Hello World

Sex and the single robot

Kim Jong-Hwan, the director of the ITRC-Intelligent Robot Research Centre, has developed a series of artificial chromosomes that, he says, will allow robots to feel lusty, and could eventually lead to them reproducing. He says the software, which will be installed in a robot within the next three months, will give the machines the ability to feel, reason and desire. More...

Jonathan Watts, East Asia correspondent
Wednesday February 2, 2005
The Guardian 

Anatomy Class - human dissection on TV

I've been watching Gunther von Hagens' TV programme Anatomy for Beginners on Channel 4 (on again tonight at 11pm, and the final programme is at 11.30pm tomorrow night Thursday 27th)

It is most extraordinarily moving. Last night they cut away the rib cage to expose the lungs, then artificially inflated them so we could see what happens when we breathe. As I watched, I was acutely conscious of my own breathing and quite amazed when I realised the size of my own lungs. I had no idea of how much space they take up, and the differential when they empty and fill. And when they injected artificial blood into the circulatory system, we watched as this previously pale corpse flooded with red and began to resemble a living body.

It's appalling that our culture prefers this knowledge of our own anatomy to be hidden from us. It is the hunger for exactly this kind of information that makes people hang around traffic accidents trying to see the injuries - they are not behaving obscenely, they just have a normal desire to know about the human body, how it functions, and how it can be damaged. This seems a perfectly healthy curiosity to me.

But apparently our 'scruples' about human anatomy have gone so far that many UK medical students never even get to do a human dissection.  At the programme's website you can read more about this and vote on the issue.

I wish I'd seen Gunther von Hagens' travelling exhibition Bodyworlds when it was in London. It's in the USA at the moment and about to open in Chicago and LA. But as I understand it, the exhibits are static. The wonder of the TV programme is the chance to see dissection in action - it is a real privilege in today's diverse society to be able to view one thing which we do all have in common with each other and with (most, I guess) other organisms.

Thanks to this programme, I have finally begun to understand what it means to inhabit this fragile and beautiful machine. From today, when I take a breath, I will appreciate and respect the wonder of the pumps and valves which move the oxygen through my body and enable me to be alive.

Brain chips could help paralysed

Page 98

Scientists are to implant tiny computer chips in the brains of paralysed patients which could 'read their thoughts'.

US researchers from Cyberkinetics Inc are to be allowed to implant the chips underneath the skulls of patients.

The chips will map the neural activity which occurs when someone thinks about moving a limb.

Scientists will then translate those signals into computer code that could one day be fed into robotic limbs.

BBC News 17 April 2004

Read full story at the BBC news website.

Windows, blinds and shutters

Page 96

Windows are nearly always two-way screens. At home, I step out of the building to look in and I see furniture and books and even more screens – TV, computer, the door of the microwave - [] – all existing beyond my reach as I gaze in.

Looking back on the book now, I see that I have written a great deal about windows and screens, but nothing about blinds and shutters. However, these mechanisms do indeed have a very singular resonance of their own. At the Hotel Del Capri I took this photo of the shutters in my bedroom. It
was on the ground floor of the hotel, just a few metres away from an intersection on Wilshire Boulevard, and I could never forget how close I was sleeping to one of LA's main arteries.

This weekend I received an email about a work of art being made right now in Los Angeles by Zehao Chang. Titled "11:11pm" it is a simple yet very beautiful piece, and although it uses Venetian blinds rather than shutters, it reminds me of the nights I spent in LA listening to the traffic and connecting it to the shimmer of lights behind the slats.

(Image by kind permission of the artist) Watch the movie

Chang writes: As people speed down a quiet street in their cars at night, passing by motels and homes, their moving headlights casts a beautiful display of lights and shadows through partially open venetian blinds. The brief intrusions of the passing strangers into another's living space highlights the inherent ephemerality of bonds and of connections, and in their wake all that remains is memory and afterimages.

12 The lived body

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As we have evolved we have created new prosthetics to reinforce and support the sensorium with spectacles, hearing aids, computer-generated voices and now we have extended that sensorium into virtuality too. We are locating a wider range of inputs, often configured in forms which were previously unknown to us. Or perhaps, only forgotten until now. The configurations of connectedness.

On 24 February 2004 BBC News Online reported that 'Fantasy worlds created by virtual reality have been shown to provide a novel form of relief to patients suffering from intractable pain. Dr Hunter Hoffman, research fellow at the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, has tested his virtual worlds on victims of burns injuries who suffer excruciating pain during their daily dressing changes which conventional drug therapy fails to control.' These worlds are designed 'to immerse the user so deeply in the virtual experience that their attention is distracted away from the pain.' Link to news item.