Jonathan Oxer
[Blog]
>> To Cyborg Or Not To Cyborg?
Mon, Mar 27th 9:15am 2006 >> Tech Toys
James Purser has expressed his discomfort with my decision to stick an RFID tag in my arm. Totally understandable, too: the questions he asks are ones I've been asking myself, and even having got to the point of actually sticking in the implanting tool I can't say it's resolved in my own mind. Once it got to the point where it was resting against my skin I had to "turn of my mind" and just do it without really thinking about it, but that was probably partly due to the fact that I was doing it without anaesthetic and it takes a remarkable mental effort to overcome the self-preservation instinct that prevents us inflicting harm on ourselves.
Do I still have reservations? Absolutely. Even now typing this it's a wierd feeling to know that under that bandaid on my left arm is a tiny microchip under the skin. Somehow my left hand is not quite my own anymore in a very odd way I can't really describe.
I wonder if recipients of medical implants such as artificial heart valves feel the same way? My mother had knee replacement surgery last year so now she walks on titanium joints, but do they feel like they are still her legs? I must admit it's a question I never thought to ask until just now, but I should. And what about organ donor recipients? I'm sure it would be quite a mental hurdle to overcome for a lot of people.
Compared to what people in those situations go through my own "alteration" is trivial. It's really no more significant than a big splinter in my arm, at least physically. The real significance is philosophical, emotional, ethical. For example, I'm Christian - yet many Christians consider RFID tagging to be the Mark of the Beast and would say I'm now damned for eternity. Obviously I don't agree or I would never have done this, but I put in this implant more to explore those sorts of headspace issues rather than the technical issues of comms protocols and RF fields. The technical problems have been overcome: this stuff can be done right now by anybody that really wants to, as myself and others have demonstrated. The interesting thing is the implications for society generally and for the way we view our bodies personally.
James Purser has expressed his discomfort with my decision to stick an RFID tag in my arm. Totally understandable, too: the questions he asks are ones I've been asking myself, and even having got to the point of actually sticking in the implanting tool I can't say it's resolved in my own mind. Once it got to the point where it was resting against my skin I had to "turn of my mind" and just do it without really thinking about it, but that was probably partly due to the fact that I was doing it without anaesthetic and it takes a remarkable mental effort to overcome the self-preservation instinct that prevents us inflicting harm on ourselves.
Do I still have reservations? Absolutely. Even now typing this it's a wierd feeling to know that under that bandaid on my left arm is a tiny microchip under the skin. Somehow my left hand is not quite my own anymore in a very odd way I can't really describe.
I wonder if recipients of medical implants such as artificial heart valves feel the same way? My mother had knee replacement surgery last year so now she walks on titanium joints, but do they feel like they are still her legs? I must admit it's a question I never thought to ask until just now, but I should. And what about organ donor recipients? I'm sure it would be quite a mental hurdle to overcome for a lot of people.
Compared to what people in those situations go through my own "alteration" is trivial. It's really no more significant than a big splinter in my arm, at least physically. The real significance is philosophical, emotional, ethical. For example, I'm Christian - yet many Christians consider RFID tagging to be the Mark of the Beast and would say I'm now damned for eternity. Obviously I don't agree or I would never have done this, but I put in this implant more to explore those sorts of headspace issues rather than the technical issues of comms protocols and RF fields. The technical problems have been overcome: this stuff can be done right now by anybody that really wants to, as myself and others have demonstrated. The interesting thing is the implications for society generally and for the way we view our bodies personally.
>> Jondo the Mandroid is RFID enabled
Sun, Mar 26th 9:08pm 2006 >> Tech Toys
Many years ago a good friend of mine, Age, started calling me Jondo the Mandroid, presumably because I kept talking about a future that included things like body mods to improve memory, augmented reality systems that splice into the optic nerve to provide a real-world HUD overlay (like the funky stuff that Wayne Piekarski does, but implanted) and other crazy things that I'm still convinced are coming but not soon enough for me.
It's taken a decade to live up to Age's joking nickname but at last I can honestly say I'm part cyborg. Maybe only about 0.00000002%, but still, it's a start.
I've got a very dark video of the procedure which I'll try to clean up and post soon, but in the meantime click through to the story for a photo taken about 20 seconds after the procedure. Warning: story contains a picture of the aftermath of a self-performed medical procedure!
Many years ago a good friend of mine, Age, started calling me Jondo the Mandroid, presumably because I kept talking about a future that included things like body mods to improve memory, augmented reality systems that splice into the optic nerve to provide a real-world HUD overlay (like the funky stuff that Wayne Piekarski does, but implanted) and other crazy things that I'm still convinced are coming but not soon enough for me.
It's taken a decade to live up to Age's joking nickname but at last I can honestly say I'm part cyborg. Maybe only about 0.00000002%, but still, it's a start.
I've got a very dark video of the procedure which I'll try to clean up and post soon, but in the meantime click through to the story for a photo taken about 20 seconds after the procedure. Warning: story contains a picture of the aftermath of a self-performed medical procedure!
>> RFID: the 134.2KHz reader lives!
Wed, Mar 22nd 8:48pm 2006 >> Tech Toys
Total, massive, major rockage: after literally months of stuffing around I've finally got a reader talking nicely to a Linux box and reading 134.2KHz ISO-standard implantable RFID tags. Woot!
This is yet another example of a phenomenon I've seen soooo many times that there really should be a name for it: the "we're American, so we're going to do everything just a bit differently to the rest of the world and then take about 50 years to catch up to global standards but in the meantime cause compatibility problems for everyone else" effect.
The thing is, the entire world *other* than the US has settled on an ISO standard that specifies the field frequency, the modulation scheme, etc for implantable RFID tags. And because implantable tags cross two very heavily regulated industries (spectrum allocation and medical devices) you'd better comply with the standard or you're in deep doodoo.
But of course the yanks go "stuff that, we don't need no steenkin 134.2KHz ISO-standard tags: we're gunna run ours at 125KHz!".
And so of course it's a total pain getting anything useful. Australian suppliers carry a hodge-podge mixture of implantable and non-implantable tags and reader-modules at 125KHz and 134.2KHz. Expensive stand-alone 134.2KHz readers: no problem, they're used by vets all the time. Cheap 125KHz reader modules: no problem, they're in plentiful supply thanks to the US so you can just walk into Jaycar and buy them. But cheap 134.2KHz reader modules? No way, Jose.
In the end I had to get reader modules from Germany and they still cost more than three times as much as the locally available 125KHz modules and are far from plug-and-play, but at last with a bit of help from a MAX232 to convert the TTL signal levels to RS232 plus a funky hand-wound reader coil I'm getting sensible stuff coming out the serial port.
Now to shave my hand and find some disinfectant ;-)
Total, massive, major rockage: after literally months of stuffing around I've finally got a reader talking nicely to a Linux box and reading 134.2KHz ISO-standard implantable RFID tags. Woot!
This is yet another example of a phenomenon I've seen soooo many times that there really should be a name for it: the "we're American, so we're going to do everything just a bit differently to the rest of the world and then take about 50 years to catch up to global standards but in the meantime cause compatibility problems for everyone else" effect.
The thing is, the entire world *other* than the US has settled on an ISO standard that specifies the field frequency, the modulation scheme, etc for implantable RFID tags. And because implantable tags cross two very heavily regulated industries (spectrum allocation and medical devices) you'd better comply with the standard or you're in deep doodoo.
But of course the yanks go "stuff that, we don't need no steenkin 134.2KHz ISO-standard tags: we're gunna run ours at 125KHz!".
And so of course it's a total pain getting anything useful. Australian suppliers carry a hodge-podge mixture of implantable and non-implantable tags and reader-modules at 125KHz and 134.2KHz. Expensive stand-alone 134.2KHz readers: no problem, they're used by vets all the time. Cheap 125KHz reader modules: no problem, they're in plentiful supply thanks to the US so you can just walk into Jaycar and buy them. But cheap 134.2KHz reader modules? No way, Jose.
In the end I had to get reader modules from Germany and they still cost more than three times as much as the locally available 125KHz modules and are far from plug-and-play, but at last with a bit of help from a MAX232 to convert the TTL signal levels to RS232 plus a funky hand-wound reader coil I'm getting sensible stuff coming out the serial port.
Now to shave my hand and find some disinfectant ;-)
>> Writing Ubuntu Hacks is like creating threads with GOTOs
Thu, Mar 16th 10:20am 2006 >> Writing
Scary, it's only a matter of hours now before Ubuntu Hacks gets passed from first-stage editorial review to the production phase. And there's sooo much more to do! It's amazing how much I've learnt in the process because even with topics I thought I already knew well I've had to do a bunch of research into all sorts of corner cases and background information that I've never had to care about before.
Each hack should be a concise sequence of steps or events, but in the real world when you're trying to make something work there are a huge number of ways that things can go astray. When I document a process I try as hard as possible to write "do A, then B, then C, then D" but to be comprehensive it often has to be "do A, and if you get result X do B, otherwise check the frobnotz and set up G, and when that works proceed to B but if it doesn't you may also need to do H, which may fail if you're on PPC because it needs the Q library, so..."
Of course that's the stuff we deal with as programmers every day so it's frustrating not being able to express it efficiently. It could trivially be represented in a flowchart, but prose is just not an effective way to convey parallel or optional sequences of events. It's like trying to write threaded code in a language that makes you control program flow with GOTOs.
But we're nearly done, and it'll be fantastic to finally see the end result. I'm told there's a Rough Cuts sneak preview listed on the Ubuntu Hacks page now but I haven't even seen it myself yet. Too busy finishing things off to stop and smell the roses!
Scary, it's only a matter of hours now before Ubuntu Hacks gets passed from first-stage editorial review to the production phase. And there's sooo much more to do! It's amazing how much I've learnt in the process because even with topics I thought I already knew well I've had to do a bunch of research into all sorts of corner cases and background information that I've never had to care about before.
Each hack should be a concise sequence of steps or events, but in the real world when you're trying to make something work there are a huge number of ways that things can go astray. When I document a process I try as hard as possible to write "do A, then B, then C, then D" but to be comprehensive it often has to be "do A, and if you get result X do B, otherwise check the frobnotz and set up G, and when that works proceed to B but if it doesn't you may also need to do H, which may fail if you're on PPC because it needs the Q library, so..."
Of course that's the stuff we deal with as programmers every day so it's frustrating not being able to express it efficiently. It could trivially be represented in a flowchart, but prose is just not an effective way to convey parallel or optional sequences of events. It's like trying to write threaded code in a language that makes you control program flow with GOTOs.
But we're nearly done, and it'll be fantastic to finally see the end result. I'm told there's a Rough Cuts sneak preview listed on the Ubuntu Hacks page now but I haven't even seen it myself yet. Too busy finishing things off to stop and smell the roses!
1 of 1
[ Back to top ]