Members of Sasquatch Watch of Virginia went camping in the rugged Allegheny Mountain highlands of the Dolly Sods Wilderness Area with GPS navigators, cameras, voice recorders and plaster of Paris to make casts of huge footprints, West Virginia Public Broadcasting reported…

…The group took plaster casts of suspicious prints but didn’t spot the creature during the expedition last weekend.

Full article here >>.

The explosion of relatively inexpensive and powerful consumer gadgets has been called a major boon in the “democratization” of media technology. Things (films, games, music, books, software, experiments, prototypes, investigations, etc.) that once required tens thousands of dollars and crews of trained professionals can now be produced in a basement or backyard with only a few hundred bucks, some spare time, and a half decent computer.

Perhaps no other “industry” has felt this impact more than professional seekers of the paranormal. For only a relatively small amount of cash (or credit) and access to a Best Buy you can too can get yourself enough equipment to call yourself a “pro” mystery hunter and perhaps even get a reality t.v show while you’re at it. Personal Voice Recorder, err I mean EVP monitor? Check. Apparition Image Capture Device AKA a digital camera? Check. GPS? Fuck, you don’t wanna get lost in a haunted house do ya? Check!

However, can we really pass this shit off as “going high tech” anymore? You’d hope that by now the bar for “high tech” would have been set higher than mp3 players and cell phones. Not that I don’t appreciate how useful, productive, and even liberating these technologies potentially are; the fact that I can bitch with a straight face about how banal and ubiquitous they’ve become is actually something quite incredible. I’m just getting a bit tired of hearing “golly gee-whiz that’s so high tech” about anything that’s got more functionality than a potato peeler. A personal organizer/portable gaming system is simply not on the cutting edge anymore.

And to top it all off in true “paranormal investigator” reality t.v. show style, after playing around with all their “high tech” gear for hours, the only thing these wannabe yeti wranglers were able to successfully collect any sort of “evidence” with turns out to be the plaster of Paris cast – which is about as “low-tech” as you can get.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

Read the Full Article Here >>.

Give it up for the analyst who pitched the idea of “open source intelligence” to the CIA – probably got got himself some nice funding and a sweet gig watching youtube all day.

But of course given the throngs of  willing participants  lining up to make information about themselves readily available for “public” consumption, and given  that they most often do so entirely for free and on their own time,  it would stupid of the gub’mint not to do this.  After all, some things really are  just too easy to resist -  like shootin’ “wild” birds in a pen.

The U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced the invention of a ‘blob-like’ robot which is able to inflate and deflate it’s body through a process called ‘jamming’, in which the robot’s synthetic (silicone) skin is changed back and forth from solid to semi-fluid states.

The so-called “chembot” will be used to  assist in military and search and rescue operations where it would be called upon to  slip through small cracks, holes, and crevices in that very special way that only animate blobs can do.

You gotta love it when you can give any ol’ piece of creepy technology a cutesy wutsey pokeman-esque  nickname and swear up and down that it’s only practical value is for saving innocent lives.

Yeah riiiiight.

This Article from 9News Australia can be found here >>.

There is nothing really new in this Wall Street journal article, yet its a nice summary of where we stand now and where we are heading in communication technology.  I still do not have any motivation to use Twitter.  If someone wants to follow my Tweets, let me know and I’ll consider it. 

The End of the Email Era – WSJ.com

“Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.
In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.”

Navy Pushing Laser ‘Holy Grail’ to Weapons Grade

There are lots of good links to other laser-related news. I didn’t realize the Danger Room had an entire sub-category for Lasers and Ray Guns. Definitely something to check back on.

Thus goes the drive for profit. Its critical that the tech adopters pay attention to this kind of thing. It is sad that we may need to have a ‘green’ certification for manufacturers of ‘green’ technology.

Solar Energy Firms Leave Waste Behind in China

“The land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in the place. . . . It is like dynamite — it is poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it,” said Ren Bingyan, a professor at the School of Material Sciences at Hebei Industrial University.”

Researchers are taking it to the next level by creating contact lenses with virtual displays. This article outlines some of the research:

Contact Lenses With Circuits, Lights A Possible Platform For Superhuman Vision

There are many possible uses for virtual displays. Drivers or pilots could see a vehicle’s speed projected onto the windshield. Video-game companies could use the contact lenses to completely immerse players in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion. And for communications, people on the go could surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see.

The terms ‘superhuman’ and ‘bionic’ probably should be used from a science perspective, but they give you the right idea in terms of potential capabilities. Neat stuff.

Check out the picture above (credit: University of Washington). They tested these contact lenses on rabbits. That’s all I need – killer rabbits with super vision.

Who the fuck are these people? I never miss the irony in these stories, especially as they occur in the ideological heartland of cut-throat global capitalism, the USA. I mean, when workers are laid off by the thousands, when drinking water is polluted, or when sick people are denied necessary care, its pretty hard not find a politician, legal bureaucrat, or industry representative to solemnly declare these events part of the inevitable function of market, which must never be interfered with – lest we risk becoming filthy communists.

That is unless “the market” is hurting established players, like the RIAA or subprime brokerage firms, and then of course, all sorts of measures to ‘influence’ the market are miraculously found. New technology causing problems with your pre-1950′s business model? No problem, strangle its use with legislation. Made some bad loans to poor suckers who can’t pay? Here’s a few trillion in liquidity, that might help, but probably not.

I’m not even going to get into the question of “stealing” and “fair use” here. That’s for another installment.