3d hologram concerts, and supersoldiers

[spoonless]

Also, while I'm stealing links from crasch, Japan has way better rock concerts than we do...

A description of it, and a link to the "Vocaloidism" phenomenon it's based on:

http://singularityhub.com/2010/10/20/this-rocking-lead-singer-is-a-3d-hologram-video/

This strikes me as the future of rock and roll. I am wondering if any bands will bother to put live people out on the stage in a decade or two. Instead of selecting the best dancers with the most well proportioned bodies, we can just record music in the studio, and then use holograms to perform it for the audience. Another great leveling force that might enable a wider set of musicians to gain fame and acclaim.



In other news, CNN has a nice article on an IronMan-like suit being developed by Raytheon:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/11/11/iron.man.suit/index.html?eref=mrss_igoogle_cnn

It doesn't fly, but it amplifies your strength by about 17 times--they have a video of a man smashing through a board and doing push-ups in it. In the Iraq War, there were about 4000 US casualities compared to about 100,000 Iraqi casualities (this is only deaths, including wounded or injured as casualities gives much larger numbers). I wonder, if the US military got enough funding to issue suits like this to its ground troops, how much steeper would this ratio be? We could conceivably get to a point where we could go in on some mission and have 10 of our boys killed for every million killed of enemy soldiers and/or civilians. Kind of scary, but very poweful. Also at only $150k, it could be useful for construction or all kinds of other sorts of stuff.

From the CNN article: "One big obstacle, however, is how to power the suit." Well duh, they obviously didn't watch IronMan--you just need to replace your heart with a glowing bluish white orb.

Comments

[entomologist.livejournal.com]

Of course, whether it actually got used that way would be a political decision -- just because it could be used to minimized enemy civilian casualties doesn't mean it would -- but I think the U.S. military probably would develop rules of engagement with that as at least one of their priorities. Even maniacs like Cheney and Rumsfeld at least gave lip service to the fact that inflicting civilian casualties is detrimental to our objectives in wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, after all. Besides, taking a terrorist alive is preferable to blowing him up with a Hellfire missile -- you can't interrogate a corpse, even when it hasn't been reduced to a thin red mist.