How long is it? No, really. How long is it?

From one of my favorite "Oh, my! Isn't that quirky?" sites, technovelgy, comes Useful Body Modifications (submitted by Bill Christensen). Here we find a dude who has a ruler tattooed on the underside of his forearm...

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...others who have small magnets implanted under the skin to attain a "sixth sense" (WTF?) and finally, pierced glasses. The latter take the Pince-nez to the twenty-first century.

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And here are the instructions from James Sooy and Oliver Gibson who have come up with this innovation:

  • Get pierced - an internally-threaded barbell that goes through the skin above the bridge of your nose.
  • Use a tabletop mill to cut the L-shaped metal pieces that screw onto the barbell.
  • Attach rare earth magnets to the glasses; these hold the glasses on.
  • Don't get rid of the bridge pieces; they let the lenses sit on your nose and take the actual weight of the lenses.
  • Technovelgy's byline is "where science meets fiction," that is, scientific and technological innovations and oddities that reflect concepts introduced in science fiction. In this case, some of the body mods in William Gibson's Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age come to mind.

    No word if the rulered forearm is NIST approvable.

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    that's neat but frameless glasses are pretty passe. Now she needs a body mod to permanently implant some of those bulky Scandinavian style frames.

    At least the ruler is on his arm. Could be worse.

    At least the ruler is on his arm. Could be worse.

    In certain other places, such a ruler would vary according to who else was present. This could be a useful measurement, but not of a spatial dimension...

    In the good ol' daze, the dominant measure of length was the cubit, generally defined as the interval from one's elbow to tip of middle finger. This must've caused some problems on jobs with more than one worker (hey, it would cause problems with a task force of just me, if I forgot whether I'd started with right cubit or left).

    By Pierce R. Butler (not verified) on 03 Jun 2008 #permalink