My Bad-Ass BIAJ

If there's one thing you can count on, it's that the gang at the Co-Prosperity Sphere is always spinning off ideas. No matter the economy, the climate, whether these ideas make our butts look big, we're throwing off ideas like a Van de Graaff generator throws off static!

While we're still working on other things, a certain mania has hit the CPS. Brain mania. This is the project I mentioned in the last post, and although I first had the idea several months ago, the wheels are finally turning.

The Inception
Many years ago, someone gave me one of those little toys that you put into water and it expands to many times its original size. This one was a tongue. It was made out of some substance whose surface was squidgy and slightly pebbled, like a real tongue. The jar I had put it in to reconstitute it was none too clean, and over the years of sitting on my desk, the water in the jar eventually turned the color of weak tea, or very strong formaldehyde. People asked me all the time if it was real. I was laid off from that job shortly before Christmas, and as a parting shot, I got one of my friends to enter the tongue in a jar into the company's annual white elephant exchange. I happened to be conferring with HR while the company party was going on, and even from across the building, I could tell exactly when my present was opened.

Over the years, I've mentioned the concept of a brain in a jar to several people, and one reaction has captured my attention: the sight of my friends recoiling in horror at the very thought of a disembodied brain in a jar. Mostly, they can't articulate why the thought upsets them, but it's clear that the entire thing touches some primal fear center. I want to know more about why the thought of a brain in a jar upsets people.

The Catalyst
Although I'd noodled the different components of the whole, I hadn't given the entire thing much serious thought because there are pivotal portions of it that are beyond my technical reach. It wasn't until the Maker Faire this year that the Pirate looked around at all the creative energy and caught fire. It went from yet another silly idea that the wife spun up to something that we're actively moving on.

The Brain in a Jar
The idea is this: a brain in a jar of some sort of preserving liquid. From the brain, wires and electrodes emerge, winding into a sort of umbilicus that disappears into a wooden box. The brain's only organic sensory input is a single eye, attached by its optic nerve directly to the brain.

The wires from the brain lead into a hand-worked wooden box, which also has leads to a keyboard and a microphone. The wooden box has as one side a display that shows three things: one portion of the screen shows what the eye sees. One portion shows an oscilloscope showing the noise being received from the microphone. The largest portion of the screen shows a chat program where people will be able to interact directly with the brain.

The Process
The addition of the Pirate to the team meant that the programming and computer hardware portions of the project suddenly got much easier. And we were utterly inspired by the fabulous project documentation from the Pirate's friend Steve Chamberlin's project Big Mess o' Wires, so we've been keeping some pretty intensive documentation of our process, which makes the Pirate very happy.

So far, it's been a lot of just deciding what the functionality is going to be. Does the brain float? Should it talk? What style do we want for the overall thing? As we make decisions, the whole thing becomes something near and dear to our hearts: a series of skills to be learned and problems to be solved. At the end of each solved problem, we are left with a tangible piece of a whole that will eventually be MADE OF AWESOME.

Stay tuned. We'll let you know how it's going