“In the 1920s, Germany had numerous ‘new animal psychologists’ who believed dogs were nearly as intelligent as humans, and capable of abstract thinking and communication,” Dr. Jan Bondeson told The Times of London.
“Part of the Nazi philosophy was that there was a strong bond between humans and nature — they believed a good Nazi should be an animal friend,” he said.
Several clever canines even managed to learn a few new tricks, Bondeson writes.
One dog, an Airdale terrier named Rolf, was able to tap out the alphabet with his paws and shared thoughts on religion. Another pooch, Don, spoke German and could bark, “Hungry! Give me cakes.”
Bondeson also writes that a dog was said to bark “Mein Fuhrer” when he heard the name Adolf Hitler.
A MYSTERY sea creature spotted in the Mersey has experts baffled.
The “monster” was snapped off Seacombe Ferry at 9am yesterday by photographer Mark Harrison.
Paul Renolds, from the Blue Planet Aquarium, who studied the photos, said: “It is virtually impossible to actually identify, but this is the time of year when large numbers of basking sharks, the second largest shark species in the world after whale sharks, head towards waters off the Isle of Man.”
10:00 PM CST, TONIGHT: Once again, it is that time of the week… time to ease into your favorite chair, sit back and relax as we explore the sublime world of the strange, the odd, and the unusual. It’s time once again for… The Shadow Hour.
Author, Arlene Uslander, is an award-winning journalist who has published hundres of articles and essays as well as sixteen non-fiction books. Tonight she will talk to us about “The Mystery of Fate : Common Coincidence or Divine Intervention?”, a collection of stories where some apparent force has intervened in the lives of everyday people. We’ll talk about some of her favorite events and he own views on Fate.
As always, the lines will be open and we encourage you to call in with your questions. The call in number for tonight’s show is (347) 826-9662 or call toll-free at (877) 867-0829.
Listen right here with our blogtalkradio widget in the sidebar. You can listen to past broadcasts at any time, or tune in every Wednesday at 10pm Central for the live broadcast.
Wow, two great Bigfoot videos in the same week! First the Ketchikan, Alaska video and now this new one from the Spokane River area.
Here’s the clip, originally posted by YouTube user samantha13950 with the following description:
While hiking, we accidentally caught an image of bigfoot walking through the woods. I didn’t even notice until I got home and saw it on the computer! This scared the crap out of us!
Learning all the time: The Lingodroids project at the University of Queensland has developed robots that can create and speak their own language
In the Terminator films it was the moment when machines learned to think for themselves that sparked the downfall of humanity.
If that hypothesis proves to be true then scientists at the University of Queensland might have a lot to answer for.
Their Lingodroid project has developed robots that are creating and speaking their own languages – and increasing their own knowledge in the process.
The robot language has now evolved to a point where they can arrange to meet each other in different places, and even hold polite conversations.
‘Words’ are electronic noises, created using a random number of syllables, which are then assigned to locations. Location names created so far have included ‘kuzo’, ‘jaro’ and ‘fexo’. Each location was around a few metres in size.
To test and develop their language skills the Lingodroids play ‘word’ games in which they arrange to meet in other places, and it has worked successfully in simulations and in a real office.
The robots are creating their own ‘words’ because human languages are so complex and nuanced that the robots found it hard to decipher.
‘Robot-robot languages take the human out of the loop,’ project leader Dr Ruth Schulz told the BBC.
‘This is important because the robots demonstrate that they understand the meaning of the words they invent independent of humans.’
The Lingodroids themselves are two-wheeled robots, looking not too dissimilar to some vacuum cleaners, which use an onboard camera, sonar and a laser range-finder to map the space around them.
The language, which sounds similar to the keytones on a phone, is actually spoken aloud by the robots using a microphone and speaker.
Games played among them include the go-to, the where-are-we and the how-far game.
In the where-are-we game, the robots map their environment independently by driving around, and then whenever they meet another robot, one gives the area in which they meet a name and both update their vocabulary with the new word.
Sci-fi: In the Terminator series of films the moment when robots learned to speak for themselves that brought catastrophic consequences
In the go-to game, one robot chooses a location, both robots find the place in their own map, and then the navigate to that place independently.
The vocabulary this creates, called a toponymic lexicon, allows the robots to go on to develop ‘words’ for distances and directions.
With their expanded lexicon, the robots were even able to meet each other in places they had talked about but never been together, and to describe places they ‘imagined’ exist outside their own maps.
FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) — It sounds like a scene from a Poltergeist movie. A house in Massachusetts, getting ravaged by water from a leaky pipe, managed to call for help on its own.
Police got a 911 hang-up call Wednesday and when they called back they just got static.
So officers headed out, they made a forced entry and found a total mess.
Wood floors were buckled, ceilings were sagging, the basement was filled with five feet of water and potentially toxic mold was growing all over the place.
It appears the water short-circuited the phone system, triggering a 911 call.
This YouTube video was uploaded on May 10, 2011. While the creature appears very briefly (less than a second), it is somewhat clearer than the typical “blobsquatch” videos out there. That, combined with the cameraman’s apparent genuine fear and excitement reflected in his voice, makes this video worth taking a closer look.
Here’s what the original post by YouTube user putua76 had to say about the clip:
I was on a logging road in Ketchikan hiking with my friend when I saw it! Boy did my heart start racing!! It was about 40 yards from the road! Not sure if it knew I was there or not, because the noise of flowing water from the stream. It seemed to travel fast! It made my hair stand up!! At one point you can see a whitish yellowish thing in it’s hand! I believe it was skunk cabbage. Not sure, but it is in bloom.
You see it jump and after that point it just seems to disappear. There was a lot of brush and trees between it and I, I could not tell where it had gone. It was a scary sort of exciting feeling at the same time!! We went to search for tracks but the river bed where we thought it was walking was full of perfect skiping rocks, we found no prints! If there is a BigFoot, Sasquatch, or Kushtaka I swear I saw him!!
10:00 PM CST, TONIGHT: It’s that time of the week… time to ease into your favorite chair, sit back and relax as we explore the sublime world of the strange, the odd, and the unusual. It’s time once again for… The Shadow Hour.
Tonight’s guest is author and magical practitioner Allie Theiss, who will join us to talk about her experiences with magic and witchcraft.
As always, the lines will be open and we encourage you to call in with your questions. The call in number for tonight’s show is (347) 826-9662 or call toll-free at (877) 867-0829.
Listen right here with our blogtalkradio widget in the sidebar. You can listen to past broadcasts at any time, or tune in every Wednesday at 10pm Central for the live broadcast. See you in the shadows…
Devotees of science fiction have been convinced for decades that an alien spacecraft crashed in the desert of New Mexico – and that the American government covered up the recovery of extraterrestrial bodies.
The so-called Roswell Incident of 1947 spawned conspiracy theories by the score.
But now, sadly for UFO spotters, a new book offers an entirely man-made – and some would say even more bizarre – explanation, featuring two of the greatest villains of 20th century history: the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and the infamous Nazi “Angel of Death” Dr Joseph Mengele.
During a powerful storm in July, 1947, an object crashed near a rancher’s home in Roswell, New Mexico.
Roswell army air base initially said that a “flying disc” had come down, but hours later, as government scientists arrived in the area, it was stated instead that a weather balloon had crashed.
The incident went largely unreported until books and documentaries in the 1970s made allegations of alien life forms.
Area 51, the new book by Annie Jacobsen, is based on interviews with scientists and engineers who worked in Area 51, the top secret test base in the Nevada desert.
It dismisses the alien story and puts forward the theory that Stalin was inspired by Orson Wells’s famous radio adaptation of the HG Wells novel War of the Worlds, which provoked hysteria across America when broadcast in 1938. According to the book, the plot started after the Soviet Unionseized from Germany at the end of the war the jet-propelled, single wing Horton Ho 229 – a fighter said to be the forerunner of the modern B2 stealth bomber.
This is where Mengele enters the story. The Nazi doctor, who experimented on prisoners in Auschwitz and fled to South America after the war, was supposedly enlisted to create a crew of “grotesque, child-size aviators” in return for a eugenics laboratory.
The book says that the plane was filled with “alien-like” children, aged 12 or 13, who Stalin wanted to land in America and cause hysteria similar to the 1938 broadcast. But, the plane, remotely piloted by another aircraft, crashed and the Americans hushed up the incident.
Jacobsen’s source, a retired engineer from the former defence company EG&G, which handled the US government’s most sensitive projects, said he was put on to the Roswell project in Area 51 in 1978.
Miss Jacobsen writes: “They found bodies alongside the crashed craft. These were not aliens. Nor were they consenting airmen. They were human guinea pigs. Unusually petite for pilots, they appeared to be children. Each was under five feet tall.
“They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes.”
Two were supposedly found “comatose but still alive”.
The EG&G engineers were told “that seeing the bodies would be a shocking and disturbing experience”.
Perhaps not surprisingly, a spokesman for the US Air Force said: “We have not yet read this book so we are not able to make a comment on it.”
A planet 20 light years away is the first outside the solar system to be officially declared habitable by European scientists.
The ‘exoplanet’ Gliese 581d has conditions that could support Earth-like life, including possible watery oceans and rainfall, they say.
Yet any future space voyagers landing there would find themselves in truly alien surroundings.
The sky is likely to be murky red, not blue, gravity is twice that of Earth, doubling the weight of anyone standing on the surface, and the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere would almost certainly not be breathable by humans.
