Here’s a bit of tech that is definitely going to change our world. The full article is over at Bloomberg Businessweek.  I can see this making it’s way into interactive map and driving displays, as well as surgical feedback.

Swedish engineer John Elvesjö is developing a device that lets users control computers just by looking at them.

These kinetic sculptures could be a very cool reference for the birdhouses and also for elements of the Skynests. These could be like BodyMods for buildings, where the buildings themselves are almost alive and functioning on their own – with strange organic junk sculptures that do things like power elevator-like conveyor belts.

This just in. Bioelectric BodyMods are real and here today. Thanks @greatdismal for the tip.

From Short Sharp Science blog on New Scientist website: ”
Brain-computer implant has passed 1000-day milestone”

Author: Helen Thomson, biomedical news editor

A paralysed woman was still able to accurately control a computer cursor with her thoughts 1000 days after having a tiny electronic device implanted in her brain, say the researchers who devised the system. The achievement demonstrates the longevity of brain-machine implants.

The woman, for whom the researchers use the pseudonym S3, had a brainstem stroke in the mid-1990s that caused tetraplegia – paralysis of all four limbs and the vocal cords.

In 2005, researchers from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, the Providence VA Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston implanted a tiny silicon electrode array the size of a small aspirin into S3’s brain to help her communicate better with the outside world.

This is the tech behind the Fins and FlashWare BodyMods.

Linking off a tweet by Lance Weiler, I came across sharedstoryworlds.com.  I love the idea of fan fiction and hope to make it a part of The Gatecrashers in the not so distant future. (of course I’ll have to get my shit together to have a world defined enough to share…but back to the story)

What is a Shared Story World?

The short answer: an entertainment property designed for collaboration with unknown individuals.

The medium answer: an entertainment property designed to allow audiences/fans/consumers to collaborate and participate in the creation of content in the entertainment property.

For the long answer go to their website and find out.

Read the full article on regenerative tissue growth from stem cell injections @ wired. Here are a couple excerpts:

Restore 1 showed that Cytori’s cells could rebuild breasts lost to cancer. The next logical step was trying it out for breast augmentation. Perhaps not surprisingly, once again this happened in Japan. The country has a strong and entrenched cultural prejudice against putting anything foreign into one’s body; organ transplants were slow to be adopted in Japan and still remain rare. But if that ick factor is the immovable object, the Western-inspired desire for bigger breasts is the irresistible force.

 

This is what it’s all about. When there is no real home for people, they will improvise and new urban worlds will be created.  I’m only half way through this book (regrettably usually where I put them down and start something new, for no reason in particular, just because – perhaps I need an iPad 🙂

In Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World, Author Robert Neuwirth travels the world to explore the largest squatter communities out there, and find how how they came to be, and how they continue to survive and thrive. These modern cities are not filled with tents, they’re filled with community boards, restaurants, home-grown social services and a new way of life; often ignored by the cities governments that surround them.

‘Neuwirth gets the lowdown on the low life by becoming a resident of four of the most happening squatopolises: the thriving extralegal pockets of Istanbul, Mumbai, Nairobi, and Rio. His ghetto epiphanies include impeccable civility, self-organizing local governments, bustling economies, modest crime rates, and squatter millionaires.’ – Josh McHugh,Wired

Cinematographer Doug Emmett suggested Maximum City to me when I gave him a quick pitch about the Gatecrashers. It was right on. Thanks Doug.  I can highly recommend this book.

This is what the  The New Yorker had to say:

Modern Bombay is home to fourteen million people, two-thirds of them packed into neighborhoods where the population density reaches one million per square mile. Its official name is now Mumbai, but, as the author points out, the city has always had “multiple aliases, as do gangsters and whores.” Mehta, who lived there as a child, has a penchant for the city’s most “morally compromised” inhabitants: the young Hindu mafiosi who calmly recollect burning Muslims alive during riots twelve years ago; the crooked policeman who stages “encounter killings” of hoods whose usefulness has expired; the bar girl, adorned with garlands of rupees, whose arms are scarred from suicide attempts. Mehta’s brutal portrait of urban life derives its power from intimacy with his subjects. After clandestine meetings with some of Bombay’s most wanted assassins, he notes, “I know their real names, what they like to eat, how they love, what their precise relationship is with God.”
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

I’m starting a Glossary here in the Garage. I’ve decided to break it up into real world; where I’m going to pull words from all the reference reading I’m doing, and Palomar City, where I’m going to plug in some definitions for in-world items you might come across on the blog. This will hopefully find it’s way into a wiki in the near future.

In conjunction with the Glossary, I’m going to start a Reading List. I read about one book a year, and usually only half of it. So don’t worry, that list is not going to be too intense.

Here are the first two entries in the Reading List.

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World

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Currently Listening To: Algodón Egipicio “El Ingenio Humano”

Social Media Counter Measures. Not even lurkers, these digital mole misdirects and propagandists are govt funded comment spammers.

The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as “sock puppets” – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.

As if private companies haven’t been doing this for many many years.

Read the full article at the Guardian.

Ok, I’ve been talking to the void for too long. I just made a few little stylistic tweaks, and now the Garage door has been opened. This is what it looked like the day it went live.