From technabob.com.

From nextnature.net.

From ~EvidencE~’s photostream.

Created by Tessa Farmer, fairies barely a centimeter tall massacre insects and use their carcass as adornment.

Link via environmentalgraffiti.com.

Fashion designers recently went all out and put together a weird mix of creations for the China Fashion Week which was held in November 2009. A bi-annual event, the Fashion Week showcases the latest creations of prominent brand names as well as the works of the upcoming folk.

Link and photo via weirdasianews.com.

Created by artist Dan Perjovschi, The Everyday Drawing, which occupied two floors of the Sucrière:

Everyday, the artist sent by email a drawing inspired by what made the headlines of the press. The Biennale staff then erased one of the drawings on the black board and dutifully copied the new one instead. Cynical, spot-on, the commentary responds to the latest news while addressing at the same time the -alas immutable- issues of our time: the distribution of wealth, globalisation, religion, migrations, the art market, global warming.

Link and photo via we-make-money-not-art.com.

In Bangladesh, people routinely stack mountainous piles of bricks onto their heads when loading and unloading the boats and Bedford trucks used to transport clay-fired bricks from the kilns where they are made to the construction sites where they are used. These feats of endurance and equilibrium look near inconceivable to blinkered Western eyes, but for the brick carriers it’s all in a day’s work.

That stack of some 20 bricks is almost as tall as the man carrying it, yet he still has room to flip a few more on top and walk the plank onto dry land. After this initial effort, workers often have to carry their precarious piles some distance, and when on site climb several flights of stairs to the rooftops where the bricks will be laid. Without wheelbarrows, single-minded stability is all that stands between a slip and tens of kilos of bricks falling – and perhaps even a snapped neck.

Words and link from environmentalgraffiti.com.

no speed limits in Beleize City, so speed bumps are placed at strategic locations to help keep things under control. no word who they got to model for the sign.

From *Watcher*’s photostream.

Indoor flight requires a craft to be small, light and able to negotiate walls and other obstacles. “Reality bites you a lot more indoors,” says Zhang. But Sensorfly is too small to carry the technology it would need to look for and plan around obstacles. Instead it uses simpler strategies to survive.

Each robot carries a radio, accelerometer, compass and gyroscope. Thanks to the accelerometers it notices if it bumps into something, then backs off and warns fellow copters nearby of the obstacle’s approximate location. Any time two or more of the helicopters are within radio range, they form an improvised data network to share information. Their design is “passively stable”: as long as the twin rotors are spinning, the craft will hover in place. Its shape is such that if it is knocked to the ground, the craft need only keep trying and it should be able to get airborne again.

Squadrons of the craft connect with each other using radio. They pass information between themselves and back to a controller, and use the time delay on the radio signals to track their relative positions.

From NewScientist.com

From Yahoo News:

this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they’ve simulated a cat’s cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has.

The scientists had previously simulated 40 percent of a mouse’s brain in 2006, a rat’s full brain in 2007, and 1 percent of a human’s cerebral cortex this year, using progressively bigger supercomputers.

The latest feat, being presented at a supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore., doesn’t mean the computer thinks like a cat, or that it is the progenitor of a race of robo-cats.

The simulation, which runs 100 times slower than an actual cat’s brain, is more about watching how thoughts are formed in the brain and how the roughly 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses in a cat’s brain work together.

The researchers created a program that told the supercomputer, which is in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to behave how a brain is believed to behave. The computer was shown images of corporate logos, including IBM’s, and scientists watched as different parts of the simulated brain worked together to figure out what the image was.

Dharmendra Modha, manager of cognitive computing for IBM Research and senior author of the paper, called it a “truly unprecedented scale of simulation.” Researchers at Stanford University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were also part of the project.

Modha says the research could lead to computers that rely less on “structured” data, such the input 2 plus 2 equals 4, and can handle ambiguity better, like identifying the corporate logo even if the image is blurry. Or such computers could incorporate senses like sight, touch and hearing into the decisions they make.

One reason that development would be significant to IBM: The company is selling “smarter planet” services that use digital sensors to monitor things like weather and traffic and feed that data into computers that are asked to do something with the information, like predicting a tsunami or detecting freeway accidents. Other companies could use “cognitive computing” to make better sense of large volumes of information.

via Mark Pesce

Via crunchgear.com.

In this provocatively titled lecture, from the very aptly named Festival of Dangerous Ideas , Julian Savulescu, Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford and Head of the Melbourne–Oxford Stem Cell Collaboration:

…examines the nature of human beings as products of evolution, in particular their limited altruism, limited co-operative instincts and limited ability to take account of the future consequences of actions. He argues that humans’ biology and psychology are unfit for the kind of society we live in and we must either alter our political institutions, severely restrain our technology or change our nature. Or face annihilation by our own design.

Which is a nice way of saying he makes a strong case for meddling in the genes of our children, and more importantly, can now identify just which ones to tweak.

This is nugenics kids, and it’s shit scary.

(OK, it would be slightly less creepy if he wasn’t wearing his suit jacket like a cape)

Watch on and be afraid;  sooner or later a Government somewhere is going to try this!

The QnA starts mid-way through the second video and is particularly good, in that most of the questions you will have are actually asked by the audience.

thanks to my buddy The Dingo Strategy for the tip-off!

Related:

• Nick Bostrom on existential risks and posthumanity

The Nokia N900 ad, creepy future and all. Via engadget.com.

A gentle reminder that the social sites you frequent on the net shouldn’t be your only concern for data mining:

Dr. Michael Birnhack of TAU’s Faculty of Law and Prof. Niva Elkin-Koren from the University of Haifa recently completed a comprehensive study on information privacy laws in Israel and found compelling reasons for lawmakers everywhere to take notice. “Our research from Israel can serve as a case study of the shortcomings of a comprehensive data protection program,” says Dr. Birnhack.

“It’s not just sites like Facebook and Twitter that should cause concern,” he continues. “It’s all the trivial things that are collected about us that we’re not protected against.”
….
A health insurance provider doesn’t need to see your medical records to understand the state of your family’s health. It can learn just as much by looking at your grocery bill. “If you use a discount card at a supermarket, information on your purchases is added to a database. If you shop for halal or kosher products, your religion can be inferred, and the purchases of fatty or gluten-free foods can provide an indicator of your family’s overall health.”

Federal legislation in the U.S. regulates for some 15 different kinds of specific data sets, such as health data and credit histories, but not for information collected by club and discount cards or by commercial Web sites. And it’s more difficult to write a law to secure confidentiality in those areas, says Dr. Birnhack.

“Unless there are specific laws in place, this personal digital information is up for grabs. It can be bought and sold between governments and private companies, which can then conduct data mining and analysis on it and sell the results to third parties,” he explains.

Like Europe, Canada has a universal informational privacy policy, but U.S. data collection and dissemination regulation is more limited. Justice system lawyers are currently debating the issue of informational privacy, and Dr. Birnhack suggests that they look to Canada’s law as a good way to protect privacy. “Canada has the best data protection regime in the world,” he says. “It’s very powerful.”

Via sciencedaily.com.

the challenge being faced by the human race now is evolve or perish; grow up or die

That killer quote comes from the trailer for Collapse:

via Sean Bonner

Everyone is still freaked out by Big Dog, right?

Well brace yourself for this video:

Technology Review say it’s for “for military chemical suit research”, but I have my suspicions. 

The finished Petman will also mimic human physiology, for example sweating in response to temperature and humidity changes, to make it a realistic testing device for the suits.

 
Let’s take the glass-half-full approach; best robotic space explorers ever?!

A “controllable morphing robot”, eventually squishing through a crack in the wall near you:

Via makezine.com.

I remember reading a scan of an old real print comic once.  The character in it was railing against the imaginary people of his imaginary world, taking them to task about their dissatisfaction with the future they lived in.  But it was really aimed at the stupid people who wanted their stupid little futures and who were too stupid to see that the future is now.  It’s always now.  Except it isn’t anymore.  The TITANs changed that.  The future is now yesterday, and last week, and ten years ago.

–ECLIPSE PHASE

In August of this year, I had the opportunity to interview Rob Boyle and Brian Cross - two of the minds behind the post-singularity, transhumanist horror Role-Playing Game ECLIPSE PHASE.  We covered a lot of topics — from details about the game and the game world to the singularity, technology’s influence on politics, reputation economies, anarcho-transhumanism and more.

(Also?  Creative uses for bacon in the dark post-singularity future.)

You can listen to the interview (recorded August 7th, 2009 in a noisy bar during the GEN CON gaming gaming convention in Indianapolis, Indiana) here:

(Or you can download it in a podcast format from here.)  As a minor warning, there are some setting spoilers in the interview.

ECLIPSE PHASE comes out this week in the US and elsewhere from bookstores and gaming retailers.  (Or in PDF format from Drive Thru RPG.)

This video shows the effect of the high-energy laser beam from the Boeing Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL), fired at a stationary truck from a US Air Force NC-130H (Hercules) flying over White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, on August 30, 2009. The ATL is a chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL), and is a scaled-down version of the megawatt-class high-energy laser in the Boeing YAL-1 Airborne Laser (ABL).

Death from above via geekologie.com.

See also:

• Boeing developing lanes with laser beams

• Boeing completes successful test of air to ground laser turret

• Boeing’s 747 laser canon

Via dailyfinance.com:

Pittsburgh police on Thursday used an audio cannon manufactured by American Technology Corporation (ATCO), a San Diego-based company, to disperse protesters outside the G-20 Summit — the first time its LRAD series device has been used on civilians in the U.S.

“The police fired a sound cannon that emitted shrill beeps, causing demonstrators to cover their ears and back up,” The New York Times reported. For years, similar “non-lethal” products designed by ATC have been used at sea by cruise ships to ward off pirates.

“LRAD creates increased stand off and safety zones, supports resolution of uncertain situations, and potentially prevents the use of deadly force,” ATC spokesperson Robert Putnam told DailyFinance. “We believe this is highly preferable to the real instances that happen almost every day around the world where officials use guns and other lethal and non-lethal weapons to disperse protesters.”

Still, Putnam acknowledged the potential for physical harm. “If you stand right next to it for several minutes, you could have hearing damage,” he said. “But it’s your choice.” He added that heavy-duty ear-phones can render the weapon less effective.

Now that the law enforcement authorites have begun using the LRAD in U.S. cities, a whole new marketplace for the company may have opened up. Don’t be surprised to see a LRAD at an event with large crowds in your town sometime in the future.

Not exactly the Inferno sound barrier device, but still effective.

Thanks to Noah J. for the link!