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When people first started imploring us to weigh in on the Open Source Boob Project we had this scary image of a website featuring a picture of a pair of fake tits that registered computer programmers could modify and reshape and manipulate with nanotechnology or whatever else until the resultant pair of tits reflected the internet's consensus of the ideal pair of boobs. (The consensus would, of course, change and grow over time, reflecting an anthropological study in the ever-changing depiction of breasts in the media, anime and videogames; that's how the project would get academic funding.) Anyway: why did I give the geeks so much credit? The Open Source Boob Project was actually just a consensual gropeathon that went down at PenguiCon, which is, naturally, a science fiction convention, though its genesis happened at ConFusion, another science fiction convention, when one geek, probably inspired by a booth babe, said to another geek: More »
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The only thing worse than a disease wherein mysterious microscopic fibers grow out of your arms and legs and cause unbearable itching is the creeping sensation of reading about one of those diseases. Which sort of explains, I think, why the medical community has long dismissed Morgellons disease as a mental illness. Morgellons sufferers get crazy rashes from which they believe they see fibers growing; the doctors see nothing, and the patients get crazier. They report coughing up bugs. They become dependent on cocaine to stay awake. Oh yeah, and almost all sufferers are women, which might be one of the reasons so many doctors have long passed it off as one big hysterical hallucination. But! One doctor finally decided to give it a look. "Send me your fibers!" he posted on a Morgellons website. And in they came. Box after box of identical fibers, all magenta and cobalt blue. He tested them against all 900 materials listed in an American textile database — nothing. He heated them to 700 degrees to determine their chemical makeup — nothing. He held a flourescent light over them. They glowed. More »
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