of applied eugenics (abortion and birth
control)

Also, did you know that the current George "Dubya" Bush's grandfather, George Bush Sr's father, was convicted of colluding with the Nazis and profiteering during WWII? And this is where the Bush's family fortune came from?

Good stuff for the first half of the book or so. I wish Marrs would've ended there.

http://www.amazon.com/Rule-Secrecy-Trilateral-Commission-Freemasons/dp/0060931841

X-Men: The Last Stand

Not good.
Boring, choppy, full of plot holes and mistakes...

And I honestly didn't care that they were killing off main characters left, right, and center. That can't be a good sign.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376994/