Noah's recent posts on the Airborne Laser and reflected laser beams reminded me of a spoof on a Pentagon PowerPoint briefing that was making the rounds in the Defense Department a couple fiscal years ago. Better than any article, this briefing captures everything that is wrong, funny and horrifying about outrageous Pentagon weapons that sound too good to be true. I'm posting the briefing, called Directed Energy Sea Mammals, for those who weren't on the e-mail chain when it first came out. The author of the original Air Force PowerPoint is a mystery (I've also seen a Navy variant of it).

The presentation is question is quite amusing.

Danger Room - Flipper Fires Lasers in Air Force Brief

In the futuristic cartoon series "The Jetsons," a robotic maid named Rosie whizzed around the Jetsons' home doing household chores--cleaning, cooking dinner and washing dishes.

Such a vision of robotic housekeeping is likely decades away from becoming reality. But at MIT, researchers are working on a very early version of such intelligent, robotic helpers--a humanoid called Domo who grasp objects and place them on shelves or counters.

A robot like Domo could help elderly or wheelchair-bound people with simple household tasks like putting away dishes. Other potential applications include agriculture, space travel and assisting workers on an assembly line, says Aaron Edsinger, an MIT postdoctoral associate who has been working on Domo for the last three years.

Edsinger describes Domo as the "next generation" of earlier robots built at MIT--Kismet, which was designed to interact with humans, and Cog, which could learn to manipulate unknown objects. Domo incorporates elements of both of those robots.

Assistive robot adapts to people, new places - MIT News Office

All-knowing browser

Ever given false information when prompted for personal details by a website? Don't worry, the US copying and computing company Xerox hopes to eliminate that kind of questioning because it believes it can get the information without even asking.

Even if you choose not to reveal who you are, Xerox says it can determine demographic information such as your age, sex and perhaps even your income by analysing the pattern of pages you choose to access on the web and comparing them to a database of surfing patterns from other users with a known background.

Xerox suggests that the idea could be used by online merchants and advertisers who want to identify the types of users visiting their websites.

Of course, the approach will only work so long as different people do not use the same browser profile. And, unfortunately, the patent application does not address possible privacy concerns.

Read the full all-knowing browser patent application.

Invention: All-knowing browser - tech - 10 April 2007 - New Scientist Tech

Thousands of people with heart disease could have new, healthy organs grown in laboratories within 10 years.

In 2003 almost 10,000 people needed surgery to replace heart valves with artificial ones
The breakthrough was a significant step on the way to growing whole new organs, including hearts

A team of British scientists has succeeded in making stem cells develop into simple tissue structures that work like human heart valves.

'In 10 years we will be able to grow a heart' | Uk News | News | Telegraph

U.S. Patent Application #20050038718 details the use of RFID readers that American Express calls "consumer trackers" to closely watch people in stores. The idea is that RFID-embedded objects carried by the shopper would emit a "consumer identification signal" when queried by consumer tracker devices in the environment. Businesses would pick up this signal and use it to identify shoppers, track their movements, and observe their behavior.

...

In an application reminiscent of a scene from Minority Report, the American Express patent would not only track and observe shoppers, but it would also spam them with purchasing "incentives," advertisements, and even odors:

I wonder how a lack of response to these ads will effect your credit rating.

American Express RFID People-Tracking Patent

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?

Danger Room - Wired News

And now, for your morning dose of strange..

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.

References to some of the unlikely origins of US military PsyOp technique have been mentioned here before:

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."

Music as torture/Music as weapon

Rattle wrote:

Your mission, if you choose to accept it...

Create a funny, original, intelligent, and accurate joke that begins with:

Alice and Bob walk into a bar...

All entries will be judged by a panel of elite IMI personnel at an upcoming conference. Reply to this post with your entries. Be prepared to back up your joke with examples, proofs, and academic papers.

Alice and Bob walk into a bar... but Alice was not amused because Bob didn't give a crap that he was going to be late because he was more concerned with building up slack.

RE: Industrial Memetics Hacker Challenge 2007

MyTunesRSS allows you to access the music and videos from your iTunes library over a local network or even the internet. You can access your music from all over the world using a simple web browser. The user interface lets you search for titles for browse your whole library by album or artist. You can access your iTunes playlists or create new ones directly in MyTunesRSS.

Download single tracks or play them right inside your browser. Or do you want to download a complete album, all tracks from one artist or the contents of a playlist to your local computer? No problem with MyTunesRSS. You can also download an M3U playlist and play them in Windows Media Player, iTunes, VLC, WinAmp or any other player capable of playing such playlists. Get a playlist as an RSS feed on your computer and stay up-to-date to the contents all the time. Enjoy cover images from the tracks if available in the files and supported by the RSS reader. Listen to your music via RSS feeds on many devices like the Playstation Portable with the latest firmware version.

Really cool. I'll have to play with this when I get home.

Codewave Software | MyTunesRSS

A net phone called the iPhone has been launched by Linksys just weeks before analysts were expecting Apple to release a similarly-named device.

The wireless iPhone allows users to make free or low-cost internet phone calls using the Skype service.

BBC NEWS | Technology | iPhone surprises technology world