Do it Yourself : Trip Visor

Thanks to a dumpster diving friend I had come into possesion of a pair of welding goggles, as well as some white translucent plexiglass. So, the old hallucination goggles project was adapted for this new, awesome, rugged, form factor.

Step 1 : electronics :
I chose to use an Arduino Pro-mini, two RGB LEDs for the goggles, and a 4 character multiplexed 7 segment display.

Step 2 : draw a circuit board. I like to use a generic drawing program so I can put graphics in the copper pattern. Some PCB drawing software will also allow this, although not all PCB fabrication services will do custom graphics. I skipped out on the current limiting resistors for the blue and green channels, since the supply voltage is actually lower than the LED driving voltage. I still needed them for the red though. This kind of design is very general, as you just need to get some LEDs to blink in a controlled manner. The circuit looks like this :

Next, transfer pattern, etch, drill, clean. It is easier to wire this up on a breadboard and then transfer it to a radioshack protoboard, to save on the hassle of making your own board. Here is a tutorial that I loosely followed, and here is a previous post where I practiced the technique, and below is the finished result. I made the traces from the Arduino to the LED display a too narrow, and unless you're careful this design requires clean up after etching.

I was wrong to try to drive this circuit from coin cell batteries. These batteries do not put out enough current to drive the LEDs. I worked around this by adding a 2xAAA battery pack to the interior of the goggles. If you copy my design, bear this in mind and adjust accordingly.

My friend laser cut white plexiglass to replace the tinted glass of the welding goggles. This is a square cut that could also be accomplished with a saw. These goggles have a slot for a piece of plexiglass on the inside, and another piece on the outside, with 7mm clearance in-between, so it is straightforward to sandwich the LEDs between two sheets of plexiglass to create diffused light. Position the LEDs approximately in the center of the visual field in each eye, so that when you look at them through a pane of the white plexiglass, they line up as if they were one diffuse source. I used standard connectors for indicator lights and power buttons in PC cases to connect the LEDs, and a rocker switch from an old Ikea lamp, to finish off the connections.

This is more durable than past designs, since it doesn't have a separate part for the driving hardware and the goggles, connected by a failure prone cable. Reminds me of this. I can actually toss this one around without breaking it.

Predictions that Work

If you're ever up for a laugh, dig up futurist predictions for the 1930s or 50s, and see what they thought the future would be like. Yet for every atomic rocket car, there are some predictions that were eerily spot on. What are the characteristic of these predictions, vis a vis the ones that don't pan out?

The best predictions of the 21st century were those relating to the computer revolution. Moore's Law, JCR Licklider's papers about the internet (or Intergalactic Computer Network as he referred to it,) and Douglas Englebart's theories about human-computer interfaces. Their ideas were first formulated in the early 1960s, but took until the mid 80s to reach a critical mass of popular use. 20 years out is pretty good for a prediction.

Now, compared to the atomic flying car, to pick one particularly egregious failed futurism, these technologies possessed clear benefits even at early stages of their development, fulfilled a unique need, and had capital costs low enough to be purchased by individuals. As the cost and complexity of a system rises, the number of stakeholder increases, and the odds of a single person derailing the entire endeavor rises. An incomplete nuclear power plant offers little to no benefit. An atomic flying car has to actually work before anyone will buy it. Meanwhile, computers are useful as bulk data processors, and phone lines for communication, long before they become truly interactive.

Of course, the biggest advantage that Licklider and Englebart had was that they made their future. First they envisioned it, then they built it. Scientists have historically been only slightly better at futurism than their lay peers, and no better at the social aspects, but they are the drivers of innovation.

The California Bug

Medical science has yet to isolate the specific germ, spore, or neurofungus that transforms normal earthlings into Californians, but the existence of such a metaphysically virulent organism can and must be inferred through indirect measure. A state populated by a virus-borne colony from the future sounds like just the kind of thing a Californian would believe, but if we calmly inventory California’s contributions to planetary civilization, the mind-virus hypothesis begins to make a frightening kind of sense.
--The California Bug, Howard Rheingold

As a Californian, I'll buy that. California isn't so much a state as a state of mind, and one that is firmly focused on the future. Strike the motherload, make it as a movie star, or build it faster, smaller, sexier in aerospace or silicon valley. A culture requires some sort of mythological wellspring, and CA's can be seen in every raygun gothic gas station, ballardian interchange, or hopeful tech start-up. We Believe in Tomorrow.

The California Dream is similar to, but not the same as the American dream. Hard work and virtue aren't at all necessary in the Golden State. What matters is creativity, vision, and just a slight edge of madness. We don't work hard because we want to make it, or rise above our humble origins, we do so because we must, because we are driven by a primal urge that we do not fully understand.

Where was I going with this? I don't really know. Maybe Science Island, a deliberate organization of people with a clear myth about the Future. We are the carriers of a Mind Virus, find others, infect them, spread the meme.

Quote

In this metallic era of barbarians, only methodically and excessively cultivating our abilities to dream, to analyze, and to attract can safeguard our personality from disintegrating into nothing or into something commonplace.

Those parts of our experiences which are real are precisely those that are felt by others.  Reality is composed of all that is in common in our experiences.  Thus our individuality lies only in the parts that are erroneous.  How happy I would be to see, one day, a scarlet sun.  It would be so mine, this sun, no one's but mine!

Bernardo Soares, retranslated from a Spanish translation by Perfecto E. Cuadrado

Fernando Pessoa died in 1935.  Apparently people have been worrying about the effect of the information revolution on individuality since well before it started.  I wonder what people were saying after the printing press appeared.  Probably they had different concerns then; I don't know if individuality had been invented.  Perhaps it was invented in response to the possibility of making exact copies of things.

But if as the exchange of information becomes more efficient we lose more and more of our individuality, does this mean, given this definition, that the boundaries of reality are constantly expanding?  I suppose so, if you grant the reality of memes.

I remember once consoling someone who was distressed about having experiences she could not convey to others, telling her that she should cherish them as something uniquely her own.

Weird Science, or Keep on Trucking

Today in weird science, Effect of estrogen on mitochondrial function and intracellular stress markers in rat liver and kidney following trauma-hemorrhagic shock and prolonged hypotension.

After major blood loss of 62% of the circulating blood volume, the animals cannot maintain their blood pressure and expire if fluid resuscitation is not provided (8). When a small volume of E2, and not vehicle, was administered after 62% blood loss, the animals not only demonstrated an acute survival during prolonged hypotension (3 hr), but also prolonged survival after fluid resuscitation.

Yes, we can drain 2/3rds of a rat's blood, shoot it full of estrogen, keep it alive for three hours, and then bring it back to life. As they say, "It's alive! Mwahahahaha!"