Josh+Holbrook

= Week 1: Wearable Technology & Augmented Reality =

My topic this week is about wearable technology & augmented reality. Wearable tech and augmented reality are becoming bigger and bigger today and more and more involved in our lives with products such as Google Glass and the newly announced Moto 360 watch by Motorola. I was inspired to write about this topic after seeing how intrusive and always-on the hoverchair displays are. I thought this scene from captured that sentiment best:

http://screenmusings.org/WALL-E/images/WALL-E-363.jpg (I couldn't get the formatting here to work for the images, so I have provided links instead.) // Two men sitting right next to each other having a conversation through their respective screens when they could just turn and talk to each other face to face! //

Clearly, the movie is satirizing modern attitudes and behaviors surrounding today's technology, and in a way WALL-E, released in 2008 (and thus more than several years before the recent explosion in wearable tech), was ahead of it's time by foreseeing what would become of us today, with many of us glued to our smartphones already—and that's not even wearable tech!

http://glass-apps.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/google-glass1.jpg // Google Glass worn by Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google. //

http://genfringe.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/motorolla-smartwatch-moto-360-google-android-wear-05.jpg // The newly announced Moto 360 with some of its capabilities displayed here. //

Google Glass has become so ubiquitous by now that it has given rise to a (I think) humorous neologism: glasshole. A glasshole, according to one definition on UrbanDictionary.com, is "Noun. A person who wears Google Glass and refuses to remove it when directly interacting with other people, private gatherings, or public events. The general belief is that these people are photographing, recording, Googling, and Facebooking the people they're interacting with instead of focusing on the conversation or acting like a human being. In extreme cases this word is directly synonymous with stalker or creeper." The mere fact that such a specific term exists speaks more about the state of affairs today than I ever could.

So ubiquitous is it, that Chris Kluwe in his TED Talk thinks that one day it will be used for sports, specifically football, to give viewer a taste of what it's really like to be there: namely, by using Google Glass on players to stream a first-person view of the game as it happens. media type="custom" key="26027432"

And here's the fantastic promo video for the very cool Moto 360 watch: media type="custom" key="26027602"

I think wearable technology will be huge, starting now and really taking off within the next 5 years. I predict that most Americans will have something like the Moto 360 on their wrists within the next 10 years.

= Week 2: Tardigrades =  Tardigrades (also known as water bears) are water-dwelling, segmented, micro-animals, with eight legs. Tardigrades are really cool because they are extremophiles: organisms that thrive in usually extremely inhospitable conditions. Tardigrades can survive: temperatures from -272 °C (~1 degree above absolute zero or -458 °F) to 151 °C (304 °F), pressures ranging from a complete vacuum to 6,000 atmospheres, being in a dehydrated state for 10 years, and doses of radiation 1,000 times higher than other animals can stand. Tardigrades are also the first known animal that can live in outer space.

I got to thinking about tardigrades after cataloging the macroinvertebrates from Robbins Park. While not macroinvertebrates, they are still very interesting.

Facts about tardigrades:
 * Tardigrades are usually about 0.5 mm long when fully grown, although some can be as large as 1.5 mm.
 * Tardigrades were first described in 1773, and were later given the name Tardigrada (meaning "slow stepper") by an Italian biologist.
 * To date, over 1,150 tardigrade species have been identified.
 * Tardigrades are ubiquitous, and have been found almost everywhere in nature, but most notably in places including: hot springs, on top of the Himalayas, under layers of solid ice, and in ocean sediments.
 * Tardigrades form the phylum Tardigrada, part of the superphylum Ecdysozoa.
 * When in their cryptobiotic state, the tardigrade is known as a tun.

media type="custom" key="26114380" // A video about tardigrades featuring naturalist Charles Shaw. //

= Week 3: Limb-lengthening Surgery = This week in class we discussed whether or not it would be ethical to use gene therapy to make yourself taller or for other aesthetic purposes. I compared it to mainstream plastic surgery today, which can be used to radically alter your appearance, but cannot make you taller. I wondered if it was possible to make yourself taller with something else, and found **limb-lengthening** **surgery**.

Limb-lengthening surgery is a procedure where the patient's limbs (usually the tibia and fibula) are carefully broken and pins are inserted into the top and bottom of the bones that are part of a special device that increases the space between the top and bottom pins very gradually, usually only by 1 millimeter a day. The bones are extended in length at a rate slow enough so that new bone continues to grow, but fast enough that it does not heal entirely. The process is notoriously painful, and lasts 6-12 months. Most patients can only have their height extended by a few inches, but some have gotten up to 6! The risky procedure, which has a high rate of complications (including infection), used to be reserved for those with one limb being longer than the other or those with dwarfism, but now more and more people are turning to it for purely cosmetic reasons. Most who elect to have the surgery from the US fly abroad, where it is cheaper.

I think that limb-lengthening surgery is a great option for those affected by such things as having one leg being longer than the other, but I find it troubling how many people get it because they are insecure about their height. I would wholly support gene therapy for height as an alternative to this.





//One success story. This man added six inches to his height.//