Some people know, with absolute certainty, that they were born the wrong gender.
A girl sees that she has no phallus, yet she feels deeply, unambiguously male. A boy is equipped with a penis, yet he feels fundamentally, unarguably female.
Such discord often gets chalked up to the physical - prenatal hormone exposures, abnormal brain structures, gay genes. Or to the psychological - repressed homosexuality, absent dads, overbearing moms, parents who wanted a baby of the opposite sex.
But there is a new explanation: Some transgender men claim to possess phantom penises. From the time they were little girls, they say they had vivid sensations of a penis between their legs. Others develop such a phantom when they begin taking testosterone therapy.
Similarly, transgender women who are born male and later undergo sex reassignment surgery generally do not report having a phantom. They say that their penis was never part of their body image.
V.S. Ramachandran, a neurologist and psychologist at UC San Diego and a leading authority on phantom limb sensations, says it has long been known that some people who are born without arms have vivid phantom arms. They can swing them around, wave goodbye and make complicated gestures.
This suggests that an intact body image - the maps of the body laid down in the brain before and after birth - can develop without actual limbs. So-called mirror neurons that map the actions and intentions of others into one's own brain may help bring the phantoms to life, Ramachandran says.

GENDER IDENTITY AND PHANTOM GENITALIA

Last year, three armed ground bots were deployed to Iraq. But the remote-operated SWORDS units were almost immediately pulled off the battlefield, before firing a single shot at the enemy. Here at the conference, the Army’s Program Executive Officer for Ground Forces, Kevin Fahey, was asked what happened to SWORDS. After all, no specific reason for the 11th-hour withdrawal ever came from the military or its contractors at Foster-Miller. Fahey’s answer was vague, but he confirmed that the robots never opened fire when they weren’t supposed to. His understanding is that “the gun started moving when it was not intended to move.” In other words, the SWORDS swung around in the wrong direction, and the plug got pulled fast. No humans were hurt, but as Fahey pointed out, “once you’ve done something that’s really bad, it can take 10 or 20 years to try it again.”

The rise has begun

rise of the machines

"Augmented Cognition," the Darpa program to build computer interfaces that adapt to their users' brains, has officially run its course.� But efforts to build mind-reading PCs continue throughout the military establishment.�
Augmented Cognition relies on the idea that people have more than one kind of working memory, and more than one kind of attention; there are separate slots in the mind for things written, things heard and things seen. By monitoring how taxed those areas of the brain are, it should be possible to change a computer's display to compensate. If people are getting too much visual information, send them a text alert. If they reading too much at once, present some of the data visually -- in a chart or map.

Pentagon's Mind-Reading Computers Replicate | Danger Room from Wired.com

March 19, 2008 -- Researchers in California have created an artificial muscle that heals itself and generates electricity.
The research, parts of which are already being used in Japan to generate electricity from ocean waves, could be used to make walking robots, develop better prosthetics, or even charge your iPod.

The accessory to go with the mp3 breast implant i guess.

Discovery News : Discovery Channel

Ray Kurzweil, the famous inventor, is trim, balding, and not very tall. With his perfect posture and narrow black glasses, he would look at home in an old documentary about Cape Canaveral, but his mission is bolder than any mere voyage into space. He is attempting to travel across a frontier in time, to pass through the border between our era and a future so different as to be unrecognizable. He calls this border the singularity. Kurzweil is 60, but he intends to be no more than 40 when the singularity arrives.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

The international struggles of our world may lead to… (ka-boom) NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST!

Nothing lends itself better to a fear-based advertising campaign than your family’s radioactive death. So when the Mort Kridel Advertising Agency was asked to create a radio ad campaign for Survive-All Fallout Shelters, they did their PR-darnedest to scare the Wonder Bread crap out of nuclear families everywhere. Tense horn stabs and canned explosions bracket sales pitches like:

Radioactive fallout, that deadly by-product of a nuclear attack, will kill literally millions of unprotected families in the event of an atomic attack. Is YOUR family protected? Do YOU have a fallout shelter?

Each Civil defense approved, basement-type, Do-It-Yourself fallout shelter includes: A complete fully-stocked first aid kit! Extra strength saran and rayon bunks! A radiation meter and individual dosimeters!

Civil defense approved, FHA approved, no money down, five years to pay!

Economical… but Priceless!

These are ripped from the original LP that would have gone to radio stations from the ad agency. There are 6 long versions and 3 shortened versions, each fairly different. Since it was promotional there was no record cover, but a scan of the record’s label is included.  No year is evident, but since the zip code is two digits, it’s presumably pre-1963, and I would guess late 1950’s.

these are great

Dinosaur Gardens » Survive-All Fallout Shelter Radio Ads

A Japanese gravestone maker called Ishinokoe (Voice of the Stone) plans to sell GRAVESTONES WITH BARCODES embedded in them. Anyone with the right kind of cell phone can simply scan or snap a picture of the stone, and get information on the departed. The barcodes will be QR codes, otherwise known as "matrix codes" or two-dimensional bar codes. (props to CScout Japan)

The Raw Feed: Japanese Gravestones Let the Living 'Call' the Dead

Wikileaks releases over 150 censored videos and photos of the Tibet uprising
Our primary interests are in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we expect to be of assistance to peoples of all countries who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact...(more)

Wikileaks - Wikileaks

heh

YouTube - Original Motion-Activated Sprinkler vs. Pigeons

The Sex Zombies at the Brighton Bar in Long Branch, NJ.

Including Vile's mind blowing solo!

YouTube - Simon Says Fuck You / Cock Donor - The Sex Zombies