Acquire a transhuman Compass Sense with a kit-built anklet

[Seems a bit pricy at $150, but awfully cool. -egg]

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Acquire a transhuman Compass Sense with a kit-built anklet

The North Paw is a kit for an anklet that subtly vibrates your on the side of your ankle that faces north, so that you attain a kind of subliminal “Compass Sense” like those possessed by certain birds.

What makes it way more awesome than a regular compass? Persistence. With a regular compass the owner only knows the direction when he or she checks it. With this compass, the information enters the wearer’s brain at a subconscious level, giving the wearer a true feeling of absolute direction, rather than an intellectual knowledge as with a regular compass.

Because of the plasticity of the brain, it has been shown that most wearers gain a new sense of absolute direction, giving them a superhuman ability to navigate their surroundings. The original idea for North Paw comes from research done at University of Osnabrück in Germany. In this study, rather than an anklet, the researchers used a belt. They wore the belt non-stop for six weeks, and reported successive stages of integration.

North Paw

(Thanks, Lucas)


“Finding out tomorrow’s weather forecast usually…

“Finding out tomorrow’s weather forecast usually…:

“Finding out tomorrow’s weather forecast usually involves actively searching on the web, waiting on the news channel, or resorting to widgets. How great would it be if this was as easy as looking outside the window? This thought led me to build Tempescope, a physical display that can reproduce (and ambiently notify) weather conditions, inside your room.”
河本の実験室: Prototyping “Tempescope”, an ambient weather display)

In which Santa helps remind us all of the importance of metadata

In which Santa helps remind us all of the importance of metadata:

Metadata is one of those things that is so important, it becomes easy to forget about. We often collect metadata without thinking about it. When we don’t collect it — or if we collect it in a sloppy manner — we notice very quickly that something has gone wrong. But when someone says the word “metadata”, a large number of us go, “the what now?” And start trying to remember what that word means before we make ourselves sound dumb in conversation.

Metadata is really just information about information — it helps us organize, find, and standardize the things we know and want to know. At the Information Culture blog Bonnie Swoger offers some Christmas-themed examples that will help you remember what metadata is, help you understand why it’s such a big deal, and improve your ability to do metadata right.

If you stumbled across this list on the web you might be able to guess what it was, but you couldn’t be sure. It would also be difficult to find this list again if you were looking for it. The list creator might find this pretty useful, but if he or she shared it with others, we would want some added information to help the new user understand what he or she was looking at: this is metadata.

Metadata for this data file:

Who created the data: Santa Claus, North Pole. An email address would be nice. This way we have some contact information in case we need clarification.

Title: “My List” isn’t a title that is conducive to finding the file again. While it might be tempting to just call this “Santa’s list” that won’t help other folks who see this file. The title should be descriptive of what the data file contains, and “Santa’s List” could be many things: Santa’s list of Reindeer? Santa’s list of toys that need to be made? A more descriptive title might be “Santa’s list of naughty and nice children.”

Date created: We don’t want to confuse this year’s list (2012) with last year’s list (2011). This could lead to all sorts of unfortunate events where nice kids get coal, naughty kids get presents, or infants (who weren’t around in 2011) get nothing at all.

Who created the data file: Perhaps Santa created the data, but then used an elf to input the data into a computer file. Many computer programs automatically record this information, although you may not realize this.
How the list was created: Behavioral scans? Parental surveys? Elf on the Shelf reports? All of the above? In order to reuse this data in future research projects, we need to know how it was collected, including collection instruments and methodologies.

Definitions of terms used: What is “naughty” what is “nice”? How did Santa place a child into one category or another?

File type: What kind of file is it? The data here are pretty simple, but Santa has lots of different file formats to choose from: excel, .csv, xml, etc. Knowing the file type helps end users determine if they can use the data.

Read the full story and get more great examples


Survival Library

Survival Library:


Tomorrow, the end of the world won’t happen. Even world economic collapse, or the total failure of the US government won’t happen without preliminary disruptions. Prepping now for that vague doomsday scenario is plain nuts. But regional natural disasters are almost a certainty. Prepping for survival of a large-scale hurricane, tornado, earthquake with a few days backup at home is a good idea. How do you prep? Most die-hard survivalists take the the “stockpile and defend” strategy, constructing doomsteads, which may or may not work in a natural disaster. Usually going with a “mobile and agile” strategy, with a ready “bug-out bag,” is better — but this is mostly a matter of temperament because we don’t have a lot of data of what actually worked in actual past disasters. (If you know of real data examining the value of home preparation please leave a link. Most of the evidence used in the survivalist prep world is Hollywood movies.)
But at the very least you should know what your survivalist options are. There are a zillion “prepper” books each one with more elaborate schemes and crazier than the one before it. Underground bunkers are only the tip. Selling doomsday (vs wilderness) survivalist advice is big cottage industry. I refuse to pay for this nonsense. The Survival Library is an open online archive of self-sufficiency, self-reliance instructions, PDFs, and videos that appear on other sites for free. It is easy to weed through. Some of the information, like welding instruction, or raising rabbits, or how to start a fire with no matches is useful whether or not you believe that the UN is sending black helicopters to take away your machine gun in the basement. The free downloadable PDF of the 500-page LDS (Mormon) Prep Manual is particularly interesting and for most normal people, all the prep literature you’ll ever need.
— KK
Survival Library
http://www.survivallibrary.me/
Sample Excerpts:

SpotLoss – bluetooth object tracker

SpotLoss – bluetooth object tracker:

Thanks to Bluetooth Low Energy, we are going to be seeing a lot more of these kinds of proximity beacons (Previous example: StickNFind). One interesting application of the $29 SpotLoss keychain fob is that you can create a computer log that shows when your son or daughter comes home at night.

The range of the device is 50 meters (164 feet) and works through walls and other solids

— Runs for a year on replaceable watch battery without recharging

— Uses a free app that allows users to easily customize settings

— Get texts or emails about proximity events

— Works with iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, iPad 3, iPad 4, and iPad Mini

— Will work with Android Bluetooth 4.0 devices shortly

— Uses Bluetooth Low Energy (a.k.a. BlueSmart) protocol so the battery use is minimal

— 5.6 x 3.0 x 1.5 cm carabiner style easily attaches to almost anything

— Connect up to ten devices to one phone or computer at the same time

— Connects with cell phones and computers in a many-to-many relationship

— Fob supports vibrating and variable pitch alerts

— Printed circuit boards and their enclosures will be assembled in Upstate New York

Spotloss


Pre-Holiday dinner mission: install LazyTruth

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Pre-Holiday dinner mission: install LazyTruth

Matt Stempeck of the MIT Media Lab created LazyTruth, a “Gmail gadget that surfaces verified debunks when you receive a chain email.” He says:

Each year, we gather around the table with large branches of our family tree. As the night wears on, family updates give way to dramatic retellings of the bizarre email chains you’ve been forwarded all year. This year, as part of your IT duties, consider inoculating the family machines with LazyTruth. The Chrome extension works right within Gmail to provide summarized debunks of common viral emails. You get fewer forwarded emails, and MIT researchers get to learn how this stuff spreads in the first place.


Autechre’s Oversteps 2012 album was fundamentally…

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Autechre’s Oversteps 2012 album was fundamentally…

Autechre’s Oversteps 2012 album was fundamentally algorithmic. I’ve aggregated extracts from interviews that mention this. I love how one extract hints at a system of multiple algorithms tracking and responding to each other. 

Source: How much do algorithms figure into your compositions as of late? : “Quite a lot. Algorithms are a great way of compressing your style… It has always been important to us to be able to reduce something that happened manually into something that is contained in an algorithm. Then the algorithm allows us to add a bit more flair or a bit more deviation that we would also do ourselves in a little script. Just a few slight tweaks can spin it out into all sorts of recreations. It’s a great way to spawn yourself if you like (laughs), and spawn your actions. It’s an addictive way to work. Programs like Max allow you to reduce these ideas to collections of numbers and scenarios that are recallable, cascade-able, even nest-able.”

Other source: “You’ve got a system. And you are listening to what the output from that system is. Much of the system involves talking to each other and listening to each other to see where they are and they say, ‘If you are doing THAT then I’ll do THIS, and if THIS happens then THIS action will happen.’ We’ve been programming stuff like this for twelve years.”

…we made our own midi-sync algorithm this year which worked perfectly and it’s way tighter than the one you’re supposed to use. And it’s unique to our system. It was a major major thing. We made it using trial and error, it took about two weeks but most of it we did in one day.”

“Then,” Rob adds, “there were a few hours of disbelief – ‘Is this actually working as we see it?'”