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battery pack 8 internal buzzers control unit with compass 23 www.hplusmagazine.com assumption I didn't know about, my confidence in my cognitions misplaced. It doesn't work while driving because the compass doesn't like being turned on its side, as it is when you work car pedals. Magnetic fields mess it up (of course) and I can feel it circling my foot on escalators or seeming to vacillate directions randomly as I rest my foot on the floor of the subway. But that's interesting too — to feel the specific places where infrastructure interferes with the Earth's magnetic field. I returned home to Washington DC to find that, far worse than my old haunt San Francisco, my mental map of DC swapped north for west. I started getting more lost than ever as the two spatial concepts of DC did battle in my head. Eventually, the Northpaw won, and the NW/NE/SW/SE on DC street signs started making a whole lot more sense. My relationship with the Northpaw is still shaky. It passes in and out of my integrated experience. When it's at its best, my awareness is not of the touch from the Northpaw, it's the awareness of north from the Northpaw. I make it dance around by spinning my office chair, but it doesn't keep up. I get nauseous and dizzy much quicker wearing the Northpaw than I do spinning without it. The Northpaw experience has been more about realigning my reality than about its being useful. It tells me more about the world, rather than giving me immediately practical information. But then, I have more a Google Maps than compass lifestyle. Skory told me that in the time he was wearing his Northpaw he found that hiking trails were much more twisted that he thought they were. But even straight things aren't that straight. I find roads and paths drifting in ways I never noticed. Not always, not a lot, but just enough to be unsettling. My world's Euclidian consistency is becoming questionable. Quinn Norton covers science, technology, law and whatever else gets her attention. She lives in Washington D.C. and is most easily reachable at quinn@quinnnorton.com sensebridge: The noisebridge cyborg group Feelspace (pDF) http://www.cogsci.uni-osnabrueck.de/~feelspace/downloads/feelSpace_finalReport.pdf ResouRces

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