Back of the Envelope

I'm as much into cybernetics as the next sci-fi geek, but this is just plain creepy:

What if, seconds before your laptop began stalling, you could feel the hard drive spin up under the load? Or you could tell if an electrical cord was live before you touched it? For the few people who have rare earth magnets implanted in their fingers, these are among the reported effects -- a finger that feels electromagnetic fields along with the normal sense of touch.

It's been described as a buzzing sensation, a tingling, an oscillation, movement, pure stimulation and, in the case of body-modification expert Shannon Larrett's encounter with a too-powerful antitheft gateway at a retail store, "Like sticking your hand in an ultrasonic cleaner."

Body-mod artists Jesse Jarrell and Steve Haworth's original idea was to implant a magnet to carry metal gadgets. It turns out that doesn't work: If you try to carry something magnetic on your implant regularly, the pinched skin between the magnets dies and your body rejects the implant. But they came up with a new application when a mutual friend suffered an accident that left a shard of iron in his finger. He worked with audio equipment, and found that he could tell which speakers were magnetized from the sensation that passed through his finger at close range.

That gave Jarrell and Haworth a new direction: Could they obtain that effect deliberately, extending the sense of touch into a sense of magnetism?

I don't think I shall be implanting magnets in my fingers in order to "feel" when electronics are acting up. First, I generally don't need to. I've been playing with electronics long enough that I have a fairly good instinctive feel for those sorts of things without any tingling in my fingers. Plus, my computers are not only really loud so that I can hear it when the drives spin up, they also have these convenient LED lights that tell me when the hard drive is chugging. Second, when I'm dealing with those sorts of problems, I tend to wind up with all sorts of scrapes and cuts on my hands from dealing with sharp wires and components. The last thing I want is an additional tingling in my hands. Plus the pictures accompanying the story aren't pretty.

Doc Rampage has a post on the proper physiology of winged humans. He argues that in order to get the proper flying position, the wings need to be lower than the shoulderblades and closer to the center of gravity. Although the hips work, he has a better proposal:

However, there is a middle ground (that was another pun, see if you can figure it out); the center of gravity is at the hips, but only when the arms are at the sides. I don't know if we want any humanoids flying around with their arms at their sides; it smacks of hotdogging. No, the proper position for a flying humanoid is the Superman prone flying position with the arms out front to improve streamlining and to keep you from smacking into a mountain head-first in the dark. This position moves the center of gravity forward several inches into a position just below the rib cage.

Standard-issue humanoids don't have a strong bone in that area to attach the wings to; we would have to manufacture one. I propose that the lowest rib become much more massive and curve downward to meet the hip bone which is sending a massive protrusion upward. The two bones would fuse together into a socket during fetal development, providing a stable platform for the wings. Of course, this takes up a lot of room in the torso, but that's OK, because flying humanoids don't need a large stomach and the many feet of intestines; they only drink nectar or suck blood or have some other dietary limitations that require much less digestion machinery.

The biggest problem I see with the new bone structure that Doc proposes is that it will greatly reduce the winged human's flexibility. Belly dancing would definitely be out.