On its surface, the internet typically seems like a friendly place – or at least generally neutral. You’d hardly expect to find an infestation of spiders online (although other sorts of infestations would probably be unsurprising).

Unbeknownst to most casual browsers, though, the World Wide Web is (fittingly, I suppose) teeming with them. Also known as web crawlers (or bots, web scutters, or automatic indexers), these spiders are computer programs that trawl the internet for content and report their findings back to search engines and other similar services. Without web spiders, search engines like Google would be forced to assign humans to browse through and catalog each and every existing web page by hand – an impossible task, given that billions of different web pages exist.

Instead, though, search engines can deploy these automatons to do their dirty work for them (and depending on what parts of the internet you frequent, I’m sure it can be very dirty work). Most webmasters are familiar with the scurryings of internet spiders; they typically come during the night, and poke and prod and crawl over and under each part of your website. Adverbly.net has been visited by at least nine different “robots/spiders,” including Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp, Ask, Relevant Noise, and several somewhat-creepy “unknown robots” identified only by short strings like “robot,” “spider,” or “bot.” I can’t help but wonder who directed these unknown bots to crawl this website; one visited nearly 200 times.

If you’re interested in learning more, you can visit the quite-extensive Wikipedia page about web crawlers, or Google’s helpful-but-brief Googlebot FAQ.

Some say that a spider in your house isn’t all bad, because spiders hunt and kill house centipedes. I’ll take house spiders over house centipedes any day. And I definitely don’t ever want to meet an internet centipede.

Today’s science news is rife with interestingly unsettling stories. For instance:

• Apparently, hundreds of small earthquakes have been rattling Yellowstone National Park for the last two weeks. This is especially unnerving considering another recent article about how scientists are worried that the Haitian earthquake indicates increased seismic activity in this part of the world.
• The body takes abstract thoughts literally
• Bad news for those of you who’ve pissed off bees: they can hold a grudge. It seems that honeybees can remember human faces.
• Bad news for those of you who’ve pissed off robots: it seems that robots have evolved to learn hunting and cooperation.
• octopuses (octopi/octopodes?) are pretty smart. I don’t recommend pissing them off.

This concludes our transmission. Until next time!

Danny Casolaro, born in 1947 in McLean, Virginia, was a freelance writer and investigative journalist. And the sentence you just read is the only part of this story that isn’t bizarre.

Danny Casolaro was found dead in a Martinsburg, West Virginia hotel room bathtub in 1991. His wrists had been slashed 10-12 times, and he’d apparently left a note.

Casolaro’s family, though, insisted that his death had not been a suicide. He’d been squeamish about blood his whole life, and to slash his wrists made no sense to them. He’d given no indication that he’d wanted to kill himself. For several months prior to his death, Casolaro had received threatening, menacing phone calls from unknown callers – one promised to “cut his body and throw it to the sharks.” And his trip to Martinsburg, West Virginia had a strange purpose. He’d intended, according to Wikipedia, to

 meet a source about a story he called “the Octopus.” This centered
around a sprawling conspiracy theory involving an international cabal, and
primarily featuring a number of stories familiar to journalists who
worked in and near Washington, D.C. in the 1980’s–the Inslaw
case, about a software manufacturer whose owner accused the Justice
Department of stealing its work product; the October Surprise theory
that during the Iran hostage crisis, Iran
deliberately held back American hostages to help Ronald
Reagan win the 1980 presidential
election; the collapse of the Bank of Credit and
Commerce International; and Iran-Contra.^[2]

There certainly seems to be at least a kernel of something sinister and mysterious at the heart of Casolaro’s investigations. The Inslaw case led to three trials in federal court and two congressional hearings; the Justice Department was accused of “deliberately attempting to drive Inslaw into Chapter 7
liquidation; and of distributing and selling stolen software for covert intelligence operations
of foreign governments such as Canada, Israel, Singapore, Iraq, Egypt,
and Jordan; and of becoming directly involved in murder,” among other things. Inslaw, which had developed a people-tracking program called “Promis,” claimed that the government had stolen the software, created a secret backdoor in the program, and resold it to various entities.

And shortly before his death, “Casolaro told people that he was nearly ready
to reveal a wide-ranging conspiracy spanning the Inslaw case,
Iran-Contra, the alleged October Surprise conspiracy, and the closure of
BCCI.^[7]
David Corn writes in The Nation that the papers Casolaro left
behind reveal few clues, except that he was in over his head, but was
tenacious.”

The day before he died, Casolaro was sighted with “a man described by a waitress as ‘maybe Arab or Iranian.'” In his alleged suicide note, written on a single sheaf torn from a legal pad, he wrote “To those who I love the most: Please forgive me for the worst possible
thing I could have done. Most of all I’m sorry to my son. I know deep
down inside that God will let me in.”

At Casolaro’s funeral, “as the ceremony drew to a close, a highly decorated military officer in U.S. Army dress reportedly arrived in a limousine.
Accompanied by another man in plain clothes, the military man
approached the coffin just before it was lowered into the ground, laid a
medal on the lid, and saluted. No one recognized either man and, to
this day, they have never been identified.”

Some enterprising conspiracy theorists have attempted to pick up the pieces and finish Casolaro’s work; a quick Google search will reveal theirs. It’s unlikely, though, that anyone has successfully unraveled Casolaro’s “Octopus” – and we’ll probably never find out whether it was an actual conspiratorial entity, or merely the product of a suicidal mind.

The last round-up was successful, so here’s another bunch of odd odds and ends from around the free world:

• “Ice Cube” dispenser
• Huntsman spiders are tough to catch
• A gallery of strange places on Mars
• Chupacabra body turns out to be hoax
• The weird experiences of 7 (non-Chupacabra) dead bodies
• Urinal fountain art installation
• Scum river bridge
• Tea submarine
• Make your own mossarium
• Crocodiles recognize their own names

There’s a lot today. All interesting stuff! Check it out, if anything catches your eye.

There are as many as 100 million species in the world. Of these, perhaps 2 million have been discovered, identified, and assigned a scientific name. Each year, scientists find and classify thousands more species from every kingdom and phylum.

Scientists aren’t the only ones on the lookout for undiscovered species and unidentified creatures, though. Around the globe, people try to name and understand animals that are unknown, frightening, or bizarre.  Common animals or unknown species are often misidentified as monstrous and sometimes become associated with folk stories and creatures of legend and mythology. Some even attempt to track and discover “legendary” animals like the Loch Ness Monster of Scotland or the Chupacabra of Latin America; the pseudoscientific study of these “hidden” creatures is called cryptozoology.

Why am I writing about this? Because a village in Lancashire, England is apparently being terrorized by an unidentifiable creature that has come to be called the “Buckshaw Beast.” From the Daily Mail:

Some say it resembles a prowling hyena, others a ferocious wolf.

While there are those who have seen the mysterious creature menacing Buckshaw Village and describe it as a terrifying cross between a wild boar and some kind of big cat.

Whatever it is, it has been blamed for mauling several deer to death, and one resident’s Alsatian dogs were left quivering with fear after a particularly close encounter.

Now one intrepid villager has taken a photograph of what locals have dubbed the Buckshaw Beast, sparking a feverish online debate about what exactly it might be.

The initial consensus was that it is a wild boar forced out of the countryside by the cold weather as it strives to find food, but experts have said one would be unlikely to kill deer.

It certainly sounds frightening. My guess? That it is a boar after all – but who knows? You can read the whole article here.

From LiveScience:

 Like your shoelaces or electrical cords, light can get twisted into
knots. Now, scientists have used a computer-controlled hologram and
theoretical physics to turn a light beam into pretzel-like shapes.

The twisted feat not only led to some pretty cool
images, but the results have implications for future laser devices,
the researchers say.

“In a light
beam, the flow of light through space is similar to water flowing
in a river,” said lead researcher Mark Dennis of the University of
Bristol in England. Even though the light from something like a laser
pointer travels in a straight line, it can also flow in whirls and
eddies, Dennis explained. 

Read more here. 

RetroThing calls attention to this short YouTube documentary about the “Amen Break,” the world’s most important drum loop:

It’s not new, but Nate Harrision’s six-year-old look at one of the most sampled drum beats in the world is still worth a listen.

“This sample was used extensively in
early hip hop and sample-based music, and became the basis for
drum-and-bass and jungle music — a six-second clip that spawned several
entire subcultures. Nate Harrison’s 2004 video is a meditation on the
ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history
of a remarkable music clip.”

Very interesting stuff.

It ranges from silly to unsettling. I’ll let you judge for yourself:

It was apparently created by the mysterious Rhode Island-based art collective Forcefield, and I’ve heard that it’s supposed to be a recreation of what someone experienced during an acid trip, but that could just be speculation (albeit believable speculation).