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Chinese Develop Remote Controlled Pigeons
Many readers sent us links to the story about Chinese scientists developing pigeons whose flight can be controlled remotely. The best coverage may be Wired's, both because they link to the English language version of the original Peoples Daily Online release, and because of the (disturbing) photos. The birds can be commanded to fly left, right, up, or down. Reader KDan writes, "A number of obvious uses jump out to me... the remote-controlled pigeons will finally allow us to create an efficient implementation of RFC 1149 and RFC 2549."
Packet storm!
Routing to the max.
If you set the evilbit can you make your pigeon crap on specified targets?
liqbase
I want simple controls:-
:-)
left, right, forward and of course.... fire!
get them to eat berries first for a full on multicolour pebble dashing.
and wait until my neighbour is washing his car.
(of course a small head mounted camera with crosshairs target scope would be good as well
ah, delight.
Now,Communist Party of China can control Google remotely!
Am I the only one who immediately thought of the Homing Pigeon bomb from Worms Armaggedon?
Anyone who has played Worms is well aware of the weaponization potential of the homing pigeon. The future battlefield will be a bed of feathers...
Each pigeon would cost 2 million dollars and cities with many statues would be labelled as an imminent threats.
Am i the only one that can see a potential weapon rather than an rfc? A fantasy writer called Philip Reeve already imagined such creatures in uses such as scouts or units of attack( imagine an army of pidgeon coming towards you ) Surveilance, and bioweapon delivery could also be a use for this enslaved beings
Something to feed to the acustic kitty. I wonder how soon before it is used on human?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We'll have to get the best of help! Somebody call Dick Dastardly and Muttley!
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
What happens on up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right?
Will we see a Pokemon-genre game where you breed pigeons?
A shame we will never know what this feels like for the pigeon. Is it really being forced to turn left against its will, or does the pigeon experience it as a sudden desire to turn left?
In the TNG canon, did the Borg originate with pigeons?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
RFC 2549 combined with this routing upgrade should finally get me an Internet connection that is faster and more reliable than Comcast Cable! Granted that this isn't exactly a very high standard, but it's a start!
So, when will I be able to sign up for IPOP in my area (IP Over Pidgeon)?
This sounds horrible. I find the idea of overriding another animal's free will very disturbing. The words "won't someone please think of the pidgeons!" come to mind, but we humans are animals after all. I would definitely not want this kind of mind control implemented with humans, and I don't want it implemented on any self-aware being.
Forget Jake, it's Chinatown.
pigeons control YOU.
Hello hello....Which side should I go...Left, right or straight..SOS..Help help
Sorry Chinese instruction are not processed
Seconded. But sadly in china, ethical values don't seem to matter that much.
Google will finally be able to implement their pigeon ranking system.
This might be the ultimate spying device: hook up a tiny camera or mike to a pigeon and command it to fly to the window of an embassy, the Pentagon, etc.
Of course, political assassinations via C4 bombs delivered by pigeons might be a possibility, too. Or, biological/chemical agent delivery to otherwise protected areas...
I am having some tiny chills running down my spine.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Nazi KZ Doctors???
Pigeons are not people....
Repeat that a couple of times, please, perhaps it will sink in.
A lot of this un-ethical kind of stuff is going on in your backyard university lab probably, it's just not in the news. Russians tried to do the same with dolphins and other animals, Israelis do this with monkeys (see hear ). You should go tour your local pig farm and see how those animals are treated.
Just because these are Chinese scientists, i.e. foreigners (and of course, probably commie terrorists, right?) that we are all appalled.
...Hitchcock-style!
Does it run on a penguin?
It is another step.
Ugly and non-ethical, yes, but most details on animal experiments are like this one.
Always wanted brain implant? - well, some research must be done.
Like it? No? Me either, but at the end people will forget all ugly parts and will use direct brian computer interface.
Remote control meer cats would be ace. There would be one button to make it pop up out of a hole, hours of fun!
Task Mangler
The pigeons had it coming... If they had been equipped with UAC in the first place:
Do you want the Chinese to control your movement? [A]llow [C]ancel
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63
"Seconded. But sadly for humans, ethical values don't seem to matter that much."
;).
When you fix something, do it right
Now Google will finetune PigeonRank to perfection!
Great. Not only are they torturing these creatures in order to do their evil bidding. But now people are going to go around slaughtering pigeons to prevent being spied on.
How about we put chips in the heads of those so-called scientist to control their movement against their will, and see how they like it. They'd probably change their minds about this being such a great idea. Oh wait, they can't change their minds because we've taken away their free will by putting a damn chip in their brain!
"Science" gets less ethical every day.
Dude, these pigeons are treated better than that hamburger you ate for lunch. And your hamburger had considerably more capasity for emotion & suffering. So, if you ain't vegetarian, you have no room to talk.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
a lack of ethical concerns here on subjects like these.
Don't worry, the pigeons have all signed informed consent forms - see the peck-marks? Our lawyers also told them that eating the birdseed we provided implied their agreement to the experiment. And they ate it.
The chinese opened their heads and stuck wires into them. NO big deal and nothing really scientific.
Right, I mean, I read your articles about how the pigeon brain works. This was a totally unneccesary experiment, since we had that knowledge already. Why do we need more "proof"?
If I'd be in charge these scientists would lose their funding, their job and their accreditation all at once
I wouldn't be so fast to cut the funding of a group who can control animals remotely. Have you never seen the movie "The Birds"? Maybe one morning you'll be pecked to death by 2000 angry pigeons...
not very far from what the Nazi KZ Doctors did to the people captured in the camps
Umm, sticking electrodes into the brains of birds, with proper aseptic and anaesthetic techniques (after all, you want a functional bird at the end of it in order to get useful data), is not quite the same as dunking people in ice water just to see how long the average survival time is...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
it's probably still along the same lines the old indicator of a murderer killing and mistreating animals as a boy.
Please provide links to prospective clinical studies that prove this?
That claim is a neat chunk of misinformation possibly of the same magnitude as Linus Pauling's (completely false) claim 30 years ago that Vitamin C cures the common cold...
MOST children are cruel to/kill animals in their childhood. Not all of them turn out to be anti-socials.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"Seconded. But sadly for everything in the known universe, ethical values don't seem to matter that much."
We can keep doing this all day if you lot don't stop being so half-arsed about it.
Don't underestimate the value of a bird that can be commanded to go down at will...
I blame Gary Larson.
I want my! I want my! I want my Eee PC!
"It scares me a little seeing a lack of ethical concerns here on subjects like these. The chinese didn't develop these pigeons. Nature and evolution did. The chinese opened their heads and stuck wires into them. No big deal and nothing really scientific."
Just "sticking wires into them" would have been unlikely to produce very cool results, aside from croaked pigeons. And that's where the science part comes into play.
"This sort of 'research' goes to show that some areas of modern science are even more bogus, bizare and pointless than some obscure spiritistic variants of alchemy from the old days."
This is either a deeply dangerous experiment for mankind OR completely bogus, pointless, etc. Pick one - you can't have both.
"If I'd be in charge these scientists would lose their funding, their job and their accreditation all at once.
Unethical bullshit pseudoscience not very far from what the Nazi KZ Doctors did to the people captured in the camps, that's what this is."
Re-read the story, the subjects were "pigeons" not "people". Frankly, if the Nazis would have stuck to abusing pigeons, not many people would have given a damn.
I remember reading those RFCs when they came out. Ahh.. the good old days when packets were sent over Avian networks... :-/
More accurate: "Free as in Market" <- Good for libertarians.
Better still: "Free as in Speech"
Or as another .sig almost has it:
BSD: Liberté
GPL: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité
Wikileaks, no DNS
What if you had 10 pigeons fitted with nuclear devices?...
Now -that- would be scary.
Maybe fitted with nuclear weapons AND microphones... =/
-Pigeons of Death, able to record your screams of fear and anguish!
...maintain communication and navigation while crossing the International Date Line?
I guess the only question is, do the birds have B and A buttons too?
If they have been experimenting on human prisoners with this. The Chinese government has been very successful in hiding or white washing their atrocities. Some day we will find that Hitler had nothing on the modern day Chinese government.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"We can keep doing this all day if you lot don't stop being so half-arsed about it."
I know, adding a symetrical cheek to make it a full-arsed Universe is a GoodIdea(TM), but I don't think we can streach the budget enough to afford such a radical change. For a start, just think of how many god years it will take to test the whole Universe for the absence of ethical values. And who's going to do the documnets, sacred texts don't write themselves you know.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
How horrible and obvious to everyone now. Should have been obvious for a long time considering the work done on remote control of cockroaches. My first thought was C4 to office windows, another poster mentioned.
There was a story a few days ago about light winged army bots that are useful in Iraq. If the other side adds pigeons we may need to have a large number of armed bots to secure a periphery around troops distant enough to keep them safe. This reminds me of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age (sounding less like fiction every day) in which cities are ringed by clouds of tiny winged bots (aerostats) that act as an immune system against invading bots.
It is interesting to consider that even without a traditional war, the combination of diffusion of low-cost high tech before cultural polarizations are wiped out (personally I expected that "wiping out" long before the Gulf War) could drive a decentralized arms race on a progressively smaller scale.
It also seems likely that attacks will be made by robotic or live drones before any realistic defense, active or passive, is implemented. Surely the idea of a secured zone breaks down in a skyscraper jungle with broad access from above, and one could never be safe unless the defensive periphery could be shrunk and mobilized to follow you.
This is just another step toward that scary future when the people who got bullied might still want revenge and they get the means to do it. If I wanted to protect my troops I'd start working on a cheap laser or phalanx style miniaturized robotic defense to take out anything small flying nearby.
It will be supported in the upcoming version of the kernel.
1. Make a judgement that someone is unethical based on one's own perception.
2. Reinforce the perception with extreme or individual incidents that are in line with that judgement.
3. Dismiss evidences that contradict the judgement or undermine the credibility of it.
4. When the position is not defendable in a debate, use unsubstantiated claim or cite anecdotal evidence.
5. Repeat 2-4 as necessary.
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.
Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right?
Japanese in the WW-II tried to use bats to carry bombs . Another great idea they had was to release hot air balloons filled with incindiary devices and release them into the jet stream. Two or three such bombs actually reached US mainland, and the fact was classified to prevent panic in USA. Finally when they carried tiny airplanes with bombs in their submarines to attack US mainland, they tried to bomb the forests. The Japanese military high command had such exaggerated reports of US and its forests, they believed that if these forests were set afire, it will burn the whole damned continent! So I am not surprised the Chinese are innovating trying to use piegons.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I agree and am concerned for the pigeons that are being opened up like this. I am also concerned about the diabolical possibilities for this.
:-D Yes, I am a cat owner, I just wish i could get the two of them to go to the bathroom in the toilet... Oh well..
BUT
There is an up side. If the pigeons were controlled in a city, they could be "potty trained". Meaning, a city wide computer system could track them and force them to put their droppings in one location. That excrement could then used by chemical companies. Of course if this system were hacked they then could be forced to put their droppings on a person, place or thing... Oh well, there's always something bad that can be done with a good.
Additionally, I say do this to cats... They never listen anyway...
~GO
First of all, there is nothing unethical about animal research, unless you are a part of the PETA animal rights brigade. Second, to compare this to what the nazi experimentation on Jews in WWII concentration camps dehumanizes the victims by comparing them to animals.
The practical applications of this scientific breakthroughs, frankly, are huge. Imagine someone who can't walk because part of their brain is damaged, can now possibly be healed, by application of these electrodes. Dogs whose rabid behavior which can't be controlled, can now be effectively managed without putting them down, etc.
Go take your medieval view of science and shove it.
well you should, the whole idea is strikingly similar, even in the graphical description.
The WP article is here: We3.
IMHO it's one of the best Grant Morrison comic.
Yeah, another guy named Tolkien also had this idea. (After the Fellowship is formed, Gandalf and Crew have to hide to avoid flocks of crows. Apparently, the Fellowship's new coats were not very bird-crap-repellent.)
I remember reading in a 1970s-era issue of Analog a story about a couple men who developed a way to control a gigantic floating octopus-cattle by applying electrical current to its brain. Interesting to see something similar actually happen.
(No, I wasn't alive when the magazine was published...my step-dad had a huge collection of Analog magazines.)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
All they have to do is wire up the sphincter and they can play Potty Pigeon for real. Infect the birds with something and it doesn't even have to be a joke.
the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face."
Here is the real story.
c lass000200003/hwz821613.htm0 70227_1305979.htm
This one is from the Peoples Daily Online. Not sure if the is "the" original version.
http://env.people.com.cn/GB/5421217.html
Here are some more stories with pics.
http://www.hf365.com/epublish/gb/paper2/20061101/
http://www.news365.com.cn/wxpd/sm/smxw/200702/t20
It seems to indicate that the unit weighs 10 grams and is powered by the pigeon.
Remote controlled pigeons are fine, but they have one drawback -- they cannot carry beer.
I'm still waiting on my remote-controlled beer fetching attack monkey. Keep at it, scientists!
And you thought all those times of practicing skeet shooting would never pay off....
Eat a Chicken, You know you want to.
I quite agree with the parent poster.
The problem is with the "moral core" concept. Basically, humans tend to seperate beings into two groups, with one being "protected" by the moral code, and the other not being protected. Shifting the boundaries between these two groups is an important part of getting soldiers to fight, and the critical component in allowing genocide to happen.
Most people tend to put animals outside their moral core. Familiarity and empathy extends some limited protection and benefit to household pets in most cases, but even these are not usually part of the moral core.
The scary thing isn't that they are doing the same *things* as the Nazis, but rather that they are doing so based on the same *line of thought*.
Off-topic, I wonder how many intelligent sadists fly under the radar by seeking out positions such as these, where they can cook up some flimsy excuse to perform legally sanctioned torture for very little real benefit. I mean, sure, the pigeons can probably be used for something (e.g. delivering a small payload, or performing inconspicous reconaissance), but the technology to do these things, including inconspicous reconaissance, is probably available in China without resorting to this.
Actually it's the "when will this be compatible with the people" part that is unsettling. / probably not // Imperius Curse ?
They're there affecting their effect.
Release the flying monk... Oh well, back to the drawing board.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
You know, there might be something to the conspiracy theories on this one. Have you ever been to Shanghai? It's a really big city. 20+ million. Almost no pigeons. Can you think of any major western city without pigeons? It's not coincidence. The survival rate of a nice pump, juicy pigeon isn't that good in China. I'm a local, I know. The point being is that this has absolutely no practical use internally whatsoever. No sane mad scientist would every build a Franken-pigeon for use in China. Half would be eaten before completing their first mission. Therefore, it must have been designed for deployment outside China.
They ought to bring out a sequel to duck hunt; except this time you control kamikaze pigeons and must fly them into the evil capitalist americans.
*Ducks*
Actually.. scuse' the pun
Good points you make. Thanks.
-kgj
-kgj
but I'm fairly sure that there are bigger birds out there that wouldn't have a problem with it.
I've always wanted an Atomic Turkey.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Repeat after me:
"All life is sacred"
Sometimes, through various reasons such as the need to eat or expansion (due to our population as a whole needing to survive), we need to kill other things. All well and good if it's for a sufficient purpose (such as we'll die if we don't). That's nature. The wolf kills the deer else the wolf dies.
Nowhere in any fucked up universe do we need to do things like this to any lifeform. It's unethical, and wrong.
Torturing anyone is wrong. Even if they're "terrorists". Yet the US Govt do that. Torturing other creatures for no other reason than "fun" is wrong. Yet the Chinese Govt (who are funding this sick idea) are doing it. Doesn't mean it's right.
And for the record I deplore anyone doing anything like this to any animal, be it equine, cetacean, primate or avian.
The truth shall always be free: Boris Floricic is Tron.
look, ma, it's raining bones!
look away, child, it's a hegemonist net surfer....
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Is the comparsion with KZ Doctors to far fetched? Is it really? Maybe there is one because it has a strong emotional conotation - which critics to the comparsion here have fallen prone to just as much as I have when using it. Yet the question remains unanswered: Must we do everything we can do? Must we put electrodes into the inards of animals and sends signals through them to see what happens? Why don't the scientists use their own brains? Newton used his own eye to - extremly successfully - find out more about the way we see and the guy who proved that ulcers are caused by bacteria successfully proved so by drinking moldy boullion in front of an atourney. Before that he was considered an unscientific moron.
Be it that the geeks 'in-defence-of-anything-called-science' gene kicks in when you mod me down as overrated or read the Nazi comparsion - I get that. But mod me down all you want - there *is* a lack of ethics in modern science and I'd go so far as to say that this electrodes-in-animal-brain thing is the corpus delicti proving that fact. In my book science and ethics and at least an ongoing discussion about ethics belong together.
If they don't belong, then there really is even a smaller difference between this study and Dr. Mengele and his studies than the critics to this comparsion or I would have care to think.
My 5 cents. Opinions please.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You got a point there. :-)
We need a funny/insightfull combo mod.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Of course the Chinese must be on something.
In other news, some Chinese scientist has built a humanoid robot and western conpiracy theorists are accusing China of prepare an attack of the clones!
Carry on with your imagination.
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.
Granted, most children are mean to animals at one point or another, but SEVEN puppies just for one /. post? SEVEN? You're definitely training to be a serial killer or something.
Could you please define the word dehumanize for me? How do you dehumanize something that is not human?
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.
Meow! http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=636 Not quite the same, but about as funny, if not funnier than chinese pigeon dive-crappers.
It's just like the fact that the French who fought Nazi in WWII are called French resistance but the Iraqis fighting US army should not be called Iraqi resistance, only Iraqi insurgency. Of course, Chechen suicide bombers are surely brave freedom fighters. A palestinian doing the same is a terrorist.
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.
I'm still trying to figure out how King Arthur got a hold of those coconuts. They were in a temperate zone! Sparrows carried them my ass.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Oh the horror! Won't anyone think of the kittens!?
P.S. by on a smaller scale I mean with the agents/weapons becoming progressively smaller in size. (Perhaps smaller agents in the air or on the ground will make them cheaper to deploy in quantity while evading detection better.) Which would imply that a given size (say pigeon size) will be escalated to faster speeds, and higher yields, at the same size, until a new smaller size weapon is realized in this race. Shades of Philip K. Dick.
Finally, we might start seeing some better ping times, and fewer lost packets for my carrier of choice! I think that google should be happy about this too.
The pigeons of China today overthrew their human masters in a major political Coo!
(from Miller/SNL/Ecuador sometime circa 1990)
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Running the control the other direction is actually more interesting.
Hm.. Eastern religions in general [Buddhism, Hinduism etc.] seem to value animal ethics much more than western religions. So what is your statement based on?
Hehehehe!
King Arthur: The swallow may fly south with the sun or the house martin or the plover may seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land?
1st soldier with a keen interest in birds: Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
King Arthur: Not at all. They could be carried.
1st soldier with a keen interest in birds: What? A swallow carrying a coconut?
King Arthur: It could grip it by the husk!
1st soldier with a keen interest in birds: It's not a question of where he grips it! It's a simple question of weight ratios! A five ounce bird could not carry a one pound coconut.
King Arthur: Well, it doesn't matter. Will you go and tell your master that Arthur from the Court of Camelot is here?
1st soldier with a keen interest in birds: Listen. In order to maintain air-speed velocity, a swallow needs to beat its wings forty-three times every second, right?
Sorry folks, it was too hard for me not to. Hehehehe!
Well, that would depend on your will, wouldn't it? Most people who choose the GPL (assuming they understand the license) want their software to remain free for their users, including derivative changes. IMO it's more free than BSD due to its protections, but I won't argue some religious war with you here. You'll need to find another sucker.
GPL: Free as in will
My point is simply that free will is something that can change moment to moment, yet can also impinge upon itself, somewhat like happens to BSDed code as it goes down the line, including a choice to bind the code by contract, which is something that we can choose to do to ourselves.
The marketplace as a whole, rather than particlar items being traded, is kept open. You have resale rights, for a start. Similarly, truely free speech can be reused, and cannot be bound in subsequent incarnations.
Bad analogies are a pet peave of mine; I'm not saying that BSD is superior, but only that free will is a bad analogy for the mechanisms of the GPL licence. There are better analogies.
Wikileaks, no DNS
I am surprised that this project implementing RFC 1149 has not been cited yet.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Are you people completely stupid? Don't you think using animals as waepons for power hungry political leaders might be a serious problem for all of us? Besides deeply hurting ethical principles. ...why not putting electrodes in YOUR brain and give the joystick to some army leaders? Let them use humans and don't bother other species!!
and guide them to enemy targets, among other things.
Through their history the Chinese have done this with pigeons: you let loose homing pigeons with burning rope attached in the neighborhood of a town. They land in the barns and rooftops and burn the city to the ground.
Only your imagination limits you: surveillance, following, selective weapons delivery. In short, anything an airplane can do except heavy delivery.
So imagine you're a Chinese saboteur: import a bunch of cyber pigeons, and, when the Chinese start war with Taiwan, release these pigeons in Taiwan, Honolulu, the Philippines, South Korea, LA, San Francisco, DC, etc. to cause damage and confusion. There's probably little chance of being detected beforehand.
I'd say:
BSD: Liberté
GPL: Égalité, Liberté
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
I think perhaps of all the answers I've read so far, yours is the most disturbing. Life is precious. This is fundamental. Pigeons, pigs, people, dolphins, whatever.
Life is precious, and we are all one. Repeat that a couple of times, please.
I did, and therefore since all life is precious, we decided to stop using live mice at our heart research laboratory and switched to live humans. In order to save countless of rodents that we kill every month, I invite you to take their place. As you say, we are all one, so in studing _human_ heart disease we would rather prefer to work with humans. Give me you address and phone number so we can invite you to our lab, aneasthesize you, then cut your heart out and attach it to a machine and pump artificial blood and drugs through it.
Yes, I actually do work in such a lab...
Yes, the lab is _not_ in China, Afghanistan, or some other "terrorist laden country", we are right here in the heartland (pun intended) of America, right in your backyard. It will make it really convinent for to come to us.
You just demonstrated my point, different cultures have different ethical/moral priorities.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.