Blog

$1billion spent on British cosmetic surgery in 2007

February 5, 2008 Paul Raven 3 Comments

I really fell out with my parents over my body-mod efforts, as tame as they are by some standards. “It’s not natural,” my mother would say. “You’re marginalising yourself into a small group of people who aren’t content to leave their bodies the way they are.” [Image by UnsureShot – no, that’s not me in the picture.]

Not such a small group after all, mother dearest – research suggests the British have spent over $1billion on cosmetic surgery in 2007 alone. [Via grinding.be]

Of course, they’re spending that money chasing after an unattainable media-manipulated conception of perfect beauty, which is still more socially acceptable than investing a few hundred dollars a year in having permanent pictures drawn on you and holes punched through various parts of your anatomy … horses for courses, I guess.

But whichever way you cut it, body modification of one type or another is becoming very commonplace. So why are people still so aghast at the concepts of transhumanism?

Blog

A touchless computer interface

February 4, 2008 Edward Willett 2 Comments

There’s not a lot of technical detail about exactly how this works, but a company called Elliptic Labs is developing a very science-fictiony touchless computer interface (Via Gizmodo):

Elliptic Labs is paving the way for use of computers and screens without touching, simply with the finger or hand in the air. Manipulate images, play computer games, control robotics or use touch screens without touching or without holding a hardware control unit.

Their technology is based on the work of Dr. Tobias Dahl from the University of Oslo, who is also the company’s founder. According to the website, their technology can recognize “with high precision” the position and properties of a finger or hand or other object up to 1.5 meters away from the sensors, which can be placed on or next to a monitor: no need for a clunky “data glove” or anything on the hand at all. The company says the technology is so compact it could even be fitted on to a mobile phone. You can view video demonstrations of it here.

Since I’m a Windows user I’ve occasionally made rather violent hand gestures at my computer, but it’s never taken the slightest notice. Perhaps that’s about to change.

(Image: Elliptic Labs)

[tags]technology, computers[/tags]

Blog

The LHC may find extra dimensions

February 4, 2008 Tomas Martin

One of the main functions of the Large Hadron Collider – the huge supercollider in Geneva, Switzerland – is to find the underlying reasons for why the particles in the universe have mass and how gravity works. My masters project is a simulation of the most simplistic solution, the Standard Model Higgs Boson. If the collider doesn’t find this particle in its simple form, there are number of more complicated theories proposed for how the world works at this tiny level.

One of these theories supposes that for every particle in the universe, there’s a supersymmetric particle balancing it out. Another set of exotic theories that could be proved right at the LHC is Extra Dimensions – is the reason Gravity is so weak compared to the other forces because its power is trapped inside other dimensions we can’t see? This would link into the infamous string theory, which describes all the tiny particles we’re made of as vibrating strings of energy, suggesting six or seven dimension we can’t see that affect everything we do see! The 27km diameter collider will start smashing protons together later this year if all goes to plan and a new era of particle physics will begin.

[link via ScienceDaily, image from the awesome webcomic xkcd]

Blog

Cables, cuts and conspiracies

February 4, 2008 Paul Raven 7 Comments

Coincidences happen. Synchronicity is a function of the inherent human propensity for seeing patterns in an essentially random world.

Seriously, I got over the whole conspiracy theory thing years ago (and, funnily enough, it was reading The Illuminatus! Trilogy that inoculated me against it), but I’m still kind of fascinated by the process of conspiracy theories – the inevitability of how they appear wherever there is a chain of events and a vacuum of facts surrounding them. Where we can’t see causality, we create it – from whole cloth if necessary. [Image by Ford – or should that be Fnord?]

Point in case – undersea optical fibre internet cables being severed or malfunctioning in the Asia and Middle East regions. Four have gone down in a very compressed time-frame; the entirety of Iran has been without internet connectivity for a couple of days (and you can check the internet traffic report for the Asia region to see of that’s still the case).

So, what’s going on? Official story – shipping anchors and power failures. Obvious conspiracist conclusion – ZOMFG clandestine operations!!1! I think we can all agree that the latter is unlikely (though sadly all too easy to believe), and that the former seems too simple to be true – even if it actually is*.

Now, leaving aside the question of what’s actually happening (which no amount of internet debate is going to determine), let’s try to answer another question – are conspiracy theories an inevitability in complex societies where it’s impossible for everyone to know everything? Or will the increasingly connected nature of the world slowly shine a light into all the dark corners where these ambiguities hide?

[* So don’t call Occam’s Razor on me, I’m not claiming anything either way; just highlighting ambiguity for the sake of debate. Play nice.]

Futurismic

$1billion spent on British cosmetic surgery in 2007

A touchless computer interface

The LHC may find extra dimensions

Cables, cuts and conspiracies

Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001