Very extreme human behaviors …
It is often very startling these days to see someone who has made the choice to alter their physical appearance in an extreme way. Or at least what I might have thought was extreme. I want to be clear that I am not against this, or for this … just sometimes caught off guard by what people do. Tatoos and body piercing are now being seen everywhere, with much of it very interesting and subtle. But every now and then I see someone and think “Wow, I wonder why they chose to tatoo their entire face?”, or “Man, having that many piercings on your face must have hurt!” The extremes that we are seeing in society only continue to grow and get … well … more extreme.

A number of years ago, a friend and I were following many of the Idea Futures claims years ago, and there was one that we found interesting. The specific claim was written in February of 1995 and stated that “By the year 2010 cosmetic surgery to alter the “natural” appearance of human beings will become fashionable.” and this is looking like incredible foresight. (No pun intended!)

The article that is linked below will be extremely disturbing to some people, and I recommend reading the warning below and understanding that he is very serious. I spent some time last night looking through these links and reading some of the articles … and seeing pictures that left me stunned. I had no idea the extent that people are pursuing “Extreme Body Modification”. It goes well beyond anything that I would have imagined. What is interesting to me is that the prediction was made in 1995 … less than 10 years ago … and we are – in my opinion – well beyond what the original claim was based on.

We live in a very wild world …

Extreme Body Modification. Warning: this story contains disturbing, graphical and un-worksafe links. Click them with caution. Superficial body modification has become, to a certain extent, acceptable and mainstream. While tattoos and body piercings were once markings of outsiders and special subcultures, celebrities and the public now display them as the latest fashion accessory (although they can still damage your employment prospects). It is clear that such modifications have become commodified and are no longer regarded as deviant, but merely as another consumer item. However many subcultures still exist that take the idea of body modification to extremes. Genital removal and limb amputation are examples of the hardcore, permanent body modification that members of these subcultures aspire to. These practices go far beyond the bounds of what society deems as acceptable body modification. While the mainstream may view this behaviour with revulsion and bafflement, it raises the interesting question of what is and what is not acceptable body modification in today’s liberal society. [kuro5hin.org]

Good intentions with bad results …
I was listening to NPR yesterday and they were covering the recent events in Bolivia. The specific segment was about Indians that live up in the mountains, and their current situation. The reporter talked about the various recent events that have further damaged the economic conditions of the Indians.

The one comment that really hit me was that a large number of local textile plants have closed down recently, limiting the opportunities for work. And why did these plants close down? The reporter indicated that it was due to the tremendous influx of “used clothing” being donated from the United States!

So with all of the “good intentions” that we have as Americans by giving away our “used” possessions, it seems that we are creating some very bad results … putting companies in these countries out of business. I would have never thought about this as a possibility … and obviously the people donating their clothing and other possessions have not thought about this either.

The world is often far more complex than than people think … and we often over look the possible consequences of our actions.

RSS – Expanding the world of publish/subscribe …
I love to see articles like the one below. It shows the growing trend for publishers to utilize formats like RSS to increase the effectiveness and useability of their content. In my opinion, this is only going to increase due to the readers beginning to learn the value of the various “news aggregator” software that is available. At Vultus we are working on a variety of applications that allow a user to monitor RSS feeds for news. We deployed a simple one that monitors Slashdot on our demo web site – scroll down and look at SlashMon.

I am in the midst of putting together a presentatiuon for more of these publications that outlines the true value of RSS as a publish/subscribe mechanism. As publications learn that they can have RSS feeds for their headlines, for specific topic areas, and for individual writers, they will see that they are then providing a more customizable resource that will attract – and keep – readers interested. There are numerous sites that offer RSS feeds … but few of them offer the diversity of feeds necessary to really get things rolling. But it is coming.

All of this relates to a new generation, or classification, of software that I call HumaNueral. When software automates a process that allows a human to operate in a neural fashion … that is HumaNeural. Two core software technologies are combining to provide this solution – news aggregators and blogging.

News Aggregators – tapping into RSS feeds – allow me to receive news articles or blog posts – “signals” – from a wide range of sources. Reading all of this content allows me to then synthesize my own ideas and memes and then write my own “news” to my various blog channels. Blogging is the means by which I generate my outbound RSS feeds that others can tap into. I subscribe to the “meme streams” that I choose to monitor, and then generate my own outbound “meme streams” …

Collaborative software that is architected around this HumaNeural architecture – a form of biomimicry – is one of my core fields of interest for the last several years. More announcements like this indicate it is coming!

Computerworld has ten new RSS feeds. If you’re a Radio user, be sure to get the nifty RSS Explorer tool, and then click here to choose the Computerworld feeds you’d like to subscribe to. It’s a pretty nerdy pub, but they can probably tell you what IBM is up to and Unix and wireless stuff, and Microsoft. [Scripting News]