http://www.livescience.com/culture/080811-brain-evolution.html

The conjecture goes like this: because we learned to cook our food, humans were able to get more and better calories than our raw food eating cousins thus spurring a leap of cognitive ability.

In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains.

Makes intuitive sense.

I've been thinking about this lately.  You see, I'm becoming a runner.  Never been before but I think you'd have to say that I'm getting there.  Which brings me to this point.  I think my "hull speed" is a 9 minute mile.

For those of you not familiar with "hull speed" it refers to a boats natural "max-speed".  Essentially the point at which you have to begin expending vastly more energy into the boat to get incremental speed increases.  For our family's Cal 40 sailboat that is approximately 6+ knots (6.5 maybe).

For me and running it appears that the 9 minute mile is about where my body likes to be.  Check out this chart.

Of course I have a chart, I'm a geek aren't I?

Anyways, the first datapoint is from February 6th.  Just coming off the long winters break and I walked half my route.  But look at the way the curve is settling down very nicely right at the 9 minute mile mark.

My goal of course is to get it much lower than that, but I anticipate having to expend a lot more energy to get there...and the energy is being expended vastly right now...at least that is the subjective opinion on the ground.

For those of you interested in this chart, go here: running log

Well these guys do it.  It's pretty funny. 

They all keep straight faces and there's a video of their exploits.

Improv Everywhere has a bunch of other "missions" they undertake.  One of the coolest is when they descend on a normal little league game with a crowd of fans for both teams, real NBC announcers, a jumbotron, mascots and the flippin' Goodyear blimp.  The players and coaches and families were not in on the joke, they merely get the best game ever.

The paralysed finger

Try this...it is impossible to lift your ring finger.

Essentially your index finger and pinky have independent extensor tendons whereas your middle and ring finger share one.

The index and small finger each have independent extension function through the extensor indicis proprius and extensor digiti minimi.

There you go, now you know.  Maybe you can win some bets at a bar now...

Humourous interview with some good bits and inside it.

We here at techRivet pride ourselves in our commitment to bringing our vast reading public only the most innovative achievements and inventions dealing with important technically problems facing us in the world today...

Then we find something like this and just marvel at the innovation, creativity and purity of mind that it took to create it.

300 hp V8 engine...Chainsaw!

So check this out.

This guy in a semi comes into our parking lot and gets stuck.  Instead of coming in and asking for help, having some people move cars, or I don't know...thinking clearly, he guns it and smacks the side of our building.

It gets better...he splits.

Here's a guy that hit and run a BUILDING!  What sorta maroon do you have to be to do that?

Sheesh!

This is great. The creativity involved with this is impressive. I especially like the bit at the end that displays this. Not that I fixated on the beer part expecially, but it just seemed to round out the video appropriately.

Hat Tip: tech herding

Joel Spolsky has a couple of very interesting posts about elevator usbiilty: [linky 1], [linky 2].

The second link brings up an interesting usability bug around users being forced to use two different elevator interfaces, one for work and one for home.

I couldn't resist telling you the second usability bug with those elevators where you select a floor before getting on. People who work in buildings with the new elevators but live in buildings with traditional elevators report that when they get home at night, they sometimes get into the elevator and then just stand there, expecting the elevator to know their floor already.

Now I think something that's much more relevant to everyone reading this is the difference between the automated faucets in public bathrooms and old school ones with handles.

Do you ever find yourself sliding your hands under a faucet and waiting...waiting...eh, oh it's got a handle.  Cause I do.

Very interesting how quickly automated faucets integrated themselves into our environment and expectations.

How fast was the Blackbird? oh yeah...that fast.

heh: Good joke: The King of Speed.

"Los Angeles Center, Aspen 20, can you give us a ground speed check?"

There was no hesitation, and the reply came as if was an everyday request:

"Aspen 20, I show you at one thousand eight hundred and forty-two knots, across the ground."

Gimme a second heh for that one

PEOPLE ARE SOYLENT GREEN!

At least I think that's what he was saying. A very interesting article today by Chris Anderson where he equates spare cycles to online content.  What's the next content channel to be tapped?

People wonder how Wikipedia magically arose from nothing, and how 50 million bloggers suddenly appeared, almost all of them writing for free. Who knew there was so much untapped energy all around us, just waiting for a catalyst to become productive? But of course there was. People are bored, and they'd rather not be.

Sometimes he really has his finger on the pulse of what's going on...

I have read science fiction since before I could grok and one of the most common "future" technologies used in the stories has been wetware: brain implants. William Gibson pushed the concept far into the mainstream with his cyberpunk novels such as Neuromancer and Count Zero. The Matrix movies took it to an extreme. But that is all fiction, what is reality?

2002

I read an article in wired way back in 2002 [linky - Vision Quest] that talked about curing blindness through wetware.  It described a brain implant technology being developed at UCLA and other locations that put a diode under the patient's skull adjacent to their visual center of the brain and cured (partially, and with side effects) their blindness.

True wetware.

The side effects of seizures not-withstanding, this was an incredible breakthrough.

But where are we today?

BCI - circa 2007

Brain Computer Interfaces [BCI] is the official name given to this discipline and there is a lot of progress.

Check out this video from Berlin:

Now that isn't wetware, but it is BCI.

Brain implants are going to help quadriplegics

And if you have any doubt as to the applicability of such technology check out this video:

Now THAT is wetware, but it is only a first step.

Here is an article about the volunteer in the above video. Wired 2005 [linky - Mind Control]

Nagle, 25, is the first patient in a controversial clinical trial that seeks to prove brain-computer interfaces can return function to people paralyzed by injury or disease.

Convergence

We have convergence happening here as well. DARPA has initiated an effort to create breakthrough prosthetic limbs [linky]. Limbs that are radically better, have actual touch and feel and human reflexes. The example I've heard it explained like is Luke Skywalker's replacement hand at the end of Empire Strikes Back.

We are on the verge of true Cyborg technologies here. And at the speed at which the discoveries are being made, how fast scientists and engineers were able to improve year over year in the last DARPA challenge [linky - driverless cars], we could be in for quite a rollercoaster.

So we have breakthroughs coming in BCI, breakthroughs in prosthetics and breakthroughs coming in vision and hearing sensors. All of this is converging rapidly. You don't hear much about it, but we are going to wake up in just 5 or 10 years with capabilities far exceeding what we have today.

The Future

In the future will we all be hooked together into a World Wide Mind? In the video below some of the leading futurists talk about what might be in store of us. I don't hear much cautionary discussion coming from them. They speak of the benefits of the World Wide Mind, what about the drawbacks?

• the obliteration of privacy
• the potential for predators to abuse the technology
• the threat of a computer virus to physically harm people
• electrocution
• dependence on external power and support for your survival
• weather (lightning)
• more...

Yet one more example of accelerating change.

We think things are not changing because we are unable to see them in the context of time. Humans live in the present. If we were to back up to 1990 and view the current state of this field of research it would look incredible. And yet here, with us being so close to it all, we don't see it, we don't talk about it, we accept it as the norm.

It is not the norm. It is revolutionary.

The crippled will walk and the blind will see.

References:

Wikipedia:
Brain Implants - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_implant

Seeing what a cat sees:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/6/20/111815/063

bionic eye
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6368089.stm
http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2007/01/second_sight_me.html

Retina implant
http://www.howstuffworks.com/framed.htm?parent=bionic-eye.htm&url=http://www.optobionics.com/home.asp

Department of Biomedical Engineering at USC is working on a variety of different projects including retina implants, not quite true wetware  but related.[linky]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savant_Syndrome

This is spooky and amazing.  Daniel can reel  off the first 22,000 digits of pi without an error...5 hours of recitation of pi...