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Friday, June 27
Capragas' Syndrome is a strange and rare psychological disorder in which an individual becomes convinced that other persons, typically relatives, have been replaced by doubles who look and act exactly like them. When it occurs, it is usually in association with schizophrenia or other delusional disorders, but it can also happen to someone who is afflicted with an organic brain disease. The disorder is named after psychologist J.M.J. Capragas, who first described it in 1923. -From my desk calendar Thursday, June 26
Friday, June 20
Wakamaru Bot at Your Service 
Its 3-foot-tall frame contains an integrated cell phone that is programmed to call emergency dispatchers automatically if a problem occurs with a patient. An embedded Web camera lets doctors and family members keep an eye on the patient at all times. Speech-recognition software and a built-in dictionary provide the robot's vocabulary. Wakamaru is so robust that he or she -- Mitsubishi can give the robot either a male or female voice -- can be programmed to remind patients to take their medicine and even call a doctor when it appears that someone is in distress. "Its primary goal for the Japanese market is to provide companionship … be with (patients) like a health-care provider," said Jawahar Samagond, a spokesman for MontaVista Software, the company powering Wakamaru. "In Japan, they have identified this as a market need." Mitsubishi plans to release Wakamaru sometime next year. The robot is expected to sell for 1 million yen, or $8,300. While Wakamaru may frighten people who are not used to being around robots -- it resembles a science fiction alien more than a human child -- in Japan, home to the Sony Aibo and others like it, robots are much more acceptable members of society. Wired Engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a "smart brick" filled with electronic sensors to continuously monitor the structural health of buildings for both routine maintenance and safety in emergencies. The brick can be laid into a wall like any other, but the prototype comes with a thermistor to track temperature changes and a two-axis accelerometer and multiplexer to measure vibration and movement. Data is transmitted to a desktop PC using an internal antenna, and future models may include an inductive coil to recharge the brick's battery. Sensors deployed throughout a building, encased in bricks, would provide a holistic, real-time picture of the strength of a building. If that seems like overkill for a 6,400-year-old technology, the smart brick's inventor, professor Chang Liu, insists the need is real. "On Sept. 11, firefighters were ill-equipped with information from the buildings," he said. "In California, people don't know whether a building is safe to go back into after a quake. Inspection takes a lot of money and a long time. We generally live with smart electronics but dumb buildings that don't perceive, report and react." Wired NASA doesn't want you to know about the Face on Mars. They claim that it's an ordinary feature of the undulating Martian terrain. Look at that face. I said look at it. LOOK AT IT. 
It's indisputably a humanoid face. Could the implication be any more obvious? Extraterrestrials planted that thing on the Martian surface as a billboard announcing their presence. Kinda like the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The 1976 Viking mission transmitted this baby back to Earth and somehow it got past those motherfuckers at NASA. WELL HAW HAW HAW! THE CAT'S OUT OF THE BAG NOW, YOU FUCKING FEDS. In 2001, NASA released a new image and the conspiracy deepened. The Face on Mars, it turns out, is cracked and disfigured. And it bears an uncanny resemblance to Mel Gibson's character in his 1993 film Man Without A Face.  
Coincidence? Or is Gibson somehow in league with the Martians? Found somewhere on Rotten.com Wednesday, June 18
New evidence revealed: America is still stupid! Many mistakenly believe U.S. found WMDs in Iraq. WASHINGTON - A third of the American public believes U.S. forces have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a recent poll. Twenty-two percent said Iraq actually used chemical or biological weapons. But such weapons have not been found in Iraq and were not used. Before the war, half of those polled in a survey said Iraqis were among the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. But most of the Sept. 11 terrorists were Saudis; none was an Iraqi. The results startled even the pollsters who conducted and analyzed the surveys. How could so many people be so wrong about information that has dominated news coverage for almost two years? "It's a striking finding," said Steve Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, which asked the weapons questions during a May 14-18 poll of 1,256 respondents. He added: "Given the intensive news coverage and high levels of public attention, this level of misinformation suggests some Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance." Monday, June 16
Microchip promises smart artificial arms Computer technology could soon transform the lives of people with artificial arms. The technology is being tested on patients in Plymouth British scientists are developing a microchip which gives people with prosthetic arms greater control over these limbs. The technology works by turning thought processes in the brain into actual physical movements. Many people who have lost their arms still have some movement in the surrounding muscles. Tuesday, June 10
Which Great Old One Are You?
Thursday, June 5
Comments Revive Doubts Over Iraq Weapons In an interview in the next issue of Vanity Fair magazine, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz cited "bureaucratic reasons" for focusing on Saddam Hussein's alleged arsenal and said a "huge" reason for the war was to enable Washington to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia. "For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Wolfowitz was quoted as saying. Click the link, read the whole article, and realise just what the fuck the US Government has perpertrated, and at what cost. Before he builds space stations, wins the Nobel Peace Prize and calls the White House home, here are a few facts about 13-year-old Gregory Smith: He loves a good cartoon, riding his bike and playing basketball. He's a bit like any kid. Except that Greg's IQ is so high it can't be quantified. He travels the globe promoting nonviolence. And he is graduating from Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va., cum laude in math... He could recite the alphabet at 1. He turned to vegetarianism at 2 after studying dinosaurs and realizing that humans, like herbivores, had flat teeth. At 4, he was doing basic algebra and reading Jules Verne. He deduced the truth about Santa Claus on a library visit that year when it dawned on him that books about St. Nick were filed as fiction. The Smiths say Greg intellectually outgrew them when he was 5, the same year he entered kindergarten in Lancaster County, Pa. ...age 9, he became what is believed to be the youngest high-school graduate in Florida's history. TV cameras captured him losing a baby tooth as he stepped on stage for his diploma... Herman had vigorously encouraged and supported the creation of the Schlangekraft Necronomicon, edited by "Simon." No doubt he’d grown weary of explaining to customers that H.P. Lovecraft’s fabled forbidden tome was a fiction, a plot device for great horror stories and nothing more. He was savvy enough to sell leftover chicken bones as human finger bones to wannabe necromancers, so he surely knew that the market for a "genuine" Necronomicon could be huge–with the right packaging. In 1977, the book made its debut in the window of Herman’s little shop of horrors in Chelsea. It generated a scene of its own, a scene bursting with mad, unfocused creativity and slapstick mayhem. The rest Police 'may shoot public' in terror attack Police could be forced to shoot members of the public to maintain order in the event of a terrorist "dirty bomb" or biological attack on Britain. The Police Federation annual conference in Blackpool was told that so few officers have been trained to deal with a chemical, biological, nuclear or radiological (CBRN) strike they would have to resort to "very unsavoury but necessary" aspects of crowd control. Bob Elder, chairman of the constables' central committee, did not refer specifically to officers firing upon civilians but sources within the organisation said it was clear police would have to resort to such desperate measures to prevent people leaving a contaminated area. Smart jacket Kayoko Tanaka, a PR staffmember of Pioneer, tries on a prototype of a wearable computer, a jacket with a built-in display in its sleeve in Tokyo on Thursday. 
Using an organic film electro-luminescent (EL) display, the wearable computer is being developed with new information technology from Ubiquity and Agent, a program system, by a collaboration of academic institutes and electronic companies. |
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