Check it out for a robber-baron Jabba, a Confederate Vader, a Victorian Boba Fett, and a monocled-Chewie…

Later.

Apparently I’m Canadian.

Coupling this concept with the realities of HTML/CSS, licenced images, web typography, and embeddable web fonts should yield a new web (maybe even 3.0) in which the web switches format to a scrollable magazine.  I have to say this is an attractive concept to me because some of the things I’m working on would function better in book form but would be effectively obsolete if I tried to do things that way.

It’s also attractive to me in that it’s flashy without using Flash.

Sure, the iPad would work great for this, but at the same time so would every other computer and monitor on the market.

So, back when people read books, fantasy novels had a nasty habit of laying out a few pages of maps at their beginnings.  While useful in helping the reader visualize the world, I’m thinking they were more to establish a history and life of the world in the author’s head.  After that’s established, you have these maps and histories kicking around so why not publish them?

See also: every Tolkien book that isn’t The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit.

You done?

Isn’t that amazing? That right there could be my future line of work. Fantastic.

It’s something I’ve been sitting on for months, truthfully, but never quite found the right way or cause to say, but after a recent trip to Copper & Blue resulted in a front page filled entirely with goalie posts, I finally hit my breaking point. I then sat on it a couple of weeks more, to make sure I wasn’t being irrational, but nope, I still feel strongly about this.

The horrible truth is, I just don’t care about the offseason.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy playing armchair GM/coach in the weeks before and after free agency as much as the next fan, and like most fans, I have my opinions about who I’d like to see in my club’s uniform next season, and how they might slot in. But somewhere around the nineteenth consecutive argument about Nikolai Khabibulin vs. Martin Biron, I realized that none of it mattered anyway, because let’s face it: the Oilers haven’t played a game that counted in four and a half months, and are at least seven weeks away from doing so again. They play the games on the ice for a reason, and I’m not going to drive myself nuts over what might happen, nor am I going to start throwing out predictions in mid-August, or worrying about what last year’s seventh-rounder is up to these days (though, if I had to guess, he’s probably douching it up in another rec league, because that’s how he rolls). Instead, I’m going to persue some of my other passions. One of them is video games, as previously discussed at length on this site, but another, one which I intend to make my career, is prosthetics.

The article that sealed it for me was this one, from the January 2009 issue of IEEE Spectrum, which got heavily into the DARPA Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, designed to take the crude hook-and-clamp arm prostheses that we’ve been giving people for nearly a century and bringing them into the 21^st century. For the past four years or so, dozens of researchers, including former Army engineer Jonathan Kuniholm, now of Duke, and Dean Kamen, the famous inventor of the Segway, have been taking different approaches to design, control, and feedback to try to create a more realistic robotic arm, and the results have been astounding. This video, from last February, shows Kamen’s arm in lab tests with a 27-year amputee:

[pro-player]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0_mLumx-6Y[/pro-player]

I saw another video just the other day that showed the subject in his home with the arm, but damned if I can find it now. The most recent thing a quick search turned up is this article, which reports that the arm was in trials as of two months ago. If I track it down, I’ll add it to the post.

Another thing in that article that caught my attention was a new way of enhancing training for amputees using the arm. It seems a little cheesy at first, but it’s intuitive, when you stop and think about it. What better way to get people to flex and relax their fingers in sequence, and get used to doing that, than to get them playing Guitar Hero?

[pro-player]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsofO6Q0Bz4[/pro-player]

Kuniholm, as it turns out, is an advocate of taking prosthetics open-source once the DARPA project runs out at the end of this year. In his article, he talks about some of the hurdles that his open-source initiative has faced, including trademark and compatibility concerns, and they’re not insignificant problems by any stretch, but the ideal behind it is one that I’m in full support of.  An open-source prosthetics hub would make it much easier for, say, a graduate student in engineering or biomechanics to get deep into the designs and concepts and produce something new and interesting. Anything that makes it easier to innovate and get involved is something that interests me, because frankly, I’m not entirely sure where to go next, once I finish my biomechanics degree.

Which brings me to the last thing that got me excited. In the January article, one of the many new technologies discussed is the rewiring of the nerves in the pectoralis muscles, to send and receive signals from the robotic arm. The upshot of this is not only improved control for whole-arm amputees, but the ability to actually receive some rudimentary form of feedback, both in terms of pressure (to prevent the arm from crushing delicate objects, like a grape or an egg) and in terms of temperature, something an able-bodied person tends to take for granted. The article goes on to mention that there’s already one place that’s starting to adapt this technique for their patients: the Glenrose Rehabilitation Centre in Edmonton, which compared to places like MacMaster or Duke, is just down the road from me here in Calgary. I’ve been meaning to email them since, well, January, but I’ve been busy with work and other things, and have never really gotten around to it. It’s something I intend to do before the summer’s out, because I’d like some sense of what I need to do in order to make this a career.

Robotics is something that’s fascinated me since childhood, and every time I read a new article or watch a new video, I get all excited. Actually, I was partially inspired to finally talk a little about it when Ender sent me this link, from an old Occam’s Beard article.  I can’t imagine this is really interesting to too many people other than me, but it’s something that’s preoccupied me over the course of the summer, and since there’s not really much going on with the Oilers or Canadiens, and nothing intelligent I can say about what’s going on in Chicago, Phoenix, and Long Island, I figure I might as well share something different about myself, to help pass the time until the real hockey starts again.