truncheon

The title of this article is click-baity in its abuse of the vague, subjective word "consciousness."

"[blank] is already happening" is a trope, in wired's headlines, that gets reused frequently, to provoke exasperation. Wired probably advises writers with an internal style guide, since their tone has remained pretty consistent over the years.

The article is a lot of hype. There's a mix of several separate concepts brought into play, with anecdotal details, to produce an emotional effect.

Without explaining the differences between the peripheral nervous system and the central nervous system, ideas are presented to confuse such differentiation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_nervous_system

The article touches upon advanced ways to interface with the peripheral nervous system of the body, in particular the extremities, addressing paralysis and amputation.

The article is not about the brain itself, although witnesses within the article explain their personal experiences. It isn't about machines becoming alive. It isn't about replacing the mind with a computer.

It's mostly about advanced ways of restoring sensation and motor control, with computer systems that remap connections beween damaged nerves. The external stimulation of nervous tissue does not translate to a migration of human experience from a biological system to a machine.

Somewhat, yes. It seems that graphite is a somewhat more relaxed state than carbon's diamond crystal allotrope.

Both burn, and can be vaporized with LOX/acetyline torches:

http://www.popsci.com/sites/popsci.com/files/styles/medium_1...

But apparently, over long periods of time, and unless coerced, carbon prefers to be graphite and so, diamonds can decay as such. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_properties_of_diamond...

Hence why graphite is generally more plentiful than diamonds.

But some of the blocking artifacts are fascinating to behold! People have drawn from it a new aesthetic in the form of the Glitch GIF.

https://duckduckgo.com?q=!googleimages+glitch+gif+filetype:g...

http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/51/69/9fc1f4a928590f14...

Oh thank god other people can see this.

Sometimes I feel like I'm noticing fnords.

I've noticed that on monitors at 120hz and 240hz, full motion video starts to look strange. Not just high resolution animated graphics renderings, but also legacy recordings of live action pre-dating HD standards.

Old NTSC and PAL recordings, and even Black and White TV shows like I Love Lucy or Leave It To Beaver, take on this interpolated, ultra-modern slick feeling of remastered image post-processing.

I can't tell what's going on, but I see it when I view certain monitors, at friends houses, in department stores and at some fast food restaurants that provide a TV in the dining room.

Re-runs of TV shows that I've watched hundreds of times on CRTs and first generation flat-screen monitors, have a certain quality and leave a distinctive impression, that a subset of recent monitors augment, contaminate and tamper with.

I can't tell what's going but I know it when I see it. I suspect that there may be some software inbetween the transcoder circuit and the final illuminated raster that attempts to reduce flicker, and provides virtual frames automatically tweened when low frame counts are encountered.

Few people agree with me, or notice a difference, but it's there, man.

It's there.

The premise here, being that powerful (or technically adept) people may have the capacity to impersonate a phone number, or clone a SIM card.

...since that part isn't directly stated, and might not be obvious to everyone.

PR snake oil.

Fitness didn't come true with the Wii. Better be prepared to still go outside and have a life. Your body will produce vitamins as your reward.

Eyestrain is subjective, and this is far from an optometrist's prescription to treat any disease or disorder. Doctors recommend tooth brushes, but which is THE ONE TRUE toothbrush?

Psychology is not hard science. This technology can either harm or help, with no guarantee of either. Use as directed.

Visibility.

Most people imagine that if they lose their homes, the fate that awaits them is the one they step over each morning on their way to work.

Most people don't have contingency plans, should they find themselves out of a job, and evicted from their residence, with no family or friends to assist with temporary resources.

Uh, the point is that, on a slow connection, everything is going to suck in unpredictable ways, because of server-side bloat, and the trendiness of developers deploying 5MB js libraries.

Worrying about whether the browser was recent or supported misses the point. Any browser can suffer these sorts of problems on a 56KB dial-up connection. (3G mobile data is frequently throttled at 128KB by popular ISP's, btw)

The "nanodegree."

If anybody ever tried to use that as a credential, they'd waste more words trying to explain what it is, and what it's worth, than if they just told you what they actually knew verbatim.

I have a nanodegree in microwaving hot pockets. Ask me to defend its intrinsic value.