Infinity, & Beyond !! Stunning - Kusama the Artist - Infinity Mirrors

#InfiniteKusama celebrates the legendary Japanese artist’s 65-year career, and has six Infinity Mirror rooms, the most ever shown together.

An Artist for the Instagram Age

Is Yayoi Kusama’s new participatory-art exhibit about seeking profound experiences—or posting selfies?

Alex Wong; Brendan Smialowski / Getty

Well before the Yayoi Kusama show opened in Washington, D.C., I heard from total strangers that I would not be able to get in. I heard about the lines, the waits, the tickets that would be released in batches every Monday at noon, the need to make arrangements now now now. The craze was on, though the exhibition was still more than a month away. “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” was starting its multicity tour at the Hirshhorn Museum. The circus was coming to town.

Back in January, I knew that this once-in-a-lifetime chance to see those half-dozen mirrored rooms—those infinite dreamworlds for one, created by Yayoi Kusama, who is 88 and lives by choice in a mental hospital in Japan—needed to be on my art bucket list.
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As I look over my ever-growing list, I see that it is chock-full of certain kinds of art—site-specific art, participatory art, relational art, land art, art that is hard to get to or hard to get into. Art that I’ve been told I absolutely, positively must experience in person before I die. Art that I can see only alone or in a small group. Art that will bring out in me an exquisite existential alertness. Art that I will complete by simply being present— art that without me is nothing.
Much of the art on my list is designed to involve the observer in ways that no mere gallery-going ever could—and indeed makes the blockbuster exhibitions of the 20th century (Picasso, King Tut, the treasure houses of Britain) seem quaint. Yes, the long lines are still part of the experience, but new elements have been added. Cameras are often allowed, which opens the door to Instagram, Snapchat, and other social media. The visitor’s encounter is, in many cases, time-limited. Most important, many of the works on my bucket list invite the spectator to engage more personally with the art.
What’s that you say? You don’t have an art bucket list? Well, you can borrow mine. First, though, I should warn you that you have already missed many of the unmissable experiences I have had on my list.

The art on my bucket list is designed to involve observers in ways that no mere gallery-going ever could.

Take New York alone. Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, a giant sphinx made of sugar, topped with a mammy head, is no longer at the Domino Sugar refinery on the East River (which has since been demolished). You can no longer see Cate Blanchett’s dramatic recitations of various art manifestos at the Park Avenue Armory. (However, her performance can now be seen as a movie, Manifesto.) You can no longer pay your respects, at the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest on Fifth Avenue, to Sophie Calle’s dead mother by watching an 11-minute video of her death. Marina Abramović, the performance artist, is no longer available to sit with you at MoMA. You missed staying dry (or getting wet) in the Rain Room while MoMA had it. (Good news, though: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently acquired it for its permanent collection, so you might have another chance.) You cannot float nude in salt water at Manhattan’s New Museum in an “Experience” designed by Carsten Höller. Rirkrit Tiravanija isn’t making Thai curry for visitors at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea or at MoMA anymore. The chance to walk through Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s orange Gates in Central Park has long since passed. Sigh.

But that’s half the fun! The fact that some folks have managed to make the scene while others get left out in the cold is integral to the excitement of participatory art. The thrill is akin to exotic travel, or getting to see Hamilton. Because not everyone who wants the experience actually gets the experience, these works, even if their intentions and messages are democratic, tend to become exclusive affairs. As the art historian Claire Bishop notes in Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, one paradox of this sort of participatory work “is that in intensifying convivial relations for a small group of people … it produces greater exclusivity vis-à-vis the general public.”
But cheer up, general public! Plenty of other can’t-miss art experiences aren’t going anywhere. I’m thinking of land art and site-specific art. Robert Smithson, for instance, created Spiral Jetty (1970) on the Great Salt Lake, in Utah, by arranging large rocks in a huge spiral. Michael Heizer made Double Negative (1969–70) near Overton, Nevada, by cutting two huge trenches into a mesa there. Walter De Maria composed The Lightning Field (1977) in the high desert of New Mexico by planting a vast field of 400 tall, lightning-attracting poles in a grid pattern. For the people who manage to make these treks, the dividend is not only the awesome sense of landscape transformed into art but also the keen realization that you and your journey are part of it.

If you can’t reach those places, don’t worry. There are other site-specific works that occupy whole rooms (De Maria’s Earth Room in New York), buildings (the Rothko Chapel in Houston), islands (the Benesse Art Site in Japan dominates Naoshima, in the Seto Inland Sea), and towns. For instance, much of Marfa, Texas, is devoted to the minimalist art of Donald Judd (known for his aluminum-and-concrete boxes), Carl Andre (known for his metal floor tiles, which visitors are allowed to walk on), and Dan Flavin (known for his arrays of fluorescent bulbs). Like old World’s Fair sites, these places and works are not going anywhere; you just have to get yourself to them. And keep in mind that the more remote they are, the more bucket-list-worthy they are, too.

If there is a poster artist for the current participatory-art craze, it has got to be Yayoi Kusama, whose exhibits—especially her Infinity Mirror rooms—have drawn record crowds around the world for the past few years. In her case, the challenge is not so much getting to the show, but getting into the show, and then getting into each individual room in the show. After you get your prized time slot—and good luck with that—you must wait your turn in not just one line but six. Most of the Infinity Mirror rooms can fit two or three people, and each has its own line to stand in.

Luckily, as with any good amusement park, there are, along with the main rides, plenty of other entertainments. At the Kusama show, the side attractions amount to a more conventional museum experience: a short course in Kusama’s early obsessional work—her repetitive nets, polka dots, and phalluses. You will learn that it was by wrestling with her mental illness and her compulsion to spread those forms on every surface—walls, floors, furniture—that Kusama began to lay the groundwork for the Infinity Mirror rooms.

Kusama’s Infinity Nets, a series of large paintings that she began in 1958, are canvases entirely covered with beautiful, repetitive loops and waves of paint that give the impression of a rippled oceanic surface that could go on and on, into infinity. (When Kusama first made them, she was compared to Jackson Pollock.) Then come the dots. Dots mean Kusama and Kusama means dots. But long before there was the circuslike Kusama we know today, her dots had a serious side. She discovered that she (like all of us) was “one of the dots among the millions of dots in the universe,” and decided to use them to evoke individual disintegration and cosmic unity. “Polka dots,” she has said, “are a way to infinity.”

Soft phallic shapes were a form of self-therapy for Kusama, who made a rowboat out of them in Violet Obsession.

Violet Obsession (1994) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2017. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Duke. Photograph by Cathy Carver.

Around 1961, Kusama’s two-dimensional obsessions began to overflow into three dimensions, as she made soft tubes out of cloth—first just plain white cloth, then striped or polka-dotted—and stuffed them like sausages. She called these soft phallic objects “Accumulations.” En route to the Infinity Mirror rooms, you’ll encounter a few. On the floor of one darkened gallery is Violet Obsession (1994), a rowboat and oars covered, both inside and out, with cuddly purple phalluses. Nearby are two chairs from the mid-1960s, sprouting soft, bulging white phalluses. Extending through the length of one gallery is A Snake (1974), a long, silver serpentine form on the floor, bristling with baked-potato-like phalluses.

There’s an embarrassment of phalluses, and that is the point. The phalluses were Kusama’s way of turning fear into something funny. Mika Yoshitake, the curator of the exhibition, explains that when Kusama was a child, her mother, suspecting that Kusama’s father was having an affair, had young Yayoi spy on the lovers and report back. This early vision of sex left her traumatized; she suffered hallucinations. Years later, as self-therapy, she began making soft phalluses and attaching them to furniture and floors. “By continuously reproducing the forms of things that terrify me,” Kusama has said, “I am able to suppress the fear … and lie down among them. That turns the frightening thing into something funny, something amusing.”
These ridiculous objects, simultaneously comic and tragic, are the perfect warm-up act for the main show, the six Infinity Mirror rooms. The first room, Phalli’s Field (1965/2016), is, if you’ll excuse the expression, Kusama’s seminal work, the bridge between the polka dots and the phalluses. It is also the bridge between Kusama’s New York experiments of the ’60s and her more recent mirrored works. The precursor to Phalli’s Field had no mirrors. It was a carpet of soft phalluses on which she could lie and be photographed. But after growing weary of sewing thousands of stuffed phalluses, she happened on the brilliant idea of achieving repetition with mirrors.
A version of Phalli’s Field was incorporated into Kusama’s public performances. She lolled in the field of her fabric phalluses on 14th Street while a camera captured the scene. Kusama’s work fit right in with the art events that were proliferating at the time—mostly one-off performances, part art and part theater, many of them involving nudity and paint, poetry and music, destruction and silence. They were called “Happenings.” (The painter and performance-art pioneer Allan Kaprow came up with the term in the late 1950s.)

Kusama grew tired of sewing thousands of stuffed phalluses, so she turned to mirrors to achieve repetition.

Installation view of Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field (1965) in Floor Show, Castellane Gallery, New York, 1965. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore; Victoria Miro, London; David Zwirner, New York. © Yayoi Kusama. Photograph by Eikoh Hosoe.

The idea was to liberate art from museum boundaries, to blur the line between art and nonart, and to take the result to the streets and to the people. Unscripted immediacy was key, yet sometimes a running camera was part of the performance, too. For Meat Joy (1964), for instance, Carolee Schneemann and other participants rolled around on an assortment of raw fish, sausages, chickens, wet paint, paper scraps, transparent plastic; the whole thing was filmed.

Back in the ’60s, Kusama was not as famous as, say, Andy Warhol. But by the end of the decade, she had everything in place for the wildly popular experience we have now—the dots, the phalluses, the mirrors, the rooms.

Let me immerse you in my immersive experience—not that it’s any substitute for being there yourself. Before we start, I should tell you that your experience will certainly be different from mine; I was lucky enough to go during a press opening, so I didn’t have to stand in any lines, I got to enter each room alone, and I was granted not just 20 to 30 seconds, but a full minute!

An attendant waved me into the mirrored room that is Phalli’s Field. As I walked down a short plank leading to the edge of what looked like an endless pasture of red-and-white polka-dotted phalluses, the attendant shut the door behind me. For a second, as I became aware of myself in the mirrors, I had the sensation of being in a department store’s changing room. But I had choices to make, and quickly. I could stand there and confront myself in this field of phalluses, or perhaps I could try to cancel myself out of the space by ducking. Neither felt right. I knelt on the little dock and regarded myself at roughly the height of the blooming polka-dot things (mushrooms without caps!). I confronted myself many times over in many mirrors in this crazy landscape. Before the attendant came to usher me out, I snapped a picture or two on my cellphone, and did a quick video-pan around the place.

“Infinity Mirrors” offers the chance to capture the lonely existential experience of infinity and send it to others as a selfie.

My next stop was Love Forever, a room that is mirrored on both the inside and the outside—my chance to be a peeping Tom, or rather a peeping Yayoi, if only for a minute. This six-sided chamber—first constructed in 1966, in part as a protest against the Vietnam War—was then reconstructed in 1994, and seems to hark back to Kusama’s childhood trauma. Instead of entering, you peer into it while another voyeur, catty-corner to you, can peer in at the same time. The room is radiant, and literally hot, because of the lights inside it. Although the view you have is abstract—an infinite hexagonal pattern of colored lights that reminded me of old Broadway—it also feels a bit dirty and illicit. You are aware of the reflection of your own eyes across the room and also of the eyes of whoever else is gazing into the box at the same time. It’s embarrassing by design. The viewer is the voyeur, and the voyeur is you.

To peer into Love Forever is to be reminded of old Broadway, and to feel uncomfortably voyeuristic, too.

Infinity Mirrored Room—Love Forever (1966/1994) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2017. Photograph by Cathy Carver.

By now, as I moved on to The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013), I had become aware that my awareness of myself was shifting with each room. In this one I was keenly alert to my size and scale. I had the sense of being alone in a city, where hiding is always a possibility. Because the world looked better without me in it, I ducked and took a selfie with no self in it. Shortly after I emerged, I could hear a recording of Kusama incanting words I couldn’t decipher. She was reciting, in Japanese, her poem “A Manhattan Suicide Addict” (2007). The lines, once I read them in English, seemed fitting after my recent attempt at self-eradication:

The present never ends …
I become a stone
Not in time eternal
But in the present that transpires

I was pushed out of my reverie by a jumble of gigantic spotted pink-and-black beach balls beckoning like carnival barkers toward the next Kusama ride. Dots Obsession—Love Transformed Into Dots, first made in 2007, was crammed with more beach balls. I quickly moved through this experience, which was as unethereal as you’ll get from Kusama—Kusama silly. Kusama psychedelic. Kusama Lite.

Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity (2009) was Kusama Heavy. Was she perhaps taking on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? With small lights hung low in the darkened and mirrored room, this work evokes the look and feel of toro nagashi, the ceremony in which paper lanterns are lit and floated down a river in the evening. I had the by-now familiar feeling of being small and absorbed in some vastness, where I knew no one but myself. This time the experience was exhilarating. I was on the dock of the bay of infinity. I had no urge to hide myself. I was only a silhouette anyway. I didn’t want to leave, but my minute was up.
And so I walked beside a field of yellow-and-black polka-dotted tentacles and on to the very last Infinity Mirror room, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins (2016). I was conscious of the stark difference between what was above—a stormy sky, looming with dark and dangerous pumpkins—and what surrounded me at ground level: a field of happy, gleaming yellow pumpkins with black spots on them. Was I a faithful Linus shivering at night in the darkness, waiting for the Great Pumpkin? No. As I again viewed myself on the horizon line, I saw that I had become a bridge between two realms, up and down. I was an upright, rectilinear self in a world of orbs.

People who know that I have had the Kusama experience look at me as though I have been to Mecca.

With its surreal backdrop, the pumpkin room was, I noticed, perfect for selfies. Well, who was I not to take a picture? I snapped 10 or so, and because the pumpkins were even more photogenic without me, once again I tried to expunge myself from some of the photos by lying low. (I learned only after seeing the show that lying down is prohibited.) Then my time was up.

I left the show by way of The Obliteration Room, a large space where visitors can decompress. On the preview day, it was an almost all-white room with all-white ikea furniture. By the time the circus left D.C. in May, thousands of visitors had adorned every surface with the colorful sticker dots that were distributed there. The white had been vanquished by a riot of Wonder Bread spots. This place, the only one where viewers got to make their mark, was the most communal and relaxing and also, I have to say, the least existentially affecting.

Kusama’s work also has a silly dimension.

Dots Obsession—Love Transformed Into Dots (2007) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2017. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore; Victoria Miro, London; David Zwirner, New York. © Yayoi Kusama. Photograph by Cathy Carver.

People who know that I have had the Kusama experience look at me like someone who has been to Mecca. They ask, anxiously, whether it’s worth it. Should they take extraordinary measures to get to this exhibit on its two-year-long tour? As I’ve thought about how to respond, I’ve also been puzzling over the peculiarities of our particular art moment: Why has the apprehension of art become so like theater? And why is Kusama, who never received as much attention in the 1960s as many of her contemporaries did, finally in the spotlight now?

I was given a one-word answer to that question—Instagram!—and surely that is right. The Kusama show has just about everything the Happenings once had—the chance to see something extraordinary, the chance to participate, and the chance to photograph (or be photographed). But the “Infinity Mirrors” exhibition has added one key ingredient to the mix—the chance to capture the lonely existential experience of infinity and send it to others in the form of a selfie. People—thousands of them (check out #Kusama and #InfiniteKusama)—Instagram themselves in the exhibit.
By offering up to the public the solo art experience that was once her own private world—a primal and personal space for looking and healing and thinking about one’s own place in the cosmos—and then by also allowing selfies in it, Kusama has created the perfect art experience for the social-media age.
Her shows are crowded because, as many viewers will tell you, you really do have to see these works in person to appreciate them. No photograph, however good, can deliver that existential jolt of being there, seeing yourself repeated ad infinitum. At the same time, Instagram is helping to drive Kusama’s popularity; it is the means by which people advertise to the world that they are among the precious few who have had this lonely experience of being one dot among millions. The visual proof has helped propel Kusama’s work to the forefront of destination art in its latest form.

Of course, destination art isn’t exactly new; the frisson that accompanies a firsthand encounter has always been an element of art appreciation. In the late 18th century, Europeans flocked to see panoramic paintings, thrilled to be immersed in a 360-degree experience. In the early 19th century, a walk through the Louvre or a tour of Italy became de rigueur for any cultured European. In 1913, the Armory Show, where Marcel Duchamp showed Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), was an essential art pilgrimage. From the 1930s to the 1950s, every city that exhibited Picasso’s Guernica on its European and American tour drew crowds. By the 1990s—30 years after New York emerged as the Happenings capital, and some two decades after land art lured viewers farther afield— the new draw was destination architecture. Think of Bilbao, Spain.
Now the magnet has moved again. Museums and galleries are currently trying to attract visitors by engineering immersive environments and interactions. From Kusama on the grand end of the scale, offerings extend down to the circumscribed and understated: In “Sara Berman’s Closet,” at the Met, Maira Kalman, with her son, Alex, has re-created her mother’s closet, holding mostly white clothing. Meanwhile, this summer the Guggenheim in New York is exhibiting Doug Wheeler’s “PSAD Synthetic Desert III.” Installed near the top of the Guggenheim’s spiral, this small show—a “semi-anechoic chamber” filled with beautiful, sound-absorbing foam stalagmites and stalactites—promises visitors in small groups (with timed tickets) the experience of the silence of the desert.

Drawn, yet again, to the lure of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I went to see Wheeler’s chamber. And I am happy I did, because I had an epiphany about exactly what sort of art moment we are in. Although I did not experience the sublime silence I was hoping for (I was actually overwhelmed by a pulsating ringing in my ears), I had an important encounter on my way out of the museum. I spied the stanchions that signal a wait-in-line-to-see experience. I stood and waited. For what? A toilet. It was a solid-gold toilet, titled America—the work of the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, installed in one of the museum’s bathrooms. Visitors, after standing in line, can not only behold and admire the toilet, but also use it. “Its participatory nature, in which viewers are invited to make use of the fixture individually and privately,” the museum’s brochure notes, “allows for an experience of unprecedented intimacy with a work of art.” Intimacy indeed.
I went in, took a picture of the gold toilet, sat down, and tried to get a selfie that included both me and the work of art. From the sink, after washing my hands, I got another picture of the gold toilet, alone. And I suddenly understood that, taken in the right spirit, America is not just a riff on Duchamp’s infamous Fountain—a porcelain urinal signed with the name R. Mutt, which, by the way, is 100 years old this year. It is also a supreme example of relational aesthetics, whose core idea is that the give-and-take of a social situation can itself be a work of art. You donate pee, you take away a photo. What will your photo be? Your face as you sit on the gold toilet? Your contribution to the gold toilet? It’s up to you! (I was told that one employee had been fired for standing on the toilet in an attempt to get a good selfie, which he then sent out to his friends.)

If you look around you, you’ll see examples of relational aesthetics everywhere. Over the past few years, for instance, several museums have offered up Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree, on which people can hang their wishes, written on little paper tags. Recently the Jewish Museum, in New York, hosted “Take Me (I’m Yours),” in which visitors were supposed to take whatever they wanted from the exhibition—plaster casts of coffee lids, ribbons with slogans, buttons, T-shirts, clips of film, vials of air.

In our trophy-getting, Instagramming, participatory era, the taking and posting of selfies has become an important and unintentional extension of relational aesthetics. Whether spectators are invited to take pictures or not (cellphones are not allowed, for instance, in Wheeler’s silence chamber), many visitors now experience museums and galleries with a cellphone in hand and a Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook account at the ready. You take a picture, you post it for your friends, and they receive the favor, and do the same in return.
Indeed, some museums have started loosening up their rules about photography, on the theory that people are more inclined to come if they are allowed to take pictures. Regardless of the rules, though, viewers snap and viewers chat, and the resulting experience is hard for any museum to control or to script—which is, after all, a basic (and potentially unnerving) principle of participatory art.

The surreal pumpkin room is perfect for selfies.

All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins (2016) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2017. Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore; Victoria Miro, London. © Yayoi Kusama. Photograph by Cathy Carver.

Case in point: In its inaugural show last year, the Met Breuer included Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)—a 175-pound pile of candy from which visitors were allowed to take a piece. Despite a sign on the wall telling viewers that photography was not allowed, the pile of candy inspired, as W magazine noted, pictures aplenty on Instagram. “The good ones are on the bottom!” read a caption that was hashtagged #GettinItIn; the picture showed a visitor plunging his hand to the bottom of the candy pile. Another Instagrammer wrote: “The Met Breuer giving out free candy on the 4th floor and other cool things that you should def go see”—a caption that yielded the comment “Omfg.”

What those exuberant viewers might not have realized, though the wall text explained it, was that by taking a piece of candy they were taking part in a performance that refers to, among other things, the physical decline of the artist’s partner, Ross Laycock, who died of complications from aids (as did Gonzalez-Torres). The weight of the pile of candy, at its outset, was Laycock’s ideal weight, 175 pounds, before he got sick.
Will Kusama’s exhibition—where photography is obviously welcome—suffer similar indignities? It already has. One visitor to All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins reportedly tripped over one of the gleaming pumpkins and damaged it while trying to capture a self-portrait in a mirror. What has become almost laughably clear is that Kusama’s mirrored investigations into existentialism and infinity have become theaters of infinite narcissism.
But does it really matter? Narcissism, after all, is one of the inescapable ingredients of participatory art, which not only highlights the give-and-take involved in any art experience, but also calls attention to the power of the audience to complete, or complicate, or confound an artist’s intention. Like Gonzalez-Torres’s pile of candy, Kusama’s works were created, at least in part, to deal with personal trauma, but they are also asking viewers to have their own experience. Surely Gonzalez-Torres knew that some visitors wouldn’t be thinking about aids while sucking the pieces of candy they took from his pile, and surely Kusama knew that no one would experience her works as she did.

In fact, maybe the distance between the sorrow and the silliness is part of the point. I do wonder, though, what in the world Kusama, who doesn’t have a cellphone and doesn’t do Facebook, Snapchat, or Instagram, would make of the circus that is “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors.” What would she make of spectators so busy trying for the perfect selfie that they fail to feel any sense of existential angst or joy? I have a suspicion that she might smile.
Although you may have missed your shot to see the exhibit in Washington, D.C., Kusama will be coming soon to a city that might be somewhere near you: Seattle, Los Angeles, Toronto, Cleveland, and Atlanta. If you ask me, I would say go ahead and put it on your art bucket list. Why miss out on the chance, before you die, to wander through fields of phalluses and polka dots and watch yourself contemplate your own insignificance in the universe? The experience is well worth it, if only to get an intimation of where every bucket list points—to the finitude of your existence in this infinite cosmos. You wait in line, you get your turn, you look around in awe, you snap a few pictures, and then, like everyone else, you are escorted out.
Well, that’s life. It may look infinite, but you are not. You are just a dot, there and then not.

About the Author

• Sarah Boxer is a writer, illustrator, and cartoonist. She is the creator of In the Floyd Archives and its sequel, Mother May I?

A Million Chinese Live In Underground Nuclear Bunkers In Beijing !!

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/proof/2017/02/atomic-rooms-beijing-china-housing/


http://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/proof/2017/02/atomic-rooms-beijing-china-housing/#/01-atomic-rooms-faccilongo.jpg






HOPE YOU CAN OPEN THE ABOVE . ? !

"A Wake" by Malena Morling, Poem WOW !!

The Writer's Almanac for February 19, 2017:

A Wake

by Malena Morling

I called Michael and he told me he just got home from a
wake. “Oh, I am sorry,” I said. “No, no,” he said, “it was
the best wake I have ever been to. The funeral home was
as warm and as cozy as anyone’s living room. We had the
greatest time. My friend looked wonderful, much better
dead than alive. He wore his red and green Hawaiian
shirt. He was the most handsome corpse I’d ever seen.
They did such a good job! His daughter was there and
a lot of old friends I had not seen in years. You know,
he drank himself to death. He’d been on and off the
wagon for years, but for some reason this is what he
ended up doing.” As my friend kept talking, I thought
of Lorca and what he wrote about death and Spain: “A
dead man in Spain is more alive as a dead man than any-
place else in the world” and “Everywhere else, death is
an end. Death comes, and they draw the curtains. Not
in Spain. In Spain they open them. Many Spaniards live
indoors until the day they die and are taken out into the
sunlight.”
“A Wake” by Malena Mörling from Astoria. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.

Pandemic Could Kill 30 Million Bill Gates Warns via Terroism or Nature

BILL GATES: A new kind of terrorism could wipe out 30 million people in less than a year — and we are not prepared

• Bill Gates, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Mike Nudelman/Business Insider
The following op-ed was exclusively provided to Business Insider to coincide with a speech Bill Gates is giving for the Munich Security Conference. The following is an abridged version of his remarks.
When I decided 20 years ago to make global health the focus of my philanthropic work, I didn’t imagine that I’d be speaking at a conference on international security policy. But I’m speaking here at the Munich Security Conference because I believe our worlds are more tightly linked than most people realize.
War zones and other fragile state settings are the most difficult places to eliminate epidemics. They’re also some of the most likely places for them to begin—as we’ve seen with Ebola in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and with cholera in the Congo Basin and the Horn of Africa.
It’s also true that the next epidemic could originate on the computer screen of a terrorist intent on using genetic engineering to create a synthetic version of the smallpox virus . . . or a super contagious and deadly strain of the flu.
The point is, we ignore the link between health security and international security at our peril. Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year. And they say there is a reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10-15 years.
Business Insider/Skye Gould
It’s hard to get your mind around a catastrophe of that scale, but it happened not that long ago. In 1918, a particularly virulent and deadly strain of flu killed between 50 million and 100 million people.
You might be wondering how likely these doomsday scenarios really are. The fact that a deadly global pandemic has not occurred in recent history shouldn’t be mistaken for evidence that a deadly pandemic will not occur in the future.
And even if the next pandemic isn’t on the scale of the 1918 flu, we would be wise to consider the social and economic turmoil that might ensue if something like Ebola made its way into a lot of major urban centers.
The good news is that with advances in biotechnology, new vaccines and drugs can help prevent epidemics from spreading out of control. And, most of the things we need to do to protect against a naturally occurring pandemic are the same things we must prepare for an intentional biological attack.

We need to invest in vaccine innovation

First and most importantly, we have to build an arsenal of new weapons—vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics.
Vaccines can be especially important in containing epidemics. But today, it typically takes up to 10 years to develop and license a new vaccine. To significantly curb deaths from a fast-moving airborne pathogen, we would have to get that down considerably—to 90 days or less.
We took an important step last month with the launch of a new public-private partnership called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. The hope is that CEPI will enable the world to produce safe, effective vaccines as quickly as new threats emerge.
The really big breakthrough potential is in emerging technology platforms that leverage recent advances in genomics to dramatically reduce the time needed to develop vaccines. Basically, they create a delivery vehicle for synthetic genetic material that instructs your cells to make a vaccine inside your own body. And the great thing is that once you’ve built a vaccine platform for one pathogen, you can use it again for other pathogens—which means we could also apply it to other hard-to-treat diseases like HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis.
Of course, the preventive capacity of a vaccine won’t help if a pathogen has already spread out of control. Because epidemics can quickly take root in the places least equipped to fight them, we also need to improve surveillance.
That starts with strengthening basic public health systems in the most vulnerable countries. We also have to ensure that every country is conducting routine surveillance to gather and verify disease outbreak intelligence.
Bill Gates Dave Thompson - WPA Pool /Getty Images
And we must ensure that countries share information in a timely way, and that there are adequate laboratory resources to identify and monitor suspect pathogens.
The third thing we need to do is prepare for epidemics the way the military prepares for war. This includes germ games and other preparedness exercises so we can better understand how diseases will spread, how people will respond in a panic, and how to deal with things like overloaded highways and communications systems.
We also need trained medical personnel ready to contain an epidemic quickly, and better coordination with the military to help with logistics and to secure areas.
It is encouraging that global alliances like the G7 and the G20 are beginning to focus on pandemic preparedness, and that leaders like Chancellor Merkel and Prime Minister Solberg are championing health security.
But there isn’t enough money to help the poorest countries with epidemic preparation. The irony is that the cost of ensuring adequate pandemic preparedness worldwide is estimated at $3.4 billion a year—yet the projected annual loss from a pandemic could run as high as $570 billion.

The pandemic is one of the 3 biggest threats the world faces 

Bill Gates believes climate change, nuclear war and pandemics are the three biggest world threats. Andrew Burton/Getty
When I was a kid, there was really only one existential threat the world faced. The threat of a nuclear war. By the late 1990s, most reasonable people had come to accept that climate changed represented another major threat to humankind.
I view the threat of deadly pandemics right up there with nuclear war and climate change. Innovation, cooperation, and careful planning can dramatically mitigate the risks presented by each of these threats.
I’m optimistic that a decade from now, we can be much better prepared for a lethal epidemic—if we’re willing to put a fraction of what we spend on defense budgets and new weapons systems into epidemic readiness.
When the next pandemic strikes, it could be another catastrophe in the annals of the human race. Or it could be something else altogether. An extraordinary triumph of human will. A moment when we prove yet again that, together, we are capable of taking on the world’s biggest challenges to create a safer, healthier, more stable world.

This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.

NOW WATCH: BILL GATES: A deadly epidemic is a real possibility and we are not prepared

More: Bill Gates Op-Ed Opinion Pandemic

Grieving Army Widow Meets Husband's Coffin on Tarmac !! Never Forget.

Human Interest

Grieving Army Widow Meets Her Husband’s Coffin on Airport Tarmac, Leaving Plane Passengers in Tears

By Dave Quinn•@NineDaves

Posted on February 18, 2017 at 1:55pm EST

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TANG CHHIN SOTHY/AFP/Getty Images; Army

A touching moment between a grieving military widow and her husband’s coffin was captured on camera by a bystander, giving millions of viewers on social media a window into the heartbreaking and personal effects of war.
Lisa West Williams was waiting to exit her aircraft at Raleigh-Durham International Airport on Tuesday, when she and her fellow passengers watched a flag-draped coffin being removed from the plane’s luggage compartments.
It contained the body of Green Beret Shawn Thomas — a 35-year-old father of four who, according to his obituary, died while serving on Feb. 2 in a vehicle accident in Niger, Africa.
The Oklahoma native was an Echo in the Special Forces and was on his eighth deployment when he died. He and his family — wife Tara and children Cheyenne, Taylor, Gavin, and Natylyn — were based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Filming the incident, Williams recorded the moment Tara greeted her husband’s coffin. Dressed in all black,  she placed her hand on the coffin and buried her head into its side. Appearing to cry, she was comforted by loved ones before six members of the military carry his coffin to a nearby hearse.
“It was an honor to fly home with this PATRIOT!” wrote Williams on her Facebook post of the video, which has been viewed over 8 million times. “God bless his wife and family. There was not a dry eye around me.”
Later, Williams told WNCT that Tara had given her permission to post the footage, thanking her and hoping others would see the sacrifices made by military families.
“She wanted people to realize that this goes on every day,” Williams told WNCT. “There are many men and women that come home in a casket and they’ve made the ultimate sacrifice for us.”
According to Army Times, Shawn was awarded — among other honors — two Bronze Stars and four Good Conduct Medals. His body will be buried at Arlington National Ceremony.
“Under his big beard, tattoos and giant muscles there was a small town Oklahoma boy that was grounded by his faith, strong values, and family,” his obituary read. “He will be missed by everyone that had the opportunity to meet him.”

http://people.com/human-interest/grieving-army-widow-meets-husbands-coffin-at-airport-tara-thomas-shawn-thomas/?xid=email-email-peopledaily-20170218PM-tout1

The following video will make you cry, think and then cry all over again.
It features a U.S. army widow breaking down in tears over her fallen husband's coffin after it touches down on an airport tarmac.
The soldier inside is named Shawn Thomas - and the 35-year old Green Beret was killed in a car accident on February 2 while deployed in Niger, Africa.

According to his obituary, Thomas shared four kids( Cheyenne, Taylor, Gavin and Natylyn)  with his wife, Tara Thomas. The family was based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Last Tuesday, Shawn's flag-draped coffin arrived at Raleigh-Durham International Airport in Morrisville, North Carolina.
A passenger on the plane that carried the coffin, Lisa West Williams, was so moved by Tara's reaction upon seeing it that she filmed the scene.
She shared the footage on Facebook, but she did so with Tara's permission. Even with her encouragement.
"She wanted people to realize that this goes on every day," Williams told WNCT-TV, adding:
"There are many men and women that come home in a casket and they've made the ultimate sacrifice for us."
"It was heartbreaking," Williams also told WNCT.

"Never seen anything like it before," she adds.
The Facebook video, which depicts the cries of other passengers watching Tara say goodbye to her husband, has been viewed over eight million times.
"It was an honor to fly home with this PATRIOT! God bless his wife and family. There was not a dry eye around me," Williams wrote as a caption to it.
Shawn - who was honored with two Bronze Stars and four Good Conduct Medals during his service - will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Watch the heartbreaking video below and then join us in giving thanks to every soldier and soldier's family out there:

Army Widow Breaks Down Over Casket: Watch the Heartbreak

Deployed Dad Surprises Daughter at Graduation

Boneless Skinless CHILDREN'S Thighs !!?? Say What?! Bell & Evans, at Whole Foods !!

Boneless Skinless Children’s Thighs, Anyone?

Sent from reader, Audrey:

I found this at Whole Foods… Chicken or Children’s thighs?

Donate Medical Data AND Organs When You Die

Why You Should Donate Your Data (as Well as Your Organs) When You Die

By David Martin Shaw, J. Valérie Gross and Thomas C. Erren • 02/16/17 3:48pm

There’s more you could donate besides blood, organs and tissue. Yale Rosen/Flickr

Most people are aware they can donate their organs when they die. Doing so is very important: Each deceased donor can save several lives if he donates his organs and tissue and they are used for transplantation. Support for organ donation among members of the public is very high – at over 80 percent in some countries, even if many people have not yet gotten around to registering as an organ donor.
But organs aren’t the only thing that you can donate once you’re dead. What about donating your medical data?

Data might not seem important in the way that organs are. People need organs just to stay alive, or to avoid being on dialysis for several hours a day. But medical data are also very valuable – even if they are not going to save someone’s life immediately. Why? Because medical research cannot take place without medical data, and the sad fact is that most people’s medical data are inaccessible for research once they are dead.

For example, working in shifts can be disruptive to one’s circadian rhythms. This is now thought by some to probably cause cancer. A large cohort study involving tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals could help us to investigate different aspects of shift work, including chronobiology, sleep impairment, cancer biology and premature aging. The results of such research could be very important for cancer prevention. However, any such study could currently be hamstrung by the inability to access and analyze participants’ data after they die.

Data rights

While alive, people have certain rights that allow them to control what happens to data concerning them. For example, you can control whether your phone number and address are publicly available, request copies of data held on you by any public bodies and control what Facebook displays about you. When you are dead you will no longer be able to do any of these things, and control of your digital identity after death is a controversial topic. For example, families often cannot access deceased relative’s iTunes purchases, or access the dead person’s Facebook page to indicate that he or she is now deceased.
When it comes to medical records, things become even more complicated. While alive, many people give their consent to participate in medical research, whether it’s a clinical trial of a new drug or a longitudinal study based on medical records. Without their informed consent, such research cannot normally take place. Medical confidentiality is rightly regarded as extremely important, and it can be suspended only with patient consent.
In most jurisdictions, the same applies once persons are dead – with the added problem that consent cannot be obtained from them at that point.
But it would be a serious mistake to assume that everyone wants such strict data confidentiality to persist after death. Just as in life, some people would provide their data for medical research in order to develop new treatments that could help save people’s lives.
Recognizing this fact, some countries do allow researchers to use deceased person’s data. In the United Kingdom, medical records remain confidential for a century after a patient’s death, but permission can be sought from the Public Records Office to use data from deceased persons in research.
However, the U.K. has one of the most permissive systems in the world regarding use of data after death. In contrast, German researchers face considerable hurdles. First, they must use prove that the individual’s right to privacy is less important than the potential benefit to society from the research – a difficult thing to prove given that no researcher knows until the study is conducted what the benefit will be. Second, they have to use anonymized data if at all possible; this means that lots of valuable background data about patients might not be available because any potential identifiers are removed. Third, researchers have to prove there is no other way to answer the research question. And fourth, they have to prove that the person could not be asked for consent.
In the United States, researchers are encouraged to share data by the America COMPETES Act. However, this law relates to data already in use by researchers, rather than than enabling access to the medical records of deceased individuals, which normally remain confidential after death.

Our proposal

These are massive hurdles for researchers to deal with. Even if they can overcome all of them, doing so wastes both time and money. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier if people could sign up to be data donors the same way that they can register as organ donors? That way, consent would exist for researchers to use data posthumously. Sadly, systems are not really in place to do this in any country that we are aware of.
As researchers in medicine and ethics, we have found the rules governing data sharing in several countries to be inadequate. We think countries should create national databases of data donors, which could be used both for living patients to control how their medical data are used and shared, and for them to indicate whether they wish to continue sharing data after death.
People should be able to indicate which type of projects they wish to share data with, which parts of their medical records they are happy to share and whether they are willing to share data in a non-anonymized manner. They should also be able to give “broad consent” to future use of data if they wish.
Data donation after death should be discussed to avoid data dying along with patients, in turn leading to other deaths by setting back medical science.

David Martin Shaw is a Bioethicist in the Department of Health Ethics and Society at Maastricht University and Institute for Biomedical Ethics, University of Basel; J. Valérie Gross is a Physician and Research Associate at the University of Cologne, and Thomas C. Erren is a Professor at the University of Cologne. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Self-Help Books, For The Newly Dead !! Roz Chast

Gesundheit, Sneezing in Cremation Urn COMIC !!!!! R.I.P.

SPECKTICKLES by Bill Abbott

Transhumanism-Humans & Machines Merging !!

NEW ATLAS

ScienceFeature

Welcome to the era of transhumanism

Rich Haridy

9 pictures

Transhumanism is moving inexorably into the mainstream as technological advances accelerate(Credit: genious2000de/Depositphotos)

View gallery - 9 images

In a compelling webseries from 2012 entitled H+, we were introduced to a future world where much of the population has a hi-tech implant, allowing individuals a direct neural interface with the internet. As often is the case in science fiction, things don't turn out well for those technological pioneers. A virus infects the implant and chaos quickly descends on a human race that has become biologically fused with technology.

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The series was an overt examination of a transhumanist future, with the title H+ being an appropriation of the common transhuman abbreviation. Five years after the series' birth, we live in a present even more entrenched on a path towards the realization of transhumanist ideals.

Early in February 2017, innovative billionaire Elon Musk reiterated an idea he had floated several times over the past year: Humans need to merge with machines. Musk sees a direct brain/computer interface as an absolute necessity, not only in order for us to evolve as a species, but as a way of keeping up with the machines we are creating. According to Musk, if we don't merge with the machines, we will become useless and irrelevant.

While Elon Musk does not self-identify as a "transhumanist," the idea of fusing man with machine is fundamental to this movement that arose over the course of the 20th century. And as we move into a tumultuous 21st century, transhumanism is quickly shifting from its sci-fi influenced philosophical and cultural niche into a more mainstream, and increasingly popular, movement.

Zoltan Istvan, a prominent futurist and transhumanist, is currently making a bold political run for the position of Governor of California. "We need leadership that is willing to use radical science, technology, and innovation – what California is famous for –to benefit us all," Istvan declared in a recent editorial published by Newsweek. "We need someone with the nerve to risk the tremendous possibilities to save the environment through bioengineering, to end cancer by seeking a vaccine or a gene-editing solution for it."

What is transhumanism?

Simply put, transhumanism is a broad intellectual movement that advocates for the transformation of humanity through embracing technology. Thinkers in the field opine that our intellectual, physical and psychological capabilities can, and should, be enhanced by any and all available emerging technologies. From genetic modification to make us smarter and live longer, to enhancing our physical capabilities through bioengineering and mechanical implants, transhumanists see our future as one where we transcend our physical bodies with the aid of technology.

The term "transhuman" can be traced back several hundred years, but in terms of our current use we can look to 20th century biologist and eugenicist, Julian Huxley. Across a series of lectures and articles in the 1950s, Huxley advocated for a type of utopian futurism where humanity would evolve and transcend its present limitations.

"We need a name for this new belief," Huxley wrote in 1957. "Perhaps transhumanism will serve; man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing the new possibilities of and for his human nature."

Huxley's ideas were arguably inspired by influential speculative fiction of the mid-20th century from the likes of Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein, and consequently his more specific transhumanist philosophies went on to influence a generation of cyberpunk authors in the 1980s. It was in this era that the first self-described transhumanists began appearing, having formal meetings around the University of California.

With the pace of technological advancement dramatically accelerating into the 21st century, transhumanist thinking began to manifest in more specific futurist visions. Cryonics and life extension technology was one focus of transhumanists, while others looked to body modification, gender transitioning and general biohacking as a way of transcending the limits of our physical bodies.

What could go wrong?

Plenty of criticisms have been lobbed at transhumanists over the years, with their extreme views of the technological future of humanity causing many to question whether this is a direct pathway to losing touch with what makes us essentially human. The fear that we will merge into some kind of inhuman, god-like, robot civilization quite fairly frightens and disturbs those with more traditional perspectives on humanity.

Science fiction classically reflects many fears of transhumanist futures, from Skynet taking over the world to a Gattaca-like future where genetic modification creates dystopian class separation. But prominent transhumanist critic Francis Fukuyama has soberly outlined the dangers of this modern movement in his book, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution.

Fukuyama comprehensively argues that the complexity of human beings cannot be so easily reduced into good and bad traits. If we were to try to eliminate traits we considered to be negative, be it through genetic modification or otherwise, we would be dangerously misunderstanding how we fundamentally function. "If we weren't violent and aggressive we wouldn't be able to defend ourselves; if we didn't have feelings of exclusivity, we wouldn't be loyal to those close to us; if we never felt jealousy, we would also never feel love," he writes.

Some of the more valid concerns about the dawning transhumanist future are the socioeconomic repercussions of such a speedy technological evolution. As the chasm between rich and poor grows in our current culture, one can't help but be concerned that future advancements could become disproportionately limited to those with the financial resources to afford them. If life extension technologies start to become feasible, and they are only available to the billionaire class, then we enter a scenario where the rich get richer and live longer, while the poor get poorer and die sooner.

Without exceptionally strong political reform maintaining democratic access to human enhancement technologies, it's easy to foresee the rise of a disturbing genetic class divide. As environmentalist and activist Bill McKibben writes: "If we can't afford the fifty cents a person it would take to buy bed nets to protect most of Africa from malaria, it is unlikely we will extend to anyone but the top tax bracket these latest forms of genetic technology."

Remember eugenics ...

The looming specter of eugenics hovers over a great deal of transhumanist thought. In the first half of the 20th century the term became disturbingly, but not unreasonably, associated with Nazi Germany. Sterilizing or euthanizing those who displayed characteristics that were deemed to be imperfect was ultimately outlawed as a form of genocide. But as the genome revolution struck later in the century a resurgence in the philosophical ideals of eugenics began to arise.

Transhumanist thought often parallels the ideals of eugenics, although most self-identifying transhumanists separate themselves from that stigmatized field, preferring terms like reprogenetics and germinal choice. The difference between the negative outcomes of eugenics and the more positive, transhumanist notion of reprogenetics seems to be one of consent. In a 21st century world of selective genetic modification, all is good as long as all parents equally have the choice to genetically modify their child, and are not forced by governments who are trying to forcefully manage the genetic pool.

Prominent transhumanist advocate Nick Bostrom, labeled by The New Yorker as the leading transhumanist philosopher of today, argues that critics of the movement always focus on the potential risks or negative outcomes without balancing the possible positive futures. He advocates that the mere potential of a negative future outcome is not enough to stifle technological momentum.

Bostrom lucidly makes his point in an essay examining the transhumanist perspectives on human genetic modifications. "Good consequences no less than bad ones are possible," he writes. "In the absence of sound arguments for the view that the negative consequences would predominate, such speculations provide no reason against moving forward with the technology."

But what about God?

At first glance it would seem like the transhumanism movement would be synonymous with atheism. In 2002 the Vatican released an expansive statement exploring the intersection of technology and religion. The statement warned that changing a human's genetic identity was a "radically immoral" action. The old adage of the scientist playing God certainly raises its head frequently in criticisms of transhumanism. Zoltan Istvan even penned an op-ed entitled "I'm an Atheist, Therefore I'm a Transhumanist" in which he, rather weakly, attempted to blend the two movements.

But there are some compelling intersections between religion and transhumanism that point to the possibility that the two sides are not as mutually exclusive as one would think. A poll by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, founded by Nick Bostrom, discovered that only half of the transhumanists it surveyed identified as either atheist or agnostic.

Lincoln Cannon, founder of both the Mormon Transhumanist Association and the Christian Transhumanist Association (the very existence of these entities says something), has been advocating for a modern form of post secular religion based on both scientific belief and religious faith. Cannon sees transhumanism as a movement that allows for humanity to evolve into what he labels "superhumans."

In his treatise titled, "The New God Argument," Cannon envisions a creator God akin to our superhuman future potential. He posits an evolutionary cycle where we were created by a superhuman God, before then evolving into becoming our own superhuman Gods, from which we will create new life that will worship us as Gods and continue the cycle anew.

The New God Argument presents a fascinating case for an evolution of religious thought, but it also pushes transhumanism into the realms of spirituality in ways that are bound to make many of the movement's advocates uncomfortable. Another more extreme religious offshoot of transhumanism is Terasem, a self-described "transreligion."

Terasem recalls a 1990s-styled new-age sentiment with its four core beliefs: life is purposeful, death is optional, God is technological, and love is essential. Founded by millionaire entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt, Terasem functions as both a spiritual transhumanist movement and a charitable organization that invests into technological research. The movement is especially focused on cryonic technology and researching ways to preserve human consciousness through downloading one's thoughts and memories into either a mainframe or an independent social robot.

The rise of the biohackers

At the turn of the century, a transhumanist community began to form that fused the ethos of computer hacking with a body modification movement determined to create do-it-yourself cybernetic devices. These "Grinders" embraced cyborg technologies that could be directly integrated into their organic bodies.

Biohacking can take the form of pharmaceutical enhancements that hack one's body chemistry, to implanting electronics into the body such as magnets or RFID and NFC tags. These transhumanist grinders sit at the furthermost borders of the movement, experimenting on their own bodies with occasionally quite extreme DIY surgical procedures.

Lepht Anonym is a Berlin-based biohacker who advocates cybernetics for the masses. Lepht (who identifies as genderless) has performed numerous body modifications over the past decade, including implanting neodymium metal discs under fingertips to enable the physical sensing of electromagnetic fields, and several internal compass implants designed to give a physical awareness of north and south magnetic poles.

But the biohacking movement is moving in from the fringe, with several tech start-ups arising over the past few years with an interest in developing a commercial body modification economy. Grindhouse Wetware, based on Pittsburgh, has been prominent in creating technology that augments the human body.

The company's most prominent device is called the Northstar, which is an implant that it is hoped will have Bluetooth capabilities allowing the user to control their devices with simple hand movements. The first iteration of the device simply had an aesthetic function with LED lights under the user's skin that mimic a form of bioluminescence. Future uses for the Northstar could see it interfacing with your smartphone, tracking biometric data, such as blood sugar, or acting as a controller for a variety of devices connected to the internet of things.

Hitting the big time

Transhumanism is moving inexorably into the mainstream as technological advances accelerate. Proponents advocate we dive head first into this brave new cybernetic world, while traditionalists grow increasingly nervous.

Regardless of one's personal view there is undoubtedly an enormous number of people lining up to have that first brain/computer interface implanted into their head, or to genetically cue a set of specific characteristics for their baby. We live in exciting times that's for sure ... now excuse me while I re-watch Gattaca and hope it doesn't turn into a documentary-like premonition of our future.

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• #Cyborg
• #Biohack
• #Elon Musk

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