What is being scanned around the world The Internet Archive updated in real time. [more inside]
posted by Sailormom on Dec 23, 2011 - 17 comments

Scandybars is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their Snickers wedged into their scanners, or why.
posted by quiet coyote on Aug 18, 2011 - 68 comments

Should Cops Be Allowed to Scan Your Phone During a Traffic Stop? In Michigan, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a complaint [PDF letter here] alleging that Michigan State Police officers used forensic cellphone analyzers to snoop in drivers' cellphones during routine traffic stops. [Before they fulfill an ACLU FOIA request, the MSP wants a $272,340 deposit up front to cover their costs of retrieving analyzer data, which is obtained without the cellphone owner's knowledge.]
posted by cenoxo on Apr 19, 2011 - 97 comments

The Nottingham Cave Survey is active program that is recording all of Nottingham's 450+ sandstone caves, using a laser scanner to capture 3D details of the caves. So far, there are over 100 clips on YouTube, most of them flythroughs into the caves. Many clips are short, some clocking under a minute, while others run over 10 minutes, such as the tour of the private Peel Street Caves (Rouse's Sand Mine [PDF]).
posted by filthy light thief on Jan 6, 2011 - 12 comments

Face your pockets. I have no idea how these people got their heads wedged into their scanners, or why.
posted by dabitch on Aug 3, 2010 - 36 comments

Vegetated State conversations: To find out whether a simple conversation was possible, the researchers selected one of the four - a 29-year-old man who had been in a car crash. They asked him to imagine playing tennis if he wanted to answer yes to questions such as: Do you have any sisters? Is your father's name Thomas? Is your father's name Alexander? And if the answer to a question was no, he had to imagine moving round his home.
posted by bigmusic on Feb 3, 2010 - 22 comments

Say hello to the newest police method for human identification: iris scanning. The Alameda County Sheriff's Office is preparing to become the first public agency in the Bay Area to scan the irises of convicted sex offenders.
posted by fandango_matt on Nov 5, 2007 - 31 comments

The Open Content Alliance poses a threat to Google and Microsoft's competing library digitization projects. OCA was founded by the Internet Archive, whose main claim to fame is the Wayback Machine, designed to archive the internet's web history. OCA's mission is to open the nation's library collections to universal web search by digitizing books and making them as widely accessible as possible. [more inside]
posted by richards1052 on Oct 22, 2007 - 9 comments

Microsoft releases Microsoft Live Search Books (beta), a third major project to scan public domain books behind Google books and the pioneering Archive.org. Content is pre-1927 editions of public domain works. Live Search blog has (slightly) more info and lots of general reactions pro and con.
posted by stbalbach on Dec 14, 2006 - 9 comments

The best Spider-Man story evar has super-apes and fruit pies. You can't ask for much more. [via]
posted by rhapsodie on Aug 5, 2005 - 20 comments

Google to team up with the University of Michigan and Harvard University to make their extensive libraries available online. According to the agreement, Google will make available all books in the public domain; the universities can put the material to whatever use they see fit. Others have made attempts before, but none with the sheer might of Google. [via /.]
posted by Civil_Disobedient on Dec 14, 2004 - 71 comments

Safety of MRI scans - annoying and temporary free registration required.
If movement whilst being scanned may not be safe, then what about the heart, lungs, blood and even a foetus? You can't keep those still.
Background: Of Mice & Magnets.
posted by southisup on May 26, 2002 - 12 comments

Get your snail mail by e-mail. This startup will scan in your postal mail, e-mail you the images, and snail mail back your e-mailed reply. All for a monthly fee of $30 (or $40 for color scans). They offer CD-ROM archiving and optionally weed out the junk mail. Anyone want to try this out and post their experiences?
posted by waxpancake on Feb 20, 2002 - 23 comments

Boobscan - the name sums it up. Personally I prefer this to the nobscan site posted the other day. Just sharing in the name of gender equality. (Warning: if it's not obvious enough, this link will lead to a site featuring nudity - maracas on the glass plate to be exact.)
posted by sixdifferentways on Apr 27, 2001 - 6 comments

Weenies galore: Pre-internet, it was used to drop your pants and sit down in the office photocopier. Now you can scan your nob and display it proudly to the rest of the world. Now I guess this is what they really meant about the Internet bringing great progress to the world...

(Disclaimer: kids probably shouldn't see this)
posted by betobeto on Apr 19, 2001 - 29 comments