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Carrion Luggage
Carrion Luggage
 
Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
November 15, 2025 at 9:17am November 15, 2025 at 9:17am
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I just wasted a whole lot of time trying to find where I've talked about pain before. I know I have; specifically, the difficulty of finding an objective measure of individual pain. Well, I found this recent IEEE Spectrum article that makes a bold claim.
If you're alive, you've experienced pain. Maybe you've even talked to a doctor about it, and the doctor wants you to rate it, like attractiveness, on a scale of one to ten, where ten is the worst pain you've ever felt.
The obvious problem is that your "ten" might be a hangnail, where my "ten" was appendicitis.
The not-so-obvious problem is you get people saying "eleven." Thanks, Spinal Tap!
This simple method is still the way pain is measured in doctors’ offices, clinics, and hospitals—but how do I know if my five out of 10 is the same as yours?
Short answer: you don't, until the tech in this article comes to fruition. Maybe.
A new, early-stage platform aims to more objectively measure and share our individual perception of pain. It measures brain activity in two people in order to understand how their experiences compare and recreate one person’s pain for the other.
I have Doubts. Unfortunately, I know little about pain beyond the experience thereof, so I'm not sure I can express these doubts meaningfully.
It’s part of a project from Docomo called Feel Tech. “We are developing a human-augmentation platform designed to deepen mutual understanding between people,” a Docomo representative told IEEE Spectrum by email.
Here's a doubt I can express: the internet was also supposed to deepen mutual understanding between people. How's that working out?
First, the system uses electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain waves and uses an AI model to “visualize” pain as a score between 0 and 100, for both the sender and receiver. The actuation device is then calibrated based on each person’s sensitivity, so a sensation transmitted to both people will feel the same.
I'm not entirely sure how to interpret that, but it sounds like it takes into account that some people have a higher pain tolerance than others. Or, at least, it tries to.
In this initial version, the platform works with thermally induced pain stimuli.
Both heat and cold can cause pain. I wonder if they used one or the other, or both. In any case, I have a feeling (pun intended) that this is far from a perfect system: from my own experience, pain is different when you know, consciously, that no permanent damage will ensue.
Eventually, Docomo aims to convey many types of physical and even psychological pain, which will be an aim of future research.
And now I'm envisioning an underground Japanese torture chamber being used for the experiments.
For one thing, Saab says he’s not clear what the use case is for the platform. In terms of the science, he also notes that pain differs in healthy patients and those experiencing ongoing pain, such as chronic pain or migraine. “If you induce pain in a healthy volunteer versus somebody who’s a pain patient, the nature of the representation of pain in the brain is different,” Saab says.
Okay, so that tracks with my own doubts.
There's a bit more at the article, which isn't very long. Whether it pans out or not is an open question; I expect they'll learn something even if it doesn't. But it does raise some interesting questions, though I think we're still far away from being able to literally feel another's pain. Which, as far as I'm concerned, is a good thing; I'll keep mine to myself, and you can do the same. |
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