NBC 2009July12

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Cyborg Meeting Minutes, July 12, 2009[edit]


David Allen - vertical northpaw, website for sensebridge

Mikolaj - compass belt, soon a new project

Mike - with Rachel on the eyes in the back of the back, hasn't done much recently though

Eric - northpaw, pulse choker, echolocation kit

Jorgen - new here, saw article on compass belt

Jsk - programming on the go, code too text based

Chung-Hay - pulse choker

Rachel - eyes in the back of the back


Working MyVu Personal Media Viewer, with input from David's iPod

Some people tried on the North Paw

People played with the pulse watch

Discussion on Echo Location Kit

Long discussion about North Paw kits.

Shocking Ourselves for Science[edit]


Mikolaj brought some electrodes - 3M Red Dotmonitoring electrode with foam tape and sticky gel. They are pretty cheap - you can get 100 on eBay for $19. We hooked them up to freqency generator (max 10V), but that wasn't feelable. Then we used DC power supply (up to 50V), and it's shocking at about 30V, totally feelable at 20V once you've created the circuit through your skin once. Current flow was between 1mA and 10mA. We hacked up a transformer which steps up the voltage to peak 30V (therefore about a 3x step up). It's feel-able with less voltage (down to maybe 12V for sensitive people, other people needed 20V or more), and the current flow is under a mA, therefore the power usage is <15mW, which is pretty awesome.

The Extended Nose Experiment[edit]

From page 59-60 of the "Natural Born Cyborgs" book by Andy Clark, there is an experiment involving nose tapping, which is supposed to result in the blindfolded subject feeling like their nose is 2 feet long. After trying 3 different experimental methods (instructions are not only confusing, but actually improper, specifying the wrong person doing the actions), we did succeed in feeling like we were tapping our own nose, but our noses did not feel longer.

Final procedure: two chairs, facing the same direction. Blindfolded subject sits behind a volunteer. A friend (the scientist) takes the subjects hand, and uses that control to make their finger tap the nose of the person in front of them. At the same time, the scientist taps his own finger against the subjects nose. The scientist should synchronize and randomize the taps he is generating. Repeating myself in a slightly different way, the subject should feel (a) their nose being tapped by the scientists finger and (b) their own finger being made to tap the nose of the person seated in front of them. Subjectively, the subject hopefully experiences a sensation that they are tapping their own nose. And their nose is supposed to therefore feel about 2 feet long, but in practice none of the four of us experienced that.

Some Links[edit]

North Paw Notes from Quinn

Audio (stereo, 3D position) Compass output

Cheap TENS unit drivers