The Future. It is happening in a building next door...

Creepy Blue Bulding

There's a building across the street from where I work, a blue building sometimes harassed by protestors, because that blue building is where the University of Washington conducts its animal testing.

A team at the UW consisting of both medical and electical engineering researchers has now created a contact lens with integrated circuits. The're working on minimizing it to provide a complete heads-up display capability that is wearable, receives data over a PAN (personal area network), and is powered by photovoltaic arrays around the perimeter of the lens.

I wonder if we couldn't put a decent-resolution camera on there too, to capture everything the wearer sees at will. On the one hand, this would make for some nice occassions: never lose photos of a birthday party, keep track of what you actually bought (and looked at) at a grocery store-- you might even be able to sell that information to store layout optimizers. But it would also have other, odder implications. Privacy would plummet further. Every time you drove like a jerk, a dozen people would have your license plate number on record. The essential anonymity of driving-- you're just a license plate number most people can't look up-- would be gone.

You could put other things in there too. What if the camera looked inward? A lot of common disease manifest in vision troubles: glaucoma, diabetes, high blood pressure would all have early-warning systems associated with them.

It's ten years out before these systems do more than just blink lights into eyes. But they're already testing live systems today. Science fiction has just been delivered.

The juciest, spiciest, raciest newspaper comic strip I have ever had the pleasure to read...

When you think of controversial comic strips, 9 Chickweed Lane does not immediately come to mind. And yet, for the past couple of weeks the strip has been, um, adults only. If not in art, at the very least in content. For one thing, Edda and Amos have suddenly discovered they can't keep their hands off each other, and then artist Brooke McEldowney used an entire day to draw a two-panel sex scene between Francis and Diane Edda and Amos that appeared in newspapers all across the country:

( Hot, Sweet, Touching Sex Scene! )

Yes, please. More of that. No, really, I'm not being sarcastic.

[I seem to have misread the previous day's panel.]

Attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture!

This morning, while stuck in traffic (there was an accident in the Battery Street Tunnel, which makes half our freeway system shut down) I was listening to Stephanie Miller show when she had this exchange with one of her two co-hosts, Chris Lavoie. They had somehow gotten onto the subject of her old show, a sex talk show, and whether or not Stephanie owned a vibrator. Chris said, "I bet you own a rabbit."

"No, I have... it has this thing that sticks out, and springs and..."

"You have a steampunk vibrator! It has rivets on it!"

"I do not!"

A couple of months ago I mentioned that I'd heard Stephanie and Chris talk about what the safeword was in Bill O'Reilly and Geraldo Rivera's sex dungeon, and was amused that they didn't bother to define safeword. Chris didn't go on to tell us what steampunk meant, either.

For a show that defines itself as "low lefty humor made up of fart jokes and the mocking of Sean Hannity," they certainly assume their audience knows a lot more than, say, Rush Limbaugh's.

And a happy birthday...

And a very happy birthday to Kouryou-chan, who turned nine today. We took her out to her restaurant of choice, gave her too much chocolate cake, and the three presents we got her were all guaranteed hits-- one of her favorite books, her newest favorite game, and more lip gloss and makeup than you can shake a dead cat at. She was very squeally throughout the whole evening, and will be hard to convince to go to sleep.

Unfortunately, her chosen activity for the night, bowling, was overbooked, so they gave us a free game if we showed up tomorrow before six. We'll do that.

Another happy birthday to beloved Shemayazi, who's always been one of the best damn things that could possibly happen to a man. May you have many happy days ahead.