It's been an interesting couple of weeks, to be sure.  While lots of different things have been going on lately, none of them are related in any particularly clear or straightforward fashion, so fitting all of this stuff together is going to be a bit of a struggle.  You may as well kick back with the beverage of your choice in a responsible fashion while I spin this yarn.

I suppose it all started with wardriving in northern Virginia many years ago.  In a nutshell, I had loaded Windbringer up with a rather small for the time USB GPS unit, installed Kismet, put the wifi NIC into monitor mode so it would pick up frames from every access point within range, and went driving around for a couple of hours.  The idea is that the software records the datestamp and GPS coordinates at which you picked up the strongest signal from a wireless access point.  Rinse, repeat for as long as your power cells hold out, or as long as you care to drive, bike, walk, ski, or employ any other means of personal transportation to move around.  At the time I was uploading my results to wigle.net to contribute to their crowdsourced global map of wireless coverage.  Then I moved, and I seem to have accidentally tripped Wigle's bot detector (probably because I was going out for many hours at a time to cover very large areas).  End result, I didn't go wardriving for a very long time.

A couple of months back I decided that I needed to get more exercise than I could get at home (which I'll probably ramble about in a later post) so I joined the local gym.  Doing so gave me access to a much more broad selection of equipment to work with, and a lot more space than my office at home.  There isn't much to say on that particular point other than it's been a great investment, and I spent a nontrivial amount of downtime there working out.  While I haven't lost weight per se, I do seem to be trading some amount of body fat for muscle mass.  I don't know how much adipose tissue I've actually lost but my clothes are getting tight against my body in different ways than before.  I guess that's something.

Originally published at Mondo 2000, 10 October 2017.

A common theme of science fiction in the transhumanist vein, and less commonly in applied (read: practical) transhumanist circles is the concept of having an exocortex either installed within oneself, or interfaced in some way with one's brain to augment one's intelligence.  To paint a picture with a fairly broad brush, an exocortex was a system postulated by JCR Licklider in the research paper Man-Computer Symbiosis which would implement a new lobe of the human brain which was situated outside of the organism (though some components of it might be internal).  An exocortex would be a symbiotic device that would provide additional cognitive capacity or new capabilities that the organism previously did not posses, such as:

• Identifying and executing cognitively intensive tasks (such as searching for and mining data for a project) on behalf of the organic brain, in effect freeing up CPU time for the wetware.
• Adding additional density to existing neuronal networks to more rapidly and efficiently process information.  Thinking harder as well as faster.
• Providing databases of experiential knowledge (synthetic memories) for the being to "remember" and act upon.  Skillsofts, basically.
• Adding additional "execution threads" to one's thinking processes.  Cognitive multitasking.
• Modifying the parameters of one's consciousness, for example, modulating emotions to suppress anxiety and/or stimulate interest, stimulating a hyperfocus state to enhance concentration, or artificially inducing zen states of consciousness.
• Expanding short-term memory beyond baseline parameters.  For example, mechanisms that translate short-term memory into long-term memory significantly more efficiently.
• Adding I/O interfaces to the organic brain to facilitate connection to external networks, processing devices, and other tools.