Coding In Paradise

There's a great post and video on Slate on rocketpacks, you know, those backpacks Buck Rogers would wear to fly around. Evidently a few of them have worked, but it sounds very dangerous and difficult to operate one of these.

Seeing With Sound:

"The vOICe vision technology for the totally blind offers the experience of live camera views through sophisticated image-to-sound renderings. In theory this could lead to synthetic vision with truly visual sensations ("qualia") through crossmodal sensory integration, by exploiting the existing multisensory processing and neural plasticity of the human brain through training and education. The vOICe implements a form of sensory substitution where the goal is to bind visual input to visual qualia with a minimum of training time and effort. The vOICe also acts as a research vehicle for the cognitive sciences to learn more about the dynamics of large-scale adaptive processes, including attention and expectation guided bottom-up and top-down learning processes, and involving cross-modal neuromodulation in the human brain. Neuroscience research has already shown that the visual cortex of even adult blind people can become responsive to sound, and sound-induced illusory flashes can be evoked in most sighted people. The vOICe technology may now build on this with live video from an unobtrusive head-mounted camera encoded in sound. The extent to which cortical plasticity and dynamic rerouting allow for functionally relevant rewiring or unmasking of neural pathways in the human brain is under investigation. Apart from functional relevance, a cross-modal binding for inducing visual sensations through sound (mental imagery and artificial synesthesia) would also be of great psychological importance. The possible role of The vOICe perceptual interface technology in cross-modal neuromodulation and synesthetic effects is being explored and developed under the Open Innovation paradigm together with many R&D partners around the world. Possible future extensions include support for binocular vision, eye-tracking, sonar and augmented cognition as ingredients of a highly modular and preferably non-invasive and unobtrusive brain-computer interface."

Some people reported that they had problems with the Really Simple History ZIP file download; for some reason the latest version of WinZip breaks on this file, even though I used the Cygwin command line ZIP tool to do so. I guess WinZip is taking liberties with the ZIP standard these days....

I've recreated the ZIP file and put it back up with a different ZIP tool, so if you've been having problems downloading RSH it should work now: download Really Simple History