Re: The Metal in my Finger.

So I've been needing to do this post for a while now, but I've been as lazy as I usually am. I suppose I'll start at the beginning.

A while back, 2004 I think, a body modification artist named Shannon Larratt filed a report with the Internets detailing the totally awesome new thing his friends Steve Harworth and Jesse Jarrel figured out how to do. After a period of healing, a tiny, but powerful magnet implanted near the sensitive nerves beneath the skin of a finger provides an entirely new sensation; the ability to feel magnetic fields. Naturally, the transhumanist and body-mod communities went crazy over this new thing. But thanks to the restraint of the artists, only a dozen or so people got the experimental new implant.

A few months later, things started to go bad. The silicone coating used to protect the Neodymium magnets from the body (and vice-versa) breached. Though various factors were involved, the general consensus is that the coating was too thin and often applied unevenly; thus the first experiment in the field was brought to a close. Although I didn't hear about it until recently, it turns out one of those original subjects had their magnet coated in titanium rather than silicone. His magnet is doing just fine.

Anyways; I relayed this story to a friend of mine, Nathan Roseborough, sometime during 2007. He was immediately facinated by the idea. His blog, http://feelingwaves.blogspot.com details the following events in more detail. In short: we did our research, discovered another protective coating material, contracted the manufacture of some new implants, and then dove right in.

In April, 2008, Nate got his first magnet implanted. This first attempt didn't turn out so well, as the healing entry wound pushed the magnet out. The second try happened in May, and was accompanied with a small stitch to heal the wound closed. After a few months of watching to see if he developed any complications, I decided it was time for my own.

In June, Nate and I selected a sterile magnet from the small collection and went to see Kieran, the Piercer at 713Tattoos on Westheimer. Kieran is the same person who installed Nate's magnet, and he has been getting better with each implantation. I'll leave out the gory details, but the process hurt less than I thought it would; stitch included.

I got my first bit of sensation the very next day when was going to warm up some water for a salt bath to help heal the wound. As the microwave clicked on there was a small but intense buzzing feeling in my finger, noticable over the slight throbbing. It really is impossible to describe the sensation as I moved my hand around the microwave to feel the subtle gradations of the field generated by the magnetron and transformer inside.

It's been about two months; and while sensation hasn't improved too much, there are always new things that surprize me. Sometimes while using my laptop, I'll find my hand wandering over the keyboard to explore the little clicks and buzzes coming from inside the device. Power supplies all taste a little different, but the 60Hz flux is nearly as familiar as my own hand.

It's been too long, again.

Almost three months since my last post. You might have just been thinking I'd dropped off the map if you haven't been following any of my other feeds. (Which is unlikely, as the homepage of this blog has a window of shared items from my reading.)

A little update on my status for those who only have contact with me via this blog. Yeah, that's all of Zero people out there, but this is for the sake of continuity and my own sick amusement.

In the last three months: I've received the best grade I've gotten at the end of a semester since they started dividing my school years into semesters, had an eye exam (first one since 2005 I think) and subsequently started wearing contacts (pictures will go up on my Picasa as I get them), searched for, found, and quit a job, spent a month slacking off and trying to minimize my financial output, finally saw the Avatar finale, grown ever more obsessed with RSS in all it's succulent goodness, found not one but three writers to obsess over, got my finger jabbed and a magnet installed (My first functional body mod, good stuff. I'll write more about it later), re-read Transmetropolitan twice and become the fan of no less than three separate mad scientists. More on those after some more background.

At the moment, I'm sitting in a rather comfortable, if frustratingly non-massaging, recliner at my Mom's house. My Mother, as well as all the other family members that inhabit/regularly visit the 80 acre midland Texas compound that is the Cox family land, is off on vacation in California. As happened last year, I have been tasked with house-sitting, plant-watering, and dog-taking-care-of. This is all well and good, except for a few limitations that the property has. One; it's about as far as you can go from civilization without leaving the continental USA. Two; the nearest city, Buffalo, is roughly equidistant from both Dallas and Houston. Meaning I am quite litterally in the middle of nowhere. Three; The internet connection here is a marvel of the modern age. Satellite internet. I have no open incoming ports, a bandwidth that fluctuates between a quarter of a DSL link and a 4400 baud modem, and annoyingly frequent service outages due to passing clouds. And Four; I have five animals and about two solid acres of plants to tend to.

So internet video is mostly out, torrents don't run at all unless I shut down my IM client to free up a few decabits of bandwidth, and most of my time is spent making sure nothing around me dies. Needless to say, I've had a lot of time to think and a poor internet connection keeping me from keeping up with my feeds. Instead, I've wandered through some old backlogs, some low-bandwidth browsing of websites and forums, and I've started to make some connections re: mad scientists.

They're back in vogue, for some reason. Ever since these three doctors made their way into my awareness, my perception of things has taken a half-twist, looping back around on itself like some auto-cannibalistic möbius strip.

I discovered Doctor Horrible and his Sing-Along blog via my feeds a few weeks ago; the latest brainchild of scifi film master, Joss Whedon. Starring Niel Patrick Harris, this low-budget online-only musical superhero comedy was found to be a quite amusing, if traditional, boy-meets-girl story. Unfortunately, due to the poor internet connection here, I was not able to see the third section before it vanished into torrentable memory (I'll go back and see it when I get home). I've also recently discovered Twitscoop, a tag cloud automatically generated from the latest twitter posts. While following the cloud erupting from Dr. Horrible's premier, I noticed another doctor.

Dr. Steel, by contrast, is a doctor on a mission. No three-episode internet miniseries here, this doctor is an insane post-steampunk musician bent on ruling the world with an army of toy soldiers. When I saw what he intends to do with the world once he rules it, I immediately enlisted in his army and torrented his discography to start absorbing his message. A track on his 2002 album, People of Earth, caught my eye. "The Singularity". My favorite subject. I started digging around through his forums, chatting with other toy soldiers for a while, and discovered yet a third doctor.

Doktor Sleepless, it turns out, was created by "Transmetropolitan" writer Warren Ellis. It took a full day, but I managed to torrent a few issues of the comic to absorb them. Warren's writing has only improved since that other comic I'm familiar with, the storyline is both ongoing and excellent, leading me to wonder if the local comic book shop has some sort of subscription service I can use to reserve subsequent issues.

Anyways, at the end of each Doktor Sleepless comic there's a bit of text from the author. Warren's been busy lately, it seems. There's a wiki for the comic, a webcomic he's writing for and it's associated forum, and so on. But something caught my eye. The body mod community in the Doktor Sleepless universe, "Grinders", are represented in the fictional blogosphere by a groupblog at grinding.be... but grinding.be also exists in the real world as a groupblog for transhumanist subjects. I've been following this blog for months... Weird how I'm just now discovering it's origins.

And even weirder, it seems Warren has somehow woven his way closer to me. While writing a weekly column for SuicideGirls, Warren worked alongside and mentioned Zoetica Ebb; who's blog I follow and is also a contributing writer to Coilhouse, an art blog I also follow. Also, that webcomic he writes for, FreakAngels, is also another one I follow...

It's strange how people gravitate towards those of like mind, even without noticing it.

A new update on magnetic implants.

Recently, I added a link to the blog of a friend of mine to my sidebar. Nate at Feeling Waves has finally posted an update on the procedure he received on Saturday.

(Note: This is terribly dangerous and essentially amounts to human experimentation. Nate has done his research and understands that this may result in surgery to remove the implant, or worse. Neither Nate nor I are responsible if you're stupid enough to attempt this yourself.)

The procedure in question is a new kind of implant dreamed up in the body mod community by Jesse Jarrell and Steve Haworth of BME fame. While subdermal implants have gotten fairly popular, they are all basically the same thing as a silicone breast implant. A small object, coated in a biologically compatible substance such as teflon, surgical steel, or silicone is inserted beneath the skin to create a raised shape (see the BME Encyclopedia article for more info). This new implant, however, is derivative of a magnetic implant Sampaa von Cyborg had installed in his arm to hang metallic objects from. That earlier experiment turned out to be a failure when it was realized that the skin pinched between the magnet and the outside object would die.

Jesse and Steve turned that idea completely around. Rather than use the magnet as a glorified message board, why not use it to detect where other magnetic fields are? Thus, the Magnetic Sense Implant (MSI) was invented. They created tiny rare-earth magnets coated in silicone and implanted them in the ends of fingers where the nerve density is high enough to pick up the small vibration due to magnetic fields.

The result? The MSI implant gave it's owners "Magnetic vision", a sixth sense never before experienced by humans. Quinn Norton of Wired Magazine wrote a lengthy article describing her experience receiving her new sensory organ.

Unfortunately, this was destined to be short lived. Due to a defect in design and construction, the tiny magnets had a tendency to break out of their protective silicone sheathes. Most famously, Shannon Larratt's experience with the failing implants spread almost as fast as word of the concept itself.

Recently, when he discovered the articles and began his research, Nate contacted me regarding the idea. We started brainstorming and discovered that silicone, teflon, and steel aren't the only things medical science has cleared for implantation. You can read about the research and more in Feeling Waves' archives.

As for me, I'm planning on getting one of these myself. Just as soon as Nate's human guinea-pig trick confirms that there isn't too much risk.

UPDATE:
Nate has added some pictures to the last few posts on his blog; be sure to check it out again if they weren't there before!

First batch of news.

Techdirt reports that another child incapable of taking criticism nation has banned youtube for a single offensive video. The poster who uploaded the video has taken it down. As techdirt says, this sort of reaction only draws more attention to the offense in question. The proper way of censoring an idea is not to draw more attention to it.

Slashdot has a post showing patent application for a Hybrid Machine/Human Computing Arrangement. Basically, this is crowdsourcing for computers. First step towards a Manna system. I for one, do not welcome our robot-people overlords.

Slashdot is also linking an article showing how completely useless the change to daylight savings is. While the California energy department still affirms that setting our clocks back for half a year conserves energy, power companies don't seem to be feeling the difference. (Insert joke about the opposite of progress). Political bashing aside, there is a real problem with how elected officials conflict science.

And finally, Make online has a blog post up detailing Quinn Norton's body hacking talk. Hit it up for a primer on to the current state of functional body modification and some things we should look for over the next year or two. If you can stomach a ~180 MB download, there is a video link posted on BMEZine's Modblog.

Blogs aren't intended to operate in a vaccuum, so post comments and send emails to me with anything you feel like needs to be said.