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

Sept 18

[sohp]

September is Cyborg month, and the 18th is Talk Like a Pirate Day. What does that mean?

http://zenisstupid.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/cyborg-pirate-ninja-jesus.jpg

Re:Sept 18

[The Clockwork Troll]

If you miss Cyborg September this go-around, don't worry, it'll be back.

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.

Interesting premise, but flawed arguments

[swillden]

The idea is interesting, and it's certainly true that if all technology were removed, including stone and bone implements, humans would have a much tougher time surviving. But there are areas of the world where we could survive without handmade weapons or fire. We're not very well-equipped for such an existence, but we're not completely helpless.

One argument the author makes repeatedly which makes no sense to me is the notion that cooking provides an "external stomach" which pre-digests our food. There are some foods that are unsafe to eat without being cooked, because of disease that they could be carrying, but in general very little of what we eat MUST be cooked, or is even harder to digest without cooking. Raw meat is just as nutritious and as easily digestible as cooked meat, it just doesn't taste as good (with some exceptions). Raw vegetables are often more nutritious than cooked vegetables.

There's no argument that if we were to have all technology/tools removed and even lose our ability to create primitive tools the human carrying capacity of the earth would be at most a few million, maybe only a few hundred thousand. So I guess you could say that 99.99% of us are "cyborgs".

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.

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!

[Master of Transhuman]

No, no, no.

A Terminator is NOT a cyborg. A cyborg is an ORGANISM which has been ENHANCED or even REPLACED by cybernetic machinery. The key is that the original entity was a living biologically based organism.

A Terminator is merely a ROBOT covered by an organic covering. The covering is no more significant than if the robot were just wearing clothes. It's just covering. The machine underneath is not a living organism and never was.

Just because James Cameron doesn't know his technology, the word cyborg has been debased beyond all recognition. It's probably a waste of time to try to correct it any more, but I like wasting my time.

This is the only cyborg I care about

[Master of Transhuman]

When they start looking like this, email me.

http://blog.hdscreencaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/summer_glau_0002.jpg/

http://usemycomputer.com/indeximages/2009/May/SummerGlauTerminatorSecondSeasonMay2009114.jpg/

http://www.wallpaperweb.org/wallpaper/babes/1920x1200/summer_glau_20090725_0161.jpg/

http://www.wallpaperweb.org/wallpaper/babes/1280x800/summer_glau_20091211_2158_1280x800.jpg/