Okay, maybe not, but Mitch Kapor, designer of Lotus 1-2-3, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and generally near-prescient entrepreneur is sending the resources of Kapor Enterprises in that direction.
Kapor currently serves as the Chairman of the Board for Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life. One of the biggest complaints about virtual worlds--and we'll skip the tired flying penis jokes--is that it's hard to navigate in a 3D environment using a mouse and keyboard. His solution is to use a 3D camera to register movement and let users ride their avatars as if they were riding Segways.
Video of developer Phillipe Bossut flapping his hands to fly after the jump.
There's been a huge upsurge in cool prosthetic technology recently, thanks to a mysterious increase in the number of first world otherwise-healthy citizens who are suddenly stumbling around the place missing a limb or two. But while advances like bluetooth-controlled legs are undeniably awesome, they're only half of the equation needed before the Detroit crime rate is cut by someone part man, part machine but All Cop. Mechanical parts and squishy human brains have a bit of dysfunctional relationship at the moment - while machines can learn how to interpret the desires of twitching muscles, the gooey nervous system tends to get annoyed or dead when the machine tries to inject signals back.
Lots of us have trouble concentrating on specific tasks for a focused period of time; I know whenever I'm performing community service (it happens a lot), any stray bird or shiny object distracts me enough to get me punished by my chain gang.
Annalee Newitz at sci-fi blog io9 posits that in the near future, temporary autism could serve as a solution: Basically, people take a pill to induce autism when they want to shut out the outside world and focus obsessively on work, and then take another pill to bring them out of their autistic state when they're ready to stop being savants. She cites work undertaken by German scientists in inducing autism in rats and reversal of autistic symptoms in mice done by researchers at MIT as inspiration for her predictions.
Even wilder, she suggests people may pursue "recreational autism" to "take a break from having messy emotions about other people decide to unplug and enter a state where human relationships are no more important than inanimate objects."
It's no secret that I've always wanted Terminator eyes — you know, the kind where a head-up display pops into your field of vision, updating you about your surroundings via head-up display and instructing you how to say things like a normal human, and not a killing machine.
This shouldn't be surprising, since I remember attending honors classes with a student who once asked whether Mexicans spoke Spanish or...Mexican: While the U.S. remains a leader in sci-tech innovation, our populace is still falling behind when it comes to general science knowledge, according to a biennial report released by the National Science Board.
Surveys of fourth- and eighth-graders show improvements in math, but science development is still lacking. Indeed, among all demographics, there's a gap in science knowledge, with European- and Asian-Americans scoring higher than others. Many Americans couldn't even answer correctly when asked if the earth moves around the sun (The New York Times helpfully reminds us that it does).
Do we really want a president who once said he "didn't believe in the theory" when asked about evolution?
Candidates for the US presidency seem to spend more time telling me what they think of each other than telling me what they think about science. We hear the occasional sound bite about climate change, but what about those other issues that will have to be reckoned with, like the future of stem cells or alternative energy sources? (Or more responses to this administration’s reprehensible practice of altering data to fit desired conclusions?)
I’m grateful to the journal Science for including “Science and the next US President” in today’s issue. It’s a quick guide to what the leading candidates have said about big issues in science, and it makes no bones about the fact that science is not on the forefront of any campaign.
From the introduction:
"It's pretty hard to find a candidate from either party who is gung ho for science," laments Representative Vernon Ehlers (R-MI), one of two Ph.D. physicists in Congress and an indefatigable promoter of science and technology.
Here are some excerpts from the article about last night’s big winners in the Iowa caucuses:
Oh, Japan -- through your tireless efforts at improving robotics, obstacle course engineering, and tentacle hentai, we'll soon live in a transhuman world where we can transmit data through our bodies. Thanks to work by researchers at Japan's Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, large chunks of data, like resumes, emails, and even tentacle hentai can be transmitted through a simple handshake.
Lots of us have trouble concentrating on specific tasks for a focused period of time; I know whenever I'm performing community service (it happens a lot), any stray bird or shiny object distracts me enough to get 
It's no secret that I've always wanted 
