A color panoramic photo. Click through for full resolution.

Denver, Colorado in 1898

The tale of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and its followers cuts to the heart of the one of the thorniest questions in religious studies: What defines a religion? Does it require a genuine theological belief? Or simply a set of rituals and a community joining together as a way of signaling their cultural alliances to others? In short, is an anti-religion like Flying Spaghetti Monsterism actually a religion?

Religious scholars mull Flying Spaghetti Monster - CNN.com

We are currently preparing the big crowning event of Miss Landmine Angola 2008 in close collaboration with the Angolan government (CNIDAH) and supported by the European Union.The event will be taking place in Luanda, Angola on April 4th, 2008, the UN International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action.

Stay tuned!

The web voting for Miss Landmine Angola is open until April 3, 2008.

Have a nice day.

MISS LANDMINE

Industrial Memetics has recently decided to try to clean up our image. So, in spite of the fact that we now have 5000 business cards which say "Information Warfare for the People," we want a new slogan that isn't alienating to uninitiates who don't know what an information war is and don't want to participate in one. We came up with a couple of ideas, but we'd thought we'd throw this up on the site and see if any of you have any suggestions. Here are our ideas so far. What are yours?

MemeStreams: Your Information Society
MemeStreams: What smart people click

BTW, if you have places in your town where you could leave some of those business cards, we sure have a lot of them. Branded bottle openners too. They look nice. We need to get rid of them, and hopefully promote the site. Let us know. We'll mail 'em to ya.

Also, if you happen to know anyone who might be interested in a MemeStreams like system as an Intranet knowledge management tool, please let us know. We think we've got a pretty refined approach to sharing useful links, and we know a lot of professional teams would benefit from have a private system they could use for such a purpose. We're in search of a first customer who can help us get the feature set right for such an application.

While most of this is over my head. Is it possible that this could become the Grand Unified Theory we are all looking forward to?

Even if it isn't the pdf is very interesting.

Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything - Telegraph

An Ohio man has pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge for being part of a gang of "swatters" -- one of them blind -- who used Caller ID spoofing to phone the police with fake hostage crises, sending armed cops bursting into the homes of innocent people.

Guilty Plea: Phone Phreaks Use Caller-ID Spoofing to Get Foes Raided By SWAT | Threat Level from Wired.com

NIST has opened a public competition to develop a new cryptographic hash algorithm, which converts a variable length message into a short “message digest” that can be used for digital signatures, message authentication and other applications. The competition is NIST’s response to recent advances in the cryptanalysis of hash functions. The new hash algorithm will be called “SHA-3” and will augment the hash algorithms currently specified in FIPS 180-2, Secure Hash Standard. Entries for the competition must be received by October 31, 2008.

Cryptographic Hash Algorithm Competition

ETrade Financial Corp. lost more than half its market value after the online brokerage forecast a decline in fourth-quarter earnings and a Citigroup Inc. analyst said the company may go bankrupt.

Bank Failure. If it wasn't for FDIC insurance there would currently be a run on etrade accounts, which would cause them to collapse. This panic would spread resulting in a massive economic catastrophy.

ETrade stock falls 58% after forecast - The Boston Globe

"In focus groups, the biggest thing they said to us was it made them safer, because if you are in a public space you know someone's watching."

The parade of horrors presented nightly by sensationalistic local television news has scared a certain segment of the population from leaving their living rooms, and its warm, glowing advertisement display. Now these people, the most paranoid in our society, have been armed with the power to spy on the actions of the rest of us and report those activities to the police! I'm sure its thrilling to think that from the comfort of their couches they can participate in law enforcement! This is how you build a network of informers and snitches!

Home snoop CCTV more popular than Big Brother | The Register

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) have successfully performed the world's first high-definition image taking of an Earth-rise* by the lunar explorer "KAGUYA" (SELENE,) which was injected into a lunar orbit at an altitude of about 100 km on October 18, 2007 (Japan Standard Time. Following times and dates are all JST.)

Don't miss the pictures and video.

Kaguya (Selene) Images of Earth-Rise Over the Moon | SpaceRef