Frames, floating floors, and foul language

I spent an entire day (10 AM to 8:30 PM, with brief breaks for lunch and dinner) last weekend with a few friends, attempting to build a shed.  This was one of those prefab things that comes, disassembled, in boxes.  Each piece had a part number stamped on it, which we only found out after a rain shower was printed in water-soluble ink.  The instructions were in English.  Well, okay, at least the words were English.  The syntax of the instructions leads me to speculate that they were originally written in Hindi, and then translated into English by an elderly woman in Bangalore whose knowledge of English came entirely from watching One Life To Live on satellite TV.  It featured sentences like this:

"For to lining up the grommet flange (part number 9067) with the anterior gasket housing (part number 2134), make nice sure that corners balance!  Especially.  And the left plumb socket (part number 8660) shouldn't be in front of the ridge cap vent (part number 1852)!   For connecting with three very nice #12 bolts behind lock washers and acorn nuts, start from outside and working your way in."

Another fun feature of this shed was that you had to have the arm length, and climbing skills, of an orangutan to put the roof together.  The only way to get the roof panels attached was to set one in place, balance (belly down) on the top of a ladder, and reach forward as far as possible to screw the far end of the panel to the struts.  You were not supposed to put any weight at all on the roof panels, which were made of sheet metal with the tensile strength of Reynolds Wrap.  Because of the near-impossibility of assembling the roof while balancing horizontally on the top of a ladder without leaning on the panels, I left several dents in the roof from my hands, elbows, face, etc.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

You would think at this point that I would have learned that my construction skills are, rated on a comparative scale, lower than that of many species of mollusk, and that I would simply refuse to take part in helping out with construction projects.  You would be wrong.   I seem to get myself involved in these enterprises all the time.  I nearly ended up in the local mental ward framing a room in my previous house, where (to save money) I had it built with an unfinished basement.  "No problem," I told the builder, in a breezy fashion.   "I'll finish it."  So I and a friend (should I mention that this is the same friend who owns the shed?) got together the following summer to frame in a room in the basement.  We decided to build the wall frames on the floor and then lift them into place, thinking that'd be simpler than assembling them while attempting to hold the lumber vertically.   It seemed a good idea until we discovered that (1) the diagonal length of a wall frame is greater than its height, (2) cement floors have very little flexibility, and (3) we should have paid better attention in high school geometry.  We finally got the wall frame in place with a sledgehammer.  At least we know it's in there solidly.  If there's ever an earthquake in upstate New York, and this house falls down, it will collapse around the wall, because that wall is definitely not going anywhere.

It was in this same room that I attempted to install a "floating floor."  For those of you unfamiliar with this home furnishing innovation, it's a substitute for tile and hardwood, which are both notoriously difficult to install.   "Floating floors" are strips of wood laminate, which lock together like Lego pieces. "It's a piece of cake," the guy at Home Depot told me.   "A kid could do it."

Well, if that statement is correct, I'm unlikely ever to participate on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? The assembly procedure required you to put together strips of the laminate, and then use clamps to keep them square as you added further rows.  After working on the project for several hours, I came to the conclusion that either the floor wasn't square or else one of my eyes was closer to the bridge of my nose than the other one, because every time I secured the clamp on one side of the room, the floor panels on the other side would pop out of square.  I said many, many bad words during the course of that day.  I finally did get the floor installed, though, and all I can say is: thank god for molding.  Whoever invented molding is a genius.   The guy at the lumber store looked at me a little oddly when I asked him if he had any eight-inch-thick molding, but whatever.   Maybe it'll be a New Trend in Interior Decorating.

So, anyway, all of this has left me in awe of people who are actually good at construction.   I mostly specialize in what my dad used to call "Do It To Yourself Projects."  I'm also good at carrying around heavy objects, giving advice, and helping out with the pizza and beer afterwards.  Just don't ask me to translate any directions written in Hindi.

A question about gender

Those of us who are 50-ish will probably remember the record, released in 1972, called Free to Be... You and Me.  In this well-meant effort to combat gender stereotypes, a star-studded cast (including Marlo Thomas, Rosey Grier, Cicely Tyson, Michael Jackson, Kris Kristoffersen, and Billy de Wolfe) did skits and performed music with the message that boys and girls were basically the same, except for the obvious anatomical differences.  Anyone can be anything, anyone can do anything, because other than the slightly different equipment (a point which was downplayed), we're all the same, really.  Little boys can play with dolls, girls can be athletes and never marry, and so on.

Now, let me say at the outset that I think it's dreadful that societally-prescribed gender roles have held people back from doing what their hearts desired.  I always make certain to tell my biology classes about the tragedy of Rosalind Franklin, the woman who discovered the double-helical structure of DNA, and who was treated as a cut-rate lab assistant by James Watson and Francis Crick.  The two men (along with Maurice Wilkins) went on to win a Nobel Prize, while Franklin got bubkis, and in fact no one even knew about her role in the research until her notebooks were discovered in the 1980s, long after her death.  Clearly her gender was the impetus for her being ignored.  Watson said about her, in his autobiography, entitled (with amazing chutzpah) The Double Helix,

Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place.  The former was obviously preferable because, given her belligerent moods, it would be very difficult for Maurice [Wilkins] to maintain a dominant position that would allow him to think unhindered about DNA.

So, there's no doubt that gender roles have done tremendous damage, and that efforts like Free to Be... You and Me were perhaps necessary to counteract that damage.  However, is the central premise -- that boys and girls are identical except for the anatomy -- correct?

I ask the question because of an experiment in education going on currently in Sweden, which takes the Free to Be... You and Me concept and pushes it a step further.  In the preschool called Egalia, boys and girls not only aren't exposed to gender stereotypes, they're not exposed to gender references at all.  The gender-based pronouns in Swedish han (him) and hon (her) are replaced with an invented pronoun, the gender-neutral hen.  None of the books represent boys and girls (or men and women) in gender-traditional roles; all are in reversed roles, or in non-traditional roles (there are lots of books about homosexual couples, for example). 

Once again, while the intent is a good one, one has to wonder if the approach is denying something that is a simple fact.  Boys and girls are different, and this goes beyond the obvious.  A 2001 study at Harvard University found that women have substantially larger prefrontal cortices (the part of the brain responsible for decision-making) and limbic systems (which regulates emotions); men have larger parietal cortices (involved in spatial perception) and amygdalas (involved in "primitive" emotions such as anger).  Men have 6.5 times the amount of gray matter (the actual neurons of the brain); women have ten times the amount of white matter (the connections between the neurons).  Clearly these differences are reflected in behavior.

I helped raise two boys, and although a sample size of two is admittedly small, I can say from my own experience that their boy-brains were evident from the start.  Their mom, who had been raised on Free to Be... You and Me, was bound and determined to bring them up without any gender stereotypes, so toy guns and the like were not welcome in the house.  Toy stoves, cooking utensils, dolls, and so on, were encouraged.  What did my kids do?  Turn the cooking utensils into weapons.  (I will say, however, that both of my kids have turned into kind, caring young men who are confident enough that they don't care if a pastime they're interested in is "traditionally male" or "traditionally female" -- and both are outstanding cooks.)

While there is a need to break down gender stereotypes where they commit the unpardonable sin of denying a person's deepest desires, wasting his/her talent, or locking him/her into a role never chosen, it remains to be seen if the way to do that is by denying that gender differences exist.  The bottom line, to me, is freedom; freedom to choose, without being told by society that your choice is wrong simply on the basis of your gender.  If efforts like Free to Be... You and Me and Egalia achieve that end, great.  If, as I fear, it makes children hesitant to choose traditional roles because they've learned that "traditional roles = bad," then all we've done is what the traditional roles themselves did -- limit children's choices because of an artificial social construct.

Coming this fall: Comet Elenin. And doomsday.

NASA has announced that this fall, we're going to witness an unusual occurrence; the appearance of a long-period comet.

Long-period comets, so called because their extremely elongated elliptical orbits only bring them into the inner solar system once every several thousand years, are spotted while they are still far out in space (often by amateur astronomers), and tracked intensively as they plunge inward toward the sun.  This one, named Comet Elenin, will be 35 million kilometers from Earth at its closest point, which will be on October 16.  Unfortunately, it appears that Elenin won't be all that showy -- some long-period comets have lit up the night sky for weeks.

A news story, you would think, of only mild interest to anyone who is not an astronomy buff.  So you can imagine my surprise when I found that websites were popping up all over the place whose main message was:

AAAAAAAAUUUUUGGGGGGGHHH WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!  COMET ELENIN WILL KILL US ALL!  DEATH DOOM DESPAIR DESTRUCTION!  *pant pant pant gasp*

For example, take a look at this site, which blames Comet Elenin for recent earthquakes.  When Comet Elenin "comes into alignment with Earth," we have "devastating earthquakes."  "The last three alignments produced the Japanese 9.0 quake, the one in New Zealand and before that the one in Chile," writes Mark Sircus, author of the article.

Now, my first question is, what does it mean for two objects to "come into alignment?"  How can two objects not be in alignment?  Two objects always lie along a straight line.  You may recall from high school geometry class that Euclid had a few things to say about this.  So Comet Elenin is in alignment with the Earth right now, which probably accounts for why I had such weird dreams last night.

Sircus then goes on to state ominously, "When the next alignment happens it will be devastatingly close."  *cue dramatic music*

Now, you doubters out there are probably thinking, "Wait a moment.  Comets are just giant dirty snowballs.  How could an object that small, which is still a couple of hundred million kilometers away, have any effect on us at all?"

Well, Sircus is way ahead of that argument.  "The main point to understand," Sircus writes, "is that if Elenin was just a normal comet it would not have the mass to generate a gravity pull that would affect the Earth when the Earth swings around into alignment."

Ooookay, so how does he know it's not a normal comet?  Because when it "came into alignment with the Earth" on March 11, the Japanese earthquake occurred.  So we know it's not a normal comet because it causes earthquakes, and we know it causes earthquakes because it's not a normal comet.  Got that straight, now?

Sircus goes on to say:

The whole solar system seems to be heating up, the sun is becoming active and earth-changing events are becoming more frequent and intense with beyond-worst-case-scenario climate changes hitting around the globe. We have increasing geo-activity, volcanoes, earthquakes, rogue tides, sinking islands, magnetic pole migration, mass animal deaths, huge unexplained whirlpools in the Atlantic and so much more it would make anyone’s head spin.

Which is obviously true in his case.  He concludes:

There is a history to Elenin that has been visible for years but now she is upon us and there is nothing we can do but prepare and pray—and love like we have never loved before.  We have to acknowledge and accept that there is a danger and there is a possibility that part of our civilization and the people in it will be lost.

So, anyway, here's another thing to worry about.  On October 16, we have Elenin causing chaos on the Earth, and then, just five days later, we have Harold Camping's revised date for doomsday, when Satan arrives and starts making giant shish kebabs out of the unrighteous. 

It should be an exciting fall.  You can think of it as being a dress rehearsal for December 21, 2012.

Coalescence of church and state

The Louisiana State House of Representatives just unanimously passed a resolution to have a monument depicting the Ten Commandments on the state capitol grounds.

When challenged regarding this apparent defiance of church/state separation, lawmakers replied that there was no conflict.  "The proposed monument is more of an historic marker than a religious one," said Representative Patrick Williams (D-Shreveport).  "It's the role the Ten Commandments plays in shaping society and laws that's being recognized.  It's about our historical heritage."

Williams is also the one who responded to a question about why the legislative session was opened with a prayer with puzzlement.  "How do you define what 'separation' is?  After all, all denominations are allowed to pray."

Williams' opinion was mirrored by Representative Page Cortez (R-Lafayette).  "I don't see a problem having the Ten Commandments out in front of the Capitol," Cortez said.  "The Ten Commandments is the basis of Judeo-Christian principles.  A monument is simply a reflection of what we stand for."

It's simply a celebration of our "historical heritage," then?  Odd that no one is proposing erecting a monument to the Code of Hammurabi (one of the first codified legal systems) or the Magna Carta (which was one of the inspirations for the Bill of Rights).  Both of these form a major part of our "historical heritage."

As far as "how do you define separation?" -- well, Representative Williams, it's simple.  If it implies a governmental establishment of religion, it's not.  How's that?  And let's look at the Ten Commandments.  Oh, how about Number One:  "Honor the Lord thy God, who brought you out of slavery in the land of Egypt; you shall have no other God before me."  Hmmm, that seems pretty unequivocal.

The "historical heritage" argument is just a wedge, the same as the "teach the controversy" foolishness that gets brought up regarding evolution.  "In the interest of critical thinking, students should be encouraged to examine all sides of the argument, and look at alternate explanations."  Just as no one is proposing a monument to the Magna Carta, no one wants science teachers to "teach the controversy" about, for example, the periodic table.  The only realm of science in which anyone wants us to "teach the controversy" is evolutionary biology -- the one area that conflicts with traditional Christianity.  (And incidentally, there is no more "controversy" over evolution in the realm of peer-reviewed science than there is over the laws of chemistry.)

The interesting thing about the erecting of a monument to the Ten Commandments is that everyone is focusing on defending themselves against arguments over why they shouldn't be displayed, and no one seems to have a cogent argument about why they should be.  What earthly purpose does such a monument serve?  Let legislators pray in their churches.  Let them study biblical writings in their spare time.  Why do we need a religious monument on governmental grounds?  "Honor the Lord thy God" has no place in government, nor the schools (nor, for the record, in the Pledge of Allegiance).  The whole thing smacks of the Christian majority doing this just because they are a majority -- i.e., just because they can.

You might ask why I'm bothered by this.  Certainly, I can just ignore it; it would do me no harm, it might seem, to walk past the monument without stopping, and allow the Christians to have their little victory.  But what worries me is that old cliché of the slippery slope.  The Pledge of Allegiance, complete with "under god," is by law recited every morning over the loudspeakers at every public school in the United States.  Swearing-in rituals conclude with "so help me god."  Even our currency states "In God We Trust."  If America moves toward becoming a theocracy, it won't be a sudden collapse of the secular government and its replacement by a religious ruler, as it was when the Shah of Iran fled and was replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini.  It will be little step by little step, drip by drip, until one day we wake up and find ourselves in a country where Christianity drives policy, where religious law and secular law have coalesced to the point that they are indistinguishable.

Fly the toxic skies

I remember when I was a kid, looking up at jet contrails, white against the deep blue sky.  Where were the planes going?  What would it be like to be up there in a jet, flying at hundreds of miles per hour?  The contrails would widen and fade, drift, and finally dissipate, only to be replaced by another, tracking a different direction.

Little did I realize that I should have been wearing a gas mask and protective eyewear.

One of the more bizarre conspiracy theories out there is the "chemtrail" idea, which nevertheless finds broad appeal amongst people whose sole hobby is picking at the straps of their straitjackets with their teeth.  The idea is that the government adds stuff to jet fuel, so that when the jet fuel passes through the engine the stuff is vaporized, to waft downwards and be inhaled by unsuspecting people.  The stuff can include:

• mind-altering drugs
• chemicals that can affect the weather
• chemicals that cause allergies, asthma, and other respiratory illnesses
• cancer-causing agents

People who buy this particular conspiracy theory cite the rise in allergies and asthma as "proof."  Evidence to the contrary is just part of the government's cunning plan for hoodwinking the people.  Take a look at this site, from AboveTopSecret.com, amusingly titled "How Jet Trails Block Out the Sunshine."  My favorite part is the paragraph informing readers, "This is a chemtrail thread for believers but other are welcomed. Please only post positive comment towards posters and do not discredit them. No need to be negative."

In other words:  You can disagree with our conspiracy theory, as long as you (1) keep your mouth shut, and (2) don't mind being a deluded, credulous sheep.

The thing I've never understood about the chemtrail idea is, do these people really think that putting LSD in jet fuel would work?  Besides the fact that a lot of the chemicals that they think are being spread around this way are complex organics that would break down during the combustion process, even if you assume that some of the chemicals made their way through the engine and out the exhaust, how could anyone actually inhale enough of the stuff to accomplish anything?  Between wind currents and just general dilution in the atmosphere, it's not like it's the most efficient chemical distribution method I can think of.

And then, of course, there's the rather painful lack of actual results.  No one I know seems to act any odder than usual when a jet flies over; the weather is still as messy and unpredictable as ever; I don't get the sniffles when I'm near an airport; and cancer rates aren't any higher than they ever have been.  But the conspiracy theorists, of course, have a quick response to those criticisms:

• the mind-altering chemicals act to make you submissive and unsuspicious;
• the weather-influencing chemicals are why the weather is messy and unpredictable;
• the government is suppressing information about rises in the incidence of allergies, asthma, and cancer;
• and Skeptophilia is clearly a tool of The Shadow Government's Disinformation Strategy.

Which, I must admit, is a pretty powerful argument.

Interestingly, the whole thing seems to have gotten off the ground (rimshot) because of a guy named Bill Nichols, from my home state of Louisiana, back in 2007.  Nichols, a Shreveport resident, suddenly noticed one day that there seemed to be an unusual number of contrails in the sky.  "It seemed like some mornings it was just criss-crossing the whole sky.  It was just like a giant checkerboard," he told reporters, adding that he had observed "unusual clouds" that began as ordinary jet contrails, but unlike normal contrails, "did not fade away."  He said that the vapor from the contrail "would drop to the ground in a haze" and collect on the ground and in water he had sitting in bowls.  Myself, I've never seen a contrail "drop to the ground" in sufficient quantities to "collect in a bowl" -- but even so, KSLA News of Shreveport took him seriously enough to sample the water at a lab and initially reported a high level of barium, 6.8 parts per million, more than three times the toxic level set by the EPA.

This caused an uproar, as you might imagine.  A couple of weeks later, it was revealed that the KSLA reporter had misread the reading, which was actually 68 parts per billion, well within expected ranges, and the station retracted the story.  But conspiracy theorists are never going to be dissuaded by numbers being off by a factor of a thousand, or, in fact, actual data in any form, and so the whole chemtrail idea was off and running.

Anyhow, I'd better wind this up.  For one thing, you can see where this is going: the usual "no data + no logic = my theory" pattern that is typical of conspiracy theorists.  Also, because we have a thunderstorm coming in, probably due to weather-altering chemicals, and I need to shut the computer down.

Your tax dollars at work

So now, Dear Readers, it's time for a fine old tradition: my yearly rant about how lousy the New York State Regents Exams are.

The total cost for developing, printing, and distributing Regents exams is $15 million annually, a cost of about $250,000 per exam.  You'd think that for that kind of money, we'd be getting something pretty spiffy, right?

This year's exam in Biology (oh, excuse me, "Living Environment."  Ten years ago, as part of their drive to improve curricula and "raise the bar," they changed the name of the course) was once again the combination of goofy, poorly worded questions, strange diagrams, and ambiguity that we've all come to expect.  Here are just a few highlights from this year's exam:

30.  Depletion of non-renewable resources is often a result of

• (1) environmental laws
• (2) human population growth
• (3) reforestation
• (4) recycling

Wow!  That is what I call one high-powered question, there.  If you can puzzle through "environmental laws = good, human population growth = bad, reforestation = good, recycling = good" you got that one right.  It's like the game on Sesame Street -- "Which of these things is not like the other?"

Equally awe-inspiring were #37-39, which were to be based on an outline diagram of a human body, with only three organs -- (A) the brain, (B) the kidney, and (C) the uterus.

37.  Failure of structure A to function would most directly disrupt

• (1) autotrophic nutrition
• (2) chromosome replication
• (3) cellular communication
• (4) biological evolution

38.  Structure B represents

• (1) cells only
• (2) cells and tissues, only
• (3) an organ with cells and tissues
• (4) a complete system with organs, tissues, and cells

39.  Structure C is part of which body system?

• (1) digestive
• (2) reproductive
• (3) circulatory
• (4) nervous

Note that you don't have to understand a single thing about how the brain, kidney, or uterus functions to get these questions right.

Then, we have a reading passage, as follows:

Plants of the snow lotus species, Saussurea laniceps, are used in Tibet and China to produce traditional medicines.  These plants bloom just once, at the end of a seven-year life span.  Collectors remove the taller-blooming plants, which they consider to have the best medicinal value.  Some scientists are concerned that the continual selection and removal of the tall plants from natural ecosystems may result in a change in the average height of the snow lotus in future populations.

Ready for the question?

50.  The removal of the plants is an example of

• (1) genetic engineering
• (2) direct harvesting
• (3) selective breeding
• (4) asexual reproduction

Yup, after all that, that was the best question they could come up with.  Even more interesting, my specialty is evolutionary biology, and I wasn't even sure what the correct answer was supposed to be.  Neither was my colleague, Sue, the other biology teacher.  Were they implying that this was selective breeding?  Didn't seem right; selective breeding implies a deliberate selection of the traits by humans, in order to alter the population's characteristics.  This was deliberate, but the farmers weren't trying to create a population of shorter plants, so that seemed kind of weird.  Answers #1 and #4 were definitely wrong.  Answer #2?

Yup.  That's the answer.  "Direct harvesting."  In order to get this one correct, students had to know the following important biological fact: collecting pieces of a plant is called "harvesting."

And so on.

I had not just one, but two, students tell me after the exam, "You didn't have to know anything about biology to pass that exam."  One student, in particular, was indignant.

"I really studied for that exam," she said.  "I knew a lot of stuff -- all the parts of the brain, how the kidney works, how to solve genetics problems.  I could have saved a lot of time and effort -- I wasn't any better prepared to take that exam after four weeks of review and studying than I was before, because you hardly had to have any specific factual knowledge about anything to pass it."

When you have students complaining that an exam is too easy, you know there is something wrong.

Of course, when people decry the lousy quality of the exam, New York state educational leaders are quick to disagree.

"People may complain about the Regents, but it does provide a teacher with a basic road map of what should be covered in a course," said Jack J. Boak Jr., superintendent of the Jefferson-Lewis Board of Cooperative Educational Services.

I'm sorry, Mr. Boak, but you're wrong.  What the Regents exam does, at least in Biology, is set the bar so low that students can walk over it.  I could write a better, and fairer, exam in two hours flat, and I wouldn't even charge $250,000 to do it.

In recent years, I have typically spent the last weeks of school telling kids, "Just focus on the broad-brush terms.  Details don't matter on this exam.  Hardly anyone fails it."  This is true.  What I don't mention, however, is that also, hardly anyone scores above a 95.  Students whose knowledge of biology is exemplary get caught by weirdly-worded, ambiguous questions like #50.  They start to question themselves, just as Sue and I did -- "Can the answer they're looking for really just be 'harvesting?'"  The sprinkling of bizarre questions means that we very rarely have anyone ace this exam, even the kids who could probably teach the course themselves.  The test is designed so that most of the scores get crammed together in the middle, between 75 and 85 -- because a bell curve makes the b-b stackers in the Education Department happy.

So, that's how our year ends -- not with challenging, fair exams, but with a series of pointless hurdles for students to amble over, and thousands of exam papers for teachers to wade through.

Seems like there are better uses that $15 million a year could be put to, doesn't it?

Memory chips and brain signal transmitters

In the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a technique has been developed which allows your memories to be selectively erased.  If you want to forget an unpleasant breakup, erase the pain of a traumatic event, or just have the opportunity to experience again reading your favorite book for the first time, you can go in and have Lacuna, Inc. selectively delete those memories.

We have just taken a step closer to being able to do that.

A team of scientists from Wake Forest University and the University of Southern California have developed a "neural prosthesis" which, when installed into the brain of a rat, allowed the scientists to delete and retrieve a specific memory.  Rats were trained to press one of two levers for food, but had been given a drug which inhibited a part of the hippocampus that allows the processing of short-term memory into long-term memory.  With the prosthesis in place, electrodes inserted into the hippocampus, the scientists were able to trigger them to remember what they'd forgotten.

“Flip the switch on, and the rats remember.  Flip it off, and the rats forget,” team leader Dr. Theodore Berger said.

The application of this technology to individuals with memory loss from Alzheimer's, dementia, or stroke is obvious.  There needs to be a memory trace there to amplify -- so the idea of using it in cases of severe brain damage is probably going to be limited, at least for the reasonable future.  But the ability of doctors to enhance memory selectively is heady stuff.  Couple that with more information about how memory is encoded in the first place -- a hot area of research at the moment -- and we'll be that much closer to creating prosthetic memory interfaces for the human brain.

Also in the news is a story about a different sort of brain implant -- one which might eventually help the paralyzed to walk again.

Developed at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, the BioBolt implant allows the brain to use the skin as a conductor, and send wireless signals.  This could allow a quadriplegic to, for example, operate a computer.  Ultimately, the interface could allow the brain to send signals to muscles, effectively routing motor impulses around the sites of damage that are preventing a person from walking.

"The ultimate goal is to be able to reactivate paralyzed limbs, by picking the neural signals from the brain cortex and transmitting those signals directly to muscles," said Dr. Kensall Wise, who is also founding director of the NSF Engineering Research Center for Wireless Integrated MicroSystems.  Wise did state that scientists are years away from these applications in humans, but just having a low-energy brain interface that can be installed in a minimally invasive fashion is a tremendous advance.   Previous incarnations of the the device had to be implanted through a hole in the skull; the BioBolt is implanted under the skin of the skull, and acts like a "microphone" to pick up, amplify, and transmit signals from the neurons.

Advances such as these never fail to awe me.  I know we're still a long way from restoring memory in individuals with brain damage (or enhancing memory in people who are normal), or seeing the paralyzed walk.  But just the fact that the scientists have accomplished this much is positively stunning, and my sense is that this is only the beginning.  It makes me think of the quote from Napoleon Hill:  "What the mind can conceive, it can achieve."