Filtered for Monday mornings

10.25, Monday 23 Mar 2015

1.

An LED jacket for sausage dogs. Back Disco Dog on Kickstarter.

If your dog runs too far away and the connection is lost, the vest will show an automatic “LOST DOG” message

Best video.

2.

There are eleven Sikh gurus – the 11th, Final and last, eternal living guru took leadership in 1708, and is the community itself, the Khalsa:

the temporal leadership of the Sikhs was passed on to the Khalsa with the bestowed title of “Guru Panth” and spiritual leadership was passed on to the Guru Granth Sahib [the central religious text]

Guru Gobind Singh the 10th guru: All the Sikhs are enjoined to accept the Granth as their Guru. Consider the Guru Granth as embodiment of the Gurus. Those who want to meet God, can find Him in its hymns.

I wonder what this kind of metempsychosis feels like from the perspective of the guru – to awaken as a text; frozen mid-thought, only alive when in communion with other minds.

3.

The brain is electric. Transcranial magnetic stimulation works by stimulating bits of your brain with a whopping great magnet.

Zap your frontal lobe, it can make you savant at drawing cats (New York Times, 2003.)

It’s loud too. Magnets eh.

Zap your motor cortex, your arm jumps. Quinn Norton on neuro-engineering (Wired, 2009):

A few inches over my ear is the part of my brain that controls my hand and arm. Schneider holds the coil there and activates it. The muscles in my scalp contract automatically, and it stings. My hand is jumping with each loud snap from the TMS machine.

I remember Quinn telling me about this experience… what stuck with me was her experience with free will. If you zap your muscles, they twitch despite yourself, but you can resist it.

But when you zap your neurons, you don’t resist: you change your mind.

Hold your arm down. Zap. [Arm moves.] Why did you move your arm? I wanted to.

So I look at all this augmented reality nonsense and it all looks quite distracting.

And so I figure: What about a transcranial magnetic stimulation helmet, with Google Maps inside? That way your can check your email and Skype your mum, while the Walking-Down-The-Street Hat takes care of the tedious job of moving your legs, and collision-detecting your way around obstacles like buses and humans.

C’mon Google, sort it out.

4.

I made a slo mo video of a bee yesterday – that ethereal hooting you can hear in the background - turn it up, it’s very quiet - is birdsong.

9 Beet Stretch is Ludwig van Beethoven’s 9th symphony stretched to 24 hours, with no pitch distortions. It’s broadcast online continuously: Listen now.

Recorded by the Huygens probe, the sound of the winds of Titan, largest moon of Saturn.

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