bkdelong | BrainStream: Nanophyte-based folicular body heat regulation and cross-social network trust relations

I so should be going to bed instead of writing this but I've been trying to get this out of my head since at least Monday and having no success whatsoever.

Techno-futuristic transhumanist daydreaming

With the way the heat has been and the fact that I have a thick, dark brown mop on my head (despite it being recently cut), I've been thinking about body heat temperature regulation.

Why bother with cutting one's hair shorter when you could rely on a nanophyte cluster that first changed the hair to translucent and then, depending on the temperature settings, would control their color to be anything from black to pure white. The latter for cooling and the former for the need to warm up a bit.

Being an amature futurist and transhumanist, I allow myself to make non-scientific based speculation such as: these nanophytes could potentially inhibit the production of melanin to the point of rendering the host an albino. Then the control of both skin and hair pigment would be left to the nanophyte clusters which would collectively turn whatever shade programmed to based on temperature needs, desired look, and location (skin vs hair) in a near instantaneous manner - as long as it would take for each nanophyte to realize it's location in the body and process the color instructions.

This brings up all sorts of questions and thoughts including what albinism would do to discussions of color and race and how much of a role facial features play in that argument.

I'm also curious what the concentration of subdermal nanophytes would need to be in order to fully display a homogeneous color across particular zones of the skin and hair. Would it be possible to make them dual use and thus have melanin inhibition and color reflection be a mere feature of a standard body nanophyte tasked with perpetual monitoring and repair duties?

Would melanin inhibition destroy the body's resistance to the Sun's ultraviolet rays and necessitate the additional task of processing UV light? Or would these nanophytes take the place of cellular melanosomes to protect nuclear DNA from UV mutation?

What about the absence of melanocytes in stria vascularis of the inner ear resulting in cochlear impairment? Would non outward-exposed melanin production be left intact?

I'm sure I'm missing quite a few other questions based on my lack of scientific and medical understanding. Not to mention what happens if pockets of nanophytes fail in their melanin-like duties of pigmentation and protection?

Ideally whatever nanophytes I'd allow in my body would be self-repairing and self replicating bringing up the ever-present argument of nanotech AI and "gray goo".

But then.....I did title this post a "BrainStream" which is what it sounds, fairly direct and unadulterated.

Cross-Social Network Trust Relationships

I rant on this topic enough as it is. There is a need for some unique identifier across social networks to easily determine similar accounts and locate friends across services. Currently email addresses seem to have this role except for the inconsistency as those change, the desire for one NOT to have all their different social network accounts linked across social networks for their coworkers or family to find what they do in their social and virtual lives.

For instance, there are people who do not want their Match.com profile with there Livejournal, Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter accounts. They may instead create an additional sockpuppet to allow them to socialize using this non-public personae instead. Of course, there are people whose online personae is the same across Match.com, LJ, and Twitter with no need to "hide" anything because no one knows who they are online except for people they've allowed. And the final category of folks who are fully open in who they are to everyone. Bravo.

The purpose of this segue is the fact that my attempt to Vlog (video blog) has been an utter failure partially due to vanity and self-consciousness and partially due to the fact that I am very carefully in what I share with who these days.

Twitter is a perfect example of this- I have allowed an open follow policy so in addition to spammers, follower-addicts, and advertisers I have various PR and Sales folks from companies in industries I work in and post about watching my ever move, now making my Twitter feed more and more boring by the day as I continually remind myself that not only can everyone read what I'm posting but I am being actively monitored.

So in Facebook, I've started doing a decent job of creating Friend Lists for every category I may interact with a person in - Social, Work, School (previously), Geo, Family, and Content (e.g. what parts of my profile they can see). One step I have not taken is to create a personalized set of levels regarding how much I trust a person. I don't do well enough with "the maths" to come up with such a scheme so I am abstaining. However, I will most likely use these lists as the standard and duplicate them in LiveJournal and Youtube with the hope of recording Vlog postings, applying the permissions to varying groups depending on the content and then posting them to a LiveJournal post "filtered" to the appropriate Custom Group POSSIBLY making a "Note" on Facebook that only that group can see (if a person happens not to be on LiveJournal).

This is all horribly manual and if I'm not blogging now, what are the chances of me following through with this? Probably very little. I'm surprised, however, that with Google and Facebook APIs combined with LiveJournal scripting that this hasn't been done yet.

I'm finding I need to share parts of my life with friends I only see online for emotional support, for commiseration, for helping them better understand me, for allowing closer, stronger relationships. I'm not having time to do email, blogging en masse isn't happening so I'm starting to more and more be at a loss, feeling isolated while almost desperate for weekend interactions with local friends with whom I can decompress.

I tried weekdays and frankly while I have been able to stay awake for longer lately, the aggregation of lack-of-sleep leaves me extremely emotionally vulnerable, obviously overtired, with a complete lack of focus. I have to severely cut down on that and save the in-person interactions for the weekend when I can catch up on sleep while balancing my duties as a father and husband. Yay?

So the next step is to finalize refining my Facebook Friend Lists. I will probably add groups for segmenting out subject matter/content of interactions. Then copying those groups, mapping them against LJ friends. Finally, I'll try a few topic-specific Vlogs and apply the same group/topic settings to them, post them to the LiveJournal filters and a note to Facebook (can I actually post a FB note that only certain Friend Lists can see?). The problem I'll run into is very few of my "friends" on either service appear to have discoverable YouTube accounts.

Now for your thoughts. Do you care? Does this sound interesting? Would you make more use of these services if it had these features? Am I making things too complex?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Twitter is just TMI for me. Not in the icky sense, but in the literal sense. It cheapens interaction, at least from my POV.

Speaking of which, now I know the terrain a bit better, lunch in Billerica or Woburn or someplace around there?

Um. I work in downtown Boston, Government Center and commute by rail ;)

During the week is a tad challenging but I can definitely do the weekends.

Remind me where the new office is? Do you come into the city at all? I could hop on one of the T lines and head out from there.

New office is Westford. Anywhere along 3 is easy. Mostly work from home, but any excuse to go to office is fine by me. We can take it to email.

I think the cross-network secret handshake is an important idea.

It's getting to the point where it's more and more possible. It just needs automation. I'm not a programmer, just an idea guy and I haven't been following OpenID or the other projects close enough to see if any of these will move in that direction.

Do you want to hang out on Sunday? Go to a mall or something?

I think the idea about changing the color of one's hair via bionanotechnology is an interesting one. Certain cells are found in the hair follicles which release melanin. If one could somehow downregulate them and replace them with cells that are encoded to produce photoactive compounds that change color as a response to temperature/humidity, it would be pretty neat. Of course, as with all technologies, I expect the real driving forces would be military (can save on air conditioning in the Middle East) or smut (Scarlett Johansson goes naturally red in the summer adult blockbuster.....).

There are lots of issues about the types of melanin (there are three or four different types produced in humans) and differences in expression throughout the different tissue types (for example, there's a melanin produced in the brain and its presence/absence is observed in past studies of Parkinson's disease). I unfortunately don't know enough about tissue-specific biology to say anymore off the top of my head. The big issue is that whatever you would want to replace it with would have to mimic its photoprotective properties against UV radiation. Melanin absorbs UV radiation and converts it into heat (IR radiation), preventing massive amounts of free radicals from being produced, which could cause serious cellular and genetic damage. It wouldn't be enough for something to simply absorb UV radiation - it would have to dispose of it in a similar way.

Anyway, back to article drafting....

Not late - right on time!

I keep forgetting to occasionally prod the great Dr. about my crazy non scientifically-based ideas (unless you include Wikipedia reading "research" - HA!)

So thanks for that bit of PhD insight....nice to know I wasn't COMPLETELY off base in comprehending the reading I did. I knew about 1/3 already of what you stated above...I just feared if I got too deep into the science, I would never get the primary thought process finished.

The big issue is how to implement such ideas. If we wanted to produce a line of albino mice and then include these cells which don't produce melanin but another set of photoactive (and photoprotective!) compounds, it probably is very doable, presuming we have everything already engineering/mutated. To, let's say, do it for you or me, we'd need to knock out the melanin-producing cells in your/my scalp, implant the mutant cell line that produces the necessary compounds, make sure that they are still viable and persistent (and not going to die out after only a few generations), and that they don't affect, for instance, the production of necessary melanin in the brain (if we were to try something like a viral or chemical knockout).

Selectivity (it does what we want and not affect other processes), survivability (it's robust enough to last the lifetime of the organism), and safety (it's not going to kill us) - the big and problematic three. I'm sure the bio/nanotech gurus have other ways of putting it, naturally. Another possibility might be dealing with our immediate surroundings - maybe we can combine known moisture-wicking fabrics with research being done into temperature/light-responsive materials to produce clothing that is adaptable enough for the sweltering outdoors and nippy air-conditioned indoors during the summers.

Having said all of that, I am totally willing to work on clones of Scarlett Johansson to get this project to work. :)

P.S. - Wikipedia is actually pretty decent on a number of topics. Especially if there's a bunch of citations one can check out for one's self.

Well, yes and no. The problem is nanotechnology is not even remotely where it needs to be for this to happen. I think the key to start would be to create a wirelessly controlled device that takes in sunlight, converts UV to IR, and morphs a variety of shades of melaninic(?) colors. Then work to get it smaller, and smaller and smaller. My concern is that in order to get a sufficient outward facing cluster of cells that performed this action, you might as well just replace skin-cells with fully programmable nanobots, right?

Given the state of software today, I will be far gone before people will allow such a concentration of nanotech in their bodies. At that point, how much of us will truly be human? (Insert Singularity commentary here)

But I think you raise a good point. I wonder if the answer is actually some sort of intelligent, nanofiber, shrink-wrap that is essentially clothing that goes OVER the skin still allowing it to breath, grow, die and shed but adds a little "oomph" like cloaking, feature morphing, and the aforementioned skin/hair color changes.

BrainStream: Nanophyte-based folicular body heat regulation and cross-social network trust relations

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Late again to the party.....

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