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The Long Now Foundation’s clock is a symbol for multi-generational thinking Jeff Bezos wants us all to be good ancestors. The Amazon supremo just tweeted that installation has begun on one of his pet projects of the last decade, the 10,000 Year Clock, also called the Clock of the Long Now. Designed to stay accurate for that huge time period, the giant clock will tick once a year, moving its century hand every 100 years, and send out a cuckoo once a millennia – just 10 times in its life. And it costs US$ 42 million. What is Bezos thinking?...

A Utah man who repeatedly made headlines around the world in the 1970s has died. Melvin Dummar was a gas station operator in Box Elder County in 1976 when he suddenly seemed to be on the verge of becoming a multi-millionaire. He was named an heir to the fortune of eccentric and secretive billionaire Howard Hughes. Dummar's name was contained in a handwritten will discovered in the headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City. The document became known as the "Mormon Will" because someone had mysteriously dropped it on a desk at the...

One unforeseen blessing of the collapse of the Soviet Union has been the easing of security restrictions in former Iron Curtain nations. Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Western journalists have been able to access to classified documents that would have gotten them shot a few years before. That's a scary thought - but not nearly as chilling as some of the secrets they've uncovered. In "Red Star Rogue," author Kenneth Sewell takes us inside the once top-secret Soviet nuclear navy to reveal the explosive facts about one of best-kept secrets of the Cold War, the sinking of Soviet...

Atheists are embracing Gods and creationism Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor and entrepreneur, the twenty-first century’s answer to Howard Hughes, believes we are living in a computer simulation. The chances that we exist in ‘base reality’ are billions to one, he says.Last week he told an audience of Silicon Valley tech evangelists: ‘Forty years ago we had Pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were.’‘Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it’s getting better every year. Soon we’ll have virtual reality, augmented reality.’‘If you assume any rate...

One of Mitsubishi's legendary Zero fighter planes took to the skies over Japan on Wednesday for the first time since World War II. The restored plane made a brief flight to and from a naval base in southern Japan. Decorated former U.S. Air Force pilot Skip Holm flew the aircraft. Zero fighters were considered one of the most capable fighter planes in World War II, rivaling the British Spitfire. Their long range allowed them to play a prominent role in the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Only a few are still in operating condition. ...

Memorial Day weekend is here which means it's the official start of swimming pool season. This year though, you may want to think twice before jumping in and making a splash. There has been a nationwide recall of 1 million pool and spa drain covers that could trap you or your child, despite their federal "seal" of approval. "We're finding out the laboratories misrepresented their testing procedures," said Albert Rizzo, of Rizzo Pools in Newington. Rizzo says the timing couldn't be worse. "If you have one main drain, I would tell you not to swim in the pool. Now I...

There are a lot of woolly, fabulous tales out there about Howard Hughes, the famously reclusive, eccentric billionaire. And the Wikipedia version of his life is not the only one that "needs additional citations for verification." The Martin Scorsese movie "The Aviator" recently advanced the images and legends of Hughes and his obsessive compulsions. Hughes officially died in April 1976, an emaciated, drug-addicted, long-haired, tragic, lonely old man who proved to some people money couldn't buy happiness. But not really, according to a new book, "Boxes: The Secret Life of Howard Hughes," by Douglas Wellman, assistant dean of the School...

HE remembers the women sunbathing naked on the deck of a passing yacht. He remembers, too, the lurking menace of a Russian intelligence-gathering trawler, watching from afar as one of the most audacious American coups of the cold war unfolded on the ocean floor, 16,500ft beneath the Pacific surface. David Sharp recalls every detail of the 1974 mission known as Project Azorian, one of the most ambitious, expensive and politically volatile clandestine operations launched by the CIA. As one of the CIA’s agents in charge of recovering a sunken Soviet submarine and its cargo of nuclear-tipped missiles, Sharp spent 63...

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the first time has revealed details about an ultra-secret Cold War-era project to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the depths of the Pacific Ocean in 1974. The high-risk salvage operation, code-named ‘Project Azorian’, had been shrouded in secrecy for decades but the spy agency broke its silence in newly-declassified documents published yesterday by an independent watchdog, the National Security Archive. The documents, drawn from a 50-page article written for an in-house CIA journal, recount the daring bid approved by then-president Richard Nixon to raise the submarine using a specially-designed ship, the Glomar Explorer....

I highly recommend readers listen to part 2 of this Focus on the Family Broadcast about the Battle of Franklin. In a word, the conversation is excellent. Historian David Fraley does an absolutely superb job describing the brutal and sad carnage while weaving in anecdotal stories about the soldiers who fought there. It is truly superb.

DENVER (AP) -- A federal appeals court has rejected a second attempt by a delivery man to claim a piece of Howard Hughes' fortune, a plight first dramatized by the 1980s Academy Award-winning "Melvin and Howard." The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday that a jury in 1978 already determined that a hand-scrawled will offered by Melvin Dummar as evidence wasn't authentic.

Freepers - help me! What are the hand washing rules for handling money and then handling ice cream?

The Aviator on National Review Online E-mail Author Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version February 25, 2005, 3:14 p.m. Howard Hughes's Last HurrahWhat The Aviator misses. by John Meroney Fifty-three years ago this week, Howard Hughes found himself locked in a battle against powerful political forces he believed were bent on undermining the free-market system. The billionaire industrialist, airplane manufacturer, and filmmaker became so passionate about the fight that he summoned all his emotional and physical strength to overcome a crippling fear of the public so he could make his case for what he saw as...

A leading expert on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder who advised actor Leonardo DiCaprio on portraying Howard Hughes in "The Aviator" says the actor himself developed a serious case of the condition. "There were moments when I was very concerned for Leo," UCLA psychiatry professor Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz told Scotland on Sunday. Schwartz, who was called in to by director Martin Scorsese to help replicate the characteristics of OCD from which Hughes suffered, says DiCaprio's brain started to malfunction, as he reawakened his own OCD he suffered as a child. "He let his own mild OCD get worse to play the part, Schwartz...

Scorsese's "Aviator" Reflects Randian Lessons Reviewed by Edward Hudgins Ehudgins@objectivistcenter.org In "The Aviator," a bio-pic about Howard Hughes (1905-1976) starring Leonardo DiCaprio with script by John Logan, director Martin Scorsese projects on the screen a moral message that is rarely found in philosophy books much less in movies: the path to joy in life is loving one's work. Scorsese portrays Hughes as a true, can-do American pioneer and visionary in both the motion picture and aeronautics industries who fights the forces of censorship in the one realm and government control in the other. Elements of "The Aviator" find their closest...

Did you hear about the new Howard Hughes movie, The Aviator? It appears to be doing quite well despite the odd requirements for the audience. When you get your ticket you also recieve a spray bottle of bleach and a surgical mask. In addition, there is a speaker phone set up at the front of the theater from which all of the Hughes lines eminate

The Aviator Release Date: December 17, 2005 (NY, LA, SF; wide release: December 25) Studio: Miramax Films Director: Martin Scorsese Screenwriter: John Logan Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, John C. Reilly, Kate Beckinsale, Jude Law, Adam Scott, Kelli Garner, Gwen Stefani, Nellie Sciutto, Alec Baldwin, Danny Huston, Matt Ross, Ian Holm, Alan Alda, Frances Conroy, Vincent Laresca, Justin Shilton, Brent Spiner, Josie Maran, Sam Hennings, Willem Dafoe, Stanley DeSantis, Jacob Davich Genre: Drama MPAA Rating: PG-13 (for thematic elements, sexual content, nudity, language and a crash sequence) Official Website: Miramax.com/Aviator Plot Summary: "The Aviator" tells the story of aviation pioneer...