Yummy...love her big, brown...eyes
Ennivalo...imádom a nagy, barna...szemeit
Monday, March 31, 2014
Monday, March 24, 2014
Nem bírják a rakendrollt
Amikor 2010-ben a Fidesz hatalomra került, érdeklődve figyeltem, mit csináltak nyolc év alatt, ahelyett, hogy kidolgoztak volna valamiféle kormányprogramot, gazdasági terveket, olyasmiket, amiket az ellenzékben maszatoló pártok szoktak. Nos, a válasz megérkezett: csak és kizárólag arra koncentráltak, hogy ha sikerül megnyerniük a választásokat (akkor még többes szám), soha többé nem veszíthessenek. És lehet, hogy bénák a gazdaságban, szétbarmolják az oktatást, egészségügyet, Európa hülyéivé tették a magyarokat, miközben emberevő diktátorokkal smúzolnak, de a hatalmat nem lesz könnyű kicsavarni a kezükből, ebben nagyot alkottak, majdnem tökéleteset, ha azt nézzük, hogy az EU és a NATO keretein belül kellett létrehozni egy kánságot.
http://hvg.hu/velemeny/20140310_Nem_birjak_a_rakendrollt
http://hvg.hu/velemeny/20140310_Nem_birjak_a_rakendrollt
Friday, March 14, 2014
11 Ways Mainstream Porn Misleads Women About Sex
Anyone who has watched even a few minutes of porn may end up with some very particular ideas about what real-world sex entails.
Porn -- at least, the kind where super-toned, tanned, hairless women are penetrated in a variety of acrobatic positions by equally toned, tanned men -- is full of myths about sex. Redditor black_brotha decided to ask women on the site what they "learned" from porn that turned out to be completely untrue in the real world.
Here are 11 of the most worrying un-truths women said porn taught them:
1. That their bodies were abnormal: "I was 100% convinced that I needed labiaplasty and was really ashamed to be naked in front of [a] guy because I thought he would think I was a freak."
2. That all sex focuses on the guy's pleasure: "I thought having sex with a man meant having to pretend I enjoyed it even if I wasn't, that it didn't matter if I had an orgasm, and that it was normal for a guy not to give a shit about my pleasure."
3. That "sexy" is purely physical, and incredibly specific:
I felt like I had to fit into a box I could never fit in. It made me feel dysphoric about not just my body, but who I was. I'm a clumsy, boyish, awkward female, that couldn't do an attractive striptease to save their life AKA the antithesis of your typical "sexy female"... There is more than just one kind of sexy and its all subjective. I've realized that Im sexy in my own way and I'm much happier now.
4. That men don't like women with hair "down there": "I thought men would expect completely hairless women and they would be repulsed by me."
5. That orgasms are almost effortless: "I thought orgasms were much easier to achieve than they actually are. As a result I thought something was wrong with me for a long time. I just assumed that PIV=almost instant orgasm. I was so disappointed to find that wasn't the case."
6. That men only find certain bodies (white, toned and smooth-skinned) attractive: "It did make me think that only women with perfect bodies ever had sex."
7. That all penises are circumcised and eight inches long: "I didn't knowuncircumcised penises existed, because all the porn I'd seen prior had circumcised male performers."
8. That insanely complex sexual positions feel good for everyone:
Those positions? Yeah, most of them don't feel good.I know everyone's different, but it is VERY DIFFICULT, bordering on impossible to have an orgasm with that much distance between the partners! Besides, one of the best things about sex is the closeness of skin-to-skin contact.
9. That you had to do everything women in porn videos did in order for your partner to enjoy themself: "It didn't occur to me until like age 27 that I didn't have to let a guy come on my face if I didn't want to. Or I didn't have to swallow. Or that it was okay to not moan if I didn't feel like moaning."
10. That men are always ready and willing: "I thought that all men liked being aggressive and dominant, like in porn, and that if they were under 50, they were always going to be able to get hard and orgasm."
11. That sex between two women is just something that happens between two straight ladies out of boredom: "I thought lesbian sex involved long fingernails, looking bored/disgusted, and waiting for a man to show up."
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Hassan Yahya « Today Islam has been reduced to a soulless ideology of Islamists »
Posted by Editor
The angry poet.
« Today Islam has been reduced to a soulless ideology of Islamists »
A 18 years old Danish citizen of Palestinian descent, poet and self-proclaimed atheist, has prompted the largest debate on religion in Denmark since the Westergaard cartoon.
Hassan Yahya has been a frequent guest on television programs where he debates other young Muslims, and his willingness to bluntly criticize them in front of outsiders has earned him many accolades from the media. Yahya sold 11,000 copies in the first 24 hours it was available, and over 100,000 have been printed total, making it the most popular Danish poetry publication of all time.
He has been literally attacked by his detractors. the poet was assaulted by a radical Muslim who had previously been convicted of terrorism under Danish law. Later that month he did a reading in Vollsmose, a poverty-stricken suburb of Odense that’s home to many Muslim immigrants. The authorities had so many concerns about the event they gave Yahya bodyguards and made all of Odense a no-fly zone.
The son of Muslim Palestinian immigrants, he grew up in a religious environment but has abandoned religion. He dropped out of school at thirteen but developed a love of literature on his own. His poetry is popular and admired. One professor of literature, Tue Nexo Andersen, described Hassan’s longer works as “almost Walt Whitman-like.
In this short interview where are going to get closer to Hassan’s story and views:
Expressing your views and opinions via poetry is such a unique way to communicate with others. What made Hassan Yahya choose poetry to express his thoughts to the world?
When I was a child, I used to spend a lot of time reading. When I did something stupid, my father used to beat me and lock me up in my room, and that’s how I discovered literature. When I was 13 years old, some rap schools were established in my neighborhood, so I started writing my own texts and rapping them, but after a while I felt like there was something wrong with that form of expression.
I felt like I had to pretend I was a gangster, and rap about beating people up and party stuff. When I wrote something personal, or something more lyrical, the producer would refuse it.
So that was the beginning. I spent a couple of years rapping, and then I just continued to write without rapping. I wrote short stories and such while at school. I started to attend a writing club once every week.
That’s where I was introduced to serious literature and poetry. I read a lot, and Karl Ove Knausgård, a Norwegian writer, made a big impression on me. He writes about his life and his relationship with his father, and I could see a lot of the same things in my relationship with my own father, the violence, the restrictions and so on… the rap thing was the beginning; maybe it had been a journey to find the best way to express myself. From rap to short stories, and other genres, it ended up with poetry.
How do you see people from your generation in Denmark, who have the same background as yours (Muslim family…), and what do they think of you? Did any of them support you?
Most of them are pissed. They feel I discriminate against them, make generalizations about them, and paint a picture which shows that all Muslims are bad people. But of course, I know many Muslims are good people. In Denmark, however, we have many of these areas where many Arabs live. They came from a refugee camp from Lebanon, like my parents, others from Syria or Jordan or another Arab country, but all from refugee camps, and it seems like they have created their own refugee camp here. These people have poor education, and the only thing they know is religion; well they think they know, but the truth as I see it, is that these people are strongly indoctrinated. My parents’ generation, which has indoctrinated mine, had been indoctrinated itself by my grandfathers’ and so on. It seems like the same primitive mindset is reproduced generation after another, but with worse results. If you look at my generation, most of them can’t read or write Arabic. That makes it difficult for them to acquire knowledge about their own religion and history. So they only know what their parents have been told, that the later themselves tell them.
You have been dealing with death threats from Islamists. Most of the Muslims in Denmark received your poems with anger. In your opinion, why do Muslims always react with violence and threats to other people’s opinions?
Every religion thinks that it represents the only truth, especially Islam. So most Muslims think that Islam is the Truth and that other lifestyles are of lesser value, that Muslims are going to heaven while all other human beings to hell. They have a hard time accepting and respecting people who are different from themselves. They count themselves as Muslims, but most of them don’t really pray; they can only kneel insincerely. They love the Eid, but they don’t fast. They don’t practice but they preach to everyone. They only know Al-Fatiha surat (the first chapter in the Quran). They don’t understand the Quran, only some outdated interpretations. They can only comprehend the bad parts of the religion: you are either a believer or an infidel; things are either allowed or forbidden, halal or haram; heaven or hell; they are completely intolerant.
And hypocrisy is everywhere. In those areas that I described earlier, there are crimes, social fraud, and violence. Boys of my generation go to Friday prayer, and the rest of the week they steal, drink alcohol, smoke weed, and fuck Danish girls, until they can get married to some Arab girl.
You mentioned in some of your interviews that Islam needs a reformation. How do you think that would be possible?
Today Islam has been reduced to a soulless ideology of Islamists, a religion of laws mainly dealing with rituals, with permissions and prohibitions, which I think weakens the spiritual message. Is Islam based on rituals or spirituality?
I don’t think any Muslim loses faith in god just because they don’t pray. Both Islamophobic Westerners and Muslim fanatics agree that Islam is a religion of laws, but other aspects of Islamic culture have been overshadowed by rituals and laws. Muslims should not let Imams and religious institutions define their religion, and have such power, driven by political agendas, to speak in the name of God.
Sunday, March 9, 2014
When liberals became scolds
“Ex-Marine Asks Soviet Citizenship”
— Washington Post headline,
Nov. 1, 1959
(concerning Lee Harvey Oswald)
“He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It’s — it had to be some silly little Communist.”
She thought it robbed his death of any meaning. But a meaning would be quickly manufactured to serve a new politics. First, however, an inconvenient fact — Oswald — had to be expunged from the story. So, just 24 months after the assassination, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Kennedys’ kept historian, published a thousand-page history of the thousand-day presidencywithout mentioning the assassin.
The transformation of a murder by a marginal man into a killing by a sick culture began instantly — before Kennedy was buried. The afternoon of the assassination,Chief Justice Earl Warren ascribed Kennedy’s “martyrdom” to “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.” The next day,James Reston, the New York Times luminary, wrote in a front-page story that Kennedy was a victim of a “streak of violence in the American character,” noting especially “the violence of the extremists on the right.”
Never mind that adjacent to Reston’s article was a Times report on Oswald’s Communist convictions and associations. A Soviet spokesman, too, assigned “moral responsibility” for Kennedy’s death to “Barry Goldwater and other extremists on the right.”
Three days after the assassination, a Times editorial, “Spiral of Hate,” identified Kennedy’s killer as a “spirit”: The Times deplored “the shame all America must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down” Kennedy. The editorialists were, presumably, immune to this spirit. The new liberalism-as-paternalism would be about correcting other people’s defects.
Hitherto a doctrine of American celebration and optimism, liberalism would now become a scowling indictment: Kennedy was killed by America’s social climate, whose sickness required “punitive liberalism.” That phrase is from James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute, whose 2007 book “Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism” is a profound meditation on the reverberations of the rifle shots in Dealey Plaza.
The bullets of Nov. 22, 1963, altered the nation’s trajectory less by killing a president than by giving birth to a destructive narrative about America. Fittingly, the narrative was most injurious to the narrators. Their recasting of the tragedy in order to validate their curdled conception of the nation marked a ruinous turn for liberalism, beginning its decline from political dominance.
Punitive liberalism preached the necessity of national repentance for a history of crimes and misdeeds that had produced a present so poisonous that it murdered a president. To be a liberal would mean being a scold. Liberalism would become the doctrine of grievance groups owed redress for cumulative inherited injuries inflicted by the nation’s tawdry history, toxic present and ominous future.
Kennedy’s posthumous reputation — Americans often place him, absurdly, atop the presidential rankings — reflects regrets about might-have-beens. To reread Robert Frost’s banal poem written for Kennedy’s inauguration (“A golden age of poetry and power of which this noonday’s the beginning hour”) is to wince at its clunky attempt to conjure an Augustan age from the melding of politics and celebrity that the Kennedys used to pioneer the presidency-as-entertainment.
Under Kennedy, liberalism began to become more stylistic than programmatic. After him — especially after his successor, Lyndon Johnson, a child of the New Deal, drove to enactment the Civil Rights Act , Medicare and Medicaid — liberalism became less concerned with material well-being than with lifestyle and cultural issues such as feminism, abortion and sexual freedom.
The bullets fired on Nov. 22, 1963, could shatter the social consensus that characterized the 1950s only because powerful new forces of an adversarial culture were about to erupt through society’s crust. Foremost among these forces was the college-bound population bulge — baby boomers with their sense of entitlement and moral superiority, vanities encouraged by an intelligentsia bored by peace and prosperity and hungry for heroic politics.
Liberalism’s disarray during the late 1960s, combined with Americans’ recoil from liberal hectoring, catalyzed the revival of conservatism in the 1970s. As Piereson writes, the retreat of liberalism from a doctrine of American affirmation left a void that would be filled by Ronald Reagan 17 years after the assassination.
The moral of liberalism’s explanation of Kennedy’s murder is that there is a human instinct to reject the fact that large events can have small, squalid causes; there is an intellectual itch to discern large hidden meanings in events. And political opportunism is perennial.
An intolerant educational system made me indifferent to the death of non-Muslims
As the Twin Towers came crashing down in New York City on September 11, 2001 an eight-year-old boy remained unmoved some 7,000 miles away in Lahore as the horrifying images unfolded before him. The boy then, descended into a mode of celebration upon discovering that the towers were in ‘non-Pakistani’ territory and that a significant majority of the dead were non-Muslims.
This boy was no suicide bomber in the making. He was not the product of an extremist madrassa nor was he the son of a jihad veteran. In fact, this was a boy who was being educated at one of the finest institutions this country had to offer. Yet, the boy had failed to appreciate the value of human life.
He was insensitive to the deaths of more than 2,000 people. What is more alarming is that at the tender age of eight, this boy had justified his delight by distinguishing between the life of a Muslim and a non-Muslim.
As much as I hate to admit it, I was this boy.
In retrospect, I question why I showed such insensitivity to the events around me.
On what basis had I come to believe that the value of the life of a Jew or Christian was less than that of a Muslim?
How did I develop this extremely bi-polar perception of an ‘angelic’ East leading a crusade against the ‘demonic’ West?
After some pondering, I realised that my response to the events of 9/11 points towards an educational system that is deeply flawed, particularly the content of our textbooks. The factual inaccuracies, historical inconsistencies and the inherent bias that permeates these books has been criticised on numerous occasions – the most prominent being The Murder of History by KK Aziz.
However, beneath the veil of this customary disapproval lies a subtle but grave problem that still goes unnoticed. This problem is primarily two-sided. The first side is concerned with our treatment of the two identities that any Pakistani holds dear, that is, their nationality and religion, while the second arises from the content of our textbooks.
Think about it – Islam and Pakistan have always been portrayed as products of persistent persecution. Textbooks on Islamiat repeatedly drive the point home that Islam faced significant oppression before attaining the global status that it has today. Similarly, our history schoolbooks constantly highlight the cruelty faced by the Muslims of British India before acquiring the independent state of Pakistan.
It is not difficult to understand then, why this theme of persecution and oppression adopts such a paramount status in our treatment of Islam and Pakistan. Consequently, this breeds an instinctive feeling of vengeance against all those who fall outside the boundaries of Islam and Pakistan. Hence, children are subconsciously taught to view the people of this world through a binary lens – one is either a Muslim or a non-Muslim; a Pakistani or a non-Pakistani.
The second problem is concerned with the content of our textbooks. Books in both, Urdu and English are infused with tales that shed light on the lives of our national heroes. However, the irony is that while we have packed our textbooks with the bravery of Rashid Minhas and the valour of M M Alam, we have ignored the compassion of Abdul Sattar Edhi and the accomplishments of Dr Abdus Salam. Intentionally or unintentionally, through our textbooks we have placed the traits of courage, bravery and valour on a higher pedestal than the traits of honesty, compassion and skill.
Unfortunately, this is the reflection of an educational system that contributes to the glorification of war at the expense of humanity.
In no way am I trying to suggest that Islamic and Pakistani history should be eliminated from our curriculum, and neither do I intend any disrespect towards our soldiers who have sacrificed their lives for the security of our homeland. I do, however, propose the adoption of a more balanced and refined approach towards teaching these subjects.
Where we celebrate a war hero, we must also celebrate a hero of science. Where we honour the bravery of an officer, we must also honour the compassion of a philanthropist. Where we recall the sacrifices of our Prophet (pbuh), we must also recall the sacrifices of Jesus.
Of course, such parity would require a shift in the very foundation of our educational system from psychological programming to a more open, pluralistic mode of critical thinking which is based on logic and reason. There is no doubt in my mind that unless we shift these foundations, we will not succeed in removing the ever-present ‘conspiracy theory’ syndrome as an explanation for all evil.
I grew up in a Pakistan where there was at least some sanctity of life and yet, I failed to recognise the intrinsic value of human life. I now fear the response of the next generation who unfortunately, have opened their eyes to a world of terror; a world where human life has been stripped of its very value and sanctity.
Thus, it is for the want of a better future for our children, that we must attach monumental significance to the task of reforming our educational system and waste no time in changing it. Otherwise, we will just be raising insensitive, fanatical and closed-minded individuals who have no value for human life.
And we will have only ourselves to blame.
Bakhtawar Bilal Soofi
A student of law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), he tweets as @bbsoofi (twitter.com/bbsoofi)
Giant prehistoric toilet unearthed
Each poo is a time capsule to the dawn of the dinosaurs
A gigantic "communal latrine" created at the dawn of the dinosaurs has been unearthed in Argentina.
Thousands of fossilised poos left by rhino-like megaherbivores were found clustered together, scientists say.
The 240-million-year-old site is the "world's oldest public toilet" and the first evidence that ancient reptiles shared collective dumping grounds.
The dung contains clues to prehistoric diet, disease and vegetation saysa study in Scientific Reports.
Elephants, antelopes and horses are among modern animals who defecate in socially agreed hotspots - to mark territory and reduce the spread of parasites.
But their best efforts are dwarfed by the enormous scale of this latrine - which breaks the previous record "oldest toilet" by 220 million years.
Fossil "coprolites" as wide as 40cm and weighing several kilograms were found in seven massive patches across the Chanares Formation in La Rioja province.
Some were sausage-like, others pristine ovals, in colours ranging from whitish grey to dark brown-violet.
"There is no doubt who the culprit was," said Dr Lucas Fiorelli, of Crilar-Conicet, who discovered the dung heaps.
"Only one species could produce such big lumps - and we found their bones littered everywhere at the site."
The culprits were dicynodonts - ancient megaherbivores
The perpetrator was Dinodontosaurus, an eight-foot-long megaherbivore similar to modern rhinos.
These animals were dicynodonts - large, mammal-like reptiles common in the Triassic period when the first dinosaurs began to emerge.
The fact they shared latrines suggests they were gregarious, herd animals, who had good reasons to poo strategically, said Dr Fiorelli.
"Firstly, it was important to avoid parasites - 'you don't poo where you eat', as the saying goes.
"But it's also a warning to predators. If you leave a huge pile, you are saying: 'Hey! We are a big herd. Watch out!"
The predator in this case was the formidable Luperosuchus, a crocodile-like carnivore up to 8m in length.
But the dung patches were equally intimidating.
A museum of poos has been created by the researchers
A density of 94 poos per square metre was recorded by the researchers. And the excrement was spread across patches 900 square metres in size.
Prehistoric coprolites are nothing new, but it is extremely rare to find an accumulation as old and substantial as this one - because faeces degrade so easily.
A sheet of volcanic ash has preserved the ancient dung piles "like Pompeii", said Dr Fiorelli.
The coprolites are like time capsules.
"When cracked open they reveal fragments of extinct plants, fungi, and gut parasites," said Martin Hechenleitner, a fellow author on the study.
"Each poo is a snapshot of an ancient ecosystem - the vegetation and the food chain.
"This was a crucial time in evolutionary history. The first mammals were there, living alongside the grandfather of dinosaurs.
"Maybe with these fossils we can glimpse into the lost environment which gave rise to the dinosaurs."
The world's oldest toilet - an artist's impressionSaturday, March 8, 2014
A camera that can see around corners
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Ramesh Raskar's team at the MIT Media Lab is re-imagining what photography can do
- By creating movies of light in motion at a trillion frames per second, camera can see around corner
- Raskar: Technology is years away from applications in the real world
- He says it could be helpful in preventing car crashes and aiding rescues
New camera captures speed of light
Editor's note: Ramesh Raskar is Associate Professor at MIT Media Lab and head of the Camera Culture research group. He is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow (2009), a recipient of the DARPA Young Faculty award, the co-author of "Spatial Augmented Reality", and the holder of more than 50 US patents. He spoke at the TEDGlobal conference in June. TED is a nonprofit dedicated to "Ideas worth spreading" which it makes available through talks posted on its website.
(CNN) -- A camera that can see around a corner?
I know this sounds like something in a sci-fi movie or a superhero comic, but this is a real-world technology we've made possible with a camera that is aware of the travel time of light, an imaging technique that can create movies of light in motion with an effective rate approaching a trillion frames per second: the speed of light.
Before I joined the MIT faculty in 2008, I had done deep research in "computational photography," a field of new imaging techniques dramatically improving the capture and synthesis of photos. But, I knew there was more to photography than just depicting what the eye can see. I wanted to create a camera that could see beyond the line of sight. The speed of light isn't infinite: light travels about a foot per billionth of a second.
If I could build a camera fast enough to analyze light at high speeds in room-sized environments, I knew we could then create cameras to solve major problems in scientific and consumer imaging, and enable completely new functionality.
I spoke to top researchers in ultrafast lasers and photonics to understand what was currently possible. When I did, most of them asked some version of: "Why? Why spend years building a camera to look around corners when no commercial application is screaming for it and no funding agency has a call for it?" In addition, it's rare to shoot light pulses and analyze at such high speeds in large environments. Ultra-fast imaging experiments are usually limited to centimeter- or smaller-size samples.
I continued the work and in the spring of 2008, with James Davis from UC Santa Cruz, wrote a proposal that laid out the mathematical foundation and various experimental solutions for exploration.
I also began working with Media Lab graduate student Matthew Hirsch to build a prototype, hoping that we would have something to demonstrate within a few months. The grant proposal was rejected for administrative reasons (I made a paperwork error!), which meant we had to wait nearly a year to apply again. But those two years didn't yield any meaningful results, as our lab components weren't designed to be used the way we wanted.
After nearly three years of experimental work, the team -- especially postdoctoral associate Andreas Velten and MIT professor Moungi Bawendi, many students, and several collaborators -- cobbled together pieces of the puzzle and built a software program to create a first demonstration of looking around corners. Very soon afterward, we could also start creating surreal movies of light in motion.
We call this new imaging technology femto photography because we capture a segment of the image with a flashlight (in this case, a laser pulse) on for a few millionths of a billionth of a second (or a few femtoseconds) and an exposure time approaching a trillionth of a second.
Just how fast is femto photography? Think of it this way: if we took one-thousandth of a second of footage from the femto camera video output and slowed it down to the speed of 30 seconds per frame -- the approximate speed of a standard TV broadcast -- it would take us a lifetime to watch.
Photographers know that at very short exposures and even at the most sensitive setting for dark scenes, we will record barely any light. So what about in a trillionth of a second? We actually record and average millions of photos to get enough light, each photo made to look the same via carefully timed synchronization with the light pulse. So even if our exposure time is indeed nearly a trillionth of a second, to get sufficient light we must take an average. Thus, as of now, we can only record repeatable events, but this is not a fundamental limitation.
Unlike conventional cameras, our femto camera captures an image as one thin slice at a time of one-dimensional space using a "streak tube," a laboratory instrument that is commonly used by chemists to study light passing through chemical samples. We then take hundreds of these narrow videos (each shot at a slightly different angle) and create a carefully synchronized, slow-motion composite of the light pulses. It takes about an hour to collect and aggregate the data (view a demonstration of a light pulse as it travels through an ordinary Coca-Cola bottle).
To see around the corner, we use femto photography to analyze scattered light. We bounce light off of visible parts into hidden parts and then measure the time and direction of returned light.
Usually the scattering of energy is considered a nuisance -- whether driving in fog or poor reception from a cell phone tower -- and most techniques either try to avoid it (by turning on fog lights) or reduce the impact of scattering (by selecting energy for the phone only from direct paths).
In contrast, we exploit the scattering. For the camera, a laser pulse is fired at a wall, and the impact of hitting the wall causes the particles of light to scatter. Some of the scattering particles return to the camera at different times. This is repeated about 60 times per image as the camera measures how long it takes for the light to travel back and where the particles land. An algorithm then crunches the data to reconstruct the hidden image. This technique even allows us to see a three-dimensional object such as a mock-up of running person.
As exciting as this work is, don't look for this technology to be in practice tomorrow -- we're still years away from bringing this to market. But, we can already imagine multiple ways that it could have a significant, positive impact on our everyday lives.
By allowing us to "see" around a corner, for example, this technology added to our cars could let us know if there's another vehicle approaching around a blind curve. It also could give us a new way to look deep inside our bodies without X-rays, or to look through a window into a burning building from a distance to see if anyone is left inside --without risking a firefighter's life.
When I gave a TEDGlobal talk on femto photography in June, I began with a reference to Doc Edgerton, a very popular MIT professor of electrical engineering who, in 1964, wowed the world with an image of a bullet in midair, having just passed through an apple. He accomplished this by using a strobe light to freeze the action of the bullet at a millionth of a second.
What we're talking about here -- the speed of light --is a million times faster, and is opening the door to a complete rethinking of what we mean by, and can do with, photography. It is a first step toward a new world of imaging that far exceeds human ability, resynthesizing data and depicting it in ways that are within human comprehensibility.
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