In her TED Women talk from December 2010, anthropologist Amber Case explores the social and personal interfaces we’re building out of technology, arguing that as a result of this activity we’ve become cyborgs. Thanks to smartphones and tablets and GPS systems, she argues, we’re now so fully augmented that we’ve become composites of biology and machine. “It’s not that machines are taking over,” Case concludes. “It’s that they’re helping us to be more human. They’re helping us to connect with each other.” It’s a compelling point of view, one that many are voicing these days.

But when I watch implant hacker Lepht Anonym talk, I’m not so sure that iPhone or Kindle a cyborg makes. Anonym seems a broken person, but beautifully; her interest in implanted sensory augments carries her into troubling, painful, dangerous territory. These transformations aren’t undertaken with a credit card, and they’re much harder to reverse than a two-year contract.

Lepht Anonym reminds us that the concept of the cyborg emerged in thinking about the extraordinarily hostile environment of space; it was extended and elaborated in political and cultural dimensions by people who were not interested in augmenting the human person in ways that make it easier to do what we already do, but to transcend quotidian constraints. As blogger Tim Maly discovered in his project 50 posts about cyborgs, which he undertook to celebrate and explore the term on the fiftieth anniversary of its coinage, the cyborg condition was understood to be one of emancipation, but profound alienation as well. In contrast to the medical, electrochemical, and pharmaceutical enhancements first envisioned for cyborgs, the effects of our consumer appurtenances thus far remain superficial and reversible—stranded on an island without an iPhone, your problems are no different from those faced by Robinson Crusoe. If our helplessness in such an environment is due to our being cyborgs, than we humans have been cyborgs for a very long time.

Lepht Anonym’s cyborg erotics harken back to Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, in which a political impatience with the biological conditions of human life urged a radical break with biological limits and the cultural baggage that comes with them. “The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden,” Haraway writes; “it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.” Where the retail cyborgs that Amber Case describes seem to be seeking that Edenic reunion, a numbing togetherness of family and community, made possible by tools that promise to make us “more human.” Troubling and total, Lepht Anonym’s cybernetic commitments remind us that we co-opted pseudocyborgs are domesticated version of the true cyborg: angry, damaged, and feral.

Original post by Matthew Battles

Gearfuse already knows the work of Vi Hart, whose knack for illustrating tricky math by combining deft and elegant doodling with Internet-video vernacular is winning and effective. In the video above she loosely adapts the conceit at the heart of Flatland, Edward Abott Abott’s Victorian novella-of-ideas about life in two dimensions. In the way it works out the practical and social implications of the 2-D world, Abbott’s book calls to mind the worldbuilding satire of Jonathan Swift, as well as the mathematically playful work of Abott’s contemporary, Lewis Carroll. Vi Hart’s version of the conceit owes a secret debt to The Little Prince; trapped in a tiny infinity, the triangular protagonist faces dilemmas that are more existential than mathematical. Or perhaps the existential and the mathematical simply turn out to be the two edges of an infinite loop merging into one. —via Brainpickings

Original post by Matthew Battles

RC cars were always fun to play with as a kid. Except for those ones that only turned if the car was going in reverse. Well naturally, as time goes on and our technology advances, [...]

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Here is an interesting bit of news. It would seem that Yahoo will soon no longer require a Yahoo account in order for you to use their services. You can instead use either a Google [...]

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Dogs are a manÂ’s best friends. They play with us, provide company, and even save us from time to time. Their poop however, is something that dog owners wish they could get around, or avoid [...]

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The more we know about our surroundings, the safer we feel. When we can tell what the temperature is outside, as well as who is near our thermometer, we can rest easy. Right? ThatÂ’s why [...]

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We like being able to do fancy things with our phones. All the fancy apps and games we get to download just make us giddy. There are a lot of useful apps out there, such [...]

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If you like to talk on your phone in the car, you must have also heard at least one warning from friends or family about the dangers involved. If you donÂ’t have a car phone [...]

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A timely visualization by Information is Beautiful‘s David McCandless and friends, Horoscoped applies word-cloud analysis to daily astrology forecasts. Programmer Thomas Winningham wrote a Python script to scrape 22,000 horoscopes archived by Yahoo’s astrology channel, Shine. To the resulting data dump, McCandless and crew applied the off-the-shelf world-cloud generator Tag Crowd, breaking down both the most-used words in the corpus and the words most frequently used in each sign. Then, with the help of designer Matt Hancock, MCandless made an elegant chart of the whole thing.

Given the peculiar mandate of the horoscope, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the word clouds of the zodiac don’t vary much from sign to sign, with a general reliance on words like “ready,” “feel,” and “better.” Unique words for each sign from the top 50 most commonly-used words, however, do seem to hint at the traditional characteristics of each sign: Capricorn’s favorites are willing, instead; Virgo’s are totally, perfect). Best of all, McCandless built out of the highest-frequency words a brilliant horoscope engineered to apply perfectly well to any sign for any day of the year. It begins as follows: “Ready? Sure? Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot.” I won’t give away the whole thing, though; do click through.

What all this says about astrology is hard to discern. The clusters of each sign’s uniquely-frequent words in McCandless’ analysis do have a certain uncanny charisma. It’s the charisma of apophenia, of course—the attractive illusion of pattern in essentially random clustering things of all kinds—and astrology as a whole is a confabulation built on such powerfully suggestive phenomena. Given the recent brouhaha over the supposedly mistaken structure of the zodiac system in Western astrology (an urban legend that crops up every few years), McCandless’ “Horoscoped” serves as a reminder of the brew of pseudoscience and willful suspension of disbelief that the institution of the daily horoscope—an invention of the modern daily newspaper—depends on.

Of course, we knew that already; as Theodor Adorno observed in the early fifties, a “climate of semi-erudition is the fertile breeding ground for astrology.” But we should be cautious with our disregard; semi-erudition is rife even on the highbrow end of Internet culture. Info visualization is one area in which we risk falling prey to semi-erudition; correlation can look very beautiful. It’s worth pointing out that, unlike the mostly-anonymous authors of daily horoscopes, McCandless does a very thorough job of exposing his data and his inventive, inspired methods to scrutiny.

Original post by Matthew Battles