Coming soon – the bionic (wo)man

A woman amputee that has been fitted with a bionic arm is able to control it with just her thoughts. The prosthetic arm is connected to nerve impulses that lead to the brain. So if she wants to open a jar, she just has to think “I want to open the jar”. Just as if she was never amputated in the first place!

Check it out.

Little People – an amazingly cool art project

Little hand-painted people, left in London to fend for themselves. Brilliant!

Click here for more.

[via boing-boing]

Find out who’s nearby with Loopt

Loopt is a newly launched startup that provides location and presence information as a mobile service. It’s been funded by Y Combinator, the well known seed-stage funding firm created by Paul Graham. Loopt offers both a cellphone and web-based map visualization interface that lets you see where your friends are and what they’re doing. They’ve clearly entered into some partnership with Boost mobile to get location information and perhaps other carrier-based functionality. Boost is owned entirely by Nextel and so it does not provide any GSM-based infrastructure. However Loopt is promising to add more mobile carriers soon and you can sign up to be notified when your carrier begins to offer the service.

This is one of the features that I have been thinking about for some time now with regards to mobile relevance. If I’m out shopping and want to sit down for a quick cup of coffee it would be great to know who’s nearby so that I can give them a ring to see if they’re up for it. Cool stuff!

Artist Banksy Commemorates September 11th

Banksy, the renowned artist known for his humorous and political artistic creations, added a hooded figure that looks like a Guantanamo inmate inside the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride at Disneyland in California. Clearly a very symbolic message on this day, September 11th 2006, that marks 5 years since the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Check out some of this other artsy ‘pranks’, like the hits on New York’s most famous museums and his graffiti on Israel’s Apartheid wall of seperation.

Scathing Review of Amazon Unbox

I recently talked about how Amazon beat Apple to the punch and opened the first real online video download store. CNet has just published a review. Their recommendation: stay away!

The Ten Best Movies You’ve Never Seen

I’m a big movie buff and always on the lookout for good movies I haven’t seen.  I enjoy the occasional mindless hollywood flick, but in general I prefer the offbeat movies that haven’t necessarily garnered box office billions.  The Pajiba staff over at pajiba.com have posted a list of 10 not so popular movies (in no particular order) that they claim are definitely worth seeing.  I’m gonna get myself started on these… but if anyone’s seen any of them then let us know!

1. Zero Effect (1998)
2. Shallow Grave (1994)
3. We Don’t Live Here Anymore (2004)
4. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1991)
5. Kicking and Screaming (1995)
6. All the Real Girls (2003)
7. Citizen Ruth (1996)
8. Suture (1993)
9. Following (1998)
10. Stander (2004)

Amazon Releases Video Download Store

Amazon has beaten Apple to the punch and has become the first to offer a wide range of video downloads through its website. Both TV shows and movies are available. I was browsing around and the offering is quite extensive, but it will no doubt expand so if your favorite TV show isn’t up for grabs yet, don’t worry.

Prices range from $1.99 for an episode of the TV series 24, to $14.99 for a full feature film. With each purchase you get 2 copies of the movie, one ‘DVD-quality’ one to keep on your PC and another lower quality one that you can transport to your portable video device. As of now Amazon supports 6 portable players, but again, more will surely come. Rentals can be had for $3.99, so not any cheaper than going out and getting it on DVD from say Blockbuster.

Of course Windows XP is required since all the formats are plagued with DRM. I’m sure they’ll come out with Mac support soon. As for us Linux people, we prefer to stick to deregulated open source stuff, so I doubt they’ll be supporting us anytime soon.

Take a look for yourself.

Light Emitting Clothes and Fabrics

This is an amazingly cool new development by Philips. It’s called the Lumalive Light Emitting Textiles and it enables the creation of animated graphics and color-changing displays embedded into regular fabric. The technology is such that the texture and softness of the fabric isn’t altered by the embedded light-emitting diodes. Philips claims that the product is ready to be commercialized. The advertising agencies are drooling now…

Click here for the video.

The 9/11 Report – A Graphical Adaptation

Click here to read The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, which sets text from The 9/11 Commission Report to images. Slate is excerpting a chapter a day through Sept. 7. Click on the chapter sections in the navigation on the right to start from the beginning.

“The Muslim”

In January of last year and in response to a poll in which 44% of Americans supported curtailing the civil liberties of Muslims in the US, I wrote about how extremely troubled I was by the festering racist sentiment in the United States. Now, just over a year and a half later, another poll was released in which 60% of Americans support singling out people who look “Middle Eastern” for security screening at locations such as airports and train stations. Sixty percent….

The situation in the US is extremely troubling and I truly fear for what may happen if this racism is left to fester much longer. Wiretapping, shallow propagandist newscasters, racist slurs in government speeches (even the President openly declaring “Islamic Fascists”), limitations on Free Speech like the man who was not allowed to fly with Arabic script on his T-shirt. Whatever happened to the US constitution people? “Live Free or Die” – it’s written on your New Hampshire license plates!

And Fox News yesterday… all Fox news was talking about all day yesterday was “Should the US strike Iran?”. That was the headline written at the bottom of the TV all day. Newscasters, military experts, politicians, all saying that US should strike Iran.

It’s scary people, it really is. I am shocked and very disturbed. Nearly 2 in every 3 people on the American street: take a step back, pause, and think about that for a second. Out of every three people that pass you by on the sidewalk when you walk to class or work, two think that your fellow citizen’s rights should be curtailed knowing nothing about them except that they are Muslim. Or even worse, “Muslim-looking”.

It is incomprehensible and irresponsible for an educated people – the people of the world’s most powerful nation – to be thinking like that in the 21st century. The human race has several times witnessed the horrors that can unfold once there is a popular feeling of hate towards a particular ethnic/religious group. It is precisely this kind of thinking, this dehumanization of a whole people, that fostered the sentiment for the extermination of the Tutsis in Rwanda and the German Holocaust of the Jews. While I optimistically do not believe there will be a Muslim genocide anytime soon, this dangerous line of thinking is a necessary precursor to any such extermination – or any state endorsed ethnic/religious discrimination for that matter. Without creating a popular sentiment of fear and hate, Hitler would not have been able to carry out the Holocaust. He portrayed the Jews as leeches that were living off the spoils of the Aryan Germans, which he professed to be superior to other races. Through propaganda and his charismatic speeches, he successfully created “The Jew”: an inferior being that subsists off our (Aryan German) livelihood and is to be hated and killed.

The Bush administration, with its gung-ho war policies, CNN, Fox, NBC, and all the other crap that Americans watch on TV have all successfully created “The Muslim”: a dark-skinned bearded or head-covered creature that cowardly lurks in the shadows, conniving on how it is to execute its innate desire to kill us (non-Muslim Americans). We fear “The Muslim” because it is savage. It has no concern for its own life, it flies planes into buildings and films itself while it decapitates humans with kitchen knives. We must carefully monitor “The Muslim” as it moves about in our towns and cities and put it in a cage (jail) if it does anything we deem suspicious, even if we have no evidence to put “The Muslim” on trial. Perhaps we can make it legal not to ever put “The Muslim” on trial since it is, in fact, a different creature than the rest of us Americans. We should kill “The Muslim” before it kills us.

My little hyperbole was not meant to belittle the issue. This is very serious.
It hasn’t reached the stage of genocide yet and I think it is far from that, but something is festering under the hood and it is ugly. I do not want to speculate, but I fear what will happen if this mindless stereotyping does not get tackled soon. Ironically, it is precisely this type of stereotyping that Osama Bin Laden and his followers feed on to sustain their beliefs that “The American” should be killed.

To the two out of three Americans who support a racist agenda – wake up! And to the one-third that is still sane, help wake these people up!