Tag Archives: mad science

Sex for Science! Chapter 2: Orgasms and Striped Socks

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Sex for Science! Chapter 0
Sex for Science! Chapter 1
Sex for Science! Interlude
Sex for Science! Chapter 2
Sex for Science! Chapter 3
Sex for Science! Chapter 4

Apparently, I have a thing for striped socks.

I’ve never realized this before. I don’t know if it’s a new thing, this thing for striped socks, or if it’s just been lurking there in some far corner of my brain, latent, awaiting the day when the whims of fashion would free it from its dark, lonely cerebral cage.

Once lapis-lazuli had departed back for San Francisco, with its cold and its fog and its hypothetical approach to traffic control, we started getting serious about doing some brain scans for Science. My fellow mad scientist who’d contacted me on Twitter and I began proposing dates and experimental protocols, and I started casting out feelers (as one is wont to do) for some victims experimental volunteers willing to be rigged up to an EEG and sexually stimulated for Science.

One of the places I inserted a feeler happened to be one of the local poly groups, because hey, we all know that polyamorous people are easy to talk into being experimental subjects, right? It kinda goes with the territory. Once you’ve cast monogamy to the wind, it’s a long and slippery downhill slide, and the next thing you know, you’re in some seedy motel in Seattle being hooked up to experimental equipment and–

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We picked a date, and I made an announcement at one of the poly groups I attend about searching for volunteers for a bit of kinky mad science. A new couple, recent imports from Australia, had decided to attend that particular meeting, and they both signed up with enthusiasm.

I like folks who’re not only not put off by that sort of thing, but are willing to say “Sure! I’d love to head off to a different city with a bunch of folks I’ve only just met and engage in sex acts while being monitored by brain-scanning equipment!”

When the appointed day arrived, zaiah and I set out to pick up our Aussie volunteer lab rats and head off toward Seattle.

We had previously reserved a suite in a motel in downtown Seattle, carefully chosen for its location just blocks from where the EEG machine we were intending to use was stored. The EEG in question had recently been purchased by one of zaiah‘s sweeties and transported to a space in Seattle’s industrial district, and as it was large and cumbersome and heavy and quite delicate, we didn’t want to move it very far.

As it turned out, that wasn’t an issue, though again I’m getting ahead of myself.

What we didn’t realize, when we reserved the suite, was that it was in The Worst Motel In Seattle. And I say that with confidence, even having not personally visited every motel in Seattle, simply because it would be impossible for any motel to be worse without actually being under active NATO artillery bombardment.

The Web site, with its carefully retouched photos, promised us a stove and refrigerator in our suite. What it didn’t mention is that the stove would have had its burners and most of its guts stolen by previous tenants, nor that the refrigerator would not actually work. When we arrived, there was no power to the room; the office switched on the power about five minutes after we checked in.

The Web site also didn’t tell us about the mural.

Dear sweet Jesus on a pogo stick, the mural. It would have been considered tacky by 1977 standards, and that’s no lie.

The suite also featured such amenities, testifying to a careful attention to detail overlooked by more pedestrian sleazy motels, as a fist-sized hole in the door separating the front room from the bedroom, and a bullet hole in one of the windows:

The only thing the motel staff didn’t think to provide us with that might have completed the experience was a sniper on the rooftop across the alley.

Setting up for the experiment itself turned out to be a bit problematic. I brought volunteers and lab jackets, but unfortunately, the EEG itself had, upon inspection, turned out to have been damaged when it was transported to the place where it was being stored. My erstwhile mad scientist partner had spent the entire night attempting to repair it, only to discover that the programming manual for it had somehow gone AWOL as well.

All was not lost, however. It just so happened that with an Arduino and a toy MindFlex game, it’s possible to rig up a crude but still effective (at least for my purposes) EEG. The MindFlex toy uses a Neurosky chip, which seemed fitting, as the experiment had gone full circle and come home to roost, or something like that. The Arduino/MindFlex combination is pretty close to what I intended to use for a brainwave-controlled sex toy, so while it was less than perfectly ideal to my fellow mad scientist, it was ideal for my own nefarious purposes.

At least the nefarious purposes involving sex toys and EEGs. I have other nefarious purposes, at least one of which involves commandeering an alien armada of space battleships…but I digress.

Technical difficulty resolved, I finally met my partner in mad science in the flesh for the first time:

I paused long enough to admire her fabulous striped socks (about which more later) and she paused long enough to admire our fabulous motel suite, and we were ready to start with the Science.

I’m still not quite sure which was more fun, being the experimenter or being one of the lab rats volunteers. But that will have to wait for the next chapter, which is the good bit and has kinky sex in it.

The Mathematics of Sex Toys, Revisited

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Quite some time ago, I wrote a post about the Most Annoying Sex Toy Ever, a hypothetical wearable vibrator that would run in an irregular pattern that the wearer could never get used to, but which also would not get the wearer off.

Lately I’ve been playing with an Arduino programmable board, and I’ve come one step closer to achieving that goal! This is a prototype of an annoying vibrator that’s intended to frustrate the user but not get the user off. I’ll post more about it later, but for now here’s a teaser.

Interestingly, someone else who’s read my previous post has written an Arduino program to do sine wave mixing the way I talked about in my earlier post, though the Arduino software I’ve written works a bit differently. The software I’ve written delays for a random time between 15 seconds and a minute and a half, then randomly chooses a pattern to run the vibe in. Each pattern has random variability baked into it, so whoever is wearing it can’t identify the pattern when it starts.

Once the prototype is tested and made more portable (it doesn’t have to be tethered to the laptop to work, just to upload the software to the Arduino board), I’ll probably be posting schematics and software. Stay tuned!

I really, really love being me.

Tandoori! For SCIENCE!

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The time for mad science is upon us! After a couple of weeks of herding cats, it is time to take the first step toward my plans for world domination through brainwave-controlled sex.

Tomorrow, we head off to Seattle, where we will spend the day hooking folks up to an EEG machine, getting them sexually aroused, and seeing if it results in a measurable, quantifiable change in observable brainwave patterns.

If the answer is “yes,” the next step will be to see whether or not a Neurosky EEG chip can be programmed to spot that change; and if the answer to that question is “yes,” then the next step after that is to see if it’s possible to make a vibrator that can be controlled by thought.

Well, kind of. A vibrator that responds to arousal state, more precisely, but close enough.

And then, world domination!

Though not the kind Steve Jobs approves of. During the process of trying to work out transporting the EEG machine from the place where it’s stored to the place where the mad science will be occurring, my iPhone made some…interesting word substitutions.

The Mathematics of Sex Toys…

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…in which we learn just how big a stinker Franklin is.

Okay. So. Long story behind it, but I have on my balcony a large Tupperware container filled with sex toys. Vibrating eggs, to be exact. At one point, I had about 250 of them. I keep giving them away to people (in fact, I’ve been known to refuse to let guests leave the house unless they take one with them), and now I’m down to about 20.

Which is still a lot of vibrators, just for the record.

Some time ago, I read online about a guy who’d taken a vibrator and connected it to a Basic Stamp–think “little tiny computer on a single chip”–that he had programmed to switch the vibrator on and off at random intervals. The idea, you see, was to play with a quirk of human physiology.

Quick dissertation about human anatomy: The way our sensory nerves work, if you present the same stimulus to the same part of the body without varying it, eventually, your sensory nerves will quit responding to it. Take a toothpick and put it on your palm; you’ll be able to feel it. Leave it there long enough without moving it or your hand and eventually you’ll stop feeling it.

The sexual organs are no different than any other organ in this regard. Flip side of the same coin, if you vary the stimulation presented to a sensory nerve, it’ll keep informing your brain “Hey! The stimulus has changed!” and you won’t be able to ignore it.

Now, this guy had programmed his Basic Stamp to switch a vibrator on and off at random, but fairly short, intervals. The idea was to create an infuriating sex toy–a sex toy that, when you wear it, you absolutely can not ignore. Because the stimulation is random, you don’t become acclimatized to it–and if it switches on and off quickly enough, it also doesn’t stay on long enough to get you off. So basically, he created a sex toy that will make sure you always pay attention to it but won’t make you come.

If you draw a graph of the way the sex toyy switches on and off, you get something like this:

There’s vibration, then no vibration, then vibration, then no vibration, for randomly varying periods of time:
bzzzzz….bzz………bzzzzzzzzzz..bzzz……bzzzzz… you get the idea.

Now, that’s good and all, but the vibrators I have are equipped with a little thumbwheel speed control. When one of my partners is foolish enough to put me in charge of the control pack for one of these things, I like to run my thumb up and down the speed wheel thingy, making the vibrator go FASTER and slower and FASTER and slower.

So I started thinking, why not program a computer to run the vibrator for random times at random speeds? From there, I started thinking about how to actually code for that.

Now, it seemed to me, as I was thinking about it on the bus on my way down to Tallahassee, that the most obvious way to go about this is to take a bunch of sine waves and put them together. One can construct a waveform of nearly arbitrary complexity by merging together sine waves of different frequencies, via a mathematical bit of wizardry called a fast Fourier transform.

For example, suppose we have something like this:

The sum of the red sine wave and the blue wave (which is itself a composite of three sine waves) looks a bit like this:

Now, feed that into a vibrator and it should keep a person infuriatingly close to orgasm without letting her get off or ignore the vibrator just about indefinitely.

The thing is, you want a wave that looks random. Any composite of a finite number of sine waves will be periodic (that is, at some point it will start to repeat), so you want something that looks random and also has a long periodicity. I was thinking about how to choose a relatively small number of sine waves–say, sixteen or so–in such a way as to maximize the periodicity and also maximize the apparent randomness when combining them with an FFT. Make the ratios of their periods prime? Stuff like that?

I was hampered somewhat by the fact that I also know fuck-all about how to actually do an FFT, too, which means that basically I know squat about the best way to go about choosing the sine waves.

Shelly’s dating a physicist, though. And he took one look at the problem and observed that a fast Fourier transform isn’t really necessary; it’s using an anti-aircraft cannon on a mosquito.

His idea, which is brilliant, is this:

Take a sine wave whose period is the interval of time over which you don’t want the pattern of the vibrator to repeat. Add it to itself with a period of double that, and add it to itself with a period of three times that, and again with a period of five times that. (Geeky readers will already see where this is going: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5… is the Fibonacci sequence.)

You don’t need very many sine waves to get a right royal (and therefore random-looking) mess.

So, in theory, it will be remarkably simple to make The World’s Most Annoying Sex Toy(tm). A little bit of simple programming and some kind of variable interface and the result should be a vibrator that will drive the wearer right straight up the fucking wall for hours, with no relief in sight.

I am such a stinker.

Fortunately, the world is saved by the mere fact that I don’t at the moment have time to actually build one of these. Yet.