"Three severed right feet have washed ashore on the Gulf Islands (British Colombia) in the past six months, in what police say is one of the most bizarre cases in recent memory.

The latest foot, still in its sneaker, was found last Friday on Valdes Island, a small community near Nanaimo that does not have regular ferry service and is accessible only by private boat or float plane.

RCMP say they're not sure whether foul play is involved and are trying to match any missing-person cases to the severed foot.

Two other right feet, both in size 12 men's sneakers, washed ashore on Gabriola and Jedediah islands last August. RCMP collected DNA from the grisly remains but could not match them to anyone in police databases. The three islands are within 60 kilometres of each other.

"We'll be using pathology examinations and anthropology examinations to garner as much information as we possibly can about the remains," said Jeff Dolen, B.C.'s assistant deputy chief coroner.

Although it is somewhat common to find individual body parts (Well yea, if you're an assistant deputy chief coroner it is,) , Dolen said this would be "the first instance of three such similar remains being discovered" in such proximity."

The other day I began to wonder about the relationship between the words "Polynesia" and "Amnesia"-why did they have the same ending? Was amnesia poetically considered an "island of the mind"? It turns out that although both are from the Greek, they have different roots.

"Why would Google need two data centers in a state with only four million residents? Why would they need to buy 520 acres in a Goose Creek industrial park when that's probably 100 times as much land as any conceivable data center would require?

Google is building a LOT of data centers. The company appears to be as attracted to cheap and reliable electric power as it is to population proximity. In Goose Creek they bought those 520 acres from the local state-owned electric utility, which probably answers the land question posed above. By buying out all the remaining building sites in an industrial park owned by an electric utility, Google guarantees itself a vast and uninterruptible supply of power, much as it has done in Oregon by building a data center next to a hydroelectric dam or back here again in Columbia by building near a nuclear power station.

Of course this doesn't answer the question why Google needs so much capacity in the first place, but I have a theory on that. I think Google is building for a future they see but most of the rest of us don't. I'll go further and guess that Google is planning to build similar data centers in many states and that the two centers they are apparently preparing to build here in South Carolina are probably intended mainly to SERVE South Carolina. That's perhaps 100,000 servers for four million potential users or 40 users per server. What computing service could possibly require such resources?

The answer is pretty simple. Google intends to take over most of the functions of existing fixed networks in our lives, notably telephone and cable television."

Glancing sideways is becoming more generally recognized as about the best way of doing what we used to call futurism.

"The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect "total accuracy" from the Bible.

"We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision," they say in The Gift of Scripture."

"Losses from organized retail theft have topped $30 billion annually, triple what they were a decade ago, according to the National Retail Federation, leading to higher prices, frequent out-of-stock problems and a more cumbersome shopping experience for consumers."

" leave no property behind me of which it is necessary to dispose. As for the everyday objects that were of use to me, I ask they be distributed as seems appropriate. My personal notes are to be burned. I ask that this be attended to by Father Stanislaw (Eds: his personal secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz), whom I thank for his collaboration and help, so prolonged over the years and so understanding. As for all other thanks, I leave them in my heart before God Himself, because it is difficult to express them."

"So one day I looked at Podcasts. I liked some aspects of them, so I am downloading all of them. Every one. I am going back and swiping older ones as I can find them, but I'm still in the process of getting every single one, so it's taking some time. I have them in languages I've never spoken, and I have listened to less than one tenth of one percent of them. At last count I'm at 75 gigabytes of podcasts which works out to roughly 7,500 individual files. I suspect there are doubles and many missed files, but we'll see if that comes with time.

I'll take a moment to describe how I am doing this. Obviously, I need some space to store all these podcasts, but space, these days, is very cheap. I watch sites that provide specials for hardware, and can purchase a 250 gigabyte hard drive for $100. It's a drive type that is prone to failure, so I buy two. At home, I run these drives on USB2 enclosures, on two separate machines, and I use a program called rsync to keep them synchronized. I download podcasts using a program called doppler, which has several advantages to its approach that are useful for archiving. I have the podcasts on a network drive, so I am not beholden to a specific machine to download the podcasts. I found very quickly that Doppler Radio didn't check to see if you had pointed it to multiple copies of the same feeds (it assumes you're using such a small amount of feeds, that you would always notice the doubles yourself), so I wrote a perl script that yanked out doubles. This has held up for the time being, and while I don't have firm numbers on how much disk space per day this process is taking, I'm not too worried about it."

"Welcome to CantFindOnGoogle.com

Most of the time, you punch what you want to know into Google, and you instantly get what you're looking for. But have you ever had that experience, where you try query after query and no matter how hard you try, you just can't find what you're looking for? That's what this site is for -- because the things Google can't find is more interesting than the stuff Google can find."

" The decisive battle for the liberation of Europe began sixty years ago this month when a Soviet guerrilla army emerged from the forests and swamps of Belorussia to launch a bold surprise attack on the mighty Wehrmacht's rear. The partisan brigades, including thousands of Jewish fighters and concentration-camp escapees, devastated the rail lines linking the German Army Group Center to its bases in Poland and Eastern Prussia.

Three days later, on 22 June -- the third anniversary of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union -- Marshal Zhukov gave the order for the main assault on German front lines. Twenty-six thousand heavy guns and rocket launchers pulverized German fortifications in a matter of minutes. The banshee-like screams of the Katyusha rockets were punctually followed by the roar of 4000 tanks and the battle cries (in more than 40 languages!) of 1.6 million Soviet soldiers. Thus began Operation Bagration, an assault launched over a 500 hundred mile long front.

But what American has ever heard of Operation Bagration? June 1944 signifies Omaha Beach not the crossing of the Dvina River. Yet the Soviet summer offensive was almost an entire order of magnitude larger than Operation Overlord (the invasion of Normandy) in both the scale of forces engaged and the direct cost to the Germans.

By the end of summer, the Red Army (which included full divisions of Poles and Czechs) had reached the gates of Warsaw as well as the high passes of the Carpathians which command the entrance to Slovakia as well as Hungary. Soviet tanks, in a stunning reverse blitzkrieg, had caught Army Group Center in steel pincers and destroyed it. The Germans would lose more than 300,000 men in Belorussia alone. Another huge German army had been encircled and would soon be annihilated along the Baltic coast. The road to Berlin had been opened.

Thank Ivan."

"A veteran South Tucson police sergeant is under investigation for firing his stun gun to subdue a handcuffed 9-year-old girl.

At the request of Chief Sixto Molina, the Pima County Sheriff's Department is trying to determine if the sergeant committed a crime when he sent a jolt through the child's body.

The police officer used a Taser on the girl at about 5:30 p.m. May 8, Molina said. The nonlethal weapon uses a pulsating electrical charge to immobilize a person for several seconds.

"I'll be the first to admit, you've got a veteran sergeant Tasing a 9-year-old girl, it doesn't look good," said Molina."

Microsoft is expected to recommend that the "average" Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.

The killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. They bragged about dwarfing the carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing and originally scheduled their bloody performance for its anniversary. Klebold boasted on video about inflicting "the most deaths in U.S. history." Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. If they hadn't been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The climax would be captured on live television. It wasn't just "fame" they were after?Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term?they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.

One by one, the 14 men, looking kindly, sitting politely as if engaged in simple conversation at a coffee shop, detail their experiences.

First up is a former officer, Yoshio Tsuchiya, who in a letter of contrition and apology written to the Chinese government, admitted killing 328 people and arrested, tortured and imprisoned nearly 2,000 Chinese citizens. Tsuchiya explains Japan's policy of 'Strict Disposal', better known as unprovoked genocide: "We rounded up suspicious-looking Chinese and executed them in the back of the head. Doing this proved your loyalty to the emperor, and brought you great honor as an MP".

" The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity."

The parents of four boys adopted from New Jersey's troubled foster care system were arrested Friday, two weeks after police found that the youngsters, ages 9 to 19, had been so starved that none weighed more than 50 pounds, the Camden County prosecutor said yesterday.

At 19, the oldest was 4 feet tall and weighed 45 pounds. The police initially thought he was 10 years old. The youngsters' condition was discovered when a neighbor called the police because the 19-year-old was going through the trash at 2:30 a.m. Oct. 10, looking for food, according to Prosecutor Vincent Sarubbi.

The four had been locked out of the kitchen of their house in this blue-collar Philadelphia suburb and were fed a diet of pancake batter, peanut butter and breakfast cereal, eating wallboard and insulation to sate their hunger, investigators said.

A caseworker from the state Division of Youth and Family Services, the agency that oversees the system, had visited the home 38 times in the past two years, investigators said.