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Ray Gun Puts Voices Inside Your Head
Sportsqs writes "The Sierra Nevada Corporation claimed this week that it is ready to begin production on the MEDUSA, a damned scary ray gun that uses the 'microwave audio effect' to implant sounds and perhaps even specific messages inside people's heads."
Pfft. Call me when they implement a 'microwave digital surround effect' on this thing. Then I'll be impressed.
Is this one of DARPA's toys?
Harrison Bergeron
imagine playing Cliff Richard to you victim incessantly. unable to sleep. unable to get away from it. all you need is somebody to point this thing at his head.
Imagine the rick rolling possibilities. We're in for a world of pain if these things become available on the internet.
On a more serious note, engineering and scientific work ethics? Does that at all exist anymore? I can't imagine anyone willingly developing a technology with so many malevolent uses. Didn't we learn anything from the Manhattan project?
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Could a microwave gun really hit a single head out of a crowd?
Perhaps we can beam an entire education into the minds of young people. Think about it. Roughly half of America's young people reach the age of 18 at being virtually retarded these days. Beaming voices into peoples' heads might be a highly useful tool.
It also might be used to teach people what Islam really is in places like Iraq where an entire religion has been subverted and perverted into a really nasty mess. Teaching real Islam to the public might cure this problem.
Looks like we finally have a real use for all those tin foil hats.
Never. Ever. let any kind of ad or marketing branch get a hold of this, never. ever.
Hmm, I thought of the Islamist tack as well, but I had a different approach. Let's use their zealotry against them.
We'll see how motivated they are to blow themselves up when Allah himself tells them that suicide bombing is a deal breaker on the whole eternal paradise thing.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
I just thought of a few more - a tinnitus emulator - playing a barking dog at a cat to freak it - play a common mobile phone noise at a crowd, see who reaches for their pocket - or more disturbing, play the sound of a woman screaming - play a dog barking at a horse race to fix the finals really I think we are scratching the surface here, this is one deeply unethical product. who can think of some more?
Two myths I want to debunk right off the bat.
Great! I love to see myths debunked.
the spectrum that your microwave uses happens to cause water molecules to resonate. These microwaves are of a different spectrum, and while they can be deadly, they are not the same.
http://www.answers.com/topic/microwave-1?cat=technology
it's in my head
s/omeomi/jerk/g
These sound like HSS speakers, which use ultrasonic carrier waves to demodulate sound when the frequencies come into contact with flesh and bone.
http://www.atcsd.com/site/
And friend of mine has a couple of these speakers. We recently used them at an art opening to beam the music of the primes into people's heads (playing the digital root of each prime number through a hexatonic scale, rests in the music were created by the occurrence of the primes in the digital-roots matrix we used to develop our own unique prime number sieve).
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
Futurama lifted that almost word for word from Isaac Asimov's Dreaming is a Private Thing.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I see enormous benefits in this technology.
1. Listening to music as loud as you want while not forcing it on others
2. Rocking out to the loudest concert in history without anyone outside the venue hearing a whisper of it (on second thought, the RIAA might require this, so maybe it's not so good)
3. Throwing a gigantic party with great tunes while letting the geezer next door -- who never listens to anything harder than Captain and Tennille -- get his beauty sleep
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
My Name Is Earl did this in the episode "Made a Lady Think I Was God". Roseanne Barr played a mean nasty woman who wore hearing aids, and Earl found out that her hearing aids picked up his walkie-talkies.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I think there's a similar effect that explains the "whooshing" sound you hear when you watch shooting stars.
For years, scientists have believed that the sound was a figment of human imagination, even though many people would swear to hearing it. The problem is that the meteors are miles and miles overhead, but the sound is heard simultaneously. Now I've personally heard the whoosh of a bolide during a the massive meteor shower, and I'd be prepared to swear it was simultaneous with the flash of the meteor trail, even though I know that sound could not travel that fast, even if it were a mere few thousand feet.
It's even more psychologically convincing because the sound isn't really a "whoosh"; it's not what you'd expect. It's more like the sound of slurping the last bit of milkshake with a straw, listened to through a long PVC pipe.
I read a few years ago that physicists found an accoustic effect created by the low frequency electrmagnetic energy working on water droplets of a certain size. This would make sense because when I did hear the "whoosh", I was lying on my back on the dewy grass. I've also read that wireframe glasses can account for the simultaneous sound.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Obviously, you should run a wire from your tinfoil hat to a conductive grounding strip attached to the heel of your shoe.
Actually, the devices I've used connect to the toe of your shoe, not the heel - Both heels are often lifted while walking. And you need to be sure that you run wires to both feet instead of just one. Also, unless you have a conductive floor (we did when we were using these, but for a very different purpose), spikes are more effective than strips. But you need to plan for the terrain. 1/4" spikes are fine for walking (and very effective for grounding) in damp vegetation or earth but may impede your progress on asphalt. In that case, you'll need very shallow spikes and will just have to accept limited grounding unless you're willing to run a very long cable to a copper rod.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
As a deaf guy it saddens me when tech like this is used for military purposes and it's consumer uses are not considered.
Remember the thing where you put the transmitter on your tongue and you can hear bypassing the ears? I'd like to try one of those. But rather than look like a drooling idiot I'd love to get my hands on one of these babies. Just strap it on a hearing aid and skip the ears entirely. Way better than a cochlear implant, non-invasive and perfect sound. Nice.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Yeah!! Get rid of all these taser and microwave weapons. Bring back good old night sticks, trunchons, jack boots, and guns. It's a lot easier to prove that victims were hurt by those weapons than by tasers or microwaves. Or their own decisions to resist arrest or not leave buildings.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Hmm...
Now avoiding TFA like the plague, it occurs to me that "shockwaves" within the skull able to cause hydrostatic pressure loads comparable to 120+ decibels (is that loud enough for ya?) hitting your eardrums might just damage something other than eardrums.
But lets not even think about the fine possibilities such as massive damage on the cellular level - just consider the overpressures that could be set up within blood vessels. It will be interesting to see if there is any increase in "massive cerebral hemorrage" as a cause of death going forward.
Or an increase in the wearing of hats by the political class anytinme they give a speech :)
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
...up until recently, generations of police officers learned how to use physical force to gain compliance. And generally speaking they knew how to do it with minimal force and maximal compliance -- a friend who is a 2nd generation police officer had his father demonstrate some of the techniques, and it was fairly amazing how well he could hurt me without actually "hurting" me (ie, leaving lasting marks, breaking bones, bruising, etc.)
The gripe my friend the cop has is that with all the touchy-feely policing (and the expensive court payouts) they have, you really can't gain compliance through physical force the way you used to be able to, so they are largely left with their guns and their tasers. And since the tasers aren't lethal, they're somehow considered "OK" to use for any problem solving short of killing someone.
I think they should start allowing the police to carry saps and clubs again as well as teach them physical force and stop letting them use a taser as a universal problem solver.
A Taser was designed to replace a gun.
Although I agree with your overall point that Tasers are seriously overused, your initial premise is incorrect.
Tasers were never intended to be used as a replacement for a gun. They are an additional non-lethal weapon to use alongside the baton and pepper spray.
Unfortunately, politicians and even the police themselves use the "Tasers replace guns" myth to win people over to the idea. After all, who wouldn't prefer to see a Taser used instead of a gun?
But that's not what happens. When the situation calls for a gun to be used, then the officer will use their gun. Period. They will never consider using the Taser instead, and they were never expected to. This is why the number of incidents involving police using their guns has not decreased since Tasers were introduced. Nor was it expected to.
The problem is that Tasers seem really harmless. You press a button, and the guy falls to the floor. Shortly thereafter, he gets up and he's apparently fine. So, hey, why not use it even in cases where the use of a baton or pepper spray would cause mass outrage?
And that's exactly what's happening now.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
That's one of the things that the guy selling the thing (in TFA) mentioned, actually.
My understanding:
This device creates vibrations in the target by rapidly heating and cooling it. Since these vibrations are in the tissue (especially bone) of your head, they reach your inner ear (cochlea) directly. So, they could help with certain kinds of deafness: namely, deafness caused by mechanical damage to the outer ear, but which leaves the nerves in the inner ear intact.
However, it seems you should be able to achieve exactly the same thing by sending acoustic waves through the skull by other means. In particular, all you need is a small speaker in direct contact with your head. That's exactly what certain existing hearing aids do. (See the Wikipedia article on Bone conduction for more.)
Hence, my opinion is that this microwave device really doesn't have any good uses which are not more easily and safely achieved by other means.
Who could have known Scanners would be so prescient?
It's: " I'm so glad I'm a Beta. Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas.They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides, they wear black, which is such a beastly colour..."