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MIT Invented A Camera That Can Read Closed Books (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: In a breakthrough that will appeal to both spies and those who work with priceless but frail historical documents, researchers at MIT have developed a camera that uses terahertz radiation to peer at the text on pages of a book, without it having to be open. Terahertz radiation falls somewhere between the microwave and infrared spectrums, and the research team, including Barmak Heshmat, Ramesh Raskar, and Albert Redo Sanchez from MIT, and Justin Romberg and Alireza Aghasi from Georgia Tech, chose that particular flavor of radiation because of how it reacts with different chemicals. Different chemicals produce a distinct frequency as they react with different terahertz frequencies, which can be measured and distinguished. In this instance, it allows the researchers to tell the different between ink and blank paper. Complex algorithms and software is required to translate the frequencies being bounced back to the camera, allowing it to distinguish letters on a page. But it also relies on how far the short bursts of terahertz radiation are traveling, by precisely timing how long it takes to reach the 20-micrometer-thick air gaps between pages of a book, it's able to calculate when it moves from page to page. The report adds, "the researchers feel their system could be a fantastic tool for museums or other facilities who want to explore and catalog historical documents, without actually having to touch or open them, and risk damage."
You just know 13-year old boys are going to use this to look at the magazines in plastic wrappers.
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The real question is how long untl it is $1 to order a set of goggles with this technology out of the back of my vintage comic book without removing it from the plastic.
Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky was doing this years ago. I do believe he's from the MIT camp though.
... this could handily digitize 1 LOC.
More seriously, this could be fantastic for opening up old archives and making searchable.
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
The summary focuses on being able to see through pages, but how fast can it scan them? Assuming cost/complexity factors don't make it prohibitive, I could see something like this being used to rapidly digitize a printed book without having to pause to turn pages or slice the spine open to feed them individually through a scanner.
Could this technique be used to read the Herculaneum Papyri?
Researchers use synchrotron to read ancient, burned scrolls from Rome 3/22/2016
http://arstechnica.com/science...
"But now, a massive X-ray microscope at the European Radiation Synchrotron Facility has allowed researchers to see what was written on these ruined documents."
More at http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc... too.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This is exactly the machine that started James P. Hogan's Giants trilogy (although in SF it used neutrinos instead of terahertz waves). Now all we need is the lunar colonization program and ... OH SNAP.
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Now we can judge a book through its cover.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The band commonly refered to as "terahertz radiation" is from 300 GHz to 3 THz. It overlaps the bottom end of the "far infrared" band on the chart you linked, just above EHF microwave - nowhere near the visible spectrum.
besides the limitation of it only working with about 10 pages and they have to be somewhat transparent, i wonder how it will work with pages of overlapping text/ink, writing is usually on both sides of each page and hence no airgap to calculate depth.
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The sin of this is that fatherlessness was not an issue in the black community until the Great Society programs of the 1960s. In 1938 the fatherless rate was 13% in the black community. Today, the number is more like 72%, vs less than 25% amongst whites. This was an induced feature of black society, and if BLM and company wanted to blame racism for something in today's society - this is it. White people assisted in making happen, in some misguided attempt to help via welfare transfer payments that only applied if you didn't have a man in the house. We literally paid black people to break up their nuclear families, and the social price remains to be paid today.
Ironically, it's this very broken family structure that essentially causes black poverty. Single parent/single earner homes are where poverty lives - only 2% of two earner black households are below the poverty rate.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I don't think crime is a result of being poor, rather it just goes along with it. For an analogy, compare the birth rates of poor people against that of wealthier people. Even though the wealthier can afford more kids, they're smart enough to not have so many. Poor people tend to smoke more compared to wealthier people, and you have to be pretty fucking dumb to start smoking these days given that for the last 40 years it's basically impossible to have grown up without hearing about just how bad smoking actually is, not to mention how costly it is.
There isn't any economic or societal pressure to "make" them do these things, in spite of what some people claim, it's just plain making stupid fucking choices, and I've seen plenty of people born into wealthy families end up poor when they're on their own because they make stupid fucking choices. Some people are naive enough to think that if you give poor people free money that they'll have less kids, abuse drugs less, and commit fewer crimes, and that poverty can be solved by just throwing money at it, but it's just that: Naive. If you give them free money, they'll just buy a new TV and switch from a pack a day to two packs a day.
Anyways...it's interesting to note the difference in behaviors between poor white people and poor black people. Poor black people tend to live in inner city projects, and poor white people tend to live in trailers. Poor black people tend to commit more crimes against other people (i.e. robbery, assault, vandalism) and poor white people tend to commit "victimless" crimes (i.e. moonshiners, drugs, prostitution.) That said, I wouldn't be surprised if the crimes that white people commit are just noticed less because nobody is exactly going to call the police and report that they just had sex with a prostitute.
"Fry and the Slurm Factory" with one of the great lines of the series:
"Ow, my sperm!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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They guys from the Hydraulic Press Channel should send them a book.
"Try to read this, suckers!"
(Score: -1, Stupid)
This sounds almost exactly like a gadget from Alias... Season 5, Episode 5, 'Out of the Box':
"There is a tomographic camera right on the bottom there. It basically acts like an X-RAY or a CAT scan. It takes images layer by layer. See? Look at that. This will allow us to take images of the Desantis files... without ever having to remove them from their storage container."
That episode aired in late 2005. Perhaps the writer should have patented it...
Alias is still on Netflix until the 15th of this month, for what it's worth.
One of the major potential uses for this technology is the ability to scan and OCR books. The current process requires either cutting the binding and then scanning each page one by one, or using error prone page flipping machines. Both are slow and expensive to operate. With this tech, one could conceivably take a single 3D image, and capture all of the pages in the book without ever opening it.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
The question then becomes why didn't poor white families suffer the same consequences and splinter the way black families have?
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
it allows the researchers to tell the different between ink and blank paper.
But it can't tell the different between "different" and "difference."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I'm hoping they made sure all that energy can't do long-term damage to the book they scan.
Still, it does remind me of what they did in Inherit The Stars.
Using this terahertz method, once you get deeper into the book the paper and print from previous pages get in the way.
Here in the future we do things differently. We collide waves from two different directions that could permeate the paper and print unaffected, such that they intersect at the point of interest, and then emit some new wave with a characteristic dependent on the material in which they intersected (blank paper, air, or ink), which can also permeate the paper and print unaffected, and can be detected externally. I will give details at a later time.
The answer is "they did", but no one was running through poor white communities and advocating people take these benefits. In urban areas, you had activists and social workers campaigning for people to take these benefits and accept the consequences. Also, incidentally, breaking down the resistance to taking alms amongst blacks. No one did the same in white communities, so here we are.
Remember, people thought they were "helping". Before the consequences were known, people were proud of their part in doing this.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Much of the modern black attitude is based on not being "disrespected". Not by earning respect, but by applying violence to those who "disrespect" you. By being the biggest, baddest (word not allowed for white people) in the 'hood.
That's not how Dr. King taught people to handle adversity, but Dr. King is dead.
Like most underclass minorities, they find it's not nearly as easy to stick it to The Man as it is to each other. So they do. And just for good measure, they fire their anger with a fantasy of "getting even" for generations of slavery.
The slavery thing needs to go away. Slavery has been illegal in the USA for well over 150 years now. Everyone responsible - both offender and victim - are long dead. At the present rate of interracial marriage, even the blackest of families is likely to be partially descended from slaveholders, even the whitest have ancestors who were slaves. And slavery isn't some sort of magical black-only thing anyway. The first slaves of Westerners in the New World were Carib Indians, thank you Christopher Columbus. And on top of that, with the immigration rate we've got, a lot of the people in the USA had ancestors who were nowhere near the American Slavery thing.
Yes, slavery is despicable, but you don't march into the future if you never take your eyes off the past. It's not 1860 or even 1960. There's a black president now and has been for nearly a decade. He may not be the best president we've ever had, but I'd wager that at least 8 people out of 10 would rather vote for him than either of the sad cases we've been offered as his successor.
But slavery is at best an excuse. Ongoing violence is like fire. As long as you feed it, it burns. To stop it, you have to stop dumping fuel on it. There are other, better ways to solve problems.
The police can't arrest all the black people, stupid.
They certainly seem to be trying.
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Well, I guess now we know how Superman's X-ray vision works. I remember at least a couple occasions where he stops reading a book thru a wall (or some such) because, in his own explanation, continued use of his X-ray power could overheat the book and set it on fire.
Does make you wonder whether Empedocles and Plato were from Krypton.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
The Wikipedia article you cite seems to be semi confused about whether 300GHz-3THz is "Tremendously High Frequency" radiation (1mm - 100um) or "Terahertz" radiation.
It's both. Like many things, that band has more than just one name.
And 3THz to 300THz most certainly does include near ultraviolet...
I said 300 GIGAhertz, not 300 TERAhertz.
Your confusion is understandable, given the unfortunate etymology of the phrase "terahertz radiation". But, etymology is often misleading.
Ultimately, the only way to be sure about the meaning of a term of art like this, is to look it up. While not every source I have found agree with the precise frequency range specified by the article I linked, all agree that the upper end of the band in question is somewhere in the infrared, and that it does not include visible light (let alone ultraviolet).
since you're mister snarky today
There is nothing sarcastic or mocking (the definition of "snark") in either of my comments in this thread. I simply pointed out your error. The fact that you automatically perceive that as "snarky" comes across either as proud or insecure (I will not speculate as to which).
And I originally wrote3THz to 300THz. THz, as in Tera Hertz. ... Is that not Tera Hertz radiation?
No, it is not. You attempted to criticize the original article for misusing the phrase "terahertz radiation", but you are the one misusing it. Your definition is etymologically reasonable, but it's not the one used by the rest of the world, so it's wrong.
Exactly.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
This is a new way to cook the books. ... at a safe distance -- Joe Martin
--
I believe a man should follow his dreams
This is going to be used by intelligence agencies to scan documents without having to look at individual pages.
Yes, no more tamperproof letters or packages.
Slavery, or minimum wage employment with government benefits. It hasn't gone away, we just have a different name for it these days.
Sci-Fi Author, James P. Hogan, used a device of this description in his trilogy, the Minervan Experiment, to view a 100,000 year old document so dessicated from exposure to the Moon's vacuum it could not be opened...
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