Aldous Huxley Tells Mike Wallace What Will Destroy Democracy: Overpopulation, Drugs & Insidious Technology (1958)

in Politics, Technology, Television | April 4th, 2018

Over­pop­u­la­tion, manip­u­la­tive pol­i­tics, imbal­ances of soci­etal pow­er, addic­tive drugs, even more addic­tive tech­nolo­gies: these and oth­er devel­op­ments have pushed not just democ­ra­cy but civ­i­liza­tion itself to the brink. Or at least author Aldous Hux­ley saw it that way, and he told Amer­i­ca so when he appeared on The Mike Wal­lace Inter­view in 1958. (You can also read a tran­script here.) “There are a num­ber of imper­son­al forces which are push­ing in the direc­tion of less and less free­dom,” he told the new­ly famous news anchor, “and I also think that there are a num­ber of tech­no­log­i­cal devices which any­body who wish­es to use can use to accel­er­ate this process of going away from free­dom, of impos­ing con­trol.”

Hux­ley’s best-known nov­el Brave New World has remained rel­e­vant since its first pub­li­ca­tion in 1932. He appeared on Wal­lace’s show to pro­mote Brave New World Revis­it­ed (first pub­lished as Ene­mies of Free­dom), a col­lec­tion of essays on how much more rapid­ly than expect­ed the real world had come to resem­ble the dystopia he’d imag­ined a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry ear­li­er.

Some of the rea­sons behind his grim pre­dic­tions now seem over­stat­ed — he points out that “in the under­de­vel­oped coun­tries actu­al­ly the stan­dard of liv­ing is at present falling,” though the reverse has now been true for quite some time — but oth­ers, from the van­tage of the 21st cen­tu­ry, sound almost too mild.

“We must­n’t be caught by sur­prise by our own advanc­ing tech­nol­o­gy,” Hux­ley says in that time before smart­phones, before the inter­net, before per­son­al com­put­ers, before even cable tele­vi­sion. We also must­n’t be caught by sur­prise by those who seek indef­i­nite pow­er over us: to do that requires “con­sent of the ruled,” some­thing acquirable by addic­tive sub­stances — both phar­ma­co­log­i­cal and tech­no­log­i­cal — as well as “new tech­niques of pro­pa­gan­da.” All of this has the effect of “bypass­ing the sort of ratio­nal side of man and appeal­ing to his sub­con­scious and his deep­er emo­tions, and his phys­i­ol­o­gy even, and so, mak­ing him actu­al­ly love his slav­ery.”

Wal­lace’s ques­tions bring Hux­ley to a ques­tion of his own: “What does a democ­ra­cy depend on? A democ­ra­cy depends on the indi­vid­ual vot­er mak­ing an intel­li­gent and ratio­nal choice for what he regards as his enlight­ened self-inter­est, in any giv­en cir­cum­stance.” But democ­ra­cy-debil­i­tat­ing com­mer­cial and polit­i­cal pro­pa­gan­da appeals “direct­ly to these uncon­scious forces below the sur­faces so that you are, in a way, mak­ing non­sense of the whole demo­c­ra­t­ic pro­ce­dure, which is based on con­scious choice on ratio­nal ground.” Hence the impor­tance of teach­ing peo­ple “to be on their guard against the sort of ver­bal boo­by traps into which they are always being led.” The skill has arguably only grown in impor­tance since, as has his final thought in the broad­cast: “I still believe in democ­ra­cy, if we can make the best of the cre­ative activ­i­ties of the peo­ple on top plus those of the peo­ple on the bot­tom, so much the bet­ter.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aldous Hux­ley Reads Dra­ma­tized Ver­sion of Brave New World

Hux­ley to Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

An Ani­mat­ed Aldous Hux­ley Iden­ti­fies the Dystopi­an Threats to Our Free­dom (1958)

Aldous Hux­ley Pre­dicts in 1950 What the World Will Look Like in the Year 2000

Aldous Hux­ley, Psy­che­delics Enthu­si­ast, Lec­tures About “the Vision­ary Expe­ri­ence” at MIT (1962)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hidden Ancient Greek Medical Text Read for the First Time in a Thousand Years — with a Particle Accelerator

in Books, History, Physics, Stanford, Technology | April 3rd, 2018

Image by Far­rin Abbott/SLAC, via Flickr Com­mons

Long before human­i­ty had paper to write on, we had papyrus. Made of the pith of the wet­land plant Cype­r­us papyrus and first used in ancient Egypt, it made for quite a step up in terms of con­ve­nience from, say, the stone tablet. And not only could you write on it, you could rewrite on it. In that sense it was less the paper of its day than the first-gen­er­a­tion video tape: giv­en the expense of the stuff, it often made sense to erase the con­tent already writ­ten on a piece of papyrus in order to record some­thing more time­ly. But you could­n’t com­plete­ly oblit­er­ate the pre­vi­ous lay­ers of text, a fact that has long held out promise to schol­ars of ancient his­to­ry look­ing to expand their field of pri­ma­ry sources.

The decid­ed­ly non-ancient solu­tion: par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tors. Researchers at the Stan­ford Syn­chro­tron Radi­a­tion Light­source (SSRL) recent­ly used one to find the hid­den text in what’s now called the Syr­i­ac Galen Palimpsest. It con­tains, some­where deep in its pages, “On the Mix­tures and Pow­ers of Sim­ple Drugs,” an “impor­tant phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal text that would help edu­cate fel­low Greek-Roman doc­tors,” writes Aman­da Sol­l­i­day at the SLAC Nation­al Accel­er­a­tor Lab­o­ra­to­ry.

Orig­i­nal­ly com­posed by Galen of Perg­a­mon, “an influ­en­tial physi­cian and a philoso­pher of ear­ly West­ern med­i­cine,” the work made its way into the 6th-cen­tu­ry Islam­ic world through a trans­la­tion into a lan­guage between Greek and Ara­bic called Syr­i­ac.

Image by Far­rin Abbott/SLAC, via Flickr Com­mons

Alas, “despite the physician’s fame, the most com­plete sur­viv­ing ver­sion of the trans­lat­ed man­u­script was erased and writ­ten over with hymns in the 11th cen­tu­ry – a com­mon prac­tice at the time.” Palimpsest, the word coined to describe such texts writ­ten, erased, and writ­ten over on pre-paper mate­ri­als like papyrus and parch­ment, has long since had a place in the lex­i­con as a metaphor for any­thing long-his­to­ried, mul­ti-lay­ered, and ful­ly under­stand­able only with effort. The Stan­ford team’s effort involved a tech­nique called X‑ray flu­o­res­cence (XRF), whose rays “knock out elec­trons close to the nuclei of met­al atoms, and these holes are filled with out­er elec­trons result­ing in char­ac­ter­is­tic X‑ray flu­o­res­cence that can be picked up by a sen­si­tive detec­tor.”

Those rays “pen­e­trate through lay­ers of text and cal­ci­um, and the hid­den Galen text and the new­er reli­gious text flu­o­resce in slight­ly dif­fer­ent ways because their inks con­tain dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of met­als such as iron, zinc, mer­cury and cop­per.” Each of the leather-bound book’s 26 pages takes ten hours to scan, and the enor­mous amounts of new data col­lect­ed will pre­sum­ably occu­py a vari­ety of experts on the ancient world — on the Greek and Islam­ic civ­i­liza­tions, on their lan­guages, on their med­i­cine — for much longer there­after. But you do have to won­der: what kind of unimag­in­ably advanced tech­nol­o­gy will our descen­dants a mil­len­ni­um and a half years from now be using to read all of the stuff we thought we’d erased?

via SLAC

Relat­ed Con­tent:

2,000-Year-Old Man­u­script of the Ten Com­mand­ments Gets Dig­i­tized: See/Download “Nash Papyrus” in High Res­o­lu­tion

The Turin Erot­ic Papyrus: The Old­est Known Depic­tion of Human Sex­u­al­i­ty (Cir­ca 1150 B.C.E.)

Try the Old­est Known Recipe For Tooth­paste: From Ancient Egypt, Cir­ca the 4th Cen­tu­ry BC

Learn Ancient Greek in 64 Free Lessons: A Free Course from Bran­deis & Har­vard

Intro­duc­tion to Ancient Greek His­to­ry: A Free Online Course from Yale

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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A Shazam for Nature: A New Free App Helps You Identify Plants, Animals & Other Denizens of the Natural World

in Biology, K-12, Photography, Science, Technology | March 30th, 2018

Do you ever long for those not-so-long-ago days when you skipped through the world, breath­less with the antic­i­pa­tion of catch­ing Poké­mon on your phone screen?

If so, you might enjoy bag­ging some of the Pokeverse’s real world coun­ter­parts using Seek, iNaturalist’s new pho­to-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion app. It does for the nat­ur­al world what Shaz­am does for music.

Aim your phone’s cam­era at a non­de­script leaf or the grasshop­per-ish-look­ing crea­ture who’s camped on your porch light. With a bit of luck, Seek will pull up the rel­e­vant Wikipedia entry to help the two of you get bet­ter acquaint­ed.

Reg­is­tered users can pin their finds to their per­son­al col­lec­tions, pro­vid­ed the app’s recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy pro­duces a match.

(Sev­er­al ear­ly adopters sug­gest it’s still a few house­plants shy of true func­tion­al­i­ty…)

Seek’s pro­tec­tive stance with regard to pri­va­cy set­tings is well suit­ed to junior spec­i­men col­lec­tors, as are the vir­tu­al badges with which it rewards ener­getic upload­ers.

While it doesn’t hang onto user data, Seek is build­ing a pho­to library, com­posed in part of user sub­mis­sions.

(Your cat is ready for her close up, Mr. DeMille…)

(Dit­to your Por­to­bel­lo Mush­room burg­er…)

Down­load Seek for free on iTunes or Google Play.

via Earth­er/My Mod­ern Met

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Watch 50 Hours of Nature Sound­scapes from the BBC: Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Proven to Ease Stress and Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness & Awe

How Walk­ing Fos­ters Cre­ativ­i­ty: Stan­ford Researchers Con­firm What Philoso­phers and Writ­ers Have Always Known

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Play a Collection of Classic Handheld Video Games at the Internet Archive: Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Tron and MC Hammer

in Technology, Video Games | March 20th, 2018

Equipped with smart­phones that grow more pow­er­ful by the year, gamers on the go now have a seem­ing­ly unlim­it­ed vari­ety of play­ing options. A decade ago they relied on hand­held game con­soles with their thou­sands of avail­able game car­tridges and lat­er discs, whose reign began with Nin­ten­do’s intro­duc­tion of the orig­i­nal Game Boy (a device whose unwrap­ping on Christ­mas 1990 remains one of my most vivid child­hood mem­o­ries). But even before the Game Boy and its suc­ces­sors, there were stand­alone hand­held pro­to-video-games, “LCD, VFD and LED-based machines that sold, often cheap­ly, at toy stores and booths over the decades.”

Those words come from Jason Scott at the Inter­net Archive, where you can now play a range of those hand­held games again, emu­lat­ed right here in your brows­er. “They range from notably sim­plis­tic efforts to tru­ly com­pli­cat­ed, many-but­toned affairs that are tru­ly dif­fi­cult to learn, much less mas­ter,” Scott writes.

“They are, of course, enter­tain­ing in them­selves – these are attempts to put togeth­er inex­pen­sive ver­sions of video games of the time, or bring­ing new prop­er­ties whole­cloth into exis­tence.” They also “rep­re­sent the dif­fi­cul­ty ahead for many aspects of dig­i­tal enter­tain­ment, and as such are worth expe­ri­enc­ing and under­stand­ing for that rea­son alone.”

What kind of games came in this form? The Inter­net Archive’s cur­rent offer­ings include vague approx­i­ma­tions of 70s and 80s arcade hits like Pac-Man, Don­key Kong, and Q*Bert;  even vaguer approx­i­ma­tions of such major motion pic­tures of the day as Tron, Robo­cop 2 (as well as Robo­cop 3), and Apol­lo 13; and sports titles like World Cham­pi­onship Base­ball, NFL Foot­ball, and Blades of Steel. You’ll even find pop­u­lar odd­i­ties like Bandai’s Tam­agotchi, the orig­i­nal vir­tu­al pet, along with less pop­u­lar odd­i­ties like MC Ham­mer, a dual-direc­tion­al-padded sim­u­la­tion of a dance bat­tle with the auteur of “U Can’t Touch This.”

So as you play, spare a thought for the devel­op­ers of these hand­held games, not just because of the dire intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty they often had to work with, but the severe tech­no­log­i­cal restric­tions they invari­ably had to work under. “This sort of Her­culean effort to squeeze a major arcade machine into a hand­ful of cir­cuits and a beep­ing, boop­ing shell of what it once was is an ongo­ing sit­u­a­tion,” writes Scott. “Where once it was try­ing to make arcade machines work both on home con­soles like the 2600 and Cole­co­v­i­sion, so it was also the case of these plas­tic toy games. Work of this sort con­tin­ues, as mobile games take charge and devel­op­ers often work to bring huge immer­sive expe­ri­ences to where a phone hits all the same notes.” And the day will cer­tain­ly come when even the most impres­sive games we play now, hand­held or oth­er­wise, will seem just as hilar­i­ous­ly sim­plis­tic.

Enter the hand­held video col­lec­tion here. And find more clas­sic video games in the Relat­eds below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Play “Space War!,” One of the Ear­li­est Video Games, on Your Com­put­er (1962)

Pong, 1969: A Mile­stone in Video Game His­to­ry

The Inter­net Arcade Lets You Play 900 Vin­tage Video Games in Your Web Brows­er (Free)

Run Vin­tage Video Games (From Pac-Man to E.T.) and Soft­ware in Your Web Brows­er, Thanks to Archive.org

Free: Play 2,400 Vin­tage Com­put­er Games in Your Web Brows­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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A Turing Machine Handmade Out of Wood

in Computer Science, Technology | March 9th, 2018

It took Richard Ridel six months of tin­ker­ing in his work­shop to cre­ate this contraption–a mechan­i­cal Tur­ing machine made out of wood. The silent video above shows how the machine works. But if you’re left hang­ing, want­i­ng to know more, I’d rec­om­mend read­ing Ridel’s fif­teen page paper where he care­ful­ly doc­u­ments why he built the wood­en Tur­ing machine, and what pieces and steps went into the con­struc­tion.

If this video prompts you to ask, what exact­ly is a Tur­ing Machine?, also con­sid­er adding this short primer by philoso­pher Mark Jago to your media diet.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es

The Books on Young Alan Turing’s Read­ing List: From Lewis Car­roll to Mod­ern Chro­mat­ics

The LEGO Tur­ing Machine Gives a Quick Primer on How Your Com­put­er Works

The Enig­ma Machine: How Alan Tur­ing Helped Break the Unbreak­able Nazi Code

Hear the Christ­mas Car­ols Made by Alan Turing’s Com­put­er: Cut­ting-Edge Ver­sions of “Jin­gle Bells” and “Good King Wences­las” (1951)

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Google Launches Three New Artificial Intelligence Experiments That Could Be Godsends for Artists, Museums & Designers

in Art, Photography, Technology | March 9th, 2018

You’ll recall, a few months ago, when Google made it pos­si­ble for all of your Face­book friends to find their dop­pel­gängers in art his­to­ry. As so often with that par­tic­u­lar com­pa­ny, the fun dis­trac­tion came as the tip of a research-and-devel­op­ment-inten­sive ice­berg, and they’ve revealed the next lay­er in the form of three arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-dri­ven exper­i­ments that allow us to nav­i­gate and find con­nec­tions among huge swaths of visu­al cul­ture with unprece­dent­ed ease.

Google’s new Art Palette, as explained in the video at the top of the post, allows you to search for works of art held in “col­lec­tions from over 1500 cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions,” not just by artist or move­ment or theme but by col­or palette.

You can spec­i­fy a col­or set, take a pic­ture with your phone’s cam­era to use the col­ors around you, or even go with a ran­dom set of five col­ors to take you to new artis­tic realms entire­ly.

Admit­ted­ly, scrolling through the hun­dreds of chro­mat­i­cal­ly sim­i­lar works of art from all through­out his­to­ry and across the world can at first feel a lit­tle uncan­ny, like walk­ing into one of those hous­es whose occu­pant has shelved their books by col­or. But a vari­ety of promis­ing uses will imme­di­ate­ly come to mind, espe­cial­ly for those pro­fes­sion­al­ly involved in the aes­thet­ic fields. Famous­ly col­or-lov­ing, art-inspired fash­ion design­er Paul Smith, for instance, appears in anoth­er pro­mo­tion­al video describ­ing how he’d use Art Palette: he’d “start off with the col­ors that I’ve select­ed for that sea­son, and then through the app look at those col­ors and see what gets thrown up.”

In col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, Google’s Art Rec­og­niz­er, the sec­ond of these exper­i­ments, uses machine learn­ing to find par­tic­u­lar works of art as they’ve var­i­ous­ly appeared over decades and decades of exhi­bi­tion. “We had recent­ly launched 30,000 instal­la­tion images online, all the way back to 1929,” says MoMA Dig­i­tal Media Direc­tor Shan­non Dar­rough in the video above. But since “those images did­n’t con­tain any infor­ma­tion about the actu­al works in them,” it pre­sent­ed the oppor­tu­ni­ty to use machine learn­ing to train a sys­tem to rec­og­nize the works on dis­play in the images, which, in the words of Google Arts and Cul­ture Lab’s Freya Mur­ray, “turned a repos­i­to­ry of images into a search­able archive.”

The for­mi­da­ble pho­to­graph­ic hold­ings of Life mag­a­zine, which doc­u­ment­ed human affairs with char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly vivid pho­to­jour­nal­ism for a big chunk of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, made for a sim­i­lar­ly entic­ing trove of machine-learn­able mate­r­i­al. “Life mag­a­zine is one of the most icon­ic pub­li­ca­tions in his­to­ry,” says Mur­ray in the video above. “Life Tags is an exper­i­ment that orga­nizes Life mag­a­zine’s archives into an inter­ac­tive ency­clo­pe­dia,” let­ting you browse by every tag from “Austin-Healey” to “Elec­tron­ics” to “Live­stock” to “Wrestling” and many more besides. Google’s invest­ment in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence has made the his­to­ry of Life search­able. How much longer, one won­ders, before it makes the his­to­ry of life search­able?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google’s Free App Ana­lyzes Your Self­ie and Then Finds Your Dop­pel­ganger in Muse­um Por­traits

Google Gives You a 360° View of the Per­form­ing Arts, From the Roy­al Shake­speare Com­pa­ny to the Paris Opera Bal­let

Google Art Project Expands, Bring­ing 30,000 Works of Art from 151 Muse­ums to the Web

Google Cre­ates a Dig­i­tal Archive of World Fash­ion: Fea­tures 30,000 Images, Cov­er­ing 3,000 Years of Fash­ion His­to­ry

Google Launch­es a Free Course on Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Sign Up for Its New “Machine Learn­ing Crash Course”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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David Lynch Teaches Typing: A New Interactive Comedy Game

in Comedy, Computer Science, Film, Games, How to Learn for Free, Technology, Television | March 2nd, 2018

Typ­ing pro­grams demand some patience on the part of the stu­dent, and David Lynch Teach­es Typ­ing is no excep­tion.

You’ve got 90 sec­onds to get accli­mat­ed to the crud­dy flop­py disc-era graph­ics and the cacoph­o­nous voice of your instruc­tor, a dead ringer for FBI Deputy Direc­tor Gor­don Cole, the hard-of-hear­ing char­ac­ter direc­tor David Lynch played on his sem­i­nal ear­ly 90s series, Twin Peaks.

Things perk up about a minute and a half in, when stu­dents are instruct­ed to place their left ring fin­gers in an undu­lat­ing bug to the left of their key­boards.

That sec­ond “in”? Not a typo (though you’ll notice plen­ty of no doubt inten­tion­al boo-boos in the teacher’s pre-pro­grammed respons­es…)

The bug in ques­tion may well put you in mind of the mys­te­ri­ous baby in Lynch’s first fea­ture length film, 1977’s Eraser­head.

On the oth­er hand, it might not.

David Lynch Teach­es Typ­ing is actu­al­ly a short inter­ac­tive com­e­dy game, and many of the mil­len­ni­al review­ers cov­er­ing that beat have had to play catch-up in order to catch the many nods to the director’s work con­tained there­in.

One of our favorites is the Apple-esque name of the program’s retro com­put­er, and we’ll wager that fre­quent Lynch col­lab­o­ra­tor, actor Kyle MacLach­lan, would agree.

Anoth­er ref­er­ence that has thus far elud­ed online gam­ing enthu­si­asts in their 20s is Mavis Bea­con Teach­es Typ­ing. Take a peek below at what the vir­tu­al typ­ing tutor’s graph­ics looked like around the time the orig­i­nal Twin Peaks aired to dis­cov­er the cre­ators of David Lynch Teach­es Typ­ing’s oth­er inspi­ra­tion.

David Lynch Teach­es Typ­ing is avail­able for free down­load here. If you’re anx­ious that doing so might open you up to a tech­ni­cal bug of night­mar­ish pro­por­tions, stick with watch­ing the play through at the top of the page.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Big Lebows­ki Reimag­ined as a Clas­sic 8‑Bit Video Game

What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchi­an: A Video Essay

“The Art of David Lynch”— How Rene Magritte, Edward Hop­per & Fran­cis Bacon Influ­enced David Lynch’s Cin­e­mat­ic Vision

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her March 20 in New York City for the sec­ond edi­tion of Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, a low bud­get vari­ety show born of a 1920 man­u­al for Girl Scout Camp Direc­tors. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Tattoos Can Now Start Monitoring Your Medical Conditions: Harvard and MIT Researchers Innovate at the Intersection of Art & Medicine

in Art, Harvard, MIT, Science, Technology | February 28th, 2018

Once reserved for rebels and out­liers, tat­toos have gone main­stream in the Unit­ed States. Accord­ing to recent sur­veys, 21% of all Amer­i­cans now have at least one tat­too. And, among the 18–29 demo­graph­ic, the num­ber ris­es to 40%. If that num­ber sounds high, just wait until tat­toos go from being aes­thet­ic state­ments to bio­med­ical devices.

At Har­vard and MIT, researchers have devel­oped “smart tat­too ink” that can mon­i­tor changes in bio­log­i­cal and health con­di­tions, mea­sur­ing, for exam­ple, when the blood sug­ar of a dia­bet­ic ris­es too high, or the hydra­tion of an ath­lete falls too low. Pair­ing biosen­si­tive inks with tra­di­tion­al tat­too designs, these smart tat­toos could con­ceiv­ably pro­vide real-time feed­back on a range of med­ical con­di­tions. And also raise a num­ber of eth­i­cal ques­tions: what hap­pens when your health infor­ma­tion gets essen­tial­ly worn on your sleeve, avail­able for all to see?

To learn more about smart tat­toos, watch the Har­vard video above, and read the cor­re­spond­ing arti­cle in the Har­vard Gazette.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet Amer­i­ca & Britain’s First Female Tat­too Artists: Maud Wag­n­er (1877–1961) & Jessie Knight (1904–1994)

Browse a Gallery of Kurt Von­negut Tat­toos, and See Why He’s the Big Goril­la of Lit­er­ary Tat­toos

A Daz­zling Gallery of Clock­work Orange Tat­toos

Free Online Biol­o­gy Cours­es 

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