When numbers instead of letters are used to spell a whole word it is called leet – which, in leet, is written as 1337. Another example is n00b, a term for newbie. Andsoforth.

Leet originated in the 1980s in relay chat services and on bulletin boards. If you look at it for the first time it might seem difficult to understand but you’ll be surprised how quickly you will catch it. Train your brain with this example of leet:

7H15 M3554G3
53RV35 7O PR0V3
H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N
D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5!
1MPR3551V3 7H1NG5!
1N 7H3 B3G1NN1NG
17 WA5 H4RD BU7
N0W, 0N 7H15 LIN3
Y0UR M1ND 1S
R34D1NG 17
4U70M471C4LLY
W17H 0U7 3V3N
7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17,
B3 PROUD! 0NLY
C3R741N P30PL3 C4N
R3AD 7H15.

Glad you caught that! As you’ve noticed, you can also combine the use of leet, textese and normal spelling or even morph it.

5p34k1ng 0f wh1ch, a1s0 c: Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch

Our solar system makes up only a tiny part of the Milky Way. To compare, if the entire Milky Way would be the size of the United States, our solar system would only be the size of an American penny.

Earth's position in the Milky Way

It’s not that Earth is that small. Earth weighs 6 sextillion, 600 quintillion tons. Yet, 764 planets the size of Earth will fit into Saturn, the second largest planet in our Solar System and our farthest planet visible by the naked eye.

Saturn and Earth in comparison

At the same time, Saturn – named after the Roman god of agriculture – is small compared to our sun. You can fit 1,700 planets the size of Saturn into the sun. It takes Saturn 29½ years to orbit the sun. Even so, compared to other suns our sun is small (the biggest known sun, VY Canus Majoris, is 2,000 times the size of our sun) and only one of an estimated 200 billion stars (and more planets) in the Milky Way.

It takes our sun 250 million years to complete one rotation of the Milky Way.

But consider that the Milky Way is only one of 200 billion+ galaxies, each with billions of stars, in the known universe. Our Milky Way is not even the biggest galaxy, being only 100,000 light years across (and 1,000 light years in thickness). The Milky Way is a spec in the universe: the size of the universe is estimated to be 13,7 billion light years in size.

A tiny ship

Earth is a tiny ship in a vast ocean. The famous astronomer Carl Sagan constantly tried to remind us of our fragile place in the universe. In 1990, he requested that the space craft Voyager 1 take a picture of us at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion km) away from Earth. The picture tells the story: Earth is a Pale Blue Dot in the galaxy.

Earth is a Pale Blue Dot in the Milky Way

Our humble home

70% of the earth’s surface is covered in water. We live on a small part of earth. We live on a spec of a spec in the universe. Honestly, it shouldn’t be that difficult to reach out to each other.

The controversial practice, known as “pay for delay,” occurs as part of patent litigation settlements and typically buys a brand-name drug company more time to sell its blockbuster drug exclusively until its patent on the drug expires. Federal Trade Commission regulators have said the practice costs American consumers an estimated $3.5 billion each year, and have pushed for a ban.

But now it appears the drug company Pfizer is adding yet another twist to its efforts to delay generic competitors. As The New York Times reports, the company seems to have struck a deal with certain pharmacy benefit managers – the middlemen in the pharmaceutical industry – to block generic versions of Lipitor.

Lipitor, Pfizer’s blockbuster cholesterol-lowering drug, is among the world’s best-selling pharmaceuticals, and this isn’t Pfizer’s first attempt to protect it.

In 2008, the company settled patent litigation with Ranbaxy, an Indian generic manufacturer, striking a deal that guaranteed that Pfizer would not have to face challenges from Ranbaxy’s generic version of Lipitor until the end of November 2011. Pfizer granted Ranbaxy some incentives as part of the bargain but said it made no payments. Nonetheless, a group of pharmacies filed suit against Pfizer and Ranbaxy last week over the deal, calling it 201Can extraordinary ripoff201D and alleging price-fixing between the two companies.

Now that it’s November 2011, Ranbaxy and other drugmakers are gearing up to offer cheaper versions of Lipitor. As The Times reports, Pfizer has tried to counter this competition by offering big discounts on Lipitor to the middlemen that process prescriptions for pharmacies and other buyers, giving them discounts in exchange for having them block generic versions of Lipitor for another six months. Here’s The Times:

Many drugstores are being asked to block prescriptions for a generic version of Pfizer’s Lipitor starting Dec. 1, when the company loses its patent for the blockbuster cholesterol drug and generic competition begins.

Medco Health Solutions, among the nation’s largest pharmacy benefit managers, is one of the companies issuing instructions, seeking to have pharmacists keep filling prescriptions with the more expensive Lipitor for six months.

See some of those instructions sent to pharmacies by the pharma middlemen. The documents were released by Pharmacists United for Truth and Transparency, a group of independent pharmacists. (We first noticed them posted at the blog Pharmalot.)

According to the group, Pfizer’s plan would mean that customers at the pharmacies serviced by these middlemen would receive Lipitor even when they’ve been prescribed a generic version. Because Lipitor co-pays would also be reduced to the level of generic co-pays, customers might not notice, but employers and Medicare Part D would pay the same amount as before, despite the availability of a cheaper alternative.

A Pfizer spokesman gave The Times a statement saying that the company was committed to ensuring that customers had access to Lipitor but declined to answer additional questions.

Article by Marian Wang, ProPublica

Of the 650 types of leeches, only a small number of Hirudo species are used, the most popular being the Hirudo medicinalis. They’re usually sold 20 to a pack, at US$7 apiece.

Also see Use of the medicinal leech (but please note that the graphics are not for the faint of heart).

Following Google and Facebook, YouTube has grown into the third most visited website with 48 hours of videos uploaded every minute. That is the equivalent of 240,000 full-length films every week or nearly 8 years of viewing content uploaded every day. 3 billion YouTube videos are viewed by 20 million people every day. Hard to believe, but that is an average of 150 video views per visitor per day… even with many videos being only a few seconds in duration.

First video on YouTube

The very first video uploaded to YouTube is still there. Co-founder Jawed Karim’s “Me at the zoo” was uploaded at 8:27 pm on Saturday April 23rd, 2005 and has been viewed more than 5 million times. It’s only 19 seconds in duration and not quite the most exciting video out there which perhaps is why it has not gone viral. True viral videos would rack up that amount of views within a day. In comparison, Susan Boyle’s video was watched more than 100 million times in less than 2 weeks after it was uploaded.

What does “Viral” mean?

The saying “Going viral” comes from the term “Viral Marketing” which is said to have been originated by Tim Draper and Jeffrey Rayport to explain the popularity of a product spreading like a virus. Which aptly describes YouTube, by far the most dominant video viewing service in the world.

Fastest trending viral videos

The word viral is now ubiquitously associated with trending YouTube videos. A video made famous by Internet users sharing it on social networks and through email can bring shame on the unscrupulous but can also bring stardom – and wealth – to an artist, votes for a politician, laughs at pranks, support for good causes, and respect for supporters of animal rights.

10 Top YouTube videos:

1. Justin Bieber – Baby – 630 million+ views,

2. Lady Gaga – Bad Romance – 420 million+ views,

3. Shakira – Waka Waka – 400 million+ views,

4. Jennifer Lopez – On the Floor – 390million+ views,

5. Eninem – Love The Way You Lie – 380 million+ views,

6. Charlie bit my finger… Again! – 370 million+ views,

7. Eninem – Not Afraid – 280 million+ views,

8. Justin Bieber – One Time – 260 million+ views,

9. Justin Bieber – Never Say Never – 260 million+ views,

10. Parto in un letto – 250 million+ views.

The Only Constant

Since change is the only constant – re Heraclitus (535 – 475 BC) – today’s most viral video will be forgotten all too soon. But for this day of writing, one of the fastest trending viral videos happens to be one that will tuck at the strings of your heart -

An adventure motorcyclist saves the life of a calf:

For the record, ADV rider Johan Gray used a Drift HD170 Stealth Helmet Cam to capture the precious moments.

Agatha Christie donated the rights to the play to her grandson, Matthew Prichard, as a present for his 7th birthday. The movie rights were sold in 1956 – to British producer John Woolf – but on condition that a film version won’t be released within 6 months after the staging.

Woolf passed away in 1999 and The Mousetrap is, after more than 50 years after its debut, still staged at the St Martin’s theater in London. Having passed the 24,000th performance, it is the longest-running show of any type in history. And, obviously, there won’t be a movie version until at least 6 months after the last stage performance in London.

Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (which introduced Hercule Poirot to the world), was rejected 6 times before it was published in 1920. She killed off her famous private investigator Poirot character a year before she died in 1976… but not before he became almost as well known as she was. Poirot appeared in 33 novels, 51 short stories and numerous radio plays, movies and TV series.

Under which name did Agatha Christie write romance novels? Mary Westmacott.

World’s first novel was written by a woman

But a ProPublica investigation has found that these groups and others are being quietly bankrolled by corporations, unions and other special interests. Their main interest in the once-a-decade political fight over redistricting is not to help voters in the communities they claim to represent but mainly to improve the prospects of their political allies or to harm their enemies.

The number of these purportedly independent redistricting groups is rising, but their ties remain murky. Contributions to such groups are not limited by campaign finance laws, and most states allow them to take unlimited amounts of money without disclosing the source.

Today’s story is the first chapter in an in-depth examination of how powerful players are turning to increasingly sophisticated tools and techniques to game the redistricting process, with voters ultimately losing.

For special interests, there’s a huge potential payoff from investing in such efforts.

“Reshaping a map is very powerful” for donors, said Spencer Kimball, a political consultant who is executive director of Boston-based Fair Districts Mass. “It’s a big opportunity to have influence at the state level and the congressional level not one race at a time but for 10 years.”

Skillful redistricting can, of course, help create Republican or Democratic districts, but it can also grace incumbents with virtually guaranteed re-election or leave them with nearly no chance at all. In the process, it can also create seats almost certain to be held by minorities or break those same groups apart, ensuring that they have almost no voice.

But it’s not cheap, and that’s where corporations and other outside interests come in. They can provide the cash for voter data, mapping consultants and lobbyists to influence state legislators, who are in charge of redistricting in most states. Outside interests can also fund the inevitable lawsuits that contest nearly every state’s redistricting plan after it is unveiled.

In Minnesota, for instance, the Republicans’ legal efforts to influence redistricting are being financed through a group called Minnesotans for a Fair Redistricting.

Fair Redistricting describes itself as independent, but it has much of its leadership in common with the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, a group with ties to the political empire of the Koch brothers, industrialists from Kansas who’ve spent millions funding conservative causes. The head of the Freedom Foundation, Annette Meeks, told ProPublica she has “no involvement” with Fair Redistricting. But both organizations’ tax filings list the same address: Meeks’ home address.

Fair Redistricting is registered under the name of her husband, Jack Meeks, who is also on the board of the Freedom Foundation. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Who is actually paying for Fair Redistricting’s lawsuit and lawyers? And what district lines are they pushing for? The group doesn’t have to say and has so far kept its finances and plans under wraps. Annette Meeks did not respond to questions about the group’s donors or its ties to the Koch brothers, but she said the group complies with all legal filing requirements. But the group’s public tax filings contain no information on its contributors.

Fair Districts Mass, which says it’s advocating better representation of minorities in and around Boston, is another window into how money can move through the system. The group describes itself as “citizen-funded.” But it also sought permission from state election officials for unlimited corporate funding. Donations “can include corporate contributions,” the group’s website announces. “Better yet,” the site notes, “we are not required to file reports regarding donations or expenditures.”

The group says its proposed maps would lead to better representation of Latinos and African-Americans.

“Minorities are very underrepresented in Massachusetts politics,” said Kimball, the group’s executive director. “We’re here to change that.”

But minority groups say Fair Districts’ proposed maps would not likely help them. (See ProPublica’s interactive feature showing the group’s maps and analysis.)

“I don’t see a person of color getting elected in this district, if that’s the goal,” said Alejandra St. Guillen, executive director of Oiste, looking at one of the maps Fair Districts has touted as helping Latinos and African-Americans. Oiste has been fighting for increased Latino representation and civic participation in the state for more than a decade.

“Even though the numbers might look as if that might be favorable to communities of color,” St. Guillen said, “if you look at voting patterns, it actually wouldn’t be.”

Others from Massachusetts have said the proposals made by Fair Districts Mass wouldn’t help them at all. At a town hall meeting in Lynn, which would be cut out of its historic district along Boston’s North Shore by the proposal, labor unions, the city’s chamber of commerce and politicians from both parties converged on the town hall, urging that the board not adopt a plan that would carve out Lynn.

Lynn’s Latino business owners are “very proud to be a part of the North Shore,” said Frances Martinez, executive director of the North Shore Latino Business Association. “Our business owners decided to come here because they know this is a place to stay and grow for their families. Please keep the district together.”

What Fair Districts’ proposals would do is hurt the traditional pro-labor and Democratic incumbents in the area. For instance, Lynn’s notably pro-union congressman, John Tierney, would effectively be drawn out of a seat2014a finding included in the group’s own research.

Fair Districts can raise unlimited, undisclosed cash for its efforts, thanks to an innovative argument it made to state election officials.

This strategy had its roots in a lesson learned 20 years ago by a Republican redistricting guru named Dan Winslow. During the 1990 redistricting cycle, Winslow twice sought permission from state election officials for a group called the Republican Redistricting Committee to accept unlimited corporate donations without having to disclose them.

At the time, Winslow argued that the group didn’t have specific political aims and would also provide redistricting resources to minority groups.

Each time, the board refused to exempt the organization from campaign finance laws on the grounds that a group with “Republican” in its name and Republican politicians as leaders could not credibly claim to be independent.

Last year, a lawyer in Winslow’s firm filed an almost identical request to accept unlimited corporate donations, but this time for a group that left “Republican” out of its name. The state agreed to his request. The group he was filing for? Fair Districts Mass.

Winslow, now a Republican state representative and legal adviser to Fair Districts, said the group has no partisan agenda.

“It’s not about shifting Massachusetts from Democrat to Republican,” Winslow said. “It creates an opportunity for challenges, for challengers to challenge the status quo.”

Fair Districts Mass Chairman Jack Robinson has run unsuccessfully for Congress three times as a Republican. Last year, when he announced the formation of Fair Districts, he said he was changing his registration to Independent.

Robinson said that change was important to Fair Districts’ “unique” ability to accept undisclosed corporate donations.

“In order to show that we are really nonpartisan, I decided to become an independent,” Robinson said.

Robinson also said the lack of disclosure has benefits.

“This is a very political process,” he said. “If you’re running a company in Newton, Mass., where Barney Frank is, and you want to donate to us, and our plan says Barney Frank has to run against another congressman, I could understand why people would not want to disclose their donations.” Frank is, of course, a powerful Democratic congressman.

The national Democratic and Republican parties are also working to limit disclosures about fundraising for redistricting. Both parties have raised and spent tens of millions of dollars on redistricting through their traditional conduits of money into state politics, the Republican State Leadership Committee and the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. And both have been pushing to keep increasing parts of those efforts exempt from disclosure requirements.

Last year, the National Democratic Redistricting Trust sought and was granted permission by the Federal Election Commission to allow members of Congress to solicit unlimited, undisclosed donations for the trust. The group, set up to fund lawsuits that inevitably spring up during redistricting fights, argued that redistricting is not a primarily political activity. Legislators doing the same fundraising, but directly for their parties, would be violating McCain-Feingold campaign finance laws. The trust is currently funding the Democratic legal response to Minnesotans for a Fair Redistricting.

The GOP formed its own opaque group dedicated to redistricting. Making America’s Promise Secure, which was headed by prominent Republicans Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, was able to secure 501(c)4 status from the IRS as a “social welfare”organization2014the same status granted Disabled American Veterans and the Lumberjack World Championships Foundation. Groups with that status do not have to disclose donors or how they spend money. And there is no limit on how much individual donors can contribute.

Florida, railroads and friends

As old hands at redistricting like to say, it’s personal. Working at the state level, you can give lasting help, or demonstrate your loyalty, to not just one party or the other but to specific candidates, who may one day return the favor.

Congresswoman Corrine Brown, an African-American Democrat from Florida, appears to be a case in point. Brown represents one of the most irregularly shaped districts in the nation. It is 150 miles long but only the width of a highway bridge at its narrowest point and scoops heavily African-American neighborhoods out of Orlando, Gainesville and Jacksonville. (See ProPublica’s interactive map of Brown’s district and the analysis.)

The result of a deal between Republicans and minority representatives in the state legislature, the district and ones like it helped elect a more diverse congressional delegation but also ensured that the remaining districts would be whiter2014and more Republican2014because minority voters, who tend to vote for Democrats, had been carved out. Redistricting professionals call that “bleaching.”

Republicans gained control of the state legislature in 1996 after decades of Democratic control and have held it ever since.

Brown, then a state assemblywoman, had worked with Republicans to create the district. She subsequently ran for Congress in it and won. She has been unbeatable ever since. (Even though 2010 was a tough year for Democrats in Florida, she still won by a landslide.)

Her seat finally was threatened last year when a coalition of unions, civic groups and Democrats got a pair of anti-gerrymandering amendments on Florida’s ballot. The amendments banned legislative districts drawn to help or hurt particular incumbents or parties. To make it clear that the amendments were not an attempt to pre-empt the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they also explicitly ban the drawing of districts to deny representation to minority groups.

Florida’s black legislative caucus and the state chapter of the NAACP endorsed the amendments, as did Democracia, a Latino political group.

But Brown opposed the effort, becoming the “African-American Chairwoman” of a group called Protect Your Vote. The group, Brown said at news conferences and in public statements, would be a bulwark against the harm the amendments would do to minority voting rights.

The NAACP strongly condemned Brown’s position and issued a statement criticizing “the blatant use of scare tactics with African-Americans and Hispanics to justify the continued gerrymandering of districts that benefit only politicians.”

Though Protect Your Vote had little support from representatives of the minority groups whose rights it was supposedly trying to protect, it had a lot of support from corporate donors, who gave nearly $800,000. (The contributions were reported because they related to a ballot measure. Normally, donations to Florida redistricting efforts don’t have to be disclosed.)

Among Protect Your Vote’s supporters were two of Brown’s own corporate donors.

Last year, Honeywell International PAC gave Protect Your Vote $25,000. The same year, the PAC gave Corrine Brown’s campaign $10,000. Also in 2010, Honeywell hired a former Brown aide as a lobbyist, according to federal lobbying disclosures. And many of the company’s government contracts fall under the purview of Brown’s membership on the Transportation and Infrastructure and Veterans’ Affairs committees.

In a statement, Honeywell said its PAC contributed money to defeat the anti-gerrymandering amendments because it supports “redistricting that is consistent with the historical practices that have served the State’s many diverse constituents well for decades.”

Another $25,000 donation to Protect Your Vote came from CSX Transportation Corp., a Jacksonville-based railroad and trucking company.

CSX has a long, friendly history with Brown, the ranking Democratic member of the House subcommittee on railroads.

Brown championed the controversial SunRail commuter rail project, using her position on the subcommittee to help secure federal funding that made the $1.2 billion project possible. The SunRail deal is worth more than $600 million to CSX. (Here’s a video of Brown  on the House floor extolling the virtues of the plan.)

Federal officials raised questions about just how many commuters the project would serve, and the Federal Transit Administration ranked the SunRail project last in terms of cost effectiveness on a recent list of national projects in the “final design” phase.

“The Protect Your Vote campaign had strong, bipartisan support, and was intended to maintain the integrity of reapportionment,” said CSX spokesman Gary Sease. “As a Florida-based corporation, we supported this bipartisan initiative.”

In November 2010, the Florida amendments passed despite Protect Your Vote’s efforts. The group filed an appeal in federal court shortly thereafter, alleging, among other things, that the new redistricting methodology outlined in the amendments did not do enough to protect incumbents. The suit was thrown out Sept. 9.

Brown and Protect Your Vote filed an appeal, vowing to take the case as far as the Supreme Court.

Brown declined to comment, saying it was a legal matter.

Unions and others play the game in California

Corporations, of course, are not the only special interests that have intervened in the redistricting process in less-than-transparent ways.

Last year, unions and others spent millions in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to kill a proposition making redistricting fairer and more transparent in California. The proposition put redistricting in the hands of a nonpartisan commission, a move opposed by Democratic politicians in the state legislature and Congress who stood to lose comfortable districts that in many cases were drawn personally for them.

The group called itself Yes on Fair, Yes on 27, No on 202014A Coalition of Entrepreneurs, Working People, Businesses, Community Leaders Such as Karen Bass, & Other Concerned Citizens Devoted to Eliminating Bureaucratic Waste. But most of the more than $7 million the group raised came from unions, large individual donations from prominent Democratic donors like George Soros2014and no fewer than 35 Democratic politicians. (Disclosure: A Soros foundation has also provided a small portion of ProPublica’s funding.)

Among the group’s donors were Nancy Pelosi; above-mentioned “community leader” Karen Bass, who was speaker of the state assembly at the time and has since been elected to Congress; and Congresswoman Lois Capps, whose coast-hugging district was so long and narrow it was nicknamed the “ribbon of shame.”

Bass now says she supported the idea of an independent redistricting commission. However, based on how the commission was designed, “I was concerned about the impact on representation from communities of color.”

Capps did not respond to requests for comment.

The group immediately spent its cash to deploy some of the most questionable tactics endemic to California’s ballot-measure system. Nearly $3 million was spent on professional signature gatherers and another $1.8 million on California’s notoriously misleading voter guides. The mailers come from legitimate-sounding groups that are actually fictions cooked up by political consultants to mislead voters.

Though Yes on Fair was funded exclusively by Democratic interests, it spent $64,000 on the “Continuing the Republican Revolution” voter guide, which featured a bald eagle and a quote honoring Ronald Reagan at the top but urged voters to reject the citizens’ redistricting commission on the grounds that it represented bureaucratic waste. Similar voter guides were sent out representing fictitious religious, feminist, environmentalist and law-enforcement groups. Perhaps the most insidious was the “Our Voice Latino Voter Guide,” which urged a vote against establishing the citizens’ commission even though Latinos stood to greatly benefit from it.

Despite Yes on Fair’s efforts, the measure for the commission passed anyway.

Once the commission was created, it offered another, limited glimpse into business interests’ attempts to influence redistricting.

An early participant in the state’s redistricting process was the California Institute for Jobs, Economy and Education, which submitted proposed district maps and testified before the redistricting commission.

But there is little evidence of the institute’s existence. It has no website and has published no scholarly research. The institute first shows up in public records, registered as a corporation in California in May 2011, just after the redistricting process had begun. It is registered with the same street address and suite number as Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk, a law firm that specializes in campaign finance and lobbying law.

The entity’s true purpose, according to someone close to it, was to represent “business interests” across California. Top-level individuals involved with the so-called institute also have ties to JOBS PAC, a pro-business committee in California that lists Philip Morris, AT&T and Chevron as donors.

Tom Hiltachk, managing partner at the firm that shares its address with the institute, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Story by Olga Pierce, Jeff Larson and Lois Beckett, ProPublica.
Intern Ariel Wittenberg also contributed reporting to this story.