A review of the new Mattel “Mind Flex” toy. Sensors read your brainwaves and adjust a fan that lifts or lowers a foam ball. It’s matching activity to some basic brainwave patterns, so it’s not well beyond biofeedback in the 1970s. But still, the idea’s got an iressistible attraction to it.
see also www.mindflexgames.com
According to Francis Heylighen:
“There is an interesting new method to measure how happy or sad people feel by analysing the “feeling” words that they use in their texts (blogs, song texts, presidential addresses, …).
Common words are given a “valence”, i.e. an average value on a scale ranging from most happy (e.g. “love”, “hope”, “proud”, “hug”…) to least happy (e.g. “death”, “lonely”, “rape”, “afraid”, …). The average valence of a text is calculated as an average (weighted by frequency) of the valence of the words it contains.
By analysing millions of blogs it is possible to measure the average valence on any given day, or in specific groups, like countries, age groups, or genders. These valences can fluctuate quite a bit, being high on days like Christmas or the Obama election, and low on days like anniversaries of 9/11 or the death of Michael Jackson. They also tend to be lower for teenagers and pensioners, and higher in middle age.”
This is one is notable for the mobile nature of the group interplay. Feels more organic – I guess organisms are mobile, nervous systems are constantly circulating.
DOD test of mesh networking of RFID tags. Kind of Phildickian – hundreds of little boxes traveling together and staying in touch with each other and their leader – kind of hive-like.
http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/view/5087
Pachube is a great site for hands-on work on the embedding of intelligence in the world.
neurolobsterObama defense budget – end of wars between states – only intra-national insurgency – war on ourselves – a prediction of the neurosphere.
A world where the Neurosphere is instantiated via a combination of RFID and nanotechnology. Some quotes:
“Orphids are to bar codes as velociraptors were to trilobites.
Orphids will cover the Earth’s surface, yes, but only down to one or two orphids per square millimeter…You’ll see a few million of them on your skin, and maybe ten sexteillion orphids on Earth’s whole surface. From then on, they only reproduce enough to maintain that same density.
Orphids use quantum computing; they propel themselves with electrostatic fields; they understand natural language; and they’re networked via quantum entanglement.
Jeez, you’re picking up my subvocal mutters. This orphidnet link is like telepathy almost.
With orphids blanketing the world, it was like your eyes were everywhere.
The orphids are the interface. Nobody needs hardware anymore. We’re putting people first and building Gaia’s minds.”
At the end of the book, the next phase:
“Not only would an unfurled eighth dimension have provided endless memory for all, it would have brought about telepathy for every object in the world.”
That last quote describes the premise for Rucker’s next book, Hylozoic. I am halfway through it and it’s more about alien visitors who also come from hylozoic worlds, rather than speculation about how hylozoism might look in our world.