I recently posted the Photosynth tech demo from Siggraph 2008. This is the program that stitches a bunch of flat photos of the same location together to create a 3-d fly-through of that location. It even displays that fly-through over the internet.

Well, Microsoft just released a version of Photosynth to the public. You can upload photos of your home, workplace, Hellfire Club cave or I suppose your colonoscopy and it will build all that into a 3-d fly-through.

Try it out, here (will require a Windows Live ID)

If you create a Photosynth, post it to the forum. I’ve created a thread for just that purpose in the “Your Projects” section.

Check it out! The Scorpion - a 200,000 volt taser on one end, pepper spray on the other.

This is the only way to properly prepare one’s midnight snack!

I’m going to try and get a demo of this for review on the show. Stay tuned…

Ok. “The Justicemobile” is my own name but apparently the Chinese do have a fleet of 40 mobile execution vans.

The country that executed more than four times as many convicts as the rest of the world combined last year is slowly phasing out public executions by firing squad in favor of lethal injections. Unlike the United States and Singapore, the only two other countries where death is administered by injection, China metes out capital punishment from specially equipped “death vans” that shuttle from town to town.

I wonder if you need a special license to drive that or if any commercial driver’s license will do.

read all about the kill-o-car here

I’m just starting into Duncan Laurie’s book on using Radionic technologies as a means to open one’s awareness to it’s levels of external influence. Or at least that is what I’m gathering it is about from what I’ve read so far. It reads like a 21st Century mix of Philip K. Dick and Carlos Casteneda as it dances on the pinhead of fact and flirtatious fiction.

Duncan Laurie is a breath of fresh air in the world of fringe technologies. I spend a considerable amount of time indulging myself in the world of the fanatical internet lunatic in hopes of finding, somewhere, some models of effective and compelling technologies of a less accessible nature than is immediately available (well truth be told I also really enjoy some of the peculiarities the human mind can drum up in the search for the novel). Usually I can over-satiate myself on the hillarious dingbats who busy their time fighting lizard people with their HMGs and their deep analysis of ‘mind control’ techniques. Rarely do you find someone not cripplingly knuckleheaded or seriously nuts, even more rare is it to discover a truly brilliant individual in these circles; let alone a genuine artist.

Duncan Laurie, in my estimations, is just that, a brilliant artist. He is a rare treasure and this book appears to be a fair reflection of just that.

Here’s a bit from the preface that may get you excited:

Consequently, much of the present book focuses on the ideas of John Norseen, an engineer and semiotitian employed for many years by the Lockheed Martin Co. and various U.S.
intelligence agencies. Norseen’s stated work was to explore the weaponization of the mind. As
such, we began our discussion from diametrically opposite directions, my background being fine
art. Our discussions provided me with a fascinating glimpse into military black box technology
and the mindset of its creators. Through Norseen I began to see how defense industry engineers
struggled to incorporate consciousness into practical design applications, how they went about
quantifying and systematizing an approach to mind physics generally considered impossible by
mainstream science.

My conversations with Norseen shifted the book’s focus more towards examining the
vulnerability of the mind to outside technical manipulation . It was the logical result of an extended
dialogue with a weapons designer. While I hoped his technical insights into mind technology
would enable me to make a better case for applying similar techniques to art, they also added a
surreal component to my investigation. Norseen’s world of semiotics became, in and of itself, a
fascinating literary digression. “

Enjoy!

Viking compadre Downtown Dave has posted an interesting assessment of the conflict between Georgia and Russia, it’s people’s histories and how this all may be at the orchestral mitt of that old cum sucker Karl Rove:

“At any rate, with so much of TurdBlossom’s sausagy fingers stirring this incredibly dangerous pot, and McCain’s unbelievable bellicosity running amok, the media have been predictably been floating the notion that all of this killing going on down in the Caucasus is somehow good for McCain. The old cold warrior appears to be on the warpath again, dying to re-fight the battles of the past. I think the jury is still terrifically “out” as to whether all of this is going to be good for RepubliCons or a disaster. But what’s clear to me is that once again, the neocons are trying to manipulate international crises as an electoral strategy designed to win over their rabid, war-loving base, whom they’re sure to keep absolutely paralyzed with fear, to such a point that they don’t realize how the Corporate Machine is fucking them over every single day of their god-damned lives.”

Read the whole post here