Orangutans Use Tablets To Chat With Friends In Other Zoos
Bored orangutans enjoy using iPads to video chat with their fellow kind in other zoos – it seems that we’re all just monkeys poking at the glowing screens we’ve been given by our handlers. Via Popular Science:
Orangutans living in captivity will soon start using iPads for primate play-dates, using Skype or FaceTime to interact with their brethren in other zoos, according to zookeepers. The great apes have been playing with iPads for about six months at the Milwaukee County Zoo, and they’ve been such a hit that other zoos plan to introduce them, too.
The “Apps for Apes” program started after a zookeeper commented online about getting some iPads for her gorilla charges. Someone donated a used iPad, and it turned out the gorillas didn’t care for it. But the orangutans loved it.
Seeing the primates with iPads has an effect on zoo visitors, according to Richard Zimmerman, who directs Orangutan Outreach: “They…
LAPD To Crack Down On Use Of Unmanned Drones By Real Estate Agents
In a nightmarish scenario from the future, technology ostensibly created to spy on our “enemies” is now being turned against us by the most nefarious of forces — real estate brokers. The Los Angeles Times reveals:
The Los Angeles Police Department is warning real estate agents not to use images of properties taken from unmanned aircraft, saying the flying drones pose a potential safety hazard and could violate federal aviation policy.
The warning was issued this week after officers saw a television news report showing a basketball-sized object with multiple rotors hovering over an expansive Westside residence.
Real estate agents have been posting aerial photos and video of homes for sale in the Los Angeles area, according to the LAPD. The pictures have been taken from several hundred feet off the ground in the city’s crowded airspace — an altitude at which police helicopters often fly.
The Self-Guided Bullet
Presumably the marketing pitch will be that you literally can’t miss. From KRQE:
Engineers at Sandia National Laboratories have invented a bullet that guides itself to the target. Sandia has wide expertise at miniature technology, and the bullet works like a tiny guided missile.
The patented design doesn’t shoot straight. Instead of a spiral rotation, the bullet twists and turns to guide itself towards a laser directed point. It can make up to thirty corrections per second while in the air…
By Popular Demand: The Cure For What Ails You
A little over a decade ago, disinformation published its first book, the now out of print anthology You Are Being Lied To (superseded by You Are STILL Being Lied To). We didn’t really know much about publishing books at the time, so when the book industry’s biggest annual trade show in Chicago came around, we needed help to stand out from the crowd. Enter Thomas Negovan, who was, and is our standard bearer in Chicago. Proprietor of the amazing art gallery Century Guild, Tom “found the others” for us.
A Renaissance man, Tom is also an accomplished musician who has done something truly unusual and, to my mind so compelling, that if you are anywhere near Los Angeles this week, you should go to the most unique of record release parties. I asked Tom to explain for disinformation:
It’s Sunday night, I’m up in Topanga in my friend Ysanne’s cabin, and as I experience no internet, no cell phone, and a…
NYPD Developing Scanners To Detect Concealed Weapons
Via the Gothamist:
Presumably sick of all the bleeding heart liberals whining about civil rights, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly has devised an elegant solution to sidestep the controversy over his department’s stop and frisk policy. Speaking at a State of the NYPD breakfast this morning, Kelly announced that the NYPD is developing a kind of infrared technology that will enable police officers to detect whether individuals are carrying guns under their clothing. Sure, it’s not as badass as shooting down a plane, but at least cops will finally be able to see what’s under our clothes without having to get out of their cars.
The mechanism, which the NYPD is developing with help from the U.S. Department of Defense, currently only works at a short range of three or four feet. But Kelly thinks they can improve it to scan citizens from a distance of up to 25 meters away. He announced this…
The Future Of Personal Identification: Buttock Scanners?
Apparently everyone has a unique “buttprint”. In the future, the driver’s seat of your car or your spot on the train may be reserved for a butt that the scanner recognizes. Via Yahoo!:
Put your fingerprint scanners away. Stand aside iris measurers. Buttocks are the new way to prove who you are.
A team of Japanese scientists claim their pressure sensor sheet can accurately identify an individual’s backside and when placed on a driver’s seat could be used as a last line of defence to stop someone else driving away your motor.
“The sheet has 360 sensors, which collect data for 39 features to recognise a person, such as pressure patterns and the dimensions of the buttocks,” said Dr. Shigeomi Koshimizu, who led the research.
Koshimizu, an associate professor at Tokyo-based Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology, said his device is 98 percent accurate and far less onerous than conventional biometrics as it requires nothing…
Data Mining Your Soul (Or Digital Profile)
Morbidly fascinating.
Network from Michael Rigley on Vimeo.
Seeing And Hearing In The Future
In an interview with the Believer, key performance artist and electronic musician Laurie Anderson traverses a lot of ground. But one intriguing portion concerns her thoughts on sensory enhancement as the big advancement to come. If we can view, hear, and touch better and more intensely, will we be more alive?
Five thousand years from now — let’s say we didn’t find the God particle. We’re still looking. I think we probably won’t be making things of the nature that we are now. I think we’ll just be trying to appreciate things more. Maybe we’ll design better ears. I mean, our hearing’s crappy. We’ll have huge ears and we’ll be able to tune in to Mars, or we’ll have a hundred lenses through which we can look onto the surface of Mars with our so-called “bare eyes,” or look through our hands. We’ll be able to be in the present more effectively.
Brits Have Too Many Holidays For A ‘Broke Country’
Happy New Year, y’alls. Looks like at least one of your wishes may have started coming true already. Dylan Welch from the Sydney Morning Herald reports on Rupert Murdoch’s meticulous documentation of his own descent into senility:
“Either @rupertmurdoch is genuinely now on Twitter, or some disgruntled ex-NOTW journo just won the hacking Olympics.”
Less than two days after joining Twitter, media mogul Rupert Murdoch appears to have had his first brush with tweeting-before-thinking, after suggesting that the British have too many holidays for a “broke country”.
Though Mr Murdoch, who joined Twitter less than 48 hours ago and already has almost 40,000 followers, quickly deleted the message, it was preserved by some Twitter users and quickly spread around the website.
“Maybe Brits have too many holidays for broke country!” Mr Murdoch, who is holidaying on the Caribbean island of Saint Barthelemy, wrote about 6am Australian time.
Publish and be damned … the tweet that Murdoch withdrew.
His wife,…
The Drones Are Coming Home
Will baby-sized drones soon be used routinely for tracking residential property lines and other domestic purposes? With our nation’s adventures in Iraq coming to an end, unmanned drones will need to be kept busy doing something…via BLDG BLOG:
A post on sUAS News—a blog tracking the “small unmanned aviation system industry”—we read about the possibility of drone aircraft being used to enforce residential property tax.
Citing a recent court ruling in Arkansas that “has approved the use of aerial imagery to collect data on property sizes,” and making reference to the already-controversial state deployment of aerial surveillance tools, sUAS suggests that drones could someday be used to manage a near-realtime catalog of local property expansions, transfers, and other tax-relevant land alterations.
Whether enforcing local building codes—keeping an eye, for instance, on illegally built structures such as the so-called Achill Henge in Ireland—or reconciling on-the-ground property lines with their administrative representations back in the city…
Connecticut’s Cold War Secret
For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets.
They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized “cleanroom” where the equipment was stored.
They spoke in code.
Few knew the true identity of “the customer” they met in a smoke-filled, wood-paneled conference room where the phone lines were scrambled. When they traveled, they sometimes used false names.
At one point in the 1970s there were more than 1,000 people in the Danbury area working on The Secret…
Luxury-Sea Boat Allegedly Generates Electricity from Ocean Water
Fake? Hank Mills with Sterling D. Allan report for Pure Energy Systems News:
A company named Luxury-Sea is building a boat with a special device that is claimed to generate electricity from ocean water, to both produce hydrogen to fuel its engine as well as power its on-board electronics.
A boat that requires no fossil fuel and that has an infinite range would be a true breakthrough. The French company Luxury-Sea claims to be building such a boat, named the MIG 675. Allegedly, it utilizes a patent pending technology that generates up to 50,000 volts of electricity from ocean water. The electricity generated is used both to power on board electronics, and to generate hydrogen to fuel a powerful 500 horse power engine…
Of course the most amazing aspect of the boat is that it runs off salt water. No details are given about how it works, and no evidence is provided. Here is a video of the boat in action, but there is no way to determine if it is really powering itself using ocean water.
The inventor of the technology, Angi Le Floch, is asserted to be self taught…
The Jesus Toaster Makes Food Miracles
Every believer has seen the videos of the Virgin Mary appearing in the form of a Cheeto or a linen stain and secretly hopes for an uncanny sign that will validate their faith — that’s why the Jesus Toaster is the perfect Christmas gift. Now anyone can have the rapturous joy of witnessing the Lord appear in their morning toast:
An App That You Play With Live Pigs
Provide some kicks for both yourself and a farm animal on a faraway continent. Treehugger writes:
In hopes of staving off boredom in human and swine alike, a team of Dutch designers have created Pig Chase — an app for interspecies entertainment that playfully pits iPad users against real-life pigs, who might otherwise only meet one another on a plate.
Since 2001, law has required pig farmers in the European Union to provide some form of entertainment to their livestock as a way of keeping them in good emotional health, which in turn helps curb aggression and anxiety. Often, toys and other materials are placed inside the sties for animals to interact with, but perhaps unsurprisingly, some farmers have found it quite difficult to turn their pigpens into playpens.
With that in mind, designers from Utrecht School of the Arts and Wageningen University in the Netherlands ventured to create new ways to make swine…
Media Roots Radio: Cyberculture, NDAA, OWS, GOP
Via Media Roots:
Abby & Robbie Martin discuss the age of information in the 21st century and philosophize what the ability to instantaneously connect with people worldwide has done to modern society; the subjectivity of “truth” as history becomes re-written with every passing generation; Alan Moore v. Frank Miller on Occupy Wall Street; The passing of the new National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that allows the indefinite detention of American citizens; the GOP race as a parody of itself with the candidates running and how voting for Ron Paul would be a fun social experiment if nothing else than to spoil the GOP primary.
Strange Growth on Nuclear Waste Might Be “Biological in Nature”
Rob Pavey reports in the Augusta Chronicle:
Savannah River Site scientists are working to identify a strange growth found on racks of spent nuclear fuel collected from foreign governments.
The “white, string-like” material was found among thousands of spent fuel assemblies submerged in deep pools within the site’s L Area, according to a report filed by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, a federal oversight panel.
“The growth, which resembles a spider web, has yet to be characterized, but may be biological in nature,” the report said. Savannah River National Laboratory collected a small sample in hopes of identifying the mystery lint — and determining whether it is alive …
eBook Readers Live in a Different Universe of Books
Amazon’s released their list of 2011’s best-selling books, revealing that 40% of the best-selling ebooks didn’t even make it onto their list of the best-selling print books!
The #1 and #2 best-selling ebooks of the year weren’t even available in print editions, while four of the top 10 best-selling print books didn’t make it into the top 100 best-selling ebooks. “It couldn’t be more clear that Kindle owners are choosing their material from an entirely different universe of books,” notes one Kindle site, which points out that five of the best-selling ebooks came from two million-selling ebook authors — Amanda Hocking and John Locke — who are still awaiting the release of their books in print. And five of Amazon’s best-selling ebooks were Kindle-only “Singles,” including a Stephen King short story which actually outsold another King novel that he’d released in both ebook and print formats. And Neal Stephenson’s “Reamde” was Amazon’s #99 best-selling…
You Can Remotely Hack Someone’s Insulin Pump To Kill Them
A McAfee researcher has shown that it is possible to remotely hijack an insulin pump implanted in someone’s body. We may someday have internal devices that keep our organs functioning into super-old age, but will live in fear of computer viruses that explode hearts by sending pacemakers into hyperdrive, et cetera. The Register writes:
In a hack fitting of a James Bond movie, a security researcher has devised an attack that hijacks nearby insulin pumps, enabling him to surreptitiously deliver fatal doses to diabetic patients who rely on them.
The attack on wireless insulin pumps made by medical devices giant Medtronic was demonstrated Tuesday at the Hacker Halted conference in Miami. It was delivered by McAfee’s Barnaby Jack, the same researcher who last year showed how to take control of two widely used models of automatic teller machines so he could to cause them to spit out a steady stream of dollar bills.
“With…
