September Is Cyborg Month

Snowmit writes "In May 1960, Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline presented a paper called 'Drugs, Space, and Cybernetics.' The proceedings of the symposium were published in 1961, but, before that, an excerpt of Clynes & Kline's paper appeared in the September issue of Astronautics magazine (issue 13), entitled Cyborgs and Space [PDF]. Aside from a mention in the New York Times, that's is the first time the word appears in print. This month is the 50th anniversary of that article. To commemorate, a group of writers and artists have gotten together to create 50 Post About Cyborgs. Over the course of the month, there will be essays, fiction, links to great older material, comics, and even a song. We're going to talk about Daleks, IEDs, Renaissance memory palaces, chess computers, prosthetic imagination, Videodrome, mutants, sports, and maybe the Bible. To kick things off, Kevin Kelly wrote this essay arguing that we've been cyborgs all along."

Comments

say what again?

[frovingslosh]

Aside from a mention in the New York Times, that's is the first time the word appears in print.

So the point is to celebrate the second time that the term was used?

Re:say what again?

[Snowmit]

The mention in the NYT is a reporter reporting on the talk that Clynes and Kline gave. So yeah, I figured the one where they actually publicly define the term would be the better anniversary.

Some of us are

[dazedNconfuzed]

For all the sci-fi fantasy and the "we all are" cyborg nonsense, some of us living among you ARE cyborgs. Maybe not as exciting as a Borgified Picard, but without computer implants and mechanical augmentation we wouldn't be alive (and some have advantages as a result).

Re:Cybauorg!

[MRe_nl]

Ah, whether the basic part is built or born.

I'm pretty sure that "to create a new word" is "to coin a phrase" and not "to qoin a phrase",
as in "minting a new coin". Unless of course "qoined" was in fact the new word you were creating ; ).

Re:Interesting premise, but flawed arguments

[rpresser]

The potato in the human diet, By Jennifer A. Woolfe, Susan V. Poats, International Potato Center, p 104.

The major part of potato carbohydrate is present as starch. The digestibility of cooked and uncooked starches from various foods including potato has been reviewed by Dreher et al. (1984), who placed potato starch in the group of least digestible food starches. There have been various experiments in which raw potato starch was fed to humans and caused symptoms such as violent stomach cramps (McCay et al., 1975), and such preparations cause caecal hyperotrophy and death in rats (El-Harith et al., 1976). The latter effects were subsequently attributed to the resistance of potato starch to digestion by pancreatic amylase (Walker & El-Harith, 1978), and were lost when the starch was gelatinized.

Cooking either peeled or unpeeled potatoes increases the digestibility of potato starch. The results of a study in vitro with pancreatic amylase into the effects of cooking potatoes on starch digestibility (Hellendoorn et al., 1970) are shown in Figure 4.5. Raw starch was barely digested; partly cooked starch from potatoes heated in water at 70 C for 20 min and cooled immediately was incompletely digestible, and the digestibility of the starch increased with cooking time.

Re:Interesting premise, but flawed arguments

[swillden]

Finally, cooking meat can render it safer by killing bacteria; the digestibility of the tissues is not of much concern to someone dying from trichinosis.

Certainly. I mentioned in my original post that some foods need to be cooked in order to be safe to eat.

Re:Cybauorg!

[Snowmit]

You might be pleased to know that there's a contribution in the pipeline that will argue along these lines.

Life is based on cybernetics ...

[Ihlosi]

... in its original meaning (the science of regulatory systems). Without reacting to external stimuli and changing it s internal and sometimes external environment towards more favorable conditions, life would not exist.

Cybernetics is about mechanical/electronic devices just like astronomy is about telescopes.