Telepathy? Snuff And Snares, Oh My!

Im Not even sure what to say about this one.

A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a "voiceless" phone call for the first time.

With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.

A video (right) shows the system being used to place the first public voiceless phone call on stage at a recent conference held by microchip manufacturer Texas Instruments. Michael Callahan, co-founder of Ambient Corporation, which developed the neckband, demonstrates the device, called the Audeo.

Users needn't worry about that the system voicing their inner thoughts though. Callahan says producing signals for the Audeo to decipher requires "a level above thinking". Users must think specifically about voicing words for them to be picked up by the equipment.

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13449-nervetapping-neckband-allows-telepathic-chat.html

In other news, i watched this last night which while dealing with the topic of snuff film in popular culture it mostly deals with the history of more popular exploitation films that most of us have heard of (cannibal holocaust, guinea pig, etc). I dont really have much interest in the subject matter or exploitation films but im a sucker for documentaries.

And after years of ignoring venetian snares output mostly because IDM/breakcore is a sort of parody of old jungle and DnB techno stuff that needs to stay dead and shouldnt exist even in parody form. I came across a release he did that is pretty amazing. The album is a couple years old so this is pretty old news to people that take an interest in this sort of thing. Anyway its entitled Rossz Csillag Alatt Szueletett which combines hungarian classical pieces with his usual mix of break beats and noise. This is the video that pretty much turned me on to it.

Imagine there's no Heaven, It's easy if you try...

No this isnt a post about Dawkins as the title may make you belive.

I've been watching a lot of V/VM videos on youtube recently. I had been aware of his existence for quite some time and how he was a breakcore/IDM dadaist destroying pop music for entertainment but i hadnt really explored his output assuming he was another laptop rockstar in a sea of laptop rockstars. How wrong i turned out to be, this guy has created some of the creepiest, psychedelic, scary distortions of pop ballads you can possibly imagine and on top of this he syncs it perfectly with video and does very odd distortions to the videos. Try to catch the atomic bomb image in the saturation of the first video.

Here are my two favorites.

Bee Gees - Words
One of those dead Beatles - Imagine

Fitting perfectly in with my previous post im pretty certain listening to this for any length of time would turn you into a serial killer especially the words video.

Apparently V/VM also known as James Kirby spent around 5 years making these bizarre deconstructions of pop music without being sued or generally harrased by lawyers untill he released an album set of nothing but remixes of Relax by the 80s artist Frankie Goes to Hollywood which caught someones attention and the cease and desist letters came and his label had to pull the album before they were sued into oblivion.

They may be able to catch one guy with a laptop but they cant catch all the guys with laptops in this intellectual copyright guerilla war or can they...

On that paranoid tip heres a little story about our friends at the DHS, yes i know im late by about 15 days on this story which amounts to about 20 years in internet time.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/08/eff_alc_sues_homeland_security/

Two civil rights watchdogs today filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Homeland Security after a number of travellers complained that their laptops, mobile phones and other electronic devices had been excessively screened at border entry points.

Internet watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation and civil liberty group Asian Law Caucus (ALC) brought the suit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The lawsuit (pdf), which was filed in the US District Court in San Francisco, calls for the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) unit of the DHS to cough up records that detail the "questioning, search and inspection" methods used on travellers who enter or return to the US through a number of ports.

The two lobby groups said they were prompted to act following more than 20 complaints by Californian citizens and residents, who told the ALC that they had been unduly harassed by CBP agents.

According to the EFF, US citizen Amir Khan – an IT consultant working in Fremont, California – has been stopped every time he returns to the country from travels abroad.

He claimed that custom officials searched his laptop, books, personal notebooks and mobile phone. Khan also said that he has been held for questioning for more than 20 hours.

Other individuals made similar complaints as well as saying that the agency had grilled them about their religious practices, families, political beliefs and other activities on their return to the US from travels abroad.

The lawsuit follows the DHS's failure to meet the 20-day time limit that Congress had set for responding to public information requests, said the EFF.

The group's staff attorney Marcia Hofmann said in a statement: "The public has the right to know what the government's standards are for border searches. Laptops, phones, and other gadgets include vast amounts of personal information.

"When will agents read your email? When do they copy data, where is it stored, and for how long? How will this information follow you throughout your life? The secrecy surrounding border search policies means that DHS has no accountability to America's travellers."

The CBP, which was not available for comment at time of writing, opened a new FOIA office in October last year under the Office of International Trade with the aim of improving agency disclosure of information. ®

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-Capgras

Kevin Underwood

I was discussing the case of Kevin Underwood yesterday after reading the transcript of his interrogation, now if you're unaware of Kevin he was a kid from oklahoma who killed his neighbors 10 year old daughter, tried to have sex with her and as a final act wanted to cannibalize the corpse. Now why should i care about another nutbag in a world full of people hellbent on killing themselves. Well he happened to occupy some of the little parts of cyberspace i did (somethingawful, kingdom of loathing). This guy was your typical net hermit as anyone reading this probably knows all about what that entails his only real outlet to the world was the internet. This hit way to close to home to be comfortable about. Good god was i a serial killer waiting to happen? Had the media been right and had all those years of playing quake turned me into a killing machine? I needed to enlist some sort of guidance to sort this out.

Before i go any further i need to make it clear i didnt know kevin and from the description i've read we wouldnt have had interest in each other not because he's a fucking pedophile and child murderer but simply because we dont share much commonality.

So i enlisted the aid of Frau Irene to make sense of all of this. When somethings meaningful in a higher sense i can count on her to make sense of it, to turn the abstract into the logical and vice versa. Im not even sure if she's quoting lyrics to some obscure 80s french new wave band or addressing whatever im babbeling about half the time but it all works out in the end. It didnt take very long for an agreement to be made that isolation and an escalation of pornographic fantasies plays into how one decides one day that its allright to murder and try to fuck a 10 year old girl. At a certain point these fantasies and images this person is obsessed with crosses that mental barrier that says "this is real" "this isnt real". Is this true psychopathy? I mean im intimately familiar with psychosis brought on by psychoactive substances but in the end i knew none of it was real. But some how in a sober state of mind this person can bypass this mental buffer without realizing it and just go on their jolly way working their shitty day jobs thinking about dismembering and eating people.

Kevin describes in his interrogation that he was into amateur anime that depicted cannibalism and visited some forums where it was discussed in great detail. Im pretty sure this is some offshoot of vore or whatever the otaku kids call it, they have a name for every sexual fetish under the sun involving cartoon characters. This brings to question was his involvement in this form of negative renforcement the thing that eventually pushed him over the edge or was he simply predisposed to psychopathy and possibly this outlet kept him from acting out for a while? I guess this depends solely on the psycho in question on an individual basis.

He also tried to scapegoat his actions on antidepressant drugs which is just silly and while i can personally attest to the fact that psychiatric meds can certainly warp your perceptions at no time have i considered violent or insane acts rational. I realize ancedotal evidence isnt empirical evidence but i've never seen a control group study by GSK that says celexa makes you fantasize about canniablism and murdering children im pretty certain that wouldnt go over well with their PR department. His defense that the happy pills made him do it is about 10 years to late, the prozac nation nonsense doesnt fly in this day and age. Its possible that he had some neurlogic defect that made this all possible as i recall they did some mri imaging of murderer brains back in the 90s and discovered a great difference in how certain neurotransmitters are disseminated around the brain and there was obvious physical differences in their brains.

Am i a future kevin underwood? Absolutely not. Is the internet harboring future Kevin Underwoods allowing them to run and play in their delusional little worlds like fanciful unicorns? Yeah probably and i imagine theres plenty of them. So keep in mind the next time you go to the grocery store that the quiet bag boy may just be imagining strangling you with your own intestines while doing horrible things to one of your orifices.

- Capgras

He's Talking To You And He's Talking To Me

"Andrew Keen, a 47-year-old Briton who founded dot-com era music startup Audiocafe, argues that basic notions of expertise are under assault amid a cultural shift in favor of the amateurism of blogs, MySpace and other popularity-driven sites. "Millions and millions of exuberant monkeys ... are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity," Keen writes in a book published Tuesday"