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Homeland Security Commissions LED-Based Puke-Saber
E++99 writes "Homeland Security has contracted with Intelligent Optical Systems, Inc. to develop an "LED Incapacitator," a nonlethal weapon consisting of a large flashlight with a cluster of LEDs capable of emitting "super-bright pulses of light at rapidly changing wavelengths." Sounds innocuous enough... until they they shine "the evil color" at you and you start puking! A working prototype has been completed, and they will soon be putting it through its paces. Homeland Security hopes to give it to Border Patrol agents and National Guardsmen by 2010."
Wow, wait until the bulimics get hold of this on the black market!
How long till you can get this in a Java applet?
...not that you'd be an effective terrorist with your eyes closed. BTW, is it wrong of me to want to see this used on large crowds?
How will people defend themselves against this?
Use the MAD method: Wear mirror sunglasses.
Puke, I am your father.
We definitely need some kind of device to shield our eyes from this "light". As I understand a practical way would be just covering our eyes, we could shape them as glasses! Not only that, but it could protect us from the suns blinding rays... I suggest we call this device "sunglasses" to deceive others of its true purpose!
Now if someone just invented these "sunglasses"...
to clean up all the puke at the borders?
Walk with Music;
Superbowl. Jumbotron.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
While non-lethal technology has the potential to be fantastic, there's a downside to be considered too.
With a gun, there's a certain level of commitment before it's used. An officer of the law must make a determination that he or she is really certain about before shooting, because hitting an innocent person is absolutely unacceptable. As a result, the tendency is to, unless there's no option, NOT shoot someone if you can hold them at bay with the THREAT of shooting. A side effect of this is that an officer given a bad order to shoot is much more likely to abstain, because once he pulls the trigger, it's all over.
As a result, innocent folks are often held at gunpoint until their identity/non-criminalness is confirmed. While traumatic and stressful, this is better than an alternative that's growing increasingly common:
Enter, the taser. Potentially a wonderful tool for stopping an attacker without permanently injuring them, doctrine has instead developed in many police and security departments to 'Zap first, ask questions later'. The 'non-injurious' aspect of the tool means that the bar is that much lower on whether or not to shoot, because "after all, if they're innocent, then it's just a bit of discomfort".
The growing number of non-lethal tools is on the surface a good, even GREAT thing. The real danger though, is a long term one. With the bar set so low, more and more people will be subject to excruciating pain, and eventually, this technology may evolve into a tool of even greater oppression of liberty than anything we have now.
Imagine if a protest can be casually broken up by making everyone vomit or crap themselves uncontrollably. If the government has the ability to casually stop groups of people from coming together or otherwise detaining them while being able to argue "it's not fatal, it's just uncomfortable", then the bar on violating our rights as citizens drops too.
So I'm interested and optimistic about the technologies, but I desperately hope that better effort is invested in making them a net positive for all of humanity and not the boot that might otherwise grind our faces into the dirt.
They're probably referring to pulse repetition rate (1/frequency) when they say "wavelength".
Right after a neuron fires it "rearms" the membrane by pumping ions across it. In time sequence its sensitivity varies smoothly through:
- The absolute refractory period: Nothing can fire it.
- The negative afterpotential: It can be fired but it takes extra stimulus.
- The positive afterpotential: It takes LESS than the usual amount of stimulus to fire it.
Then it returns to its normal, resting, sensitivity.
The sensitivity slope may be an artifact of the ion pumps and channels, but it appears to function as a mechanism for encoding the strength of a stimulus as a pulse rate.
This has a side effect: If a nerve is given short pulses of stimulation with a spacing corresponding to the length of time between a stimulus that fires it and the peak of the positive afterpotential, once it fires once it will tend to continue to fire in synchrony with the pulses from then on. If you have a bundle of such nerves with similar timing and all affected by the stimulus, each additional pulse picks up additional nerves and phase-locks them to the stimulus. Within a few pulses most of the fibers in the bundle tend to be firing rapidly and in unison.
You can see this with a strobe light with a variable repetition rate. Run it slow and you see distinct pulses - a flicker. Run it fast and you see a continuous light - the pulses have fused into a continuous response. But run it near the "flicker fusion rate" boundary and you get a lot of weird visual effects - notably flickering rainbow colors across the neighboring (or entire) visual field that tend to enhance and obscure the actual image with a flickering, undecipherable, psychedelic-poster version of itself.
You get colors other than those of the actual source (if it is colored rather than white) and effects in other parts of the visual field than the actual strobing light and things it is illuminating. This is because nerves for parts of the eye that would not normally be stimulated enough to trigger by this light (if it were non-strobing) still become entrained when they happen to be in a positive afterpotential period when a blink occurs.
(By the way: Don't try this if you're epileptic. It can produce a seizure. Indeed: Some people discover they're epileptic when they are exposed to such flickering lights.)
One speculation about the hypothetical "brown note" was that infrasound at a positive-afterpotential repetition rate matching that of nerves controlling the intestines might force peristalsis in the colon or trigger the appropriate reflexes for defecation. (It might be interesting to retry the debunking experiments with a train of narrow high-pressure pulses, approximating impulses, rather than a sine wave. B-) )
This flashlight appears to be attempting a variation of the same effect. By entraining the nerves of the visual processing responsible for locating onself in space and/or ones motion, it could create a visual illusion of movement that doesn't match the signals from the inner ear and the muscle-position sensors. A mismatch among these three systems produces motion sickness, nausea, and vomiting.
This reflex appears to be a defense against ingestion of neurotoxic poisons (such as those in some mushrooms and food-poisoning bacteria), using their disruption of the complex navigation system as an early warning and attempting to eliminate them from the digestive system before enough are absorbed to disable a critical system and kill the victim.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Sorry had to:
Sunglasses at night
I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can so I can
Watch you live and breathe your storylines
(And) I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can so I can
Keep track of the visions in my eyes
While she's deceiving me
It cuts my security (has)
She got control of me
I turn to her and say
Don't switch the blade on the guy in shades, oh no
Don't masquerade with the guy in shades, oh no
I can't believe it
You got it made with the guy in shades, oh no
(And) I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can so I can
Forget my name while you collect your claim
And I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can so I can
See the light that's right before my eyes
While she's deceiving me
She cuts my security (has)
She got control of me
I turn to her and say
Don't switch the blade on the guy in shades, oh no
Don't masquerade with the guy in shades, oh no
I can't believe it!
Don't be afraid of the guy in shades, oh no
It can't escape you
'Cause you got it made with the guy in shades, oh no
I said I wear my sunglasses
I wear my sunglasses at night
Wear my sunglasses at night
You are all a bunch of idots.
Aw, that's sweet.
But if the cops shot everybody, most especially the white children of Middle America, there'd be hell to pay. Better to scare the little shits off with tasers and rubber bullets and puke rays when they try to protest over tossing the quaint Geneva Conventions, that musty old Constitution, or the Magna Fuckin' Carta in the dustbin.
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.