Happy New Year!
We hope you had an excellent holiday season; we certainly had a productive one! To end our long period of radio silence, here’s what we’ve been up to:
Stimulator Units/ERG Units
Jeff has been pouring his heart, soul & sanity into home-fabricating our stimulator units in his spare time off work. He ran into some issues, including some bleedover into the visible spectrum by some of the LEDs we had originally planned to use, but he now has all four units working and will be shipping them out to us tomorrow, along with the ERG units. Hooray Jeff!
Retinoic Acid & Dehydroretinol Storage
One of the major concerns we’ve had is how to go about storing these two fatty acids, which are exceedingly sensitive to light and heat and will degrade at room temperature. To cope with this issue, we’ll be keeping the containers wrapped in foil at our homes in a dedicated freezer with dry ice, which will have to be replenished every other day or so to keep the reagents nice and stable at negative 75 C or so. Shipping will also be a difficulty; the reagents will first be shipped to Gabriel in Seattle, and then overnight shipped on dry ice mere days before beginning supplementation.
Soylent…?
Mr. Rhinehart of Rosa Labs has run into some difficulty in supplying us with the vitamin A deficient blend of his product necessary to begin our experiment. We patiently but eagerly await this final obstacle to beginning our project to open up a whole new world of electromagnetic radiation to the eyes of human beings.
We apologize for the further delay! Please bear with us as we work out these final few kinks and let us know if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Peyton Rowlands
peyton.rowlands@scienceforthemasses.org
UPDATE
Jeff has sent out all of the ERG testing equipment, and it has arrived safe and sound at the private residences of the test subjects! Here are some pics of my stimulator and ERG units, parts of which I will shortly be jamming onto the surface of my right eyeball in the name of SCIENCE!!!
I apologize for the low image quality–my phone camera isn’t so great! Jeff has informed me that he’ll be posting the long-awaited stimulator unit protocol very soon now. Please forgive him the delay; Jeff works in the medical field, and is consequently very short on time and overburdened with stress.
Stay tuned for more reports form the fringe of mad science! (Can you tell how bubbly this package has made me?)
I hope that someday this kind of sensory alteration is commonplace and easy and safe to do…. I bought a thing called a DURR watch that vibrates every 5 minutes to give me a better awareness of my interpretation of time… but i wanna do more stuff like that… one question that often runs thru my head is, if we altered a human’s ability to hear pitch so he could hear super high pitches like a dog and super low pitches like an elephant, would that human hear music the same way? would music become less (or more) interesting due to it being so narrow in terms of frequencies, or would the way that human heard pitch and timbre be so altered that most normal music would sound horribly discordant? I wonder if the same thing could happen with the vision experiment you’re doing… will the ability to see infrared affect the way he sees other colours? will normal Red start to look like yellow, making yellow look like green, green to blue, and so on? Heck, for all i know, he might start seeing things that science hasn’t even discovered yet!!
That’s an excellent question, and one which we hope this project will allow us to explore. We honestly have no idea if we’ll see a shift in our perception of color to match the shift in spectrum sensitivity, if we’ll see colors no one else has before (try imagining a color you’ve never seen), or if we won’t see a clearly defined set of colors at all, but rather a vague brightness where before there was none.