(via Oh, the places you’ll go… with this shoulder-mounted telepresence robot (video) — Engadget)

…, a team of Japanese engineers from Yamagata University have crafted a tiny telepresence robot that mounts to your shoulder. Part of this year’s IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, the unsettling cyborg companion, dubbed MH-2 for miniature humanoid, is designed to act like a virtual chaperon or comrade, all depending on the person remotely piloting it…

Slow slicing (Traditional Chinese: 凌遲, Simplified Chinese: 凌迟, Pinyin: língchí, alternately transliterated Ling Chi or Leng T’che), also translated as the slow process, the lingering death, or death by a thousand cuts, was a form of execution used in China from roughly AD 900 to its abolition in 1905. In this form of execution, the condemned person was killed by using a knife to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time. The term língchí derives from a classical description of ascending a mountain slowly.

Lingchi was reserved for crimes viewed as especially severe, such as treason and killing one’s parents. The process involved tying the person to be executed to a wooden frame, usually in a public place. The flesh was then cut from the body in multiple slices in a process that was not specified in detail in Chinese law and therefore most likely varied. In later times, opium was sometimes administered either as an act of mercy or as a way of preventing fainting. The punishment worked on three levels: as a form of public humiliation, as a slow and lingering death, and as a punishment after death.

According to the Confucian principle of filial piety or xiao to alter one’s body or to cut the body is a form of unfilial practice. Lingchi therefore contravenes the demands of xiao. In addition, to be cut to pieces meant that the body of the victim would not be ‘whole’ in a spiritual life after death.[citation needed]

This method of execution became a fixture in the image of China among some Westerners. It appears in various accounts of Chinese cruelty, such as Harold Lamb’s 1930s biography of Genghis Khan.

The pictures are part of the execution of Fu-zhu.li. Beijing, April 10, 1905.

this is so beautiful

Photos of 1955 Atomic Bomb Test

Some rare and eerie photos of a replica town involved in an atomic bomb test in May 1955, including mannequins used to demonstrate the effects on people.

Whats really hood, bish?

Matt Momchilov - Say It, 2010
Acrylic on canvas
14 in. x 18 in.