From New Scientist Technology, your ACME Inc. update

Human cannonballs

The old circus trick of firing a person from a cannon is being considered by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a way to get special forces, police officers and fire fighters onto the roofs of tall buildings in a hurry.

A ramp with side rails would be placed on the ground near the target building at an angle of about 80°. A (very brave) person would then sit in a chair, like a pilot’s ejection seat, attached to the ramp.

Compressed air from a cylinder underneath would be rapidly released to shoot the chair up the ramp's guide rails. At the top the chair would come to an instant halt, leaving the person to fly up and over the edge of the roof, to hopefully land safely on top of the building.

Of course, the trick is to get the trajectory just right. But the DARPA patent suggests a computer could automatically devise the correct angle and speed of ascent. It also claims that a 4-metre-tall launcher could put a man on the top of a 5 storey building in less than 2 seconds. I think I'll take the stairs.

Read the full patent here.

Source: http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn9170-invention-human-cannonballs.html

while miles below her curlews call from strangely stunted trees

1. Don't throw bombs at your ex. If throwing bombs at your ex, don't smoke. And if you have thrown a bomb at your ex while smoking and set yourself on fire, don't claim you were trying to blow up a beaver dam instead.
   
   
2. Come, let us listen to the Talking Bible Dolls.
   
   
3. World! Carrot! MUSEUM!

Also my lunar lander usually crashed

boutell went to a vintage computing shindig of some kind and met David H. Ahl. Ahl had a magazine called Creative Computing which I started reading in junior high school in 1977. That's where I learned that eventually all the computers in the world would be hyperlinked (via Ted Nelson), that anyone could program a computer, and that computers were a hell of a lot of FUN.

I took the computer class in junior high, which meant that I was left in the computer room with a couple of other nerds and we messed around. If we wrote a program that did something, we got A's. Otherwise we got B's and were ignored.

We used a teletype hooked up by acoustic coupler to the school district's PDP-10 minicomputer. There were very few things you could do on this system, which included: writing BASIC programs; playing Lunar Lander; playing chess; and playing Super Star Trek.

The last of these was an obsession. I wasted miles of the district's newsprint chasing Klingons around. I wasn't a fan of the TV show, so my friends had to explain to me what it all meant at first, but after that.. to the stars! Star Trek was on the system, which was fortunate because the paper tape roll for it was about three inches across and we were all scared to unfasten it and run it through the reader. We saved our own programs on the punched paper tape too.

Later on my friend Dan Coble got a Radio Shack home computer, the original one. For $500 he had a box that hooked up to his TV, had 4k of memory, and saved to cassette instead of paper tape. And from then the explosion happened.

Ahl's magazine and books were a huge influence on me, mostly because I got the DIY bug and was comfortable with computers very early, before PCs. Creative Computing had ads for the kit computers like the Altair, and programs in basic, and news about the exciting world of older nerds who were doing cool stuff. And it was the games that got me hooked both on the computer experience and on programming. So I was delighted to see that to this day there is a port of Super Star Trek available so that I can chase Klingons around on my 1.67 GHz PowerPC laptop instead of the school district's minicomputer and teletype.

Things I don't understand: where's my mailbox?

Neither the USPS nor anyone else can locate my nearest mail collection box.

How can this be hard? There are official USPS mail drop off boxes in fixed locations. They rarely move. They know where these are because they pick up from them every day. The location of the nearest one should not be lore handed down from generation to generation, it should be a searchable database.

The USPS has all its post offices in a locator, but not the boxes. Google Local has all the private companies from the phone listings that do mail stuff, but not the boxes. But everyone needs to know where the mail boxes are, not least businesses in the area. Every place I've worked there has been some mail every day that someone drops off in a mail box on the way home.

I am confused.

Interesting news from the phrenology ward

Today in a psychotherapy session I was discussing my problems with relationships, and more specifically my lack of intimate relationships. The working theory is that my own emotional life is too intense to communicate to others and that I shut them out in ways I'm not consciously able to control, mostly nonverbal.

This is particularly true if I have an attraction to someone, because my feeling of attraction is tightly coupled with unacceptably strong fear, shame, and self-hatred so that I become exceptionally false and not "present".

Okay, interesting theory. But what's the mechanism here? One theory is that the problem lies in the 10th cranial nerve. This is the vagus nerve, which goes to both the gut and the lungs from the brain. The "polyvagal theory" holds that separate branches of the vagus nerve, when stimulated, produce strong and opposed feelings: either you feel very safe, or not at all safe.

This has implications for a number of problems, including some autistic spectrum disorders, PTSD, panic attacks, and social adjustment problems. If the two systems become, as my therapist puts it, "overcoupled", then it can be impossible to make a serious connection with someone without being overwhelmed by unpleasant emotions. The result is a kind of neural shutdown, which makes people like me seem distant or standoffish when we're feeling exactly the opposite.

Stephen Polger, the originator of the polyvagal theory, has had some promising results at the University of Illinois treating autism with sound. There are also some suggestions and tips for dealing with these problems in this interview with Polger, which is intended for a lay audience. The other information I've found about this so far has been much more technical.

In my own case, since I am not autistic, PTSD, or suffering from panic attacks, the goal is to get the neural function more normal through a combination of neurofeedback, EMDR, somatic therapy, and medication. It's kind of a science project though, since some of these ideas are very new and raw and will undoubtedly be further refined later.

Plate O' Voles

Today I was looking up information on the web about this vagus nerve stuff and the Polyvagal theory and kept running across information about Prairie Voles and monogamy. This was worth a good laugh partly because it's a lot of fun to say "monogamous prairie vole". Apparently the research into the psychobiology of monogamy is often done with these critters because there are monogamous and non-monogamous variants of them with different biology.

So tonight my mother went to the UCI Neurology of Learning and Memory class and the speaker talked about prairie voles, monogamy, the branching of the vagus nerve, and polyvagal theory.

I have vole synchronicity. Who wants some of this lovely plate o' shrimp voles?

Gas Station Sign (generated)

Gas Station Sign (generated), originally uploaded by conradh.

We have been weighed and found wanting.