John Denver, Roswell, And Dead Aliens [feedly]

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John Denver, Roswell, And Dead Aliens
// Mysterious Universe

Born into an Air Force family in the town of Roswell, New Mexico in 1943, Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr. gained worldwide fame as singer-guitarist John Denver, who is perhaps best known for his hits Take Me Home, Country Roads; Rocky Mountain High; Thank God, I'm a Country Boy; and Leaving on a Jet Plane, the latter having been recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary and which reached number one on the charts.

As Denver's popularity grew in the 1970s, so did his passion for politics, and pressing social and humanitarian issues. It was this passion that led the world of officialdom to take note of the man's activities, as a May 22, 1975 document generated as a result of inter-agency interest in Denver makes abundantly clear.

According to the document, a "Dump the War Rally" took place at the Metropolitan Sports Arena, Bloomington, Minnesota, on May 23, 1971. Among those listed as speakers was Denver, along with Congressman Paul McCloskey, Former U.S. Congressman Allard Lowenstein, former U.S. Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, U.S. Congressman Donald Reigel, and former Navy Lieutenant (and, later, presidential candidate) John Kerry.

An article had appeared in the May 3, 1971, issue of the Minneapolis Star newspaper, quoting the rally sponsors denying that "the antiwar rally is part of a 'dump Nixon movement.'"

Nevertheless, government files reveal that: "Wheelock Whitney, a Republican leader, would not endorse this rally because he considers it a 'dump Nixon effort.'"

Official papers further noted that a spokesman for the Bipartisan Caucus to End the War had said: "We're not waiting for November 1972," and that the same spokesman had informed the Minneapolis Star that it wanted to "persuade the political animal who holds the presidency to change his course of action before the election."

In this case, officialdom took no action, beyond filing the data for potential future reference, and the "Denver File" (which ultimately ran to 33-pages) seems to have remained largely inactive until December 1979, when the FBI reported that threats had been made to kill the singer:

"Approximately seventeen threatening phone calls directed at singer John Denver has been received in Los Angeles since December 1, 1979. A female, speaking German and English has called daily from Germany demanding first to speak to Denver and then stating that her mother's boyfriend is coming to Los Angeles to kill Denver. John Denver, who is presently at his home in Aspen, Colorado, is aware of the threats."

Aside from politics and humanitarian issues, Denver's other big passion was outer space. He even took, and notably passed, NASA's physical and mental examination to determine if he was fit enough to cope with the extreme rigors of a journey into space. As a result, he almost made it onto the Challenger Space Shuttle.

That Denver was ultimately not selected, prevented him from joining the ill-fated January 1986 mission that ended in utter disaster when Challenger exploded shortly after take-off, killing the crew. This event led to an FBI investigation of the accident that ran to 170 pages.

There is a genuinely weird saga in the life and career of John Denver that touches upon official secrecy and that deserves to be mentioned. One of those aboard the tragic Challenger Space Shuttle flight that Denver almost got to travel on was astronaut Ellison Onizuka. He had told his close friend Chris Coffey that, while serving in the Air Force at McClelland Air Force Base in 1973, he – Onizuka – had viewed a piece of black-and-white film footage that showed alien bodies on slabs.

They were alien bodies not unlike those supposedly recovered from a crashed UFO by the military in 1947 at Roswell, New Mexico. Roswell, as I noted at the beginning of this article, was John Denver's hometown. A curious set of coincidences, to say the least.

John Denver died on October 12, 1997, when his private plane plunged into the ocean near Pacific Grove, California.

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What is this machine inside a secret underground room under NYC? [feedly]

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What is this machine inside a secret underground room under NYC?
// Gizmodo

Deep under Grand Central Terminal, beyond basements and subway lines and through 10 stories of bedrock lays a secret underground chamber that's almost as big as Grand Central Terminal itself. What's inside the room? A machine the Nazis wanted to destroy in World War II.

More specifically, the machines were rotary converters. There were 9 of them inside the underground room with each weighing 15 tons. They were able to transform 11,000 volts of alternating current to direct current to power all the trains above. Basically, as the Science Channel explains, they were the beating heart of the entire northeastern United States metro rail network (spanning over 2000 miles long).

When the US decided to join the Allies in World War II, Hitler recognized the importance of this underground room and sent German Nazi soldiers to destroy it. All they needed to do was throw sand on the machines and 80% of the troop and war material movement in the northeast US would come to a halt, thus delaying the US from joining the war. Luckily for us and the rest of the world, the German Nazi soldiers never made it.

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Living lake in Russia is hungry for human bodies and souls [feedly]

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Living lake in Russia is hungry for human bodies and souls
// Gizmodo

Avoid Russia. It's not the human rights situation, their maniac president, or even all those crazy drivers trying to kill you. It's just that this unholy land will destroy you on its own, without any human intervention: Screaming meteors, massive fires, giant holes, and now living lakes hungry for human bodies.

I bet you put a 2-mile-long pole into that vortex and it will eat the entire thing.

Fuck this place, really. Don't go there.

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The Case for Using Shitty Passwords [feedly]

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The Case for Using Shitty Passwords
// Gizmodo

We all know it's important to take our online security seriously, but hold on just a second before you stuff that next password full of just the right combination of symbols, numbers, upper and lowercase letters. Shitty passwords have their place.

If you've signed up for any kind of online account recently, the case for a shitty password practically makes itself. You hammer in your trusty email address in one text box while the one beneath it offers you a challenge and a temptation. You should really use a strong, unique password that's hard to remember, it loudly implies. But it'd be so much easier to just use your dog's name, like you do for everything else.

Fortunately there is a solution to this problem, one that you're probably already using: a password manager. For the mild inconvenience of installing an app across your devices and logging into it now and then, the passwords to even your most inane accounts can be 37-character alphanumeric gibberish, and you barely have to remember a single letter.

We've all been told this is the way to go, and most of us probably believe it. But maybe it's not. Maybe sometimes a shitty password is the best password.

Giving up and giving in

Before you dismiss this wholesale, just think about it for one second. What if you just used shitty passwords? Not all the time of course, but most of the time. When it's easy! New research from Microsoft suggests that's exactly what you should do.

The argument goes something like this:

Strong passwords are good, but your brain only has room for so many of them. Sharing passwords between accounts hurts your security, but memorizing a bunch of strong unique passwords is basically impossible. Using a password manager gives you the best of both worlds, but at a huge risk; you're bundling your Google, or Paypal, or Facebook, or Amazon password (all very high value) with your Imgur and ReadItLater and stupid-old-highschool-Hotmail-account-you-check-every-two-years-for-kicks password (much lower value) behind one master pass. All of your eggs are in one basket.

That wouldn't be a problem if strong passwords were impenetrable, but we all know from experience (if not our from own, then from that of others) that passwords aren't perfect. Even the strongest password possible is worthless if someone finds a way around it.

If your master password gets sucked up by a client-side keylogger, or gets guessed, or forgotten, or if you stay logged in to an insecure computer, your entire kingdom is lost. And while LastPass and OnePassword have never been hacked, you can bet people are trying; a cache of master passwords is the ultimate get. It may seem unlikely, but the stakes are too high to risk it.

So what's a security conscious person to do? Just use shitty passwords. Not all the time, of course, but on the sites you truly don't care about. Microsoft argues that by just reusing the same, stupid "Sparky31589" at all your low-value sites—like ones where you don't store any important financial info—you're freeing up your mental RAM for memorizing four or five unique and secure passwords for your high-value accounts.

And this isn't just the conclusion of a bunch of logic and reasoning. These researchers used actual math, and models, and probability (that I can't even hope to understand or explain).

The only real catch is that so many damn sites that force complexity on you. We are an Important Site, so your password must have 30 characters, upper case and lower case letters, three symbols, two numbers, an underscore and an anagram for a US state. And in order for this to work those sites have to knock it off and give us all the freedom to go weak when we want to, because sometimes it just makes sense.

Password optional

And if that's the case, why not go even further? Maybe passwords should be entirely optional for some site! It sounds nuts (and maybe it is), but bear with me.

There are low-value accounts, but there are also no-value accounts. Just think for a minute and I bet you can think of at least one online account of yours that doesn't even need a password. My Imgur account I use mainly to store screenshots of my phone, for instance, could well be password-free. Ditto the dozens and dozens of accounts I've made for services I tried for just a few days, or intended to only use once. When I use my go-to shitty password on these ultra-low value accounts, I'm actually making that password weaker, to no real gain. It's like making extra copies of a key to secure lockers that have nothing inside.

Password-free accounts do exist, if not very widely. Maybe you've heard of Mailinator, the password-free email service. It's great for all your one-use, low-value email needs. Hell, the backup email address for my Xbox Live account was on Mailinator for years; the obscure address was password and username all in one. I might not actively recommend going that far, but there are plenty of cases where it'd make sense. You wouldn't believe how many Mailinator accounts I use, and if you can find out their wildly obscure addresses, you are more than welcome to what's inside.

No password is perfect

The whole argument of using shitty passwords (or no passwords at all) strikes at the heart of a deeper truth: passwords kind of suck. They suck to remember and they kind of suck at their jobs. Even the guy who invented them thinks they're pretty dumb.

Strong password-mania helps perpetuate the idea that if your password is strong enough, it's basically bulletproof, but that's just not true. Your password is more like a bike lock than a bank vault; it keeps honest people honest, but anyone with an angle grinder can probably saw through. And that's not to mention the exploits and dumb mistakes that expose your passwords all the time.

Using strong passwords is only half the security battle; the other half is minimizing the damage when one or two inevitable leak out. Until someone can come up with a way to kill the password once and for all—whether it's through biometrics or some other future-tech—we're stuck balancing both sides of that equation. The good news is that being lazy about sharing your passwords between accounts isn't part of the problem; it's a potential solution.

Photo via Computer History Museum

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Jawbone takes on Weight Watchers with its latest app update [feedly]

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Jawbone takes on Weight Watchers with its latest app update
// Engadget Mobile

There are things fitness trackers are generally pretty good at. You know, like counting your steps, measuring how many calories you burned. And then there are things fitness trackers are generally bad at. Logging your food intake is a particularly sore point. After all, it's not like the onboard sensors can tell when or what you've eaten, so you have to go through the tedious business of manually entering all your meals. What's more, companies like Jawbone and Fitbit aren't exactly weight-loss specialists, which means their food databases tend to have gaping holes compared to services like Weight Watchers. So, even if you're disciplined enough to keep a food diary, the thing you ate might not even be in the system. That goes double if you eat out -- how are tech companies supposed to know how many calories are in the brownies at that cafe around the corner?%Gallery-slideshow207600%

Filed under: Wearables, Software, Mobile

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Source: Jawbone

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Dwight A. Hunt, Sr., A+, MCP
Desktop Support Specialist - Lead
MHealthy, Health & Well Being Svc.
University of Michigan Health Systems
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Ann Arbor MI 48104
Phone: (734) 647-5758
Fax: (734) 764-0292
Cell: (734) 545-5189
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5 Quick Ways To Free Up Space In Your Gmail Account [feedly]

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5 Quick Ways To Free Up Space In Your Gmail Account
// Gizmodo

Google has boosted Gmail storage space by a factor of 15 since it debuted in 2004, but power users may still find themselves bumping up against the limit (and you now have to share it with Drive and Google+ Photos too). Here are some quick, easy tips for clearing out a significant amount of room in your Gmail account.

Delete files

The Gmail search box lets you look for specific file types—try searching for filename:mp3 or filename:mov to locate those larger attachments that you can really do without. The Gmail attachment file size limit is 25MB, so you may find you can free up a significant chunk of space with this method.

You can find all emails that have attachments irrespective of file type by opening the search drop-down dialog and ticking the Has attachment box. One option for Office files is to convert them to the native Google Drive formats, which don't count against your storage quota.

Plain text and quotes

HTML emails—with their embedded images and formatted text—don't take up much more room than plain text ones, but if you're talking about 100s of emails a day over the course of several years then it can add up. Set your next email to plain text and Gmail should remember your choice in future.

You can also save space by overriding the default setting to quote every email you respond to. On longer threads this can really start to get messy, filling your Gmail account with multiple copies of the exact same message. Erase all quoted text before replying, or select specific sections to quote.

Erase old emails

The Gmail search box can help you find older messages that you're never going to look at again. Try entering older_than:2y to see all emails from more than two years ago—select all, hit the trash button, and they're gone forever.

Of course you can combine this search with a label or sender to make sure these are emails you really don't need (newsletters for example). The search drop-down dialog offers some date search capabilities too.

Search by size

Once upon a time you couldn't search for emails by size in Gmail, but now you most certainly can. Enter larger:5m to find messages of 5MB or above, or open up the search drop-down dialog and use the size option there.

In my own creaking Gmail account I found 356 emails that were 5MB or bigger, which works out at at least 1.78GB of room that can be cleared. If you regularly use your Gmail account to handle high-resolution photos or PDFs then you might come across more matching messages than you expect.

Download local copies

If you can't bear to lose your older or larger Gmail messages forever, download a copy to your local email client of choice. By switching on POP or IMAP through the settings page you can get your messages into a desktop program and then save or export them as required.

From the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab of Gmail's settings it's possible to switch POP and IMAP on or off, as well as re-enable POP for all the emails you've downloaded previously. Head to the Labels tab in settings to change which labels are included in the IMAP process.

[Header image: Alexander Supertramp / Shutterstock.com]

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MHealthy, Health & Well Being Svc.

University of Michigan Health Systems

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Are Werewolves Taking Over a Philippine Island? [feedly]

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Are Werewolves Taking Over a Philippine Island?
// Mysterious Universe

When over 200 members of a small Philippine island's goat population end up strangled with their stomachs ripped open and vital organs removed and the killings just happen to coincide with occurrences of a full moon, there are plenty of mythical creatures to suspect. Filipino folklore has stories of the Sigbin, a goat-like blood sucker with large ears, and the Aswang, a vampire-werewolf combination. But on Sibale Island in the Romblon province, they blame werewolves.

Sibale Mayor Lemuel Cipriano reports in Manila Standard Today that 14 goats in Barangay Poblacion and 13 in Barangay San Vicente were killed in the past few weeks, usually between midnight and 2am, adding to the total of 200 killed since 2012 out of a total goat population of only 1,000. He has local police patrolling the villages, especially on full moon nights.

None of the 4,500 people living on Sibale Island have seen any werewolves, but the timing, frequency and brutality of the killings has residents and officials baffled.

It would be easy to dismiss the werewolf story if it weren't for the other strange happenings in the area. Sibale Island is in the Romblon province which is one corner of the Romblon Triangle, a so-called graveyard of sunken ships where a number of maritime disasters have occurred over the past 60 years. They range from the sinking of Japanese warships during World War II to the Don Paz ferry, which collided with an oil tanker in 1987 and sank with 4,000 people on board. Sailors traveling in these waters have reported seeing ghost ships and receiving mysterious navigation guidance from fireflies and santilmos or St. Elmo's Fire.

The Romblon Triangle

If that's not enough, Sibale Island has serious economic problems and its human population growth is being outpaced by monkeys. It's no wonder the locals are upset about losing their supply of meat and milk, whatever the cause.

Is Sibale Island doomed to be consumed by mythical werewolves, maritime disasters, monetary problems and monkeys? Only time will tell.

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MHealthy, Health & Well Being Svc.

University of Michigan Health Systems

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PCMAG [feedly]

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PCMAG
http://mobile.pcmag.com/?origref=#!/article/53c535c0ec0691f0d50000a9-fox-loses-another-bid-to-ban-dish-hopper-features
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Desktop Support Specialist - Lead

MHealthy, Health & Well Being Svc.

University of Michigan Health Systems

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Ann Arbor MI 48104

Phone: (734) 647-5758

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Why Do We Have Blood Types, Anyway? [feedly]

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Why Do We Have Blood Types, Anyway?
http://gizmodo.com/why-do-we-have-blood-types-anyway-1605159876
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MHealthy, Health & Well Being Svc.

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Ann Arbor MI 48104

Phone: (734) 647-5758

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Cell: (734) 545-5189

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UFOs in and Over Texas [feedly]

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UFOs in and Over Texas
// Mysterious Universe

Whether the subject-matter is UFOs, Bigfoot, lake-monsters, or something else definitively Fortean, there is one kind of book I like more than any other. It's a book of the regional kind. Yes, a nationwide (or even a worldwide) study of one particular mystery is valuable. But, when you have an author who focuses on one specific area – a place they know very well – and who has the ability to dig deeply into the anomaly at issue, that's when things really gel.

Perfect examples are Stan Gordon's book, Silent Invasion (on a Bigfoot-UFO wave in Stan's home-state of Pennsylvania, in 1973), John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies (which does an excellent job of chronicling the high-strangeness at Point Pleasant, West Virginia in the 1960s), and Linda Godfrey's werewolf-themed The Beast of Bray Road – a place I have to visit, one day!

And there's another book to add to the list. It's the newly-published title from Nate Riddle: Lone Star Saucers: Searching for UFOs in Texas. Published by Schiffer Books, this is an excellent study of UFOs in Texas, one that should be read by anyone with an interest in significant UFO incidents, both modern and old. A native of Texas, Nate is someone I've met on a number of occasions (he interviewed me for the book, too), and who has extensively studied the history and lore of UFOs in the Lone Star State.

So, what does the book contain? Well, I'll tell you. First and foremost, there is the writing style. Rather than taking a bland, boring approach to his subject-matter, Nate writes his book in definitive road-trip style. Take, for example, the chapter in the book on the legendary UFO crash at Aurora, Texas (about a 45-minute-drive from where I live). Nate begins:

"My jeep's tires crunched the gravel beneath them on Cemetery Road as I made a U-turn and came to a stop…tree branches quietly shuddered above, providing just enough shade to drop the oppressive temperature a degree or two."

In other words, Lone Star Saucers is not just an examination of UFOs over Texas. It's also the personal story of one man's on-the-road quest to uncover the truth. And, the Aurora case is a fine place to start. A weird and highly controversial affair, it's focused on the reported 1897 crash of a UFO in town, the discovery of a significant amount of strange debris, and the claimed burial of the pummeled E.T., whose piloting skills were apparently severely under par.

Few people with a fascination for UFOs will forget the massive wave of UFO encounters that occurred in Stephenville, Texas in 2008. Countless eyewitnesses to a craft of massive proportions, sightings of military F-16 aircraft furiously pursuing the UFO, rumors of United Nations interest in the case, and a town plunged into states of excitement and wonder, are just the start of it.

Nate takes a road trip down to Stephenville to interview one of the main witnesses, a man named Steve Allen. His account makes for illuminating reading and demonstrates that whatever happened at Stephenville back in 2008, in terms of the UFO phenomenon, it was profound in the extreme.

Lone Star Saucers also takes us back to the 1950s, a time when Texas and flying saucers crossed paths on more than a few occasions. A perfect case in point: the Lubbock Lights, which Nate tackles in a chapter that also focuses on the work of MUFON's Director of Research, Robert Powell – who Nate interviewed in Austin, Texas.

There is also a superb, very cool, and extremely revealing interview with Apollo astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell – who was born in Texas. During the Q&A, Mitchell discusses his thoughts on the theory that the deep UFO secrets are hidden by "a cabal…a global group" that is sitting on alien technology "for future purposes of profit." This chapter, alone, is well worth the price of the book.

Steve Hudgeons, the Texas State Director of MUFON, gives Nate a cool interview that covers how he got interested in the UFO controversy, some of the notable Texas-based cases he has investigated, liaising with eyewitnesses,  investigative techniques, and much more. Still on the matter of interviews, Sunny Williams – originally of Wichita Falls, Texas – talks about her research, findings, and personal encounters with the UFO phenomenon.

Add to that the Cash-Landrum event of December 1980, a great deal of humor, careful attention to detail,  and a wide and varied cast of characters, and you have a great book!

PS: There is also that interview with me (done in an Arlington, Texas Starbucks) , where you will find me talking about everything from George Adamski to the Men in Black, DMT and LSD to The Matrix, and alien abductions to Ouija-boards…

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MHealthy, Health & Well Being Svc.

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Phone: (734) 647-5758

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