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Steven Pinker and SWAMP are really interested in Phineous Gage, who suffered from a railway spike passing through his brain, he didnt die, but his personality changed for the worse. This runs counter to the idea of the noble savage.

Matt and Doug from SWAMP talked about  Vladimir Vernadsky and the noosphere. The theory that humans have been extended by technology.

However, now we have technology based diseases.

Metahuman is the now, the reach of the internet, satellite networks. Technology that uses people without much concideration of the humans. In the conflict between Metahuman vs Human,the Metahuman corporation often wins.

Walmartathon, 24hrs in a walmart consuming. The idea of the corporate organism and by doing this action they are interrogating the metaorganism.

spore1.1, 2004
SWAMP seeks to kill a rubbertree plant from home depot (with its garanteed money back offer), it is fed by the homedepot stock value, if it goes up, then it gets watered. During a bull market the plant died because of too much water, after enron the plant died because of too little. From this they worked out that this simple system was too likely to go to extremes as it was based on a single variable. In real life, multiple factors keep organism

Douglas Easterly at the Biofi workshop. Here he is holding an arduino and explaining how great   microcontrollers are.

I am attending the Bio-Fi workshop at Republica Polytechnica in Singapore, run by Doug, Matt and Kathrine from swamp.nu

During the workshop we are learning about php and how it can be used for data scraping (e.g. maybe we want to get the pollution/particulate value for a LA highway from the pollution website).

What do we want to do with that?

Well……we can use it to activate an arduino board. The arduino can drive a simple transmitter that talks to a Bio-Fi module. This module is attached to a essential oil vapouriser…. Cool!

Di Ball has a picture of the back of my head at the workshop here.