We don't have long to wait now

I can sense it.

Dubya now has all the "authority" he needs to take complete control of this country. All he lacks is an excuse. You can bet they've got something up their sleeve. Just like September 11, only bigger and better.

All you have to do is listen to the neocon shills to know something's afoot.

Are you ready for The Day After?

Underwater camouflage

This is fascinating stuff. I've always been mesmerized by the octopus. Imagine what kind of language they'd use if they ever attained sentience!

Lament - An FSX Video by Lotus

Here is Lotus's latest FSX video. I flew a number of the aircraft you see here. Download the high-res version here.

The 'drone' UFO hoax

This 'drone' phenomenon probably started as a gag, but it's grown into something of a phenomenon in certain UFO circles. I'm positive it is a hoax, and those who accept this stuff uncritically are going to lose a lot of face when it's revealed as such.

It started as a series of photos, then became more elaborate photos. Thankfully some people with CGI modeling and animation skills created demonstration movies (one, two, three, four) showing how easy it is to create such fakery, even with unsteady hand-held footage.

Here is a blog which purports to be leaked information from a program called CARET (here's an article about the blog) which dealt with the 'alien technology' upon which the drone is based.

This kind of visual stuff is my bread and butter and I can tell you with little doubt it's all fake. The shapes which comprise those craft are exactly the kind Lightwave, Maya, or 3DSMax are good at producing, and all professional 3D packages have render modes that can produce photoreal lighting/shading. The photographs are obviously ray-traced CGI renders using a radiosity lighting algorithm.
(Check out this tutorial on environment-based lighting with High Dynamic Range Imaging.)

Not only do the designs of the craft strike me as utterly without precedent in the realm of serious ufology, but the 'alien language samples' in the CARET document look completely specious. The terminology in the document sound impressive but it's really just fluff and nonsense.

My guess is it started as a hoax, and gained additional (and probably totally independent) contributors. As more people are duped, more incredible supporting material will be provided until it blows up eventually. Think of the process as an ad-hocratic viral meme with a self-destruct switch.

That hot new neoconservative philosopher named Plato

The neoconservative movement, based on the principles of Machiavelli and Leo Strauss, probably gets its seminal ideas from a certain reading of Plato, suggests Simon Blackburn in his book "Plato's Republic". Alex Koppelman's complete interview with the author can be read here.

Twenty-four hundred years ago, Plato wrote a book called "The Republic," in which the famed teacher Socrates and his pupils discuss the ingredients of an ideal government. They decide that there is a higher realm than mere physical reality, that it is the duty of a small cadre of enlightened, elite citizens called "guardians" to become philosopher kings, and that only these rulers can grasp what is truly real and Good. Over the years, "The Republic" has been invoked to justify everything from authoritarian elitism to liberalism, but during the 20th century, neoconservative godfather Leo Strauss reinterpreted it to his own political philosophy, with its controversial assertion that it's OK for the enlightened elite to tell "noble lies" in the service of the Good. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz actually took courses on Plato from Strauss at the University of Chicago; other neoconservative hawks with Straussian genes include Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq and current ambassador to the U.N.; and Bill Kristol, neocon pundit and co-founder of the Weekly Standard.

...Leo Strauss [saw] him as in some sense endorsing the idea that it's a dog-eat-dog world. This was kind of a covert message, Strauss thought, of [Plato's] text. Strauss thought that this covert message or esoteric message was supposed to be perceived only by a number of people of special illumination, amongst which he included himself, of course. And that was the ideology that eventually became American neoconservatism, the view that the servants of the state are entitled to do anything -- to lie, to manipulate, to foment war, to destabilize neighboring states, to disguise their actions under a hypocritical cloak of goodness. So it's an extreme example of realpolitik, which I think is just a 180 degree misreading of what Plato is about. But it just shows that you can put down the clearest words on the page and it will be read saying the opposite.

The events of September 11, 2001 bear all the hallmarks of the most audacious "noble lie" ever told. It was a christmas gift tailor-made for the newly elected neoconservatives, a "New Pearl Harbor" giving them license to transform the US into an outright Empire. I can only hope people wake up from this carefully crafted deception before it's too late.

The most sacred photograph I know of

...is the image of this lone man blocking a tank column in Tiananmen Square, 1989. You can learn more about this moment in history from PBS's Frontline documentary on The Tank Man.

Spying on the Homefront: PBS documentary

Spying on the Homefront is a new PBS documentary from the Frontline series. You can watch the entire episode online.

Everybody's a suspect. And if you're good, we won't bother you. And if you look a little strange, then you might get on a watchlist.

I also re-recommend their excellent The Persuaders.

This is code written by elves

What can you pack into a 177kb executable? Magic. Download the demo here, if you have a decent 3D card. Or, if you just want to see a YouTube video of what the demo does, watch this.

Using photographs to enhance videos of a static scene

All I can say is wow. Using this technique, one could up-rez blurry, shaky, poorly-exposed video using automatic image-stitching from related digital imagery. Unwanted components of the original video can be removed seamlessly too.

The ramifications for filmmaking, art, and propaganda are mind-boggling.

On a related note, the new technology of plenoptics, or "light-field" imagery, can take specially formatted images that allow depth of field, exposure, and even position to be altered after the fact. Simply amazing!

Thanks to Chriz for these links.