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September Is Cyborg Month

Posted by timothy on from the please-participate-in-the-form-of-a-bot dept.

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."

4 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. say what again? by frovingslosh · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?

    --
    I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
    1. Re:say what again? by Snowmit · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      I have a lot of opinions about Cyborgs and Architects
  2. Some of us are by dazedNconfuzed · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).

    --
    Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
  3. Re:Interesting premise, but flawed arguments by rpresser · · Score: 3, Informative
    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.