H4x0r 0f 7h3 Ψ34r

How was 21 year old moot, founder of 4chan at the top of the Time 100 poll? Paul Lamere explains:

At 4AM this morning I received an email inviting me to an IRC chatroom where someone would explain to me exactly how the Time.com 100 Poll was precision hacked. Naturally, I was a bit suspicious. Anyone could claim to be responsible for the hack - but I ventured onto the IRC channel (feeling a bit like a Woodward or Bernstein meeting Deep Throat in a parking garage). After talking to ‘Zombocom’ (not his real nick) for a few minutes, it was clear that Zombocom was a key player in the hack. He explained how it all works.

The Beginning
Zombocom told me that it all started out when the folks that hang out on the random board of 4chan (sometimes known as /b/) became aware that Time.com had enlisted moot (the founder of 4chan) as one of the candidates in the Time.com 100 poll. A little investigation showed that a poll vote could be submitted just by doing an HTTP get on the URL http://www.timepolls.com/contentpolls/Vote.do?pollName=time100_2009&id=1883924&rating=1 where ID is a number associated with the person being voted for (in this case 1883924 is Rain’s ID).

Soon afterward, several people crafted ‘autovoters’ that would use the simple voting URL protocol to vote for moot. These simple autovoters could be triggered by an easily embeddable ’spam URL’. The autovoters were very flexible allowing the rating to be set for any poll candidate. For example, the URL http://fun.qinip.com/gen.php?id=1883924&rating=1&amount=160 could be used to push 160 ratings of 1 (the worst rating) for the artist Rain to the Time.com poll.

In early stages of the poll, Time.com didn’t have any authentication or validation - the door was wide open to any client that wanted to stuff the ballot box. Soon these autovoting spam urls were sprinkled around the web voting up moot. If you were a fan of Rain, it is likely that when you visited a Rain forum, you were really voting for moot via one of these spam urls.

Soon afterward, it was discovered that the Time.com Poll didn’t even range check its parameters to ensure that the ratings fell within the 1 to 100 range. The autovoters were adapted to take advantage of this loophole, which resulted in the Time.com poll showing moot with a 300% rating, while all other candidates had ratings far below zero. Time.com apparently noticed this and intervened by eliminating millions of votes for moot and restoring the poll to a previous state (presumably) from a backup. Shortly afterward, Time.com changed the protocol to attempt to authenticate votes by requiring that a key be appended to the poll submission URL that consisted of an MD5 hash of the URL + a secret word (AKA ‘the salt’).

“Needless to say, we were enraged” says Zombocom. /b/ responded by getting organized - they created an IRC channel (#time_vote) devoted to the hack, and started to recruit. Shortly afterward, one of the members discovered that the ’salt’, the key to authenticating requests, was poorly hidden in Time.com’s voting flash application and could be extracted. With the salt in hand - the autovoters were back online, rocking the vote.

Another challenge faced by the autovoters was that if you voted for the same person more often than once every 13 seconds, your IP would be banned from voting. However, it was noticed that you could cycle through votes for other candidates during those 13 seconds. The autovoters quickly adapted to take advantage of this loophole interleaving up-votes for moot with down-votes for the competition ensuring that no candidate received a vote more frequently than once every 13 seconds, while maximizing the voting leverage. One of the first autovoters was MOOTHATTAN. This is a simple moot up-voter that will vote for moot about 100 times per minute.

Mooter is a Delphi app (windows only) that can submit about 300 votes per minute from a single IP address. It will also take advantage of any proxies and cycle through them so that the votes appear to be coming from multiple IP addresses. rdn, the author of Mooter, has used Mooter to submit 20 thousand votes in a single 15 minute period. In the last two weeks, (when rdn started keeping track) Mooter alone has submitted 10,000,000 votes (about 3.3% of the total number of poll votes).

From the screenshot you can see that Mooter is quite a sophisticated application. It allows fine grained control over who receives votes, what type of rating they get, voting frequency, the proxy cycle, along with charts and graphs showing all sorts of nifty data. In addition to highly configurable autovoting apps, the loose collective of #time_vote maintains charts and graphs of the various candidate voting histories. Here’s a voting graph that shows the per-minute frequency of votes for boxer Manny Pacquiao.

More charts are available for browsing at here.

So with the charts, graphs, spam URLs and autovoters #time_vote had things well in hand. Moot would easily cruise to a victory. Although they still had some annoying competition, especially from fans of the boxer Manny Paquoia. Zombocom says that “it can take upwards of 4.5K votes a minute to keep Manny in his place”. Despite the Manny problem, the #time_vote collective had complete dominance of the poll.

The Ultimate Precision Hack
At this point Zombocom was starting to get bored and so he started fiddling with his voting scripts. Much to his surprise, he found that no matter what he did, he was never getting banned by Time.com. Zombocom suspects that his ban immunity may be because he’s running an ipv6 stack which may be confusing Time.com’s IP blocker. With no 13 second rate limit to worry about, he was able to crank out votes as fast as his computer would let him - about 5,000 votes a minute (and soon he’ll have a new server online that should give him up to 50,000 votes a minute.) With this new found power, Zombocom was able to take the hack to the next level.

Zombocom joked to one of his friends “it would be funny to troll Time.com and put us up as most influential, but since we are not explicitly on the list we’ll have to spell it out. ” His friend thought it was impossible. But two weeks later, “marblecake’ was indeed spelled out for all to see at the top of the Time.com poll.

So what is the significance of ‘marblecake’? Zombocom says: ” Marblecake was an irc channel where the “Message to Scientology” video originated. Many believe we are “dead” or only doing hugraids etc, so I thought it would also be a way of saying : we’re still around and we don’t just do only “moralfag” stuff .

To actually manipulate the poll, Zombocom wrote two perl scripts. The first one, auto.pl is pretty simple. It finds the highest rated person in the poll that is not in the desired top 21 (recall, there are 21 characters in the Message) and down-votes them (you can view this as eliminating the riff-raff). The second perl script, the_game.pl is responsible for maintaining the proper order of the top 21 by inspecting the rating of a particular person and comparing that rating to what it should be to maintain the proper order and then up-voting or down-voting as necessary to get the desired rating. With these two scripts, (less than 200 lines of perl) Zombocom can put the poll in any order he wants.

Ultimately, this hack involved lots of work and a little bit of luck. Someone figured out the voting URL protocol. A bunch of folks wrote various autovoters, which were then used by a thousand or more to stack the vote in moots favor. Others, sprinkled the spam urls throughout the forums tricking the ‘competition’ into voting for moot. When Time.com responded by trying to close the door on the hacks, the loose collective rallied and a member discovered the ’salt’ that would re-open the poll to the autovoters. The lucky bit was when Zombocom discovered that no matter what he did, he wouldn’t get banned. This opened the door to the fine grained manipulation that led to the embedding of the Message.

At the core of the hack is the work of a dozen or so, backed by an army of a thousand who downloaded and ran the autovoters and also backed by an untold number of others that unwittingly fell prey to the spam url autovoters. So why do they do it? Why do they write code, build complex applications, publish graphs - why do they organize a team that is more effective than most startup companies? Says Zombocom: “For the lulz”.

Need Work?

Eye Defying

Slow Magnets

Cups And Balls



Everybody Be Cool

Thor Wang!

Just like these awesome names, from a new generation comes...THOR WANG!

On Valentine’s Day Thor Wang, a little American boy of Swedish-Taiwanese descent disappeared. The father, Yen-Chen, a.k.a. Andrew, did not return the boy after his four hour allotted visitation. This was not a custody battle, but parental child concealment. The mother, Maria “Mia” Danielsson Wang has sole custody of baby Thor and the baby’s father Wang had visitation rights only.

The day of the abduction, Mia handed Thor over to Wang for a parental visitation. Ironically, it happened at the Marina del Rey sheriff’s office. It had been ordered by the court it was the place for Mia to hand Thor over to Wang as well as the place where Wang was supposed to hand him back. When Wang didn’t show up at 4pm as scheduled, she called him, and he asked for another hour with the child. Mia agreed and went back to the sheriff’s office at 5pm, but again Wang did not return with the baby. After several hours, Mia was allowed to file a suspicious circumstance report with the sheriff’s, and officers went out to Wang’s home to see if he was there. Yeah, he wasn't.

The next day Mia filed two missing person’s reports, one for Thor and one for Wang. Shortly thereafter, information came stating that Wang and Thor were in Guatemala. Danielsson went there with American authorities to claim Thor back, but since they did not bring the complete documentation from the US court verdict, the case ended up in a court in Guatemala and Thor was placed in an orphanage. After some sorting out, the Swedish Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed that Thor was reunited with his mother, and were being kept at a secret location in Guatemala.

Just last week, mother and son returned to Sweden. I tell ya, it just warms the heart to hear the story. But moreso to say Thor Wang.

Rub. Rinse. Repeat.

Scientists have successfully tested a new nanoparticle therapy on rats, and believe it could also be used to help humans. Get boners.

In bland, scientific terms, an anti-erectile chemical nitric oxide is rubbed on the "problem" area, and absorbed directly into the skin. Of the seven rats treated, five showed signs of arousal, according to results presented to the American Urological Association. The new treatment would likely have fewer side effects than Viagra, which is taken orally and been shown to cause headaches and facial flushing.

Researchers also believe that the therapy could work much more quickly than Pfizer's market-leading drug, which takes up to an hour to kick in.

Average Joe Cinema

An interview series with Kevin Smith, talking about making movies lately. This set will take close to an hour off your morning.

Pearls Before Swine

The outbreak of swine flu, first in Mexico then cases all over the world, has gotten a lot of people worried for a good reason: despite the existence of scarier diseases caused by exotic viruses like Hantavirus and Ebola, influenza still reigns as the number one infectious killer in modern times.

Unlike regular seasonal epidemics of the flu, there are also rare but deadly pandemics, i.e. cases of influenza that spread on a worldwide scale and infect a large proportion of the human population. And there's been several before. Will this be one of them or fizzle out like SARS?

The Peloponnesian War Pestilence
The very first pandemic in recorded history was described by Thucydides. In 430 BC, during the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta, the Greek historian told of a great pestilence that wiped out over 30,000 of the citizens of Athens (roughly one to two thirds of all Athenians died).

Thucydides described the disease as such "People in good health were all of a sudden attacked by violent heats in the head, and redness and inflammation in the eyes, the inward parts, such as the throat or tongue, becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural and fetid breath." Next came coughing, diarrhea, spasms, and skin ulcers. A handful survived, but often without their fingers, sights, and even genitals. Until today, the disease that decimated ancient Athens has yet to be identified.

The Antonine Plague
In 165 AD, Greek physician Galen described an ancient pandemic, now thought to be smallpox, that was brought to Rome by soldiers returning from Mesopotamia. The disease was named after Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, one of two Roman emperors who died from it. At its height, the disease killed some 5,000 people a day in Rome. By the time the disease ran its course some 15 years later, a total of 5 million people were dead.

The Plague of Justinian
In 541-542 AD, there was an outbreak of a deadly disease in the Byzantine Empire. At the height of the infection, the disease, named the Plague of Justinian after the reigning emperor Justinian I, killed 10,000 people in Constantinople every day. With no room nor time to bury them, bodies were left stacked in the open.

By the end of the outbreak, nearly half of the inhabitants of the city were dead. Historians believe that this outbreak decimated up to a quarter of human population in the eastern Mediterranean. What was the culprit? It was the bubonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. This outbreak, the first known bubonic plague pandemic in recorded human history, marked the first of many outbreaks of plague - a disease that claimed as many as 200 million lives throughout history.

The Black Death
After the Plague of Justinian, there were many sporadic oubreaks of the plague, but none as severe as the Black Death of the 14th century. While no one knows for certain where the disease came from (it was thought that merchants and soldiers carried it over caravan trading routes), the Black Death took a heavy toll on Europe. The fatality was recorded at over 25 million people or one-fourth of the entire population.

It's interesting to note that the Black Death actually came in three forms: the bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic plague. The first, the bubonic plague, was the most common: people with this disease have buboes or enlarged lymphatic glands that turn black (caused by decaying of the skin while the person is still alive). Without treatment, bubonic plague kills about half of those infected within 3 to 7 days. In pneumonic plague, droplets of aerosolized Y. pestis bacteria are transmitted from human to human by coughing. Unless treated with antibiotics in the first 24 hours, almost 100% of people with this form of infection die in 2 to 4 days.

The last form, septicemic plague, happens when the bacteria enter the blood from the lymphatic or respiratory system. Patients with septicemic plague develop gangrenes in their fingers and toes, which turn the skin black (which gives the disease its moniker) Though rare, this form of the disease is almost always fatal - often killing its victims the same day the symptoms appear.

We haven't heard the last of the bubonic plague. In 1855, another bubonic plague epidemic (named the Third Epidemic) hit the world - this time, the initial outbreak was in Yunnan Province, China. Human migration, trade and wars helped the disease spread from China to India, Africa, and the Americas. All in all, this pandemic lasted about 100 years (it officially ended in 1959) and claimed over 12 million people in India and China alone.

The Spanish Flu
In March 1918, in the last months of World War I, an unusually virulent and deadly flu virus was identified in a US military camp in Kansas. Just 6 months later, the flu had become a worldwide pandemic in all continents. When the Spanish Flu pandemic was over, about 1 billion people or half the world's population had contracted it. It is perhaps the most lethal pandemic in the history of humankind: between 20 and 100 million people were killed, more the number killed in the war itself (Source)

The Spanish Flu actually didn't originate in Spain - it got its name because at the time, Spain wasn't involved in the war and had not imposed wartime censorship, thus it received great press attention there. Recently, scientists were able to "resurrect" the virus from a well-preserved corpse buried in the permafrost of Alaska.

Better Buy

Best Buy is giving vinyl a spin (ow, that pun hurts).

The consumer-electronics giant, which happens also to be the third-largest music seller behind Apple's iTunes and Wal-Mart, is considering devoting (a whole) eight square feet of merchandising space in all of its 1,020 stores solely to vinyl. That only equates to slightly under 200 albums, but after a successful test in 100 of its stores the format which represents 5% of Best Buy's music sales is growing while CD sales continue to shrink. Vinyl sales grew 15% year-over-year in 2007 and 89% in 2008. The 1.9 million vinyl albums purchased last year were the most since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991, and this year is shaping up to be even better, with 670,000 vinyl albums sold through mid-April. By contrast, CD sales have fallen at a roughly 20% clip for the past few years.

To be sure, the growth in vinyl, even when combined with digital sales, isn't enough to offset the decline in CD sales, but it does show that consumers and nostalgic nerds like myself haven't abandoned the format. And the fact that a retailer of Best Buy's size is willing to expand vinyl offerings is an positive for the beleaguered music industry. A typical Best Buy store features about 16 to 20 square feet of music merchandise and displays about 8,000 CDs.

Hoping to capitalize on the renewed interest in vinyl, all of the major record labels have combed through their catalogs to remaster and re-release marquee titles with their original artwork and packaging. Compared with a CD, vinyl costs more to make and retails for a higher price -- $22.95 vs. around $13.99 for a CD -- but has lower margins. Companies like Atlantic and EMI Capitol say extending their catalog and the profits made from vinyl warrant producing the format. The situation is the reverse for Best Buy, but the margins on vinyl sales are still "healthy enough" to mitigate the risk that comes along with not being able to return unsold inventory like it can with CDs.

Jazzy Robots, Misdirection, And Cleveland...Rocks?

Sent To A Maximum Security Penalty Box

Scarlett will attest that from time to time (okay, regularly), I've yelled at an official or even questioned a ref's qualifications, but while there have been some occasions where the zebras have been attacked, what Ladislav Scurko takes things to a different level.

The Philadelphia Flyers sixth-round pick in 2004 has been charged with murder after being accused of stabbing referee Marek Liptag 14 times back in January 2008 over a monetary dispute. Liptag's remains weren't found until this past December in Slovakian forest. Does anybody know how the draft works behind bars?

Scurko played for Spisska Nova Ves, his home city team as well as the Western Hockey League's Seattle Thunderbirds. He began playing professionally in 2007 with HC Kosice of the Slovakian Extraliga where he won the league title this past season. Scurko also played for Slovakia at two U20 World Championships and two U18 World Championships. I'm sure he'll be a welcome edition to the penal league, but I hear team showers are worse than the on-ice fights.

The former Flyers prospect faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted and would be released when he turns 43 at the latest, or when Chris Chelios finally retires from the NHL.

Just Your Local Henge

In ancient times, hundreds of years before the dawn of history, lived a strange race of people: the druids
No one knows who they where or what they were doing...but their legacy remains - hewn into the living rock of Stonehenge

The strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern. The rocks are each 16 feet tall, with four of them weighing more than 20 tons apiece. Together they support a 25,000-pound capstone. Approaching the edifice, it's hard not to think immediately of England's Stonehenge or possibly the ominous monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Built in 1980, these pale gray rocks are quietly awaiting the end of the world as we know it.

Called the Georgia Guidestones, the monument is a mystery—nobody knows exactly who commissioned it or why. The only clues to its origin are on a nearby plaque on the ground—which gives the dimensions and explains a series of intricate notches and holes that correspond to the movements of the sun and stars—and the "guides" themselves, directives carved into the rocks. These instructions appear in eight languages ranging from English to Swahili and reflect a peculiar New Age ideology. Some are vaguely eugenic (guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity); others prescribe standard-issue hippie mysticism (prize truth—beauty—love—seeking harmony with the infinite).

What's most widely agreed upon—based on the evidence available—is that the Guidestones are meant to instruct the dazed survivors of some impending apocalypse as they attempt to reconstitute civilization. Not everyone is comfortable with this notion. A few days before I visited, the stones had been splattered with polyurethane and spray-painted with graffiti, including slogans like "Death to the new world order." This defacement was the first serious act of vandalism in the Guidestones' history, but it was hardly the first objection to their existence. In fact, for more than three decades this uncanny structure in the heart of the Bible Belt has been generating responses that range from enchantment to horror. Supporters (notable among them Yoko Ono) have praised the messages as a stirring call to rational thinking, akin to Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. Opponents have attacked them as the Ten Commandments of the Antichrist.

Whoever the anonymous architects of the Guidestones were, they knew what they were doing: The monument is a highly engineered structure that flawlessly tracks the sun. It also manages to engender endless fascination, thanks to a carefully orchestrated aura of mystery. And the stones have attracted plenty of devotees to defend against folks who would like them destroyed. Clearly, whoever had the monument placed here understood one thing very well: People prize what they don't understand at least as much as what they do.

The story of the Georgia Guidestones began on a Friday afternoon in June 1979, when an elegant gray-haired gentleman showed up in Elbert County, made his way to the offices of Elberton Granite Finishing, and introduced himself as Robert C. Christian. He claimed to represent "a small group of loyal Americans" who had been planning the installation of an unusually large and complex stone monument. Christian had come to Elberton—the county seat and the granite capital of the world—because he believed its quarries produced the finest stone on the planet.

Joe Fendley, Elberton Granite's president, nodded absently, distracted by the rush to complete his weekly payroll. But when Christian began to describe the monument he had in mind, Fendley stopped what he was doing. Not only was the man asking for stones larger than any that had been quarried in the county, he also wanted them cut, finished, and assembled into some kind of enormous astronomical instrument.

What in the world would it be for? Fendley asked. Christian explained that the structure he had in mind would serve as a compass, calendar, and clock. It would also need to be engraved with a set of guides written in eight of the world's major languages. And it had to be capable of withstanding the most catastrophic events, so that the shattered remnants of humanity would be able to use those guides to reestablish a better civilization than the one that was about to destroy itself.

Fendley is now deceased, but shortly after the Guidestones went up, an Atlanta television reporter asked what he was thinking when he first heard Christian's plan. "I was thinking, 'I got a nut in here now. How am I going get him out?'" Fendley said. He attempted to discourage the man by quoting him a price several times higher than for any project commissioned there before. The job would require special tools, heavy equipment, and paid consultants, Fendley explained. But Christian merely nodded and asked how long it would take. Fendley didn't rightly know—six months, at least. He wouldn't be able to even consider such an undertaking, he added, until he knew it could be paid for. When Christian asked whether there was a banker in town he considered trustworthy, Fendley saw his chance to unload the strange man and sent him to look for Wyatt Martin, president of the Granite City Bank.

The tall and courtly Martin—the only man in Elberton besides Fendley known to have met R. C. Christian face-to-face—is now 78. "Fendley called me and said, 'A kook over here wants some kind of crazy monument,'" Martin says. "But when this fella showed up he was wearing a very nice, expensive suit, which made me take him a little more seriously. And he was well-spoken, obviously an educated person." Martin was naturally taken aback when the man told him straight out that R. C. Christian was a pseudonym. He added that his group had been planning this secretly for 20 years and wanted to remain anonymous forever. "And when he told me what it was he and this group wanted to do, I just about fell over," Martin says. "I told him, 'I believe you'd be just as well off to take the money and throw it out in the street into the gutters.' He just sort of looked at me and shook his head, like he felt kinda sorry for me, and said, 'You don't understand.'"

Martin led Christian down the street to the town square, where the city had commissioned a towering Bicentennial Memorial Fountain, which included a ring of 13 granite panels, each roughly 2 by 3 feet, signifying the original colonies. "I told him that was about the biggest project ever undertaken around here, and it was nothing compared to what he was talking about," Martin says. "That didn't seem to bother him at all." Promising to return on Monday, the man went off to charter a plane and spend the weekend scouting locations from the air. "By then I half believed him," Martin says.

When Christian came back to the bank Monday, Martin explained that he could not proceed unless he could verify the man's true identity and "get some assurance you can pay for this thing." Eventually, the two negotiated an agreement: Christian would reveal his real name on the condition that Martin promise to serve as his sole intermediary, sign a confidentiality agreement pledging never to disclose the information to another living soul, and agree to destroy all documents and records related to the project when it was finished. "He said he was going to send the money from different banks across the country," Martin says, "because he wanted to make sure it couldn't be traced. He made it clear that he was very serious about secrecy."

Before leaving town, Christian met again with Fendley and presented the contractor with a shoe box containing a wooden model of the monument he wanted, plus 10 or so pages of detailed specifications. Fendley accepted the model and instructions but remained skeptical until Martin phoned the following Friday to say he had just received a $10,000 deposit. After that, Fendley stopped questioning and started working. "My daddy loved a challenge," says Fendley's daughter, Melissa Fendley Caruso, "and he said this was the most challenging project in the history of Elbert County."

Construction of the Guidestones got under way later that summer. Fendley's company lovingly documented the progress of the work in hundreds of photographs. Jackhammers were used to gouge 114 feet into the rock at Pyramid Quarry, searching for hunks of granite big enough to yield the final stones. Fendley and his crew held their breath when the first 28-ton slab was lifted to the surface, wondering if their derricks would buckle under the weight. A special burner (essentially a narrowly focused rocket motor used to cut and finish large blocks of granite) was trucked to Elberton to clean and size the stones, and a pair of master stonecutters was hired to smooth them.

Fendley and Martin helped Christian find a suitable site for the Guidestones in Elbert County: a flat-topped hill rising above the pastures of the Double 7 Farms, with vistas in all directions. For $5,000, owner Wayne Mullinex signed over a 5-acre plot. In addition to the payment, Christian granted lifetime cattle-grazing rights to Mullinex and his children, and Mullinex's construction company got to lay the foundation for the Guidestones.

With the purchase of the land, the Guidestones' future was set. Christian said good-bye to Fendley at the granite company office, adding, "You'll never see me again." Christian then turned and walked out the door—without so much as a handshake.

From then on, Christian communicated solely through Martin, writing a few weeks later to ask that ownership of the land and monument be transferred to Elbert County, which still holds it. Christian reasoned that civic pride would protect it over time. "All of Mr. Christian's correspondence came from different cities around the country," Martin says. "He never sent anything from the same place twice."

The astrological specifications for the Guidestones were so complex that Fendley had to retain the services of an astronomer from the University of Georgia to help implement the design. The four outer stones were to be oriented based on the limits of the sun's yearly migration. The center column needed two precisely calibrated features: a hole through which the North Star would be visible at all times, and a slot that was to align with the position of the rising sun during the solstices and equinoxes. The principal component of the capstone was a 7\8-inch aperture through which a beam of sunlight would pass at noon each day, shining on the center stone to indicate the day of the year.

The main feature of the monument, though, would be the 10 dictates carved into both faces of the outer stones, in eight languages: English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and Swahili. A mission statement of sorts (let these be guidestones to an age of reason) was also to be engraved on the sides of the capstone in Egyptian hieroglyphics, classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Babylonian cuneiform. The United Nations provided some of the translations (including those for the dead languages), which were stenciled onto the stones and etched with a sandblaster.

By early 1980, a bulldozer was scraping the Double 7 hilltop to bedrock, where five granite slabs serving as a foundation were laid out in a paddle-wheel design. A 100-foot-tall crane was used to lift the stones into place. Each of the outer rocks was 16 feet 4 inches high, 6 feet 6 inches wide, and 1 foot 7 inches thick. The center column was the same (except only half the width), and the capstone measured 9 feet 8 inches long, 6 feet 6 inches wide, and 1 foot 7 inches thick. Including the foundation stones, the monument's total weight was almost 240,000 pounds. Covered with sheets of black plastic in preparation for an unveiling on the vernal equinox, the Guidestones towered over the cattle that continued to graze beneath it at the approach of winter's end.

The monument ignited controversy before it was even finished. The first rumor began among members of the Elberton Granite Association, jealous of the attention being showered on one of their own: Fendley was behind the whole thing, they said, aided by his friend Martin, the banker. The gossip became so poisonous that the two men agreed to take a lie detector test at the Elberton Civic Center. The scandal withered when The Elberton Star reported that they had both passed convincingly, but the publicity brought a new wave of complaints. As word of what was being inscribed spread, Martin recalls, even people he considered friends asked him why he was doing the devil's work. A local minister, James Travenstead, predicted that "occult groups" would flock to the Guidestones, warning that "someday a sacrifice will take place here." Those inclined to agree were hardly discouraged by Charlie Clamp, the sandblaster charged with carving each of the 4,000-plus characters on the stones: During the hundreds of hours he spent etching the guides, Clamp said, he had been constantly distracted by "strange music and disjointed voices."

The unveiling on March 22, 1980, was a community celebration. Congressmember Doug Barnard, whose district contained Elberton, addressed a crowd of 400 that flowed down the hillside and included television news crews from Atlanta. Soon Joe Fendley was the most famous Elbertonian since Daniel Tucker, the 18th-century minister memorialized in the folk song "Old Dan Tucker." Bounded by the Savannah and Broad rivers but miles from the nearest interstate—"as rural as rural can be," in the words of current Star publisher Gary Jones—Elberton was suddenly a tourist destination, with visitors from all over the world showing up to see the Guidestones. "We'd have people from Japan and China and India and everywhere wanting to go up and see the monument," Martin says. And Fendley's boast that he had "put Elberton on the map" was affirmed literally in spring 2005, when National Geographic Traveler listed the Guidestones as a feature in its Geotourism MapGuide to Appalachia.

But many who read what was written on the stones were unsettled. Guide number one was, of course, the real stopper: maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature. There were already 4.5 billion people on the planet, meaning eight out of nine had to go (today it would be closer to 12 out of 13). This instruction was echoed and expanded by tenet number two: guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity. It didn't take a great deal of imagination to draw an analogy to the practices of, among others, the Nazis. Guide number three instructed readers to unite humanity with a living new language. This sent a shiver up the spine of local ministers who knew that the Book of Revelations warned of a common tongue and a one-world government as the accomplishments of the Antichrist. Guide number four—rule passion—faith—tradition—and all things with tempered reason—was similarly threatening to Christians committed to the primacy of faith over all. The last six guides were homiletic by comparison. protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts. let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court. avoid petty laws and useless officials. balance personal rights with social duties. prize truth—beauty—love—seeking harmony with the infinite. be not a cancer on the earth—leave room for nature—leave room for nature.

Even as locals debated the relative merits of these commandments, the dire predictions of Travenstead seemed to be coming true. Within a few months, a coven of witches from Atlanta adopted the Guidestones as their home away from home, making weekend pilgrimages to Elberton to stage various pagan rites ("dancing and chanting and all that kind of thing," Martin says) and at least one warlock-witch marriage ceremony. No humans were sacrificed on the altar of the stones, but there are rumors that several chickens were beheaded. A 1981 article in the monthly magazine UFO Report cited Naunie Batchelder (identified in the story as "a noted Atlanta psychic") as predicting that the true purpose of the guides would be revealed "within the next 30 years." Viewed from directly overhead, the Guidestones formed an X, the piece in UFO Report observed, making for a perfect landing site.

Visitors kept coming, but after several failed investigations into the identity of R. C. Christian, the media lost interest. Curiosity flared again briefly in 1993, when Yoko Ono contributed a track called "Georgia Stone" to a tribute album for avant-garde composer John Cage, with Ono chanting the 10th and final guide nearly verbatim: "Be not a cancer on Earth—leave room for nature—leave room for nature." A decade later, however, when comedienne Roseanne Barr tried to work a bit on the Guidestones into her comeback tour, nobody seemed to care.

Christian kept in touch with Martin, writing the banker so regularly that they became pen pals. Occasionally, Christian would call from a pay phone at the Atlanta airport to say he was in the area, and the two would rendezvous for dinner in the college town of Athens, a 40-mile drive west of Elberton. By this time, Martin no longer questioned Christian's secrecy. The older man had successfully deflected Martin's curiosity when the two first met, by quoting Henry James' observations of Stonehenge: "You may put a hundred questions to these rough-hewn giants as they bend in grim contemplation of their fallen companions, but your curiosity falls dead in the vast sunny stillness that enshrouds them." Christian "never would tell me a thing about this group he belonged to," Martin says. The banker received his last letter from Christian right around the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and assumes the man—who would have been in his mid-eighties—has since passed away.

The mysterious story of R. C. Christian and the absence of information about the true meaning of the Guidestones was bound to become an irresistible draw for conspiracy theorists and "investigators" of all kinds. Not surprisingly, three decades later there is no shortage of observers rushing to fill the void with all sorts of explanations.

Among them is an activist named Mark Dice, author of a book called The Resistance Manifesto. In 2005, Dice (who was using a pseudonym of his own—"John Conner"—appropriated from the Terminator franchise's main character) began to demand that the Guidestones be "smashed into a million pieces." He claims that the monument has "a deep Satanic origin," a stance that has earned him plenty of coverage, both in print and on the Web. According to Dice, Christian was a high-ranking member of "a Luciferian secret society" at the forefront of the New World Order. "The elite are planning to develop successful life-extension technology in the next few decades that will nearly stop the aging process," Dice says, "and they fear that with the current population of Earth so high, the masses will be using resources that the elite want for themselves. The Guidestones are the New World Order's Ten Commandments. They're also a way for the elite to get a laugh at the expense of the uninformed masses, as their agenda stands as clear as day and the zombies don't even notice it."

Ironically, Dice's message has mainly produced greater publicity for the Guidestones. This, in turn, has brought fresh visitors to the monument and made Elbert County officials even less inclined to remove the area's only major tourist attraction.

Phyllis Brooks, who runs the Elbert County Chamber of Commerce, pronounced herself aghast last November when the Guidestones were attacked by vandals for the first time ever. While Dice denies any involvement in the assault, he seems to have inspired it: Spray-painted on the stones were messages like "Jesus will beat u satanist" and "No one world government." Other defacements asserted that the Council on Foreign Relations is "ran by the devil," that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, and that President Obama is a Muslim. The vandals also splashed the Guidestones with polyurethane, which is much more difficult to remove than paint. Despite the graffiti's alignment with his views, Dice says he disapproves of the acts. "A lot of people were glad such a thing happened and saw it as standing up against the New World Order," Dice says, "while others who are unhappy with the stones saw the actions as counterproductive and inappropriate."

Martin winces every time he hears Dice's "Luciferian secret society" take on the Guidestones. But while he disagrees, he also admits that he doesn't know for sure. "All I can tell you is that Mr. Christian always seemed a very decent and sincere fella to me."

Dice, of course, is far from the only person with a theory about the Guidestones. Jay Weidner, a former Seattle radio commentator turned erudite conspiracy hunter, has heavily invested time and energy into one of the most popular hypotheses. He argues that Christian and his associates were Rosicrucians, followers of the Order of the Rosy Cross, a secret society of mystics that originated in late medieval Germany and claim understanding of esoteric truths about nature, the universe, and the spiritual realm that have been concealed from ordinary people. Weidner considers the name R. C. Christian an homage to the legendary 14th-century founder of the Rosicrucians, a man first identified as Frater C.R.C. and later as Christian Rosenkreuz. Secrecy, Weidner notes, has been a hallmark of the Rosicrucians, a group that announced itself to the world in the early 17th century with a pair of anonymous manifestos that created a huge stir across Europe, despite the fact that no one was ever able to identify a single member. While the guides on the Georgia stones fly in the face of orthodox Christian eschatology, they conform quite well to the tenets of Rosicrucianism, which stress reason and endorse a harmonic relationship with nature.

Weidner also has a theory about the purpose of the Guidestones. An authority on the hermetic and alchemical traditions that spawned the Rosicrucians, he believes that for generations the group has been passing down knowledge of a solar cycle that climaxes every 13,000 years. During this culmination, outsize coronal mass ejections are supposed to devastate Earth. Meanwhile, the shadowy organization behind the Guidestones is now orchestrating a "planetary chaos," Weidner believes, that began with the recent collapse of the US financial system and will result eventually in major disruptions of oil and food supplies, mass riots, and ethnic wars worldwide, all leading up to the Big Event on December 21, 2012. "They want to get the population down," Weidner says, "and this is what they think will do it. The Guidestones are there to instruct the survivors."

On hearing Weidner's ideas, Martin shakes his head and says it's "the sort of thing that makes me want to tell people everything I know." Martin has long since retired from banking and no longer lives in Elberton, yet he's still the Guidestones' official—and only—secret-keeper. "But I can't tell," the old man quickly adds. "I made a promise." Martin also made a promise to destroy all the records of his dealings with Christian, though he hasn't kept that one—at least not yet. In the back of his garage is a large plastic bin (actually, the hard-sided case of an IBM computer he bought back in 1983) stuffed with every document connected to the Guidestones that ever came into his possession, including the letters from Christian.

For years Martin thought he might write a book, but now he knows he probably won't. What he also won't do is allow me to look through the papers. When I ask whether he's prepared to take what he knows to his grave, Martin replies that Christian would want him to do just that: "All along, he said that who he was and where he came from had to be kept a secret. He said mysteries work that way. If you want to keep people interested, you can let them know only so much." The rest is enshrouded in the vast sunny stillness.

via WIRED, bitches

Simmons Unleashed! Everett Unleashed!

Bea Arthur 1922-2009

back when she was Bernice Frankel and only 19 years old

Booked Weekend

Damn it if every year it doesn't sneak up on me, but the LA Times Festival Of Books returns to UCLA this weekend.

I tell myself I should go every year, and then I don't. There's lot's of impressive authors there plying their trade, but I'm too much of a pansy to fanboy it up and pucker. So if any of you are thinking about going, let me know how it was. And if you talk to T.C. Boyle, Gore Vidal, or Ray Bradbury, I'd be interested to hear about that.

And Alyssa Milano and Kristin Chenoweth are supposed to be there too. Tasty.

Coming In Seven Days

You'll see what I'm talking about. And then regret it.

Craziness x 3

Regular

Extra

Ultra

Badge vs. Badge

I waited to put this post up, so that more of you could see Observe And Report without ruining it with discussion. I've you've seen Paul Blart: Mall Cop, then that movie was already ruined for you. Anyway, this in an interesting comparison of the two films from Cinema Blend:

It's undeniable that Observe And Report is a better movie than Paul Blart: Mall Cop. But it's also strange how many similarities there are between the two movies, despite all of Warner Bros. efforts to tell us that they have nothing to do with each other. Yes, Observe And Report is a wicked and deranged satire of American masculinity, while Paul Blart is that movie you went to with your parents when nothing else was playing in January. But they're both working off the same template, the same general idea of "Whoah, mall cops sure are funny," and in some ways draw the same conclusions about their pitiful characters.

Here are several ways in which Observe And Report is exactly like Paul Blart, from major characters to the grand finale. And before you start writing hate mail, stick around for a couple of much more important reasons that Observe And Report is completely unlike that other mall cop movie, and a brilliant movie in and of itself. Just proof that from the same basic premise and characters, two hugely different movies have emerged.

SPOILER WARNING!!! SPOILER WARNING!!!

Since we're talking about the films, you can bet many of the items on the list, especially towards the bottom, are spoilers. You've been warned.

Ways Observe And Report And Paul Blart Are Alike

The fat guy living with his fat mom who pities him
It's not just the mall cop careers that make Paul Blart and Ronnie Barnhardt seem so similar. Both obviously struggle with their weight, and both live with their equally overweight moms, who are supportive and maybe a little overbearing and, in Ronnie's case, a huge mess.

The silly two-wheeled vehicle used for transportation
Paul rides a Segway both in the mall and out, a cheap joke that's used way too many times. Ronnie rides a white Honda motorcycle, which is left as a subtle jab never mentioned by the characters. At the mall Ronnie has an equally-ridiculous ride, a white egg-shaped golf cart, but since it has four wheels, it doesn't count.

The archnemesis working outside the mall with more power
Paul Blart's rival is a SWAT team agent and former high school classmate played by Bobby Cannavale, brought in at the end to handle the robbery in progress. Ronnie's is a much bigger character played by Ray Liotta, a cop who is just as power-mad and maybe deranged as Ronnie, but just does a better job at keeping his cool.

The jokes about mall cops not actually having guns
Probably the one shared joke between the two movies is one about having to pretend you have a gun even though you're not allowed one. Apparently this is a pretty universal mall cop gripe.

The pretty girl crush who works in cosmetics in the mall
For Paul, it's weave salesgirl Amy, played by a very bland but very pretty Jayma Mays. For Ronnie, it's makeup salesgirl Brandi, played by a batshit crazy but also very pretty Anna Faris.

The night out drinking that ends badly, sorta
Paul Blart doesn't really drink, so when he goes out with the other mall workers and downs a margarita before he knows what it is, the night ends in some embarrassing karaoke and falling through a plate glass window. Brandi, on the other hand, is an experienced drinker and pill-taker, but that doesn't stop her from getting just as hammered as Paul does. And while Paul makes a connection with his dream girl while drinking (but before falling through the window), Ronnie gets some face time with the lady as well (before she falls asleep while they're having sex.)

The rivalry with one other mall employee
Paul is constantly teased by a guy working at the bank named Stuart. Ronnie has an ongoing "fuck you" battle with Saddam, who works at the lotion kiosk.

The police training montage
Both Paul and Ronnie really want to be real cops, and while Paul's dream ends in the first scene when he flunks out of the obstacle course, Ronnie hits training halfway through the movie, and is actually pretty good at it. It's the psychological profile that'll get you, though.

The right-hand man who turns out to be a thief
At the end of Paul Blart it turns out that -- gasp! -- the new cop trainee was helping the robbers all along! About three-quarters of the way through Observe And Report, it turns out that the sidekick played by Michael Pena -- gasp! -- is a robber too.

The final showdown in the beloved mall
At the end both Paul and Ronnie have to protect their own turf against invading hordes, and they're the only men for the job. For Paul, this is because he's literally the only person in the mall who hasn't been taken hostage. For Ronnie, it's because he's a complete psychopath.

Ways They Couldn't Be More Different

The tone
You'll be reading a lot about tone in Observe And Report, how it swings wildly between flat-out comedy and brutal darkness, and how depending on who you are, it's either a rousing success or completely disturbing. Whereas Paul Blart, of course, is straight-down-the-line mainstream comedy. Despite the bizarrely similar plot points, Observe And Report sets out its own path early on and only gets weirder from there.

Attitude toward its characters
Much like Jody Hill's first film, The Foot Fist Way, Observe And Report takes an indulgent but highly critical look at its middle-class characters. There's nothing necessarily wrong with driving a crappy car or working a crappy service job or taking too much pride in your miniscule power, but then again, every one of these characters is deranged in some way or another. I don't think I need to explain to you that Paul Blart's approach to its "characters" is pretty much as chess pieces to move around its happy, shiny set.

Where the story actually goes
Paul Blart's story goes in a pretty typical direction, right down to the completely predictable double-crosses and the climactic kiss at the end. In Observe And Report, though, you honestly have no idea where things will go between one scene and another, and multiple moments get nothing from the audience but stunned silence. It's remarkable that a movie can actually be that shocking in 2009.

Observe And Report is a satire
This goes back to that whole "not a mainstream comedy" thing, but the new mall cop movie is taking the notion of a gunless cop and using it to parody the armed and dangerous machismo of modern America. Paul Blart is a poor schlub who couldn't cut it as a real cop; Ronnie Barnhardt is a poor schlub who has been conditioned by his culture to think walking around armed and dangerous is the only way to be a real man.

There are actual guns in Observe And Report
Real-life mall cops must stick to their tasers and nightsticks, but Ronnie Barnhardt gets his firearms in the end.

Thursday Is For Headlines

The Dead Polo Ponies And Their Mysterious Millionaire Owner - Is this a news story or a Scooby-Doo adventure? Guest starring Don Addams, and they would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddling kids!

Apple Pulls Plug On 'Baby Shaker' iPhone Program - What's the harm if people want to pay $0.99 so they can shake a baby quiet? It's a far better deal than the $4.50 they charge to shake a real baby downtown.

Giant Mystery Blob Discovered Near Dawn Of Time - Giant Blob's mother upset by accusations. She says he's just big boned. Perhaps even husky.

Government Tally: 87,215 Iraqis Have Been Killed Since 2005 - Congratulations to Sgt. Rex Bloodthirst of Witchita, KS, who personally fragged 753 Iraqis in active tours of duty between 2006 - 2008. He also holds personal bests with the Afghanistanis (238), Somalians (90), and Canadians (6 - due to friendly fire). Way to go, killer!

Michael Phelps On Miss Calif. Rumors: "I'm Single" - Face it, he's a fugly pot smoker and she's intolerant of the gays. The only way this would have any shot of working is if they were on a reality tv show. Wait, I smell an idea...

Venezuela To Give Island To New Jersey - Whoa! I saw "New Jersey", "give", and "island" and thought they were finally going to bring Puerto Rico into the union and bounce all those guidos. Not that I think that would be much of an exchange...ever see their annual sexual assault and arrest parade in NY?

FDA To Allow 'Morning-After' Pill For 17-Year-Olds - Now if only there was something that could be done to make sure the age of consent was uniformly lowered to 17. It's too risky to guess these days...just because they're at the Britney concert, doesn't always mean they drove themselves there.

NYPD Computers Targeted By International Hackers - A plot to expunge the parking citations by the kin of the city's taxi fleet? A retalitory strike orchestrated by a united food cart front? What criminal mastermind is interested in the NYPD databases? The only thing you're gonna find through NYPD keyboards are doughnut crumbs, boogers, and pron sites.

Why Women Are Leaving Men For Other Women - Judging by some of the "women" they're leaving their men for, I don't know that there's much of a distinction. Maybe the next study they do on the subject ought to focus on the eyesight of the women leaving men. Really, Samantha Ronson? I wouldn't fuck her with somebody else's dick. Or somebody else's fake dick. I have seen many movies, and all the lesbians are pretty attractive. And don't tell me they're acting...nobody in those movies can act.

Magazine Takes Heat For Doctoring Obama Pic - You DO NOT alter the color of the presidential shorts. EVER. This is America. If you want to mess with the presidency, keep it to election results, okay buddy?

Hugh Jackman: I'm Not Gay - "But by denying it, I'm saying there is something shameful about it, and there isn't," he says. Wolverine is not using his secret backdoor mutant power, but when you do as many musicals as Jackman (even the name sounds, well, gay), it's going to raise questions. So let's leave out that he's married to an older woman and their two adopted children - that's not screaming swingin' bachelor and ladies man.

O.C. Police Investigate Rape And Killing Suspect In Two Arson Cases - How badly do I want to take a look at those police reports? Did he rape the arson before he killed it? Or did he burn the rape after the killing? Maybe he burned the killing and then raped it? People are sick these day.

Cricket Scales New Heights With Everest Match - Coming up on the evening edition: "Cricket Players Die From Exposure, Exhaustion, Elements After Foolish Mountain Match".

Clinton: Pakistan Realizing Threat From Insurgents - Hillary on the finer points of the obvious - see, she would have made a fine president! I guess it would take the Taliban being a scant 60 miles from overtaking the Pakistani capital for those folks to realise the meaning of "Taliban" isn't quite "student" as suggested.

Adoptive Mom Of Girl Found In Storage Bin Arrested - I'm pretty sure there's a "what do you call a dead 9-year old quadripligic found in a plastic bag" joke in there somewhere.

Strips And Dips

These are both spreading across the web, so as not to seem less with it or rebelious, I follow the Interweb Protocols of '02 and post these for you. I think they're both great. Fucking with your graduating class is hall of fame material. Anybody you cared about you're still in touch with, and everyone else is, well, documentary fodder. Plus getting a stripper to go in your place is supercool. And as far as the naked wizard (yes kids, that means NSFW) and his taser attraction, I say "hit him again"! Put some clothes on and stop being a douche - it's not your soapbox, it's a concert. And seriously, be very upset about your micro-penis.

Even Superheroes Are Powerless Against The Recession

I'm Not Sayin' I'm Better Than You, But...

This is from the LA Times (part of the "Jew-run liberal media", in case you didn't know):

Gregory Cochran has always been drawn to puzzles. This one had been gnawing at him for several years: Why are European Jews prone to so many deadly genetic diseases? Tay-Sachs disease. Canavan disease. More than a dozen more. It offended Cochran's sense of logic. Natural selection, the self-taught genetics buff knew, should flush dangerous DNA from the gene pool. Perhaps the mutations causing these diseases had some other, beneficial purpose. But what?

At 3:17 one morning, after a long night searching a database of scientific journals from his disheveled home office in Albuquerque, Cochran fired off an e-mail to his collaborator Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. "I've figured it out, I think," Cochran typed. "Pardon my crazed excitement." The "faulty" genes, Cochran concluded, make Jews smarter.

That provocative -- some would say inflammatory -- hypothesis has landed Cochran and Harpending in the middle of a charged debate about the link between IQ and DNA. They have been sneered at by colleagues and excoriated on Internet forums. They have been welcomed to speak at a synagogue and a Jewish medical society. They were asked to write a book; that effort, "The 10,000 Year Explosion," was published early this year.

Scientists are increasingly finding that propensities for human behaviors -- for addiction, aggression, risk-taking and more -- are written in our genes. But the idea that some groups of people are inherently smarter is troubling to many. Some scientists say it has such racist implications it's unworthy of consideration. "What are their theories about those on the opposite end of the spectrum?" asked Neil Risch, director of the Institute for Human Genetics at UC San Francisco, who finds the matter so offensive he can barely discuss it without raising his voice. "Do they have genetic theories about why Latinos and African Americans perform worse academically?"

The biological basis for intelligence can be a thankless arena of inquiry. The authors of "The Bell Curve" were vilified 15 years ago for suggesting genes played a role in IQ differences among racial groups. But Cochran, 55, and Harpending, 65, say there's no question that as a whole, Ashkenazi Jews -- those of European descent -- have an abundance of brain power. (Neither man is Jewish.) Psychologists and educational researchers have pegged their average IQ at 107.5 to 115. That's only modestly higher than the overall European average of 100, but the gap is large enough to produce a huge difference in the proportion of geniuses. When a group's average IQ is 100, the percentage of people above 140 is 0.4%; when the average is 110, the genius rate is 2.3%.

Though Jews make up less than 3% of the U.S. population, they have won more than 25% of the Nobel Prizes awarded to American scientists since 1950, account for 20% of this country's chief executives and make up 22% of Ivy League students, the pair write. "People are perfectly willing to admit that some people are taller or some people are shorter," Cochran said. "But no one wants to say 'This group is smarter.' " Once Cochran gets talking, it's hard to get him to stop. He jumps from idea to idea, beginning new sentences before finishing old ones. In e-mail discussion groups, where he befriended Harpending, he thrives on debating people and proving them wrong.

A PhD physicist, he started out in El Segundo, developing satellite imaging systems and other optics hardware for Hughes Aircraft in the 1980s. As the Cold War ended and defense budgets shrank, Cochran moved his family to Albuquerque and became an optics consultant while indulging his amateur interest in biology. He worked for a while with evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald on theories that germs cause common disorders like heart disease and Alzheimer's. The pair courted controversy by postulating that some unidentified pathogen prompts a hormonal imbalance that makes babies more likely to become gay.

Cochran read more than 15 genetics textbooks and became intrigued by the deadly diseases that disproportionately afflict Ashkenazi Jews: Tay-Sachs, a neurological disorder that debilitates children before killing them, usually by age 4. Canavan disease, which turns the brain into spongy tissue and typically claims its victims before they can start kindergarten. Niemann-Pick disease Type A, in which babies accumulate dangerous amounts of fats in various organs and suffer profound brain damage and death before their second birthday. He was struck by the fact that so many of the diseases involved problems with processing sphingolipids, the fat molecules that transmit nerve signals.

This seemed an unlikely coincidence. Genetically isolated groups often have higher rates of certain diseases. But of the more than 20,000 human genes, only 108 are known to be involved in sphingolipid metabolism. The odds of Ashkenazi Jews having four sphingolipid storage disorders by random chance are less than 1 in 100,000, he calculated. He talked it over with Harpending, an expert in human population genetics. They came to believe this was an example of heterozygote advantage -- where having two copies of a mutated gene can mean disaster but one copy is helpful.

The most famous example of this is sickle cell anemia, which strikes people of African descent who have two defective copies of the hemoglobin B gene. As a result, they make red blood cells that are too curvy to carry oxygen to critical organs. People who have only one bad copy make useful red blood cells that are deformed just enough to protect them from the malaria parasite, insulating them against the disease. Instead of sickle cell anemia, Ashkenazi Jews had to contend with Tay-Sachs, Niemann-Pick and other diseases. Instead of malaria resistance, Cochran and Harpending reasoned, Jews got an IQ boost.

The idea didn't come out of nowhere. Researchers have been drawn to the question of Jewish intelligence and genetic diseases at least since the 1920s, when some of the disorders were first being studied. Many physicians remarked on the unusual intelligence of their patients. One of the first to conduct a systematic study was Dr. Roswell Eldridge, a neurogeneticist at the National Institutes of Health. He compared IQs of 14 children with torsion dystonia -- a neurological disorder afflicting Ashkenazi Jews that twists the body through uncontrollable muscle contractions -- against 10 of their healthy siblings and against unrelated Jewish students matched by age, sex and school. The patients had an average IQ score of 121, compared with 111 for the control students, he found. Siblings had an average IQ of 119, compared with 112 for their matched controls. The results were published in 1970 in the medical journal Lancet.

Dr. Ari Zimran, director of Shaare Zedek Medical Center's Gaucher Clinic in Jerusalem, thought he would get similar results by studying the very bright patients he treated for Gaucher disease, another Ashkenazi genetic disorder in which excessive amounts of a fatty substance build up in certain organs, causing pain, fatigue and other symptoms. His small study in the 1980s found no difference between IQs of patients and unaffected relatives. A larger study might have done so, Zimran said. But he decided not to pursue it. "There is enough anti-Semitism," he said.

Cochran and Harpending are the first to make a broad case linking multiple Jewish genetic diseases to intelligence. Their theory draws on history, statistics, neurobiology and population genetics. Jews first came to Europe in the 8th and 9th centuries, long before they were known for intellectual prowess, Cochran and Harpending say. They worked as traders before taking financial jobs made available by Christians who were forbidden by the Church from charging interest. By 1100, local registries listed most Ashkenazi Jews as lenders. That set the stage for natural selection to do its work, Cochran and Harpending theorized. Jews didn't intermarry, keeping their gene pool closed. They were subjected to periodic persecution, which kept the population from outgrowing its professional niche.

According to the theory, the smartest individuals made the most money, and the wealthiest families had the most surviving children. The genes of the most intelligent Jews spread most, slowly raising the average IQ of the entire group. Over 40 generations -- roughly 1,000 years -- an increase of just 0.3 points per generation would have added up to a cumulative advantage of 12 points, Cochran and Harpending theorized. Some of their other models projected a benefit of 16 to 20 IQ points. They wrote up their theory and sent it off to a journal. It was rejected.

Harpending said he gave it to an anthropologist friend, editor of another journal, who asked to publish it there. That plan was called off. The friend, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said the paper was clearly controversial and its extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence -- which was lacking. The paper found a home in a 2006 issue of the Journal of Biosocial Science, published by Cambridge University, after its release online in 2005. The theory quickly spread among anthropologists and geneticists.

Within a few months, "every academic I came in contact with knew about this," said R. Brian Ferguson, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J. Many found it irresistible. A young colleague told Ferguson that the paper convinced him of the power of using genetics to study behavioral differences among people. To Ferguson, that was a dangerous idea. There may indeed be versions of genes that are unique to Ashkenazi Jews, but it would be impossible, he said, to prove that those genes are responsible for higher IQs. "This is not a legitimate area of research," he said.

Others are more receptive to the theory, despite its thorny implications. Dr. Melvin Konner, a biological anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta, said he's impressed by the theory's ability to explain why all the Ashkenazi diseases are clustered "on about five pages of a biochemistry textbook." But, he added, Cochran and Harpending still have to show that the genes play a direct role in brain development. "There's evidence that some of them do," he said. "It's not a crazy idea. It's just not nearly a proven idea." It would be easy to test the theory, said Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognition researcher: "See if carriers of the Ashkenazi-typical genetic mutations score higher on IQ tests than their noncarrier siblings." Cochran and Harpending readily acknowledge the need for such experiments. But they have no plans to do them. They say their role as theorists is to generate hypotheses that others can test. "One criticism about our paper is 'It can't mean anything because they didn't do any new experiments,' " Cochran said. "OK, then I guess Einstein's papers didn't mean anything either."