The Nerd's Eye View

I stepped out of the BART car, having slouched from Fremont to my downtown Oakland transfer point. As I stood on the platform, I patted myself down in my daily ritual and as I did I realized what the muted thunk I'd heard 10 minutes or so earlier was. I turned in time to see the train leaving the platform, with my cell phone on it. My cell phone with everything that I need at my fingertips. On a train. Headed to Richmond. Without me.

There was the cold panic, the bargaining, the rushing upstairs to ask about lost and found, and the profound realization of how useless that was. There was self-flagellation: I had looked back to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything, but hadn't patted down; what was I in such a rush for? That peaked after getting to the apartment and realizing I had no way to contact anyone or even text or call myself to beg whoever had the phone to return it. And the long evening.

I went to bed last night and reminded myself that I had only had a cell phone a short time. That there was a time when I resisted the pressure to get one, and to be contactable all the time. I reminded myself that it's only a phone. How many other leashes have been attached to me without my feeling it?

So now here I am, without a phone, trying to get the old one disabled remotely and feeling strangely adrift. I try to remember that sometimes drifting isn't so bad.

Posted by Lo Fat Mo at 9:58 AM | Permalink

At first blush, this post about flexible micro-LED's might seem like more the gee whiz technophilia you typically see here. And it is, but it's a little bit more than that. While there is something interesting about the idea of implanting circuitry under your skin as a new form of body modification (think about what you could do at clubs!), there are also other applications. Coupled with a heads up display (or even better, direct corneal or brain input), you could quickly read and assimilate tons of data just by running your LED implanted fingertip across it. Information at your fingertips would no longer be just a figure of speech! What do you think of that?

UPDATE 10/20/10: you can now power your LED's with subcutaneously implanted solar cells.

Posted by Lo Fat Mo at 2:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My friend Mrs Burg rapped me across the knuckles figuratively yesterday for being so lax about updating the blog, and truth to be told, I am ashamed of being so quiet. Especially after reading about the fashion blog Style Rookie last night, wherein a 13yr old girl is apparently setting the fashion world on it's head. I should at the very least be able to blog a few times a week about the world at large, right? Unfortunately I know next to nothing about fashion (just ask Dr Germ, Mrs Burg, or frankly anyone I have ever known) so I will just have to go with my old standby, nerdy crap.

Just read a lovely article about bipedal robots in the IEEE Spectrum. By lovely I don't refer to the prose but mainly the subject matter, which is sort of what I thought I'd be doing when I went to college. Or at least that by now I'd have a robot butler named JVs4.7 (pronounced "Jeeves 4 point 7") who would accompany me on adventures and always be ready with a sandwich, a cool drink and a monotone bon mot. But I digress. The point is that it's amazing to me that we've reached the stage we have and at the same time it's amazing to me that we're not further along. Even these robots are sort of gimmicky and prone to failure, they have battery life problems, stability problems and really what can they do that is useful? The REEM-B can pick up a bottle of Coke and pretend to pour it but doesn't seem to realize the cap is still on. Good job, Robot ... not! I can make fun of them now of course, since they're not sophisticated enough yet to take over and enslave us all but that's a far away future, right? (I should point out that the Justin robot out of Germany actually can see and follow, and remove caps and pour - we'll have to keep an eye out for that one).

I won't even get into the cyborg rats that they're building with half track hind legs.

Posted by Lo Fat Mo at 9:37 AM | Permalink

As you can imagine I have a bit of egg on my face due to being a week late (which I'm sure Ada Lovelace would not have stood for at all, being English and a mathematician to boot, as well as a Lady). But when I realized this day was actually so closely past, I couldn't resist the urge to put up a quick post about it. For those of you who know me well, you know I'm a big supporter of women in the sciences and frankly the more the better. There's something about walking into an engineering building in any college in the world, that changes the enterer (is that word?) from whatever gender they are into an Engineer, and that's a lovely thing. So kudos out there Women of Science! and don't let the bastards grind you down!

Post-script: Just want to thank Shaenon Garrity, creator of Narbonic and Skin Horse (for getting me into mad science ladies), and Sydney Padua, creator of The Adventures of Babbage and Lovelace for teaching me about Ada Lovelace and opening the door to a real discussion of women in the sciences. Ms Padua is also an accomplished animator and general art bad ass, so check her out talking about graphic storytelling and just random Babbage anecdotes.

Check out more about Ada Lovelace day at Finding Ada.

Posted by Lo Fat Mo at 1:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)