I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
Brianna Karp's trailer now sits outside a friend's home near Los Angeles
But 24-year-old Brianna Karp's story started as a nightmare.
In a rocky economy, Karp was laid off from her Irvine, California, job as an executive assistant in July 2008.
She got by for a while on temp jobs and unemployment benefits. But when her savings dried up, she was no longer able to afford her rent.
The only answer she saw then was a trailer she'd inherited from her father -- a man she barely knew who had recently committed suicide.
"I was left with a truck and this camper, which I was going to sell but coincidentally this happened to me," she said. "I thought, 'Well, I have this.' "
Karp, who writes that she is also estranged from her mother, ended up camped in a Los Angeles-area Walmart parking lot.
Forget about 20/20.
"Perfect" vision could be redefined by gadgets that give you the eyes of a cyborg.The tech industry calls the digital enrichment of the physical world "augmented reality." Such technology is already appearing in smartphones and toys, and enthusiasts dream of a pair of glasses we could don to enhance our everyday perception. But why stop there?
Scientists, eye surgeons, professors and students at the University of Washington have been developing a contact lens containing one built-in LED, powered wirelessly with radio frequency waves.
Eventually, more advanced versions of the lens could be used to provide a wealth of information, such as virtual captions scrolling beneath every person or object you see. Significantly, it could also be used to monitor your own vital signs, such as body temperature and blood glucose level.
Major Tom: "when i was a younger man than i am now, i picked up a dog eared neon pink copy of toffler's future shock at the goodwill. as i read through it, i was fascinated with his ideas on progress and its affects on humanity. some of it was over the top, and some of it shockingly applicable for our times. the older i get, and the more technology advances, the more a harken back to Toffler's ideas like 'Transience', 'the Modular Man', and 'Future Shock'. i do not claim to have answers to the questions posed in these articles posted here, nor do i wish to direct your opinions. i simply wish to give you, as they give me, pause."
