What are you gonna do, play with your prick for another 30 years? ... George Carlin
Danger Room - Wired News
Topic: Technology
10:48 am EDT, Mar 28, 2007
Intel, another partner on the work, goes one step further, suggesting we could replicate whole human beings."The replicas would mimic the shape and appearance of a person or object being imaged in real time, and as the originals moved, so would their replicas," according to their website. "These 3D models would be physical entities, not holograms. You could touch them and interact with them, just as if the originals were in the room with you. "
Any bets on who is going to utilize this first... Porn, or the military?
Bits of News - First Hardware to go through Evolution Developed
Topic: Computers
10:44 am EDT, Mar 28, 2007
For decades people have tried to replicate the human mind, using more and more sophisticated software make better A.I’s, but still the best A.I’s are not much smarter than your average cockroach.
Maybe that’s the problem? Everything that we’ve done so far is software based, the hardware to drive the A.I has been much unchanged. But a Norwegian team at the University of Oslo has made what will possibly be the next generation of hardware.
Every creature in nature is a product of evolution, and did I mention that creationism is just bull?
What the team has done is add evolution to hardware (Norwegian), all hardware that you and I have used so far is made the creationism way, it’s made and can not be changed at runtime through evolution. All changes to existing hardware have to be made through software.
kuler is the first web-hosted application from Adobe Labs designed both to stand alone and to complement Adobe� Creative Suite� software. Built using Adobe� Flash� and ActionScript 3.0, kuler is all about color: color for exploration, inspiration, experimentation and sharing.
Interesting. I wonder what my color studies professor would make of social color... Some of what makes color jump out at you has to do with the environment you are used to (for instance, someone raised in a desert might find that greens and purples tend to stand out more.) I wonder how geographical color will graph itself.
The Forehead Retina System (FRS) uses a special headband to selectively stimulate different mechanoreceptors in forehead skin to allow visually impaired people to "see" a picture of what lies in front of them. The Forehead Retina System is the result of collaborative research by Tachi laboratory at the University of Tokyo and EyePlusPlus, Inc.
The Forehead Retina System uses tactile sensations in the forehead to present a "picture" of the outline of objects; this enables visually impaired people to "see" what is in front of them.
Really neat... Makes me want to use it to have eyes in the back of my head.
Bald blind men will now have the equivalent of wide screen.
There is a town in Austria called "Fucking." This Google map link shows that there are a number of Fucking roads there, and a quick fucking glance at the fucking satellite view shows a whole fucking lot of trees and farmland nearby. Fucking Link. (Thanks, Ken)
One of the most startling aspects of musical culture in the post-Cold War United States is the systematic use of music as a weapon of war. First coming to mainstream attention in 1989, when US troops blared loud music in an effort to induce Panamanian president Manuel Norriega’s surrender, the use of “acoustic bombardment” has become standard practice on the battlefields of Iraq, and specifically musical bombardment has joined sensory deprivation and sexual humiliation as among the non-lethal means by which prisoners from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo may be coerced to yield their secrets without violating US law.
The very idea that music could be an instrument of torture confronts us with a novel—and disturbing—perspective on contemporary musicality in the United States. What is it that we in the United States might know about ourselves by contemplating this perspective? What does our government’s use of music in the “war on terror” tell us (and our antagonists) about ourselves?
This paper is a first attempt to understand the military and cultural logics on which the contemporary use of music as a weapon in torture and war is based. After briefly tracing the development of acoustic weapons in the late 20th century, and their deployment at the second battle of Falluja in November, 2004, I summarize what can be known about the theory and practice of using music to torture detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. I contemplate some aspects of late 20th-century musical culture in the civilian US that resonate with the US security community’s conception of music as a weapon, and survey the way musical torture is discussed in the virtual world known as the blogosphere. Finally, I sketch some questions for further research and analysis.
According to the book The Men Who Stare at Goats by journalist Jon Ronson, Channon spent time in the seventies with many of the people credited with starting the New Age movement and subsequently wrote an operations manual for a First Earth Battalion. Rather than using bullets and munitions, Channon envisaged that this new force would attempt to conquer the hearts and minds of the enemy using positive vibrations, carrying lambs symbolic of peace and employing unconventional but non-lethal weapons to subdue others. Lethal force was to be a last resort. Members would practise meditation, use yogic cat stretches and primal screams to attain battle-readiness, and use shiatsu as battlefield first aid.
Some ideas proposed in the writings of Channon later found their way into military procedures for psychological warfare. Ronson specifically cites the First Earth Battalion manual's proposal to use music to effect "psychic mind-change" as one. However, the American military has adopted loud sound as a psychological weapon, not to win hearts and minds. For example at Waco, Texas, repeating the techniques used four years earlier in an attempt to drive Manuel Noriega from his sanctuary, an earsplitting cacophony of noise was played at the compound 24/7, that included the sound of rabbits being slaughtered, chanting Tibetan monks, roaring jet engines, and the Nancy Sinatra hit, "These Boots Were Made For Walking."
