This is reminiscent of the "toposcope," built In the 1940s by late W. Grey Walter. It was a 22-channel EEG, or perhaps one should say EES for electroencephaloscope, which displayed a map of the brain's electrical activity in real time... if I recall correctly, on 22 "magic eye" tubes, allowing the special propagation of brain waves to be visualized.

"The idea has been around (at least) since 1968." Try 1913 or earlier, with the development of the stenotype machine, the chorded keyboard device which is used to transcribe courtroom testimony at about 200 WPM.

...to live out an entire lifetime relatively free of terror of bacterial disease.

I was born in the Penicillin Age.

In the 1950s when I was a little kid I had a lung infection--not bacterial, never diagnosed, so the story isn't totally apropos--but anyway they sent me to the hospital, where among other things I got penicillin injections every day. (In the buttocks. Huge needle, viscous stuff, fairly painful, especially for a little kid in an age where nurses believed the key to managing small kids was to _surprise_ them. It was the kid in the next bed who warned me "It's not a temperature, it's a stick.") I hadn't mastered taking pills, and when I got home they got some stuff from the druggist called "aureomycin." It cost $70 for the smallest bottle I've ever seen. I spat it out and said "I can't take it, it tastes too bad." My dad said "Oh, come now, let me show you," put a drop on his tongue and spat it out and said to mom, "Nobody can possibly take this, it tastes too bad."

Anyway, almost everyone reading this has grown up in times when we take it for granted that big tombstones aren't going to be surrounded by a flock of little tombstones, and that when we get an infection, we go to the doctor and get some pills and follow the label directions and take them all, and it will probably be cured. It seems quaint to imagine _dying_ of bacterial disease.

And slowly, it is all coming back. First it was tuberculosis, never quite fully conquered but the days of the "sanitarium" seemed to be gone. Then "hospital staph." And soldiers coming back from Vietnam with penicillin-resistant syphilis. MRSA. And now "incurable gonorrhea."

Will I live long enough to die of once-routinely curable bacterial infection?

This may be unfair, but it's what I'd do with any other "product" as like the 2008 G1G1 XO and any other "company" that produced it. It was a while ago and hopefully things have utterly changed, but I have to say that my experience with the 2008 G1G1 program was so inexcusably bad that it poisoned MY opinion of the program. Supporters will make excuses and some may be valid, but the thing was a travesty. It fell utterly short anything we expect from a "product." It was simply not as" advertised".

The biggest disappointment to me was that it was billed as a transparent system, with all of its own OS code supposedly exposed and viewable via a "View Source" key. As delivered, and during its first year of updates anyway, that button did nothing of the sort. It would show you HTML source within the web browser, and did nothing at all elsewhere--not even give a warning.

The claimed "20 hour" battery life turned out to be about 3 hours. Several subsequent "power management" updates increased it to about 4.

At least my keyboard worked. A colleague who bought one had a keyboard failure within about a month of delivery, and it turned out that such failures were common--and that anything resembling "customer service" simply didn't exist.

Actually, I used a light pen on a PDP-1 and my problem was that I got a sort spot on the pad of my index finger. Normally, there was a shutter closed over the sensor, and you had a slide a little spring-loaded slide to uncap it. The spring was probably stronger than it should have been, and the slide had little ridges on it to give a better grip.

My finger didn't actually get blistered, but close. It got sore and painful enough to make me realize I needed to avoid using it for a day.

Vertical desktop touch screens have been with us since at least 1972. The University of Illinois' PLATO project didn't just deploy them on a significant scale, it exposed impressionable students to them.

Since then, many perfectly good touchscreen technologies have been available, commercially, and have been widely deployed e.g. in kiosks. And GUI software support behind them, e.g. Windows for Pen Computing, GO, etc. has been around for two decades.

Meanwhile, successful deployments of touchscreen technology have been widespread since, let's say, 1997 and the Palm Pilot--but always on small, handheld, horizontal-screen devices.

If large vertical touchscreens are really usable for sustained periods of time, and if they really add something of substantial value to mouse point-and-click GUI's, I find it very, very hard to believe they wouldn't have already gained traction.

I'd add that if multitouch gestures are really a significant improvement, I think it's at least as likely that they will take the form of detached, horizontal trackpads like the Apple Magic Trackpad. Horizontal surface, small-muscle coordination.

I think it's significant that vertical touch screens are still rare on desktops. Their use in 1972 in the University of Illinois' PLATO system meant not only that the technology was employed in a large scale, but that it was made available to impressionable students. Over the years many technological solutions were found, prices have come down, and there's been wide-spread use in "kiosk" environments.

If they were really usable in full workday desktop environment I think we'd have seen them take off long ago.

Nevertheless, I would point to the Apple "Magic Trackpad" as a possible compromise. If, in fact, multitouch gestures add real value to a GUI, but large vertical screens cause "gorilla arm," then an auxiliary flat multitouch panel is a possible solution--and has the advantage of being retrofittable to existing displays. It was once thought that people would have great difficulty adapting to the "abstract" nature of mouse movements in one plane causing pointer movements in another--and indeed there seem to be small percentage of people who find this to be a real problem--but by and large people adapted quickly.

When something has been going on that long, it seems likely that the ability to get drunk must somehow confer survival benefits on the human species as a whole. Otherwise, there would have been selection against alcoholism and selection for people who are alcohol averse for whatever reasons. Given the actual variation we see in taste preferences and sensitivity been people, there would have been plenty of variation to act on, and most children, for example, find the smell of alcohol repellent. 11,000 years is thirty thousand generations, plenty of time for selection to have taken place.

In real dollars, i.e. corrected for inflation, it's about the same as in 1979-1980.

It's interesting, without shortages and lines at the pump, how much less threatening it seems. I remember visiting my aunt that Christmas and being quite concerned because our tank wasn't big enough to hold gas for the whole round trip, and in addition to lines, many, many gas stations had short hours--there was no certainty of being able to find a gas station open on Christmas day.

I listened to the event live, and I and everyone in the room heard it as "one small step for man." And I remember at the time hearing a comment, "shouldn't he have said one small step for a man?" The audio recording is perfectly clear. There's no squelch, no gap, and nothing half-buried under static. The New York Times reported it as it was.

Neil Armstrong originally insisted he had said "a" but later acknowledged that he could not have said so. Wikipedia cites sources.

Yet some encyclopedias and history books include the "a." It is a kindly falsification of history, made out of misguided respect for Neil Armstrong's feelings.

And I find it shocking.

It is a trivial distortion, but it is a distortion of an event that was witnessed in live broadcast by half a billion people and electronically recorded.

If such a thing can be distorted simply to spare one man's feelings about a completely inconsequential mistake, what does that tell us about the trustworthiness of basic, prosaic factual details of historical events with few eyewitnesses, no electronic records, and money, politics, or national pride hanging in the balance?

I before E, except after C
Or when sounded like "A"
As in "neighbor" and "weigh"
Except seize, inveigle, either,
Weird, leisure, neither.

(Also science, conscience, sheik, ancient, being, caffeine, feisty, forfeit, protein, species, and several dozen others, including "Einstein"--twice! The amazing thing about the rule is that it works at all. It seems as if it all the exceptions are words whose spelling is so familiar that you never stop to ask...)

Christmas on Mars forms the climax of the 1955 George Pal movie, "Conquest of Space." The crew of the first ship to Mars has been debating whether God gave Mars to humankind to exploit, or just Earth. They all agree that according to the Bible God gave "the four corners of the Earth" to humankind. The question is whether God's domain extends to Mars.

If God exists on Mars, then Mars belongs to humankind as well.

Due to plot complications, the ship is forced to remain on Mars for a year, and their water supply isn't going to last that long. On Christmas Day, they are glumly playing carols on the harmonica while contemplating the prospect of their demise, when it begins to snow, providing the water they need and proving that God exists on Mars. Ergo Mars belongs to humankind, it's OK to conquer space, and the music is allowed to build to a crescendo behind the words "THE END."

The special effects aren't too good, either.

As a kid reading about how they used colchicine, a toxic compound that interferes with cell division--to create polyploid varieties of fruits and vegetables that are much larger than those with the natural chromosome complement. And I realized that surely does qualify as "genetic engineering" of a sort.

That's just a stray synaptic firing. Please don't read any subtext into that. I'm not saying today's GM is the same thing. I'm not saying frankensalmon are safe. I'm not even saying polyploid vegetables are safe. And I happen to think there's a totally legitimate concern about allowing commercial interests to rush new technology into widespread use too quickly.

All I'm saying is that I suddenly realized that they've been doing genetic engineering all my life.

The original idea wasn't vacuous. The researchers who coined the term, particularly Spearman, honestly thought they had found statistical evidence for a single common factor that could be called "intelligence." But I thought that had all been thoroughly exploded by the 1950s.

There was a guy way back in the 1960s who worked out a sort of abstract block diagram, 6 by 6 by 6, of 216 different "thingies" that represented some aspect of intellectual performance. What was it called? "Structure of Intellect." Google, click click, J. P. Guilford. So he spent a chunk of his career devising psychological tests that ought to detect each of those 216 intellectual abilities and then doing the correlations to show that each of the tests was really, truly measuring something different from the others. When I encountered his stuff, he had successfully demonstrated the existence of about 150 of those 216 skill or talents. In other words, intelligence isn't one thing, it's at least 150 different, independent, things.

And that was in the 1960s. I'd have hoped that by now IQ was lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Spearman. Whatever was keeping it alive? Racism? The standardized testing industry?

I don't quite see how this goes much beyond what was known a half-century ago, though it's helpful to see it confirmed. But if the officials want to test intelligence, they will just go on testing intelligence, whatever the science says.

I highly recommend it. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, by Mary Roach, really tells you everything you wanted to know about space travel but were afraid to ask. In fact it tells you things you never even thought to ask about. Like "What really does happen to clothing that is kept in contact with skin without being changed, for weeks?" Like "When they see a turd floating through the cabin, due to someone's carelessness, how do astronauts handle the situation?"

After reading that book, I asked myself the question, "Well, if you won a free all-expenses-paid monthlong trip to the International Space Station, would you accept?" And my honest answer is... I... am... not... sure.

So, my hat's off to those who volunteered, and I hope they have thought it through. Not just the suicide part, but what comes before. Because it sounds like being homeless and living in a car, only not as comfortable.