Thanks for the link to the wikipedia article. However according to wikipedia it's still all based on reviews of the literature which injects some speculation, then it is weighted (more speculation), then finally indexed (even more guessing) so this report is based on A LOT of guessing and meta data and virtually ZERO actual measuring of anything. To re-iterate, maybe it's because I live in Canada, but I've experienced it in Japan, too: if you go for a walk in the wild it is incredible to observe the amount of animal life all around you. Everyone should do this more often so as to feel less horrible about the state of the world. Humans are having an impact for sure, but this is a REALLY big planet and there's room for a lot of life. I do feel that we humans need to make more of an effort to live together at peace with all this other life, and respect it more, but I don't think we need to get all bent out of shape over it. There's a lot of unnecessary FUD on this topic.
If you go to the original article in the Guardian, you then have to click on a link to the World Wildlife Fund which then links to a report from the Zoological Society of London https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/d... which is the ACTUAL study that all this is based on. If you read it you find there is no actual research that definitively counts any species or animals so everything about this is pure speculation. There has been no actual observed decrease. The headline is totally misleading. The actual report simply speculates that there will be decreases due to human behaviour. This is not news. This is not even science. It's simply fear mongering and speculation. In fact if you take the time to read the report it even shows that in some cases human impact is now decreasing year by year, e.g. in world fishing catches. People: please read the source of these stories before making wild comments about statements that are not even based on observable facts. Or better yet: get off your chair and walk into any woods or get out on the sea near you and notice the vast array of life that surrounds you. It's totally astounding. This article is not science. It is hubris. It is humans thinking they are so powerful and wonderful that they can kill every other living thing on the planet. This is totally and completely false. We are just animals like all the rest. Here for a short time and then gone. So read the source and get a grip.
A nanogram is a billionth of a gram. There might be 100 nanograms of plastic in a kilogram of salt according to the scientific paper behind this article. How is this level of contamination, at the nanogram or 100 nanogram (typical) level even a concern? This is probably even far below the normal level of dust in clean air. Human bodies are well adapted to handle this level of contamination in our environment. The human body's systems and biochemical pathways have filters and other mechanisms to remove this level of contamination on a routine basis. This is true for virtually all life forms. Also, "plastic" is most likely polyethylene, polystyrene, or similar simple hydrocarbons. At the level of nanogram sizes these would hardly be polymers, but almost bits of ethylene or styrene. These are NOT toxic compounds. I'm the first person to agree that there is far too much plastic being used on the planet today but these amounts of contamination at nanogram or at best sub microgram levels are not higher than thousands of other contaminants in salt, air, water, or just on your fingers at any given moment. Many of those are more toxic than ethylene. In salt these detected levels of micro plastics are orders of magnitude lower than the anti-caking agents put in salt (.01% maximum by law), or the iodine added to salt for health benefits (0.002% to 0.004%). The micro plastics in the article are at ~.0000001% for comparison according to the original paper referenced by the article. If you are going to worry about this you should go live in a clean room, but even in highest level microchip manufacturing facilities, arguably the cleanest places on Earth you might get this level of contamination. So where can you go to get away from these dreaded contaminants? Space? I bet there are nanogram levels of "dust" in space as well, including ethylene and styrene. This is a non-issue. In fact, given the amount of natural oil seeps and countless simple hydrocarbon sources on this planet, there's probably that much ethylene and styrene in the natural environment without even humans doing anything. For instance, when fruit and vegetables ripen they gives off a lot of ethylene. You are surrounded by these molecules anyway, whether they are in "micro plastics" or other sources. I cannot believe the focus on this total non-problem. As other posters have said: it's more about click-bait than reality.
If you read the abstract of the original paper the typical amount found was on the order of 100 nanograms in 1Kg of salt. To put that in perspective that is 1e-10. That is.00000000001 of a kg. There is probably that amount of pretty much anything you can think of in a kilo of salt. Will it do any harm? Extremely unlikely. This focus on micro plastics is weird. It is meaningless FUD.
Great post and realistic summation. It took me four years just to understand the difference between science and speculation. Much of what passes for science is really speculation and should be taken as such. I.e. fairly useless.
I once had a layover in an airport and ended up having a beer with a random guy at the airport bar. He turned out to be a big shot at the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and he was on his way to Phoenix for a special cop meet up where police from all over the country descend on one city to do a blitz on drunk drivers. I asked him how come there's no such thing as a breathalyzer for marijuana. He was very quick to answer. The NHTSA has of course done plenty of studies on pot-smoking drivers and pot-smokers who have accidents. The fact is: when people smoke pot they drive slower, and usually more cautiously. He said, it's the opposite of alcohol drinkers. The statistics show that very few accidents are caused by pot-smoking. He said that for these reasons they do not focus much attention on pot-smoking drivers.
what is ridiculous is that the so-called "researchers" were on the radio today here in Edmonton, and made the bizarre claim that their system could be converted to deal with terrorism by just programming in terrorist scenarios that their software would then solve...
hello defense spending budget!
Just watched the "Imitation Game" last night, the Alan Turing story and this was basically the fundamental idea of the movie: that Turing would make a machine to foil the Nazis. It worked, and look where we are today.
Surprised nobody has linked to this YouTube video of the thrush in the paper: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Doesn't sound that much different from a lot of other birds that use similar intervals. e.g. Red winged blackbird and chickadee.
One thing I've noticed is that any print magazine you may want can be downloaded from your favourite torrent site in just a few seconds. e.g. here are the latest issues of some popular ones...
http://kickass.to/national-geo...http://kickass.to/the-economis...http://kickass.to/scientific-a...
and of course
http://kickass.to/penthouse-us...
These are pdf files of only a few tens of megabytes and with hundreds sharing new issues hot off the press, they appear almost instantly on your computer. With this going on, who would buy a paper magazine?
NB: these are page for page exact copies of the real print magazine so all the ads are intact. I even wonder if magazine companies are uploading their own publications to sell more ad space based on how many torrented mags are shared. If I was in the magazine business I would do this for sure.
The New Yorker website is quite good, but many of their articles can only be found in the real print magazine. They don't appear online. Plus, there's something *better* about the print version of the New Yorker with its classic very readable three column layout, its well designed typeface, inimitable New Yorker cartoons sprinkled about each issue, and even the tiny little illustrations that dot the articles and follow some clever theme in each issue. I know there's an iPad/Tablet version of the New Yorker (which I have never read) but the print magazine is still pretty nice. And I have not even mentioned the expensive ads.
Since public health is considered a primary good, virtually all advanced nations have some system of medicare whereby citizens get free health care, paid for by tax dollars. If we can agree that communication is a fundamental basic human need--it's what makes us human--then why not provide Communicare as well? Especially today, in the 21st century when for the first time in history global communication has become incredibly cheap thanks to the Internet and wireless telephone technologies. If you eliminate the profit component, which in some cases is 1000 fold (e.g. for text messages), it probably would cost no more than about $100/person/year to provide free telephone and Internet service to every citizen in a country. In fact you can make a philosophical argument that it is fundamentally immoral to profit from the human need to communicate, just as it is immoral to profit from human illness. What is needed is a politician, a champion, someone like the great Tommy Douglas of Canada who brought medicare to all Canadians in the 1960s. I wonder which country will be first to wrestle communications from the relatively small number of for-profit corporations and give it to its citizens for free, or more accurately, for a tiny fraction of their tax dollars. Think how much cheaper it would be than medicare.
Smell receptors are very similar to immune system receptors. They are designed to use combinatorics so that they can "identify" on the order of trillions of different shaped molecules. In fact they are designed to "detect" molecules that have never even been invented. The mathematics of smell combinatorics is what makes it (currently) an intractable problem. Also, I believe we only know what a few of the human smell receptors detect, in terms of molecular shape and smell. It's extremely difficult to conduct experiments on smell--i.e. on how smell receptors work--in human subjects. There are countless problems and this is why smell remains a mystery.
This story is not about *science*. It's about an Art Project. As long as you treat the original post as a fanciful work of art, all is fine. As soon as you assume that anything like that can be created with present day technology you are off in dreamland.
The difference here is that in the early days of photography we knew that light created images, and we knew that lenses refracted light in such a way that we could capture it. We also had silver halide which changed from clear to black on exposure to light. In other words, we had a lot of technologies based on light that we understand. At the moment this simply does not exist for the sense of smell.
Perhaps you are not a chemist. When you say, "You merely want something that smells like them," how do you characterize that smell in the first place? Are you aware that there is no system for doing this today? Smell is not like light or sound, where there is a well understood spectrum of vibrations or frequencies and all you have to do is duplicate those frequencies. Nobody knows what smell is. If we knew that, then "smell photographs", as well as copiers, smell-phones and even "smell glasses" to correct anosmia as we have glasses to correct myopia would exist. But they don't. Why? Because there IS NO SYSTEM TO CLASSIFY SMELLS. Rather, there are dozens of systems and none of them work. A chemist cannot synthesize a molecule and say in advance what it will smell like. They might be able to say, "this will smell fish-like or ammonia-like, or fruity, or floral, but they cannot say: "this will smell exactly like that vase of flowers." This is not possible with today's science. So your response makes no sense. The closest thing we have to this is what is called "head-space analysis", a technique that is VERY expensive and in fact requires a human nose at the end of the gas chromatograph to work. That "nose" does not come cheap. Experts that do this sort of thing are paid very well and there are not many of them in the world. The reason why the flavour and fragrance industry is a multi-billion industry is because none of this is easy. While it would seem that science has figured out smell, in actual fact smell remains one of the bigger mysteries of science. It's pretty much unknown how it works. There are theories, but none of them work to enable chemists to "merely create something that smells like something", to paraphrase your initial conjecture. And "coffee smellers and perfume smellers" don't actually create smells. They take compounds either derived from natural products or synthesized by chemists and combine them in ways that smell correct. By the way: this is an art, and it's VERY VERY hard to do.
This is vapourware. Perhaps pun intended. Imaginative, kind of, but such devices have been predicted since the early 1900s. Never comes to market. Why? Headspace analysis is super expensive. Even the right library of molecular signatures, which would be needed to interpret the output of the GC/Mass Spec is in the neighbourhood of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then you need a really good GC/Mass Spectrometer machine. Or at least a really good Gas Chromatograph. All this is very expensive, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars neighbourhood. And that's JUST TO FIND OUT WHAT MAY BE IN THE SMELL. Then you need a professional perfumer and a perfume house with thousands of fresh organic compounds available to reblend the smell. This is a million dollar project, or at the very least tens of thousands for each "photograph". Prohibitively expensive. I cannot believe a moderator let this one through at slashdot. Oh well.
Voltage Pictures (who are these guys?) are doing the same thing in Canada, according to this article at Torrent Freak. Makes a good read. Basically, in Canada, the ISP Tek Savvy is not standing up to Voltage, however they have delayed proceedings for a month to notify their users. Here's a question for you Slashdotters: if a person removes all evidence of downloaded movies from their computer and denies downloading anything or ever possessing any "pirated" material can they still be found guilty? I know that there may be a record someplace of the bits having transited the Net to a particular IP address, but is this enough for a conviction? If there "is no body", i.e. no "pirated" file as evidence, how can anything be proven? Same for broadcast material? If I "accidentally" capture some radio waves from a private network and watch a pay-for-view show, then the show is over, how can anything be proven that a show was "pirated"?
Actually, to be honest, I totally agree with you and your position. I'm not a luddite and I've used your argument similarly many times with friends. It's interesting that in the end the guy cuts the thing out of his head though. Also, by far the most attractive woman in the episode has no "grain", but she also shows the horrible scar it left, demonstrating what an ordeal it is to get the thing out of you.
...and some people were mistrustful of photography because they thought that cameras could 'steal' their souls, or worried that automobiles traveling faster than 50mph would rip our bodies apart. This is really like saying that 1984 is the "logical conclusion" to the internet and government intervention, when in truth we, as a society, are generally pretty good at voicing concerns, and we're able to deal with and temper those concerns.
I'd certainly agree that there are some major negative side effects of this technology, so in the end I think comments like yours are good to bring up. I still, however, remain pretty hopeful that this is a technology that will have tangible, positive effects on our lives. Eventually.
Well, still: as an exercise, watch the episode. It's a fast torrent download. And then let's discuss.
Try downloading and watching this episode of Black Mirror, "The Entire History of You" (Season 1, Episode 3) in which most people (in a not too distant future) have a 'grain' implanted behind their ear which records everything they do, see or hear. This allows memories to be played back either in front of the person's eyes or on a screen, a process known as a 're-do'. Google Glass feels like the beginning of this, and [spoiler alert] what do you think happens at the end of the episode? You can read the whole synopsis on the Wikipedia page for it.
If you actually go through the slideshow you can see that there's a hell of a lot more involved than just pressing some buttons on an android phone. Among other things "Russian scrapings" on eBay and "Universal Software Radio Peripherals" are mentioned. I guess a very industrious group of engineers could pull this off, but this is not going to be that easy.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the link to the wikipedia article. However according to wikipedia it's still all based on reviews of the literature which injects some speculation, then it is weighted (more speculation), then finally indexed (even more guessing) so this report is based on A LOT of guessing and meta data and virtually ZERO actual measuring of anything. To re-iterate, maybe it's because I live in Canada, but I've experienced it in Japan, too: if you go for a walk in the wild it is incredible to observe the amount of animal life all around you. Everyone should do this more often so as to feel less horrible about the state of the world. Humans are having an impact for sure, but this is a REALLY big planet and there's room for a lot of life. I do feel that we humans need to make more of an effort to live together at peace with all this other life, and respect it more, but I don't think we need to get all bent out of shape over it. There's a lot of unnecessary FUD on this topic.
If you go to the original article in the Guardian, you then have to click on a link to the World Wildlife Fund which then links to a report from the Zoological Society of London https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/d... which is the ACTUAL study that all this is based on. If you read it you find there is no actual research that definitively counts any species or animals so everything about this is pure speculation. There has been no actual observed decrease. The headline is totally misleading. The actual report simply speculates that there will be decreases due to human behaviour. This is not news. This is not even science. It's simply fear mongering and speculation. In fact if you take the time to read the report it even shows that in some cases human impact is now decreasing year by year, e.g. in world fishing catches. People: please read the source of these stories before making wild comments about statements that are not even based on observable facts. Or better yet: get off your chair and walk into any woods or get out on the sea near you and notice the vast array of life that surrounds you. It's totally astounding. This article is not science. It is hubris. It is humans thinking they are so powerful and wonderful that they can kill every other living thing on the planet. This is totally and completely false. We are just animals like all the rest. Here for a short time and then gone. So read the source and get a grip.
A nanogram is a billionth of a gram. There might be 100 nanograms of plastic in a kilogram of salt according to the scientific paper behind this article. How is this level of contamination, at the nanogram or 100 nanogram (typical) level even a concern? This is probably even far below the normal level of dust in clean air. Human bodies are well adapted to handle this level of contamination in our environment. The human body's systems and biochemical pathways have filters and other mechanisms to remove this level of contamination on a routine basis. This is true for virtually all life forms. Also, "plastic" is most likely polyethylene, polystyrene, or similar simple hydrocarbons. At the level of nanogram sizes these would hardly be polymers, but almost bits of ethylene or styrene. These are NOT toxic compounds. I'm the first person to agree that there is far too much plastic being used on the planet today but these amounts of contamination at nanogram or at best sub microgram levels are not higher than thousands of other contaminants in salt, air, water, or just on your fingers at any given moment. Many of those are more toxic than ethylene. In salt these detected levels of micro plastics are orders of magnitude lower than the anti-caking agents put in salt (.01% maximum by law), or the iodine added to salt for health benefits (0.002% to 0.004%). The micro plastics in the article are at ~.0000001% for comparison according to the original paper referenced by the article. If you are going to worry about this you should go live in a clean room, but even in highest level microchip manufacturing facilities, arguably the cleanest places on Earth you might get this level of contamination. So where can you go to get away from these dreaded contaminants? Space? I bet there are nanogram levels of "dust" in space as well, including ethylene and styrene. This is a non-issue. In fact, given the amount of natural oil seeps and countless simple hydrocarbon sources on this planet, there's probably that much ethylene and styrene in the natural environment without even humans doing anything. For instance, when fruit and vegetables ripen they gives off a lot of ethylene. You are surrounded by these molecules anyway, whether they are in "micro plastics" or other sources. I cannot believe the focus on this total non-problem. As other posters have said: it's more about click-bait than reality.
If you read the abstract of the original paper the typical amount found was on the order of 100 nanograms in 1Kg of salt. To put that in perspective that is 1e-10. That is .00000000001 of a kg. There is probably that amount of pretty much anything you can think of in a kilo of salt. Will it do any harm? Extremely unlikely. This focus on micro plastics is weird. It is meaningless FUD.
Great post and realistic summation. It took me four years just to understand the difference between science and speculation. Much of what passes for science is really speculation and should be taken as such. I.e. fairly useless.
Nailed it. Absolutely correct.
That is exactly correct. This LBRY thing is highly suspect.
If she wasn't such a gorgeous babe there would be no story. This is all about eye candy. Not house building.
I once had a layover in an airport and ended up having a beer with a random guy at the airport bar. He turned out to be a big shot at the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and he was on his way to Phoenix for a special cop meet up where police from all over the country descend on one city to do a blitz on drunk drivers. I asked him how come there's no such thing as a breathalyzer for marijuana. He was very quick to answer. The NHTSA has of course done plenty of studies on pot-smoking drivers and pot-smokers who have accidents. The fact is: when people smoke pot they drive slower, and usually more cautiously. He said, it's the opposite of alcohol drinkers. The statistics show that very few accidents are caused by pot-smoking. He said that for these reasons they do not focus much attention on pot-smoking drivers.
what is ridiculous is that the so-called "researchers" were on the radio today here in Edmonton, and made the bizarre claim that their system could be converted to deal with terrorism by just programming in terrorist scenarios that their software would then solve...
hello defense spending budget!
Just watched the "Imitation Game" last night, the Alan Turing story and this was basically the fundamental idea of the movie: that Turing would make a machine to foil the Nazis. It worked, and look where we are today.
Surprised nobody has linked to this YouTube video of the thrush in the paper: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... Doesn't sound that much different from a lot of other birds that use similar intervals. e.g. Red winged blackbird and chickadee.
One thing I've noticed is that any print magazine you may want can be downloaded from your favourite torrent site in just a few seconds. e.g. here are the latest issues of some popular ones... http://kickass.to/national-geo... http://kickass.to/the-economis... http://kickass.to/scientific-a... and of course http://kickass.to/penthouse-us... These are pdf files of only a few tens of megabytes and with hundreds sharing new issues hot off the press, they appear almost instantly on your computer. With this going on, who would buy a paper magazine? NB: these are page for page exact copies of the real print magazine so all the ads are intact. I even wonder if magazine companies are uploading their own publications to sell more ad space based on how many torrented mags are shared. If I was in the magazine business I would do this for sure.
Check out the Fortean Times. "The world of strange phenomena"
The New Yorker website is quite good, but many of their articles can only be found in the real print magazine. They don't appear online. Plus, there's something *better* about the print version of the New Yorker with its classic very readable three column layout, its well designed typeface, inimitable New Yorker cartoons sprinkled about each issue, and even the tiny little illustrations that dot the articles and follow some clever theme in each issue. I know there's an iPad/Tablet version of the New Yorker (which I have never read) but the print magazine is still pretty nice. And I have not even mentioned the expensive ads.
Seriously, the paper does not report on anything like visible light invisibility. That's not what this is. This is a case of misleading labelling.
Since public health is considered a primary good, virtually all advanced nations have some system of medicare whereby citizens get free health care, paid for by tax dollars. If we can agree that communication is a fundamental basic human need--it's what makes us human--then why not provide Communicare as well? Especially today, in the 21st century when for the first time in history global communication has become incredibly cheap thanks to the Internet and wireless telephone technologies. If you eliminate the profit component, which in some cases is 1000 fold (e.g. for text messages), it probably would cost no more than about $100/person/year to provide free telephone and Internet service to every citizen in a country. In fact you can make a philosophical argument that it is fundamentally immoral to profit from the human need to communicate, just as it is immoral to profit from human illness. What is needed is a politician, a champion, someone like the great Tommy Douglas of Canada who brought medicare to all Canadians in the 1960s. I wonder which country will be first to wrestle communications from the relatively small number of for-profit corporations and give it to its citizens for free, or more accurately, for a tiny fraction of their tax dollars. Think how much cheaper it would be than medicare.
Smell receptors are very similar to immune system receptors. They are designed to use combinatorics so that they can "identify" on the order of trillions of different shaped molecules. In fact they are designed to "detect" molecules that have never even been invented. The mathematics of smell combinatorics is what makes it (currently) an intractable problem. Also, I believe we only know what a few of the human smell receptors detect, in terms of molecular shape and smell. It's extremely difficult to conduct experiments on smell--i.e. on how smell receptors work--in human subjects. There are countless problems and this is why smell remains a mystery. This story is not about *science*. It's about an Art Project. As long as you treat the original post as a fanciful work of art, all is fine. As soon as you assume that anything like that can be created with present day technology you are off in dreamland.
The difference here is that in the early days of photography we knew that light created images, and we knew that lenses refracted light in such a way that we could capture it. We also had silver halide which changed from clear to black on exposure to light. In other words, we had a lot of technologies based on light that we understand. At the moment this simply does not exist for the sense of smell.
Perhaps you are not a chemist. When you say, "You merely want something that smells like them," how do you characterize that smell in the first place? Are you aware that there is no system for doing this today? Smell is not like light or sound, where there is a well understood spectrum of vibrations or frequencies and all you have to do is duplicate those frequencies. Nobody knows what smell is. If we knew that, then "smell photographs", as well as copiers, smell-phones and even "smell glasses" to correct anosmia as we have glasses to correct myopia would exist. But they don't. Why? Because there IS NO SYSTEM TO CLASSIFY SMELLS. Rather, there are dozens of systems and none of them work. A chemist cannot synthesize a molecule and say in advance what it will smell like. They might be able to say, "this will smell fish-like or ammonia-like, or fruity, or floral, but they cannot say: "this will smell exactly like that vase of flowers." This is not possible with today's science. So your response makes no sense. The closest thing we have to this is what is called "head-space analysis", a technique that is VERY expensive and in fact requires a human nose at the end of the gas chromatograph to work. That "nose" does not come cheap. Experts that do this sort of thing are paid very well and there are not many of them in the world. The reason why the flavour and fragrance industry is a multi-billion industry is because none of this is easy. While it would seem that science has figured out smell, in actual fact smell remains one of the bigger mysteries of science. It's pretty much unknown how it works. There are theories, but none of them work to enable chemists to "merely create something that smells like something", to paraphrase your initial conjecture. And "coffee smellers and perfume smellers" don't actually create smells. They take compounds either derived from natural products or synthesized by chemists and combine them in ways that smell correct. By the way: this is an art, and it's VERY VERY hard to do.
This is vapourware. Perhaps pun intended. Imaginative, kind of, but such devices have been predicted since the early 1900s. Never comes to market. Why? Headspace analysis is super expensive. Even the right library of molecular signatures, which would be needed to interpret the output of the GC/Mass Spec is in the neighbourhood of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then you need a really good GC/Mass Spectrometer machine. Or at least a really good Gas Chromatograph. All this is very expensive, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars neighbourhood. And that's JUST TO FIND OUT WHAT MAY BE IN THE SMELL. Then you need a professional perfumer and a perfume house with thousands of fresh organic compounds available to reblend the smell. This is a million dollar project, or at the very least tens of thousands for each "photograph". Prohibitively expensive. I cannot believe a moderator let this one through at slashdot. Oh well.
Voltage Pictures (who are these guys?) are doing the same thing in Canada, according to this article at Torrent Freak. Makes a good read. Basically, in Canada, the ISP Tek Savvy is not standing up to Voltage, however they have delayed proceedings for a month to notify their users. Here's a question for you Slashdotters: if a person removes all evidence of downloaded movies from their computer and denies downloading anything or ever possessing any "pirated" material can they still be found guilty? I know that there may be a record someplace of the bits having transited the Net to a particular IP address, but is this enough for a conviction? If there "is no body", i.e. no "pirated" file as evidence, how can anything be proven? Same for broadcast material? If I "accidentally" capture some radio waves from a private network and watch a pay-for-view show, then the show is over, how can anything be proven that a show was "pirated"?
Actually, to be honest, I totally agree with you and your position. I'm not a luddite and I've used your argument similarly many times with friends. It's interesting that in the end the guy cuts the thing out of his head though. Also, by far the most attractive woman in the episode has no "grain", but she also shows the horrible scar it left, demonstrating what an ordeal it is to get the thing out of you.
...and some people were mistrustful of photography because they thought that cameras could 'steal' their souls, or worried that automobiles traveling faster than 50mph would rip our bodies apart. This is really like saying that 1984 is the "logical conclusion" to the internet and government intervention, when in truth we, as a society, are generally pretty good at voicing concerns, and we're able to deal with and temper those concerns.
I'd certainly agree that there are some major negative side effects of this technology, so in the end I think comments like yours are good to bring up. I still, however, remain pretty hopeful that this is a technology that will have tangible, positive effects on our lives. Eventually.
Well, still: as an exercise, watch the episode. It's a fast torrent download. And then let's discuss.
Try downloading and watching this episode of Black Mirror, "The Entire History of You" (Season 1, Episode 3) in which most people (in a not too distant future) have a 'grain' implanted behind their ear which records everything they do, see or hear. This allows memories to be played back either in front of the person's eyes or on a screen, a process known as a 're-do'. Google Glass feels like the beginning of this, and [spoiler alert] what do you think happens at the end of the episode? You can read the whole synopsis on the Wikipedia page for it.
If you actually go through the slideshow you can see that there's a hell of a lot more involved than just pressing some buttons on an android phone. Among other things "Russian scrapings" on eBay and "Universal Software Radio Peripherals" are mentioned. I guess a very industrious group of engineers could pull this off, but this is not going to be that easy.