Working in Movement

I've written before about cortical plasticity and human/computer interfaces, as well as somatic-based interface devices for game consoles and computers. These devices used cameras and displays to provide a visual image of the user inside the game. Now a different sense can get involved. It's our old friend the kinesthetic sense. A Joystick That Challenges You to Sweat tells the story.

From the article:

When a player pushes and pulls on the kiloWatt's steel rod, sensors pick up microscopic flexes of the metal. A processor calculates how many pounds of force the player is exerting and converts the pressure into on-screen action. The player hardly moves, but the small motions and the constant isometric pressure can be strenuous.

I wonder if this sort of technology could be useful in developing or refining movement patterns, ala Awareness Through Movement (ATM) lessons.

Here are a few names: Diamond Famy; Jewel Derenzis; Wes Debis; Spring Hassig; Felton Metherell; Moshe Feldenkrais.

Ever heard of 'em? Other than Feldenkrais, probably not. They are all made up names, freshly generated from a database at Kleimo.com. The database uses data from the U.S. Census to generate the random names.

People use Kleimo's site to generate names for a variety of reasons, according to Yours not so Truly, J Goodspam. Some use the generated names in on-line fantasy games or for novels or screenplays. But probably the most common users are spammers, those fellows that flood your email box with all that annoying, unsolicited junk email. As anti-spam technology gets more sophisticated, legitimate-sounding names are more likely to sneak through the filters. The article concludes with a sound bit of advice for those of us who want to avoid spam: stop relying so much on email and start using the telephone again.

It's all true, or my name's not Garnett Abbatillo.