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drethelin comments on Open Thread, July 1-15, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Posting here rather than the 'What are you working on' thread.
3 weeks ago I got two magnets implanted in my fingers. For those who haven't heard of this before, what happens is that moving electro-magnetic fields (read: everything AC) cause the magnets in your fingertips to vibrate. Over time, as nerves in the area heal, your brain learns to interpret these vibrations as varying field strengths. Essentially, you gain a sixth sense of being able to detect magnetic fields, and as an extension, electricity. It's a $350 superpower.
The guy who put them in my finger told me it will take about six months before I get full sensitivity. So, what I'm doing at the moment is research into this and quantifying my sensitivity as it develops over time. The methodology I'm using is wrapping a loop of copper wire around my fingers and hooking it up to a headphone jack, which I will then plug into my computer and send randomized voltage levels through. By writing a program so I can do this blind, I should be able to get a fairly accurate picture of where my sensitivity cutoff level is.
One thing I'm stuck on is how to calculate the field strength acting on my magnets. Getting the B field for a solenoid is trivial, but with a magnetic core I'm sure it throws everything out of whack. If anyone has any links to the physics of how to approach that, I'd be much obliged.
And if you're curious about what it's like so far to have magnets in your fingers, feel free to ask.
"superpower" is overstating it. Picking up paperclips is neat and being able to feel metal detectors as you walk through them or tell if things are ferrous is also fun but it's more of just a "power" than a superpower. It also has the downside of you needing to be careful around hard-drives and other strong magnets. On net I'm happy I got them but it's not amazing.
FYI, there's no need to be careful around hard drives (except for your own safety, since they're large chunks of metal your magnet will stick to.) The platters of a modern hard drive are too high-coercivity and too well-shielded for even a substantial neodymium magnet (bigger than you can fit in a fingertip) to affect them.
Credit cards, on the other hand.
Great thinking! Once you have fully developed and trained your superpower sensitivity you can read the cards by merely brushing your hands past someone's wallet!
::deliberately failing to get the joke::
I think the issue is that the magnets will destroy the data on the credit card stripe...
Also, aren't MRI's going to be a problem?
It's not the being careful about ruining them, it's the giant magnet IN them that can fuck you up.
I'd mostly agree with that. After I finish my current project though I have some more in mind about using them as input methods, so for me they're as much toys I can experiment with as anything else.