(Photo: Blogspot)

There are many factions of 9/11 truthers, people who believe that the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center are not what they seem. While many are outspoken, none of the various groups' members has ever defaced a famous French painting, but hey, there's a first for everything.

The Local reports that a member of the group Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth was arrested at the Louvre's new branch in Lens, France after scrawling graffiti on a famous painting, "Liberty Leading the People" by Eugene Delacroix. She reportedly used a black marker to write "AE911," a reference to the name of the group, in the right-hand corner of the painting.

AE911 is an outspoken faction with an extensive online footprint. Its members believe the attacks were caused by explosives instead of planes. The group has an active blog and website and they're responsible for a feature-length documentary outlining their conspiracy theories. Despite the fact that the graffiti's message is tied to AE911, France's TF1 News reports that the woman is believed to have acted alone.

Lucky for art enthusiasts, the museum said it should be able to restore the painting easily. No word on whether the Illuminati was involved in suppressing the woman's graffitiing, but with zero evidence we feel confidence in saying they were.

Sound the alarm! (Photo: flickr.com/ell-r-brown)

There may be a day coming where your impulse to tweet in every emergency actually does you some good. The Next Web reports that the London Fire Brigade is currently investigating the possibility of setting up a Twitter version of its 999 emergency line.

What exactly that looks like is still up in the air, as they're still in the exploratory stages. (So for the love of God, Londoners, keep dialing 999 in emergencies.) The Brigade already has a verified account where it updates the public on fires and other news.

“When it was first set up in 1935, people said that dialling 999 to report emergencies would never work," said deputy commissioner Rita Dexter in a statement. "Today BT handles over 30 million emergency calls each year."

Of course, it's probably not a lack of reports via tweet that'll be the problem. It's the opposite that's going to create a massive migraine for London's firefighters.

If you think high school kids are bad IRL about pulling the fire alarm, just wait until you get the rumor-producing turbine that is Twitter into the picture. If this feed really happens, it's going to bring new life to that hoary old saw about shouting "fire" in a crowded theater.

Wire frame of the towers from Mr. August's Greenpoint rooftop.

For many of us, the Manhattan skyline is marked as much by absence as presence. Hanging out on his rooftop on Hope Street in Greenpoint, Brian August was trying to explain to a friend the void left behind, both in the mind and to the eye, by the loss of the Twin Towers.

There was some copper tubing lying around from an art project and Mr. August mocked up a simple sculpture to show a friend how the towers had appeared from that rooftop nine summers earlier. The finished product, a stark outline of the towers scaled to fit the skyline, struck Mr. August with a deep emotion.

“This really started ten years ago,” said Mr. August, a lifelong New Yorker. “I started thinking to to myself, how many people go about their routines in New York, and they get to a certain place where they always used to stop and look at the towers. What if you could give everyone this experience, and a way to share it with others.”

The result is 110 Stories, a mobile app Mr. August created for iPhone, and soon Android. Its purpose is simple, said Mr. August: orient, augment, comment.

Users open the app, which orients them to point their camera at where the towers would have been. When they snap a photo, the app augments the picture by sketching in how the towers would have appeared. Finally, it prompts them to comment on what that the resulting image means to them.

“I kept telling the developers, simpler, simpler,” said Mr. August. Instead of a cheesy pair of computer-generated towers, the app generates a haunting wireframe silhouette like the one Mr. August first created on that Greenpoint rooftop.

Augemented reality apps have a bad reputation, deservedly so. Most have been used for corny marketing campaigns or pretentious art projects. Mr. August’s app, with its simple, specific purpose, manages to offer an alternate snapshot of reality that is jarring and profound.

“It occcured to me that there is a whole generation growing up, and people who have never visited New York, who will have no conception of how big the towers were, how beautiful and how iconic, and all the different vantage points around New York where you could see them.”

While Mr. August has been thinking about this project for ten years, it was only in the last two months that he decided to throw everything he had behind making it a reality.

“You know, you reach a point when you’re obsessed with something, where you feel like its possible, and for me that was maybe two months ago, where this idea was just kind of cascading through my brain, I just said to myself, if you don’t do this, with the ten year anniversary coming up, you will be kicking yourself for the rest of your life.”

Mr. August put 110 Stories on Kickstarter in order to raise funds, eventually surpassing his goal and raising more than $27,000, meaning the app will be live on the iPhone in time for the anniversary. The normally verbose Mr. August recently released a video thanking everyone and expressing his sentiments with just three words. “We did it.”

HandsOn Network is powering the app, which lets users access a searchable 9/11 Day database to sign up for nearby volunteering activities and share it with friends to encourage more people to volunteer. According to The Next Web, current opportunities include revitalizing schools on the Lower East Side as well as programs around the country, such as turning an abandoned airport hanger in L.A. into a community center.

Before you get that pit in your stomach (at least if you're as cynical as Betabeat) thinking about corporate co-opting of what will be a particularly emotional anniversary for the city, this issue has long been close to American Express, which lost eleven employees on 9/11 in its offices across the Trade Center site. In addition to its $10 million contribution to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, the company has supported many other initiatives to rebuild Lower Manhattan.

It was complicated enough to fit them all within a taxonomy of their location at the time of the attacks, but grew more complex with hundreds of requests for certain names to be placed adjacent to loved ones.

So the foundation turned to computer science, hoping an algorithm could help them sort the problem. According to a wonderful piece in the New Yorker by Nick Paumgarten, more than one of the initial experts contacted for the task declared that it was an impossible. "The reasons for these requests were varied. Sometimes the victims were cohorts, or best friends. In other cases, the families knew, from last phone calls, whom their loved ones had been with in the end—in an elevator, on a ledge—and wanted those people listed together."

Luckily Jake Barton, principle at Midtown design firm Local Projects, didn't know about the doubters when he accepted the challenge.

"They had decided on a structure before they had the capability of making those designs a reality," Barton told Betabeat by phone today. "They had imagined you could design an arrangment where all the names were spread evenly, but underneath this seemingly random set of names, would be this incredibly complex lattice work of meaning."

Barton and data artist Jer Thorpe used a classic algorithm designed to solve the "knapsack problem", a way of arranging irregular objects in the most efficient way possible. "A computer did all the heavy lifting and number crunching," says Barton. "But we made the tool adaptive enough so that the foundation could come in afterwards and make changes, and the system would respond dynamically. Efficiency is important, but you also need that human touch."