His company, Oblong Industries, was founded to move g-speak into the real world. Oblong is building apps for aerospace, bioinformatics, video editing and more. Before founding Oblong, Underkoffler spent 15 years at MIT’s Media Laboratory, working in holography, animation and visualization techniques, and building the I/O Bulb and Luminous Room Systems.

tamper system

oblong’s tamper system 1801011309 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

luminous room

luminous room demos from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Is this how tomorrow’s computers will be controlled? According to John yes, in as soon as 5 years. Yeah haa.

Interestingly, the guys from MS have been working on something similar and their Project Natal seems to even shorten this time line, but watch for yourselfs: Whole body motion sensoring and mapping plus voice recognition:

In the case of Baker v. Exxon, an Anchorage jury awarded $287 million for actual damages and $5 billion for punitive damages. The punitive damages amount was equal to a single year’s profit by Exxon at that time. To protect itself in case the judgment was affirmed, Exxon obtained a $4.8 billion credit line from J.P. Morgan & Co. This in turn gave J.P. Morgan the opportunity to create the first modern credit default swap in 1994, so that J.P. Morgan would not have to hold so much money in reserve (8% of the loan under Basel I) against the risk of Exxon’s default.

Exxon appealed several times over the years on court to reduce the punitive damages. Then in 2008 the supreme court limits punitive damages to the compensatory damages, which for this case were calculated as $507.5 million.
Of course, Exxon recovered a significant portion of clean-up and legal expenses through insurance claims associated with the grounding of the Exxon Valdez.

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The gulf disaster is 100 times worse than the Exxon Valdez incident. First BP said the gusher would spill only 5000 gal/day. After scientists were pressing for the footage the numbers became 10.000 then 50.000 gal/day. Now they admitted that about 5.000.000 gal/day are pouring out.
The truth is that the Gulf of Mexico is a “toxic soup” of oil, methane, benzene, hydrogen sulfide, other toxic gases and very poisonous chemical dispersants such as Corexit 9500 and BP does not provide any information to the doctors on what is in the oil disperser that was sprayed all over the place.

And now for the best part, BP and Obama are trying everything they can to prevent anyone on reporting what the actual status at the gulf coast is. That is absolutely disgusting. Journalists who come too close to oil spill clean-up efforts without permission could find themselves facing a $40,000 fine and even one to five years in prison under a new rule instituted by the Coast Guard late last week. [Article]

All kinds of protests against the established order are being framed. This gives the desired pretext to use unnecessary violence on peaceful protesters and to write them all off as violent anarchist.

The same happens at the G20 / G8 summit:

See how the cops are marching. This really looks like martial law. Scary stuff right there.

For all who need more, here is a collection of Toronto protest videos. The PressForTruth vids can be found here

In connection with the latest developments in Yemen and the security conference in Munich it seem inevitable that war is upon Iran. Whatever they will offer the West, it won’t be enough. Of course the Iranian regime is oppressive and its president nuts (as many religious people are) but this doesn’t justify a preemptive strike. So we get to see the same narrative as there was a few years ago in the case of Iraq with its “weapons of mass destruction”. So please, don’t be fooled again:

Capitalism Hits the Fan: A Marxian View from UVC-TV 19 on Vimeo.

Same talk, fancier graphs, but annoying “preview only” watermark on the vid:

(i) The former socialist south Yemen figured out is got screwed the last 20 years. Now, it is trying to overthrow the corrupt islamic government. This is a shiite movement and so shares a positive kinship to Iran.

(ii) The West is trying to put up as much pressure as it can on Iran to prepare war. This means to suppress all shiite groups in Middle east. (Irak, Afghanistan, Pakistan)

(iii) The daddy of the Detroit flight attacker is heavily involved in the african banking business. Umaru Mutallab was the Nigerian Minister of Economic Development in 1975. He then spent a decade as the Managing Director and CEO of United Bank for Africa. For the last ten years, Umaru has been the chairman of the First Bank of Nigeria. This bank and others owe literally billions to Yemen. If the revolution would come this money is lost. This can be found here: Billions in Recent Yememi Investments and The Underwear Bomber’s Daddy. It’s a Small World Ain’t It?

This information is more eloquently put in the following sources:

The Western politics [point (i)+(ii)]: in german 15 min long (its spliced)

Read more, for the finances [point (iii)]:

Operation Scorched Earth and the Underwear Bomber

Dancing With Snakes

read it here: http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2009/12/21/bruce-sterling-gothic-chic-in-the-future-favela/

He’ll  be also talking at the opening of the transmediale this february in Berlin. So don’t miss it!

theres also a video of the talk he gave at reboot:

So, lets have a look at the know universe:

A myriad galaxies with M33 in focus Digital Universe (AMNH)

On the other site of the Atlantic, Barack Obama called for an increasing military presence by 30.000 men and women. I am not sure if the politicans actually have a clue, what is going on in Afghanistan, but this documentary will give you some more insight:

Last, but not least, you could even argue, that the NATO is actually chasing an enemy that doesn’t exist… and it is about resources (NABUCO pipeline) again: