Free Republic

When Jason Padgett pours cream into his morning coffee, this is what he sees: “I watch the cream stirred into the brew. The perfect spiral is an important shape to me. It’s a fractal. Suddenly, it’s not just my morning cup of joe, it’s geometry speaking to me.” Padgett’s world is bursting with mathematical patterns. He is one of a few people in the world who can draw approximations of fractals, the repeating geometric patterns that are building blocks of everything in the known universe, by hand. Tree leaves outside his window are evidence of Pythagoras’ theorem. The arc that...

In the beginning it was banker suicides. Then about two weeks ago, suicides were replaced by outright murders after the execution-style killing of the CEO of a bank in otherwise sleepy (and tax evasive) Lichtenstein by a disgruntled client. Then on Friday news hit of another execution-type murder in just as sleepy, if not so tax evasive, Belgium, where in the city of Vise, a 37-year-old Director at BNP Paribas Fortis was murdered alongside his wife and a 9 year old nephew in a premeditated and orchestrated drive-by shooting. L'venir reports: According to Marcel Neven, Mayor of Vise, nothing can...

Good Morning! I'm wishing to open up a new email account and depart Gmail, basically because of Google policies. Does anyone know of a secure, FREE, email service? Many thanks in advance.

Almost 10 years on FR. It is time for me to go. To protect my privacy. You understand. I doubt anything is secure any longer. I will miss you all. hci0904@gmail.com

I've been heating my home primarily with a wood burning stove for two years. A Napoleon 1400. In the past couple of weeks, I've been getting a smoke backdraft into the room when I open to load more logs. The wood is well seasoned, but I'm guessing I may have an obstruction in the air intake, preventing a proper draft. Anyone have a similar problem in the past and how best to deal with it? I have supplemental gas heat, but much prefer to use the wood stove. Thanks in advance!

Where the heck can I get live election results?

Hey! I've been having an issue with Firefox over the past month or so. In the tools/options page I have it set up for scrolling pages with the mouse wheel. Lately, almost on a daily basis, when I pull up certain webpages the wheel scrolling goes dormant and I have to use the scroll bar on right side of screen. This just happened a few moments ago when I pulled up FR. It seems random and no particular website that I can discern causes it. When this happens I cannot go to the tools/options page and reset the scrolling. The...

The Federal Aviation Administration is working towards putting the finishing touches on rules and regulations for widespread domestic drone use, and the agency expects as many as 30,000 UAVs will be in America’s airspace by the decade’s end. As Russia Today notes, given that the department has already addressed the issue of acquiring drones to give the DHS a better eye of domestic doings, though, those law enforcement operations in question could very well transcend away from legitimate uses and quickly cause civil liberty concerns from coast-to-coast. All drones will be equipped with Electro-Optical/Infra-Red sensors, as well as the technology...

ALL EUROPEAN LIFE DIED IN AUSCHWITZ By Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez I walked down the street in Barcelona , and suddenly discovered a terrible truth - Europe died in Auschwitz ... We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world. The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned....

According to this video, it's the largest rifle made.

I've got a Sony laptop, which has been a great machine. But, It fell off my bed onto the floor several weeks ago and I can't get the thing to boot up to windows. It powers up, but won't start in any mode. I think a connection got jarred loose inside, maybe disk drive or something else. I've got the back off the machine now and have cleaned out with some air, pulled out and snapped back in all the circuit boards that I could feasibly see to do. Any other suggestions before I try and put back together and...

“They Did It!” The President just concluded a frenzied “jobs” bus tour to explain why unemployment is at 9.1% — after borrowing nearly $5 trillion in stimulus the last three years. You know the usual suspects responsible for our, not his, malaise: George Bush did it; the Republican obstructionists in the Congress who were wary of approving another $2 trillion in debt did it; the Tea Party did it; Standard and Poor’s did it; the Japanese earthquake did it; the Japanese tsunami and nuclear accidents did it; the Middle East unrest did it; the European debt crisis did it; new...

I'm absolutely sure someone on FR can handle this in a snap. I'm trying to find the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle. I only know the length of one triangle side intersecting the 90 degree angle. That is 104.625. I also know the other two angles, in degrees, in the triangle, are 17 and 73 degrees. I'm pretty certain I've worked this type of problem before, but it was many, many years ago. Thanks in advance!!

A local photographer and litigious advocate for handicap accessibility in the Florida Keys died Monday at the age of 65. Michelle Wisniewski was an ardent and often unpopular activist for the Americans with Disabilities Act, and sued or threatened to sue more than 20 local businesses and the city of Key West over handicap accessibility issues. She was president for five years of the Florida-based Association for Disabled Americans, which boasts 441 civil lawsuits filed seeking compliance with the ADA, according to the association's May 2010 newsletter. It is unclear whether the association will follow through with any pending litigation....

A Miami man came close to a super-sized nightmare at a Tavernier fast food restaurant Tuesday morning when he inadvertently shot himself with a concealed handgun while waiting in line to order. Rafael Juan Ubeda, 44, who also has a home in Cudjoe Key, was inside the McDonald's at 91400 Overseas Highway at 10:30 a.m. when he reportedly reached inside his coat pockets to warm his hands and accidentally discharged a .22-caliber Derringer revolver. The single bullet reportedly entered Ubeda's right thigh and exited below his right knee cap. The bullet did not strike anyone else inside. A restaurant manager...

I've never heard of this Nigel Farage before, a self described "Euro-skeptic". But he gives one hell of a speech here, in my opinion.

A half-pound of cocaine and thousands in cash were confiscated and nine illegal immigrants were arrested during a highway interdiction operation Friday that employed modern imaging software to find hidden compartments in trucks and shipping containers. The gamma ray imaging technology was used to examine seven trucks stopped at a Florida Department of Transportation weigh station in Islamorada, Monroe County sheriff's spokeswoman Becky Herrin said. "This is the first time that we've worked with the [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] using the imaging technology," Herrin said of the Vehicle and Cargo Inspection System (VACIS), "It's commonly used at seaports and...

An attempt to destroy a political system necessarily coincides with an attempt to destroy the economy of that system. Economic sabotage is not the fictitious activity of nonexistent groups. It is the activity of real enemies, foreign and domestic. Watch the players at work. Consider which nations are manipulating oil prices, grain prices, and strategic metals. Ask yourself what their goal is. Why are they doing it? Are they attempting to raise the standard of living within their own countries, or attempting to smash the standard of living in the United States? In a recent speech on August 3, David...

ALL FREEPERS PLEASE KEEP A LOOKOUT FOR MY DAUGHTER WHO HAS BEEN TAKEN BY WIFE. WIFE FALSELY ACCUSED ME OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE 3 WEEKS AGO, RESTRAINING ORDER LIFTED BY JUDGE 5PM, MAY 12. WIFE TAKES DAUGHTER AND FLEES SOUTH FLORIDA, DRIVING 2009 BLACK BMW 328I SPORT WAGON. POSSIBLY HEADED FOR SAN ANTONIO, TX. BOLO!! BOLO!! LILLIAN EMMA HASKELL AGE 2 DOB--6/22/2008 BROWN HAIR, BROWN EYES VERY SMALL FOR AGE 31 INCHES TALL 18 POUNDS WEIGHT HAS MEDICAL NEEDS TRAVELLING WITH MARY ANN HASKELL BROWN HAIR, BROWN EYES COB--7/7/1953---AGE 56 5'8--145 POUNDS

Crony Capitalist tendencies do not discriminate with respect to "side of the aisle." The left has been as busily handing out delicious treats to its favored students as the right. Tacking on a reverse bill of attainder cleverly (or not so cleverly) disguised in prose designed to deter key word searches and in order to slip cash to a friend of a friend is as American as reality shows. Accordingly, the somber faces of Zero Hedge readers should register exactly no surprise whatsoever on learning that the Health Care Swill harbors a series of such glory hole surprises. Consider this...