Read the how & the who at Engadget…

via The Grumpy Owl

Citizen journalism went to new heights in Warsaw, Poland just the other day:

After the Mayor’s efforts to restrict the Press during the “clear out” of Occupy Wall Street, this technology should soon be standard issue for anyone wanting to preserve Raw History.

Who should be the early-adopters of this than the “good” “folks” at News Corp:

Rupert Murdoch’s pet project, The Daily, has some impressive aerial footage today of the devastation in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which was obtained with an unusual tool.The Observer was the first to report, back in November, that the staff of the iPad app was working with “a journalistic secret weapon,” the Parrot AR.Drone quadricopter, also known as “The Flying Video Game.” Now they’re finally putting the thing to use, with a new feature called “Daily Drone.”

And just to clarify, “drone” refers to the unmanned chopper itself, not the announcer’s rather dry intonation.

And the Military-Entertainment Complex lurches a step closer to the world depicted in the excellent Mexican cyberpunk movie, Sleep Dealer:

It is more important than ever, as nearly everything seems on the brink of collapse and/or rapid change, that we honestly examine the past and present state of our culture and society. To acknowledge what counts as progress and what does not.

This film, Miss Representation, looks like a good step in that direction:

(E.C.C.O assures me this is unrelated to my recent McLuhan kick.)

via Jerem Morrow

If the young are not initiated in to the village, they will burn it down just to feel its warmth.
– African Proverb

This vernacular video documentary does an almost perfect job sketching out the complexity of the situation in the UK.

Which brings us to the F-word: FERAL:

In the sense of “abandoned by – or escaped from – society”, “living outside the mainstream”, “beyond the control of rules, regulations and accepted norms”, even “gone wild”, feral seems quite a reasonable choice of word to describe something big and faceless such as an economy, the media, or even, at a pinch, a powerful and privileged elite. But when you start applying it to people (youths, yobs), or to a disadvantaged group of people (an underclass), it’s somehow different. Then feral becomes, intentionally or not, dehumanising. Use it in that way and you’re comparing humans to animals. Which isn’t, can we agree, a very nice thing to do.

As Paul Raven tweeted, this is “the worst sort of Othering”, and why we shall never cease repeating here There Is No THEY!

Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex.

– Frank Zappa

Forgive this video it’s poor English subtitles, it’s rare that someone on a television program truly tries to capture the complexity of current affairs instead of reducing their argument to a series of emotive, simplistic appeals.

via @darkoptimism

via Justin Pickard

This hour long lecture from earlier this year is filled with varying values of Interesting.

More generally you have the Benevolent aspect of an ever-more god-like entity, Google; and the level to which it’s “organizing everything”.

Then you have the degree of complexity required to contribute; not that much actually, though the code still probably looks like a magical incantation to the uninitiated.

But above all else, this points to the many, many ways anyone with a ‘net connection and motivation can help prepare for, or assist with, the impact of natural disasters and emergencies of many kinds. Because (and they have the graphs to prove it) the Internet is the key now; phone lines may go down, SMSs may be delayed, but the signal cannot be stopped.

Longtime readers will know by now that – scientific issues aside – some of us here at Grinding have a fondness for the “Stoned Ape” theory of the evolution of consciousness, language and technology.

The following video details a… version of that theory – with killer videodrome singularity robots, too.

“This is a clip from Duncan Trussell’s Comedy Central Pilot “Thunderbrain.” The animation and voice over was by Will Carsola from daybyday (www.livedaybyday.com) and it was produced by RZO Hothouse (http://www.hhouseproductions.com/)”

Why do transnational extremist organizations succeed where democratic movements have a harder time taking hold? Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist extremist, asks for new grassroots stories and global social activism to spread democracy in the face of nationalism and xenophobia.

via Wes Unruh

Blame Via @Theremina. I have no more words to add:

via BoingBoing

via Justin Pickard

Needless to say, the ability to photograph barcode-less items in the real world and get instant information on them could be huge, a sort of away-from-a-home-computer Google. What remains to be seen is if Sony can bring it to the masses in a palatable format and, of course, what Google will counteroffer if SmartAR takes off.

Video and words from core77.com.

From CrunchGear:

Designed and manufactured by Polymer Vision, the screen can be rolled and unrolled 25,000 times. The question, obviously, is why would you need a rollable display? Well, as ereaders become ubiquitous the need for them to be almost indestructible. I could see a day when kids get their own ereaders for the nursery a la the Diamond Age. Interestingly, Polymer Vision isn’t the company of note when you think of e-ink displays so either they will license this technology or they could start taking more and more market shares from leaders like Eink.

Some gorgeous video via io9.com, eight minutes of time-lapse sequence taken inside and outside of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.

Six Flags New Orleans was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
It has been abandoned ever since.
This film was made in October 2010 by Teddy Smith

via Interdome