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Operation Acoustic Kitty
rockville writes: "Remember the Cold War, when intelligence agencies had no oversight and a blank check? Now that those days are back, here's a good object lesson: the Chicago Sun-Times has details about Operation Acoustic Kitty, a CIA program to wire a cat to spy on the Soviet Union. Feel free to be either shocked at the depravity or shocked at the stupidity. The first prototype is also a nominee for Worst Presentation Ever." Hmmm. Last time I posted a story about cats, I got angry email from cat-lovers. Let's see what happens this time.
In my haste to be a quick poster I'm afraid I mistakenly referred to "Carl" Yablonski when I meant to refer to the perennial CLIFF Yablonski. I apologize profusely and hope I have not damaged the impeccable integrity of Slashdot.org
Good night, and God bless.
They say to give the CIA more free reign over what they do, that it would make them more effective. This only solidifies my doubts. They're no more effective, it seems - just have free reign to do stupid things. Like kill cats. Or fail to assassinate Fidel Castro how many times...?
But we know about those, so perhaps I am incorrect. Perhaps we only hear about what they do wrong; after all, the failure means that it is no threat to our security (except our loss of faith in the CIA?). After all, it's whatever succeeded that would need to be kept secret, so that it could continue to work. You have to wonder... if they make enough stupid mistakes, and know they're stupid enough to be benign in regard to security, perhaps the CIA is somewhat smarter than we think. They know what they do wrong, then perhaps they know what they do right. They'll just never get credit for any of it.
Golly gee, I've refuted myself again.
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"And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion...." -- J.S. Mill
True, but imagine trying to actually operate a fly by remote control in 3D. With the cockroach, you can basically just move in two dimensions by walking forward/backward and rotating, but it's much more complicated with a fly since you have to account for aerodynamics and the like - a fly is more than a tiny RC airplane. Entirely apart from the difficulty of simply flying the thing, I doubt human operators would find it easy to emulate "fly-like" flitting flying patterns.
The last problem is that, unlike cockroaches, flies can't carry five times their weight while flying around, so you'd have to really miniaturize the electronic equipment. After all, you'd need two cameras (for 3D viewing), wireless transmission equipment and electrodes, all really lightweight and attached in such a way that it doesn't get in the way of wings or legs.
All in all, I think remote-control flies might still be quite a while off. Cockroaches will have to do for now.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
Kind of puts into perspective God's talents as the original engineer, doesn't it. Robotics is my original field, and anyone who's studied it very quickly becomes struck by how the best robotic subsystems we can even imagine (nanotech and all) are just incredible kludges next to the real thing.
Mimicry of biosystems is a good way to learn, but it will be a very long time (if ever) before we can make a robot fly that has even a tiny fraction of the capabilities of a real fly. (Just try and duplicate those compound eyes...) The same goes for cats, which explains the rationale behind this truly gruesome experiment - they knew they couldn't make a fake cat that would fool anyone, so they implanted the smallest radio transmitter they could get into a real cat. (And remember that in 1966, even the best one-off military technology might have made that a sizable package...)
Unfortunately for them, mental control through electronic equipment is very, very obvious to the person with the electronic equipment inside them. I presume, very seriously, that the cat ran into the street against its better judgement because it was going insane from the forced electrical stimulation and the intense pain of having that many pieces of electrical equipment stuffed into its body.
Um, genius, in 1966 LBJ (liberal Democrat) was in power.
In any case, got news for you: it's left wingers that have always been interested in mind control. The Soviet Union and Hitler ring a bell? Who constantly wants larger and larger governments? That would be the left wing.
Of course, you will respond with "well, why are they trying to expand the FBI's powers? Huh? Huh?"
The difference between right wing politics and left wing politics is that the right wing generally wants to expand the power of law enforcement to catch criminals, whereas the left wing generally wants to expand the power of government to control the opposition party and enhance their own power. If you want to see this in action, take a look at how Democrats manipulated local elections for 40+ years to keep control of congress.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
A whole bunch of people work for the CIA. They aren't all "sick fucks." If you don't like the cat thing, fine... but without "intelligence" we'd be a lot worse off than we are with it.
The CIA may do some distasteful things, but you can't condemn them all for that, and you are definitely enjoying some protection from the agency.
This is presumably working on the theory that nervous systems are fairly similar in all animals. So if you can work out how to make a cockroach tap-dance under computer control, then you can do the same for Christopher Reeve or other paralysed ppl (but presumably in this case under CR's control - just imagine some h4x0r getting root on CR's control box! :-).
You'd have real problems getting a grant to do these experiments on babies, or even on volunteers. Messing with nervous systems could (a) cause lots of pain, and (b) damage the nerves so that the person is paralysed. But with cockroaches, who cares? If it gets paralysed, squish it and move on to another one. Why roaches? Well, they're large insects, so presumably it's easier to trace the nerves. And I'd guess insects are easier to deal with due to their exoskeleton - if you need to attach something to an insect, you can glue it to the outside and be sure it won't come off. With mammals and reptiles, you've always got the problem of attaching stuff securely to skin. And of course, there's the PETA issue - pictures of cute fluffy mice in labs are good for publicity, but no-one's going to object to experiments on roaches bcos they're not photogenic!
Maybe you need to reconsider how medical research is done. Transplants were _not_ done on humans, they were done on chimps, rats, dogs, etc first.
Grab.