Home again, home again!

Back from Gainesville, where Shelly is moving next week. We hosted a three-day housewarming party in her new, and still largely bare, apartment. The group sex was a nice touch; I think that’s an excellent way to warm a house.

I finally met Shelly’s new sweetie, and Shelly and I met his other sweeties, which was all good. We took a brief tour of the UF campus with datan0de and femetal, UF graduates the both of them, and played with all the exhibits in the physics building.

I also came back with an injury, which I lay firmly at smoocherie‘s feet. A poi-spinning injury, to be more specific. She has me hooked.

But by far the coolest thing to come out of the weekend was information about a very simple procedure which can give a person a sixth sense, courtesy of Shelly’s new sweetie, who works with giant magnets every day.


I can not express how badly I want this done.

Seriously. The English language does not have the words that can adequately convey how much I want this.

The idea is very simple. An incision is cut in the tip of a finger, and a tiny sliver of magnetized iron [Edit: actually, niobium] encased in silicone is inserted in the slit. The slit is then stitched up around it.

Result: You now have the ability to feel magnetic fields. The handful of people who have done this report they can feel whether or not an electrical wire is live, and even tell that a hard drive is about to fail. They can feel the magnetic field of a transformer on a pole or of a cell phone about to ring, and can sense the field coming from the anti-shoplifting device at a grocery store.

This. Is. So. Fucking. Cool.

Ten minutes, one stitch, and you go from having five senses to having six. Just like that. No shit, if I thought I could do it safely, I’d be tempted to do it to myself. I can not imagine anything more cool, short of, say, having the full-on cyborg gear from The Ghost in the Shell.

And it’s so easy to do. It kind of surprises me that more people don’t want it done.