GENOMICON

There’s been a fair bit of this in the last couple of months… prosthetics controlled by thought etc. There was recently a load of excitement and fuss to do with brain-to-speech synthesis… which may or may not be tempered by the fact that it only did 3 vowel sounds, and required a bit of implanted hardware that neurons grew around. Oooh. Aaaah. etc.

Still that is a bit like saying “yea, my dog plays chess but he’s not that good”. A hello-world is a hello-world. The difference between 0 and 1 is MASSIVELY different to the difference between 1 and 2.

I went on about this sort of thing in Feb last year. There’s an Open-EEG community… or was… but here’s the thing: if you don’t have a blog, no one can tell if you’re alive. I guess I could join the mailing list, but I’m already overwhelmed with mailing lists, and I’m only on about 5.

Anyway… a couple of things turned up recently that are partly related.

Waking you up when you’re sleeping lightly thing for iPhone – although according to wikipedia, there is some dispute as to whether being woken when you’re sleeping lightly is the best way to be woken… personally, I’d tend to go for something like this

But anyway, I saw the waking up watch/iphone thing a while back and had a spot of bother finding it again… and found that there are actually loads of such devices out there – the sensory bit is called an Actigraph – which sounds a bit snake-oily to me… like any advert that contains the words “scientifically proven”. As far as I can gather, all it is is a piezo, which measures movement… often filtering out everything except the 2-3 hz range… which is about the speed of a normal, common, every-day case of DTs. How that correlates to sleep, I couldn’t say, but that is apparently what’s being measured.

I think though the real value of this isn’t being woken up when you’re sleeping lightly, but the fact that it forces you to pay attention to sleep over a long period – keeping a sleep diary etc… which will probably make you aware of just how much caffeine, alcohol, stress etc are messing you about.

It would be quite cool to have something like a system-monitor for your body/mind going all the time. So rather than being pulled this way and that by laziness, gluttony and random whims, you do actually get to run yourself like a well tuned machine. Do what works, rather than what feels good in the short term.

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Off at a tangent – or something that comes in at a different level, something that also turned up recently is this pedometer that has an LED flower on the side of it.

and if you don’t do loads of walking, it dies.

Utter genius – it’s a tamagotchi that makes you do something you want to do, but can’t be arsed with.

“Captology” – capitalising on people’s amazing powers of nurturing and anthropomorphism etc. This is kindof what I was on about in my open-source energy monitor idea – setting up the interface so it’s kindof pavlovian… but this is so much better.

There are so many applications of this – turn your iPhone into a Chumby-like creature that you have to look after. Like having a familiar… or one of those daemons off Golden Compass. iPhone as pet. Brilliant.

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PS:

Electric Shoes:

” the iShoes have a powerful 500 watt motor that can take you up most hills.” – – hackedgadgets.com

Cool. I wonder if that means that when you’re going back down hill again, you can charge the battery in your light up in the dark coat…

enlighted.com

It’s a funny one is electric clothes… Arduinos have a special clothing variant I think… it’s an idea that’s been around forever (well, since Dune), always circling and waiting but never quite arriving. I guess washing might be a problem. Could be useful for medical diagnostics though maybe. Clothes that change colour when your blood pressure is getting to high. Turn black, when you’re dead, or a goth or something. Light up with loads of flashing lights when you’ve gone a bit mad.

It’s got to be useful for something.

There have been a proliferation of these recently:

Though I can’t really believe that that woman actually sits there reading a magazine, waiting for her plants to need watering. She should get a hobby. Like building one of these:

Which is the by now, semi legendary arduino thing that sends a twitter message when your plant needs watering, a smallified, off-the-shelf version being here:

Which seems to be an emerging pattern with open-source hardware… all information for free, but sell kits on the side – though I can’t help but noting that neither Etsy nor Lady Ada are currently stocking this item.

The reason I mention it though is because of this:

which is a variant that not only measures soil-moisture but also light strength, humidity, temperature… and logs the data, which you can then upload to their site to compare to a database that they have of plants… and what conditions they prefer.

Quite a nice idea – and dead simple to do… although I couldn’t help but noticing that they say “Plant Sensor uses patent-protected sensors” as though that’s a good thing, rather than an insult to humanity… especially right after they say “We brought NASA Mars Rover Technology down to Earth” – sorry? Don’t taxpayers pay for NASA Technology? Well they can go fuck themselves up the chuffers. The only reason I’d buy one is to reverse-engineer it and put the designs up on the web.

Still… that aside. I really like the idea of this when applied to various larger scales… it kindof ties in with the WorldChanging.com idea of using cellphones to monitor environmental conditions globally – so we can be far more responsive to changes in local conditions etc.

I think it might also help people with backyard-farming – which is a fairly crucial component of “buying out at the bottom“, which is a fairly crucial component of humanity surviving the 21st century, in my most humble of opinions.

I’ve got this vague vision of rfid enabled censors for pretty much everything being scattered like confetti all over the place… they can network together and in a dead-simple mycelium type way, cover the entire planet. Whether we like it or not, The Universal Mind is becoming omnipotent. Firstly it was the CCTV cameras and webcams, now it’s about a billion people with cellphones and web connections. Sooner or later it’s going to become botnetified (mp3).

I’m not sure that these are good for, but there’s a whole mass of them on Youtube etc.

The homopolar motor works from the Lorentz principle of current flowing through a wire makes a magnetic field which interacts with the neodymium magnet, producing torque. it says. On youtube. Who I no longer like, because they keep deleting things.

$700 AUS… now that’s getting somewhere. It looks as though it uses the whole roof as a way of funnelling the wind. Looks simple enough to reverse engineer as well – really there’s no reason why these things should cost more than plastic rubbish bins….

… apart from the need for:

A battery bank
Regulators / Inverters
Wires, wires, wires.

I quite like the idea that someone had a while back… which was only an idea – for a wind system that you could just plug into any wall point – and it would supply power back to the rest of the house. I guess it’s not impossible with adequate levels of trickery at the junction-box end of things.

It’s so easy to get hung up on the mechanical bits… it’s actually retrofitting the existing system that costs.

1926 style.

This is pretty cool… A shame in a way we’re heading into a period of planetary overheat rather than an ice age. I wonder if they work on sand.

from boing boing

http://idealist.blinkr.net/

I think this is interesting because it’s a kind of ecosystem (not dissimilar to the entire internet in some ways) for “products” that compete on their ability to get attention rather than be sold. This makes for weirder and more interesting things.

Although, alas… (and ain’t that always the way?) you could be forgiven that design agencies are using it for free advertising.

So obviously I’m interested in this partly because it’s made out of Lego and has machine guns that fire metal balls etc:

I mean who wouldn’t be?

The main reason I’m interested though is that it’s has First-Personalisation Capabilities… ie: you can see through its eyes.

This is something that Cati Vaucelle did as a research project at MIT Media Laboratory / Tangible Media Group.

An idea that has huge potential I think… I can see us getting to a stage where our robotics become good enough that a lot of people spend more time embodying a robot than being in their own skin, so to speak. Imagine a surgeon’s rig… instead of being next to a patient she operates through a machine – with 6 arms and microscope eyes.

She can perform keyhole surgery where she sees from the POV of a micro bot (also with 6 arms and microscope eyes) right inside someone’s body.

Meantime, she’s sitting in her living room, 12,000 miles away and later that day she’ll perform 3 more operations, all on different continents.

This could go in a million different directions. It’s one of the most exciting technologies that hasn’t quite happened yet that there is I think. Want to be a bird? Want to be a plane? Want to go on a safari hunting spiders 10 times bigger than you?

Meantime… it’s toys and weapons though. Until robotics technology catches up.

from : www.auger-loizeau.com via : dvice.com

A cross between an sensory deprivation tank and a telephone.

I find this video quite mesmerising for some reason. Maybe because it reminds me of the little fluffy clouds video. Reminds me of being in love with someone I never knew. Or only almost new. I zigged when I should have zagged back in 92

from Loop.ph – textiles meet technology.