Science Made Cool

Just Another Cyborg Day

Throughout the month of September, Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon has been posting cyborg-themed articles to honor the 50^th anniversary of the first use of the term. I’m reading them with a fair bit of interest: ever since I got my own machine part, I’ve been asking people what they think about the future of cybernetics. One thing I’ve learned – most people think cyborg parts will make you a better ass-kicking machine.

I don’t buy it. I’ve talked to folks who think that someday people will voluntarily chop off their legs to replace them with better, stronger, computer-driven mechanical appendages. None of them can really answer my question: Why should they? Yes, some people do things just ‘because it's cool.’ But if they really want to run 70 miles per hour, they could forgo the surgery and just buy a motorcycle.

I’ve also talked to people – let’s call them cyborg purists – who think that if there’s no feedback loop, it’s not a cyborg. To these people devices like my insulin pump, no matter how high tech, aren’t real cyborg parts because they can’t sense changes in their environment and respond appropriately. But a lot of prosthetics don’t need active feedback systems – some of the newest artificial legs work by passively storing and rereleasing elastic energy at each step. And machines can improve: last year I “upgraded” my pump system by adding a continuous glucose monitor (CGM). The two machines don’t talk to each other – they’re not even made by the same company, but the CGM gives me a constant stream of blood sugar readings, and I can use the data to make more informed decisions about what my insulin pump is doing. In short, it’s a feedback system, which I guess makes me even more cyborgy now. But it still requires a lot of attention.

“Yeah, sure” you say. “How much work could that possibly be?” Let me show you, as I go through

ONE CYBORG DAY

MIDNIGHT: I fold the last pile of laundry and (finally) get into bed. I plug in my CGM receiver to recharge overnight – it reads 135 mg/dl: a little higher than normal for a non-diabetic, but still in my target range. It’s safe to sleep.

4:30 AM: My turn to get up in the middle of the night to walk the puppy. I check the CGM before I stagger downstairs – it’s reading 132 and the trend line is flat, which means I’ve been pretty stable while sleeping. That’s good news: one bad dream can send my blood sugar raging toward maple syrup territory.

Free Museums this Saturday

This year, Museum Day is September 25th. Smithsonian magazine has convinced museums around the country to open their doors for free to people with a Museum Day ticket in hand. A Museum Day ticket is good for two admissions, so grab your favorite companion, fill in the online request form, and plan a Saturday adventure! 

(Smithsonian museums are, of course, always free. This is your chance to explore places like the Museum of Natural History at Harvard, the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, or the Pacific Aviation Museum in Hawaii.)

Birds of a Feather

Hive minds are a staple of science fiction, going back to Olaf Stapledon's Martians, if not earlier. In mid-century they became a powerful metaphor for the way oppressive societies like Communism and Fascism subsume an individual's identity. Unfortunately, this led to a tendency to map hive minds onto real-world totalitarian systems, with a charismatic leader at the top and ruthless enforcers oppressing the masses. T.H. White did this wonderfully in The Sword in the Stone, when Merlyn magically sends the young Arthur to visit an ant colony in order to learn firsthand what it's like to be the victim of an oppressive system.

But that ignores what makes hive minds so interesting. In reality, the "mind" of an ant colony or a flock of birds doesn't reside in the Queen, or some Head Bird. Instead it's an emergent property of the group, just as human intelligence is an emergent property of our billions of neurons. There's no "seat of intelligence" in our brain (Descartes thought it might be the pineal gland). A Phineas Gage can get big holes blown through his head and remain functional because intelligence is distributed across the entire brain.

A pair of researchers in Hungary have analyzed bird flocking behavior, using tools for modeling the motion of particles. They found that the flock as an entity can switch from flying to sitting on the ground much more quickly than simply a random group of birds would as individuals. In other words, the flock decides to land as a unit, even though the birds which make up the flock are just following some fairly simple behavioral rules about maintaining safe distance from each other, staying in the flock, and so on.

This has its parallel in human societies, too -- a modern market economy is an "emergent property" of billions of individuals pursuing fairly simple, personal goals. There's no master mind controlling the Invisible Hand, yet a market economy is much more efficient than directed ones. Far from being a metaphor for totalitarianism, a hive mind can show the power of individual freedom.

Phineas Gage

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of a singular event: the day a tamping iron was driven through the head of railroad foreman Phineas Gage during work on a railroad cut in Vermont. Accidents with explosives and flying chunks of metal were all too common in the early days of railroad building, but what makes Gage's case so impressive is that he survived and lived another twelve years as an active, self-supporting man.

Just to be clear, this wasn't some miraculous chance where the iron rod somehow passed through his head without doing any damage. It did plenty of damage. Gage lost an eye and the entire left frontal lobe of his brain. It just didn't kill him. The Wikipedia article is quite informative and debunks some of the more far-out accounts.

On my Other 'Blog, I just posted a piece about my first published story, "A Diagram of Rapture." In part of that little essay I point out that in a very real sense, we are our brains. Unless you believe in an immaterial soul which somehow exists apart from the body, your true identity is the result of the workings of your brain.

But how, then, to account for a case like Phineas Gage? How could he remain himself despite getting half his brain blown out? There are accounts of his behavior changing after the incident, but even today a neurologist would be hard-pressed to decide which changes were due to brain damage, and which were due to the shock of surviving a gruesome near-fatal accident. Maybe Phineas got more licentious and profane afterwards because he decided he wanted to enjoy life while he had it.

About the only thing a materialist like myself can say is that the brain is really, really complex, we still don't know much about how it works, and evidently it can withstand a lot of damage and keep working.

Anyway, be careful with explosives tomorrow.

More Bad Ideas

We've taken a couple of weeks off from 'blogging, but we're back now and Science once again will be made Cool.

. . . or not. Case in point: this Really Bad Idea from Canada. To keep drivers from speeding through a school zone, the West Vancouver school district is creating an optical illusion painted onto the road surface. When viewed from just the right angle, it looks like a girl in the road chasing a ball -- just ahead of your car! Swerve, dammit! Hit the brakes! Aiee!

The road illusion is an example of anapomorphic art, in which an image is painted to be viewed from an unusual direction, rather than the standard face-on image. It's a natural for roads and traffic directions, because of course on a road one can fairly easily predict where the viewer will be. I'm a little surprised that the technique hasn't been applied to advertising more commonly.

Anyway, drivers in West Vancouver can now barrel on in confidence. That little kid in front of your car is almost certainly just an illusion. Floor it!