Trust the Ferret, the Ferret is Wise

This Wired article is about very cool stuff. Methods of augmenting human senses through things like feedback belts and tongue sensors and so on. I think that sort of stuff's awesome. They talk about how the brain re-maps once it has a chance to get used to the new sense, and how it can make things noticeable humans usually can't notice. It's cybernetics without all the brain implantation and stuff. Direction senses, orientation, even "sight" through the tongue sensor. That's so awesome. And I've noticed the same thing with well-designed games and stuff, once you get used to the controls and the interface, you're not pushing buttons or moving the controller, you're making things happen in the game world. That could lead to a whole discussion about identity, since you don't say "Aww, my character almost died!" you say "Man! That dragon almost got me!" But I'm not going into that one right now.

Maybe I'm just a tremendous nerd, but the idea of using technology to add on to our senses and expand the way we can see the world is tremendously awesome to me. I'd love to have smartgoggles or something that would let me identify things and then find more information about them instantly. Imagine something that let you look at products on the shelves and see how healthy they are, or color them by worker treatment, environmental costs, whatever that went into them. Or be able to "smell" various chemicals, or...pretty much anything. Not all of it's possible, or easy, but the potential there, that's so awesome. Or on a more mundane side, look at cell phones, and the growing ability to talk to a pretty good chunk of anybody, a pretty good chunk of anywhere.

I love living in the future. Wish it'd hurry up and get here.

Remember in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, how Judge Doom wanted to buy the trolleys and shut them down to build freeways and make people buy cars?

That's actually somewhat true, except with GM doing the buying, not a toon judge. Well, here, let me quote about National City Lines: "Between 1936 and 1950, National City Lines (NCL), a holding company sponsored and funded by General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California and Phillips Petroleum, bought out more than 100 electric surface-traction (streetcar) systems in 45 cities (including New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, and Los Angeles). Those systems were ultimately dismantled and replaced with GM buses."

Hardly the only force that brought about the end of the streetcar system, but definitely one of the major ones, I'd suspect.

The Disappearance of Trams
GM Streetcar conspiracy
The Straight Dope

Oh, and did you know that "General Smedley Butler testified before a Congressional committee that a group of men had attempted to recruit him to serve as the leader of a plot and to assume and wield power once the coup was successful." The "group of men" was a bunch of wealthy industrialists. But somehow, the story never became a big deal (wealthy interests, most newspapers were owned by a small group then, etc) and many of the references were deleted from the report, a full version has yet to come out. The Sentate report confirmed that "In the last few weeks of the committee's official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist government in this country." But nothing ever came of that, either. The Straight Dope has some more.

There are other colors besides white, black, silver, and beige. It's possible to make things these colors. Please use some of these colors on things such as computers and other bits of technology once in a while. Thank you.

This summer, as I've said, I plan to go a-wandering a bit. And I would like to document this visually as well as with words. And the best way to do that in this modern age of marvelous magic is with a digital camera. However, I'm not full of money to splurge on such a thing. But buying something cheap and crappy rather than something good and durable is a recipe for bad things. So, I turn to you, the LJ-having public that I actually know, what's a good digital camera that's not uber-expensive? Good quality pictures and good storage are nice, though obviously I can buy a new flash card, and will probably have access to the Internet so I can store the pictures somewhere like Flickr. And where's a good place to buy one?