Can your ears talk back, and does the discrepancy between your vestibular caloric stimulation and visual system cause you grief
Burnt Bread

The processing speed of auditory information rivals that of modern electronic gadgets. Our auditory systems detect rapid changes of sound frequency and intensity, and at best can sense low frequency (weak) sounds at about the 1000 – 2000 Hz frequency. If our hearing was any more sensitive, we would be able to hear the air molecules bouncing against our ear canals. Each part of the ear performs a specific function. The external ear captures, focuses and filters sound. The middle ear concentrates sound energies while the cochlea (the most important part of the inner ear) converts vibrational energy into waves of fluid.

Interestingly, the ear also emits sound as part of the hearing process. In cases where a brief sound, such as a click, is sent into the external ear canal, a similar sound comes back from the inner ear. Though some sounds echo in the ear, this sound is not an echo; it is produced by the cochlea and is thought to play a part in boosting particular frequencies.

Motion sickness is in the ears. Low frequency movement of hot or cold liquid in the ear canal (caloric stimulation) during body acceleration is why travel sickness occurs. The body becomes disorientated from the discrepancy between information received by the ear versus touch or vision, and feels distressed.

A Not-So-Helping Hand; Or, Prosthetic Limbs in Science Fiction
Disturbly

So, you're writing a sci-fi story. Maybe a space opera, maybe a bit of cyber-punk; maybe it's more of a comic-book style world, with more or less contemporary technology, with a few anachronistic pieces of super-tech being manufactured by savants and geniouses. Whatever it is, you want your character to be bad ass. As you glance around your room and take in your Fullmetal Alchemist wall scroll, boxed set of Texnohlyze DVD's, and your General Grievous action figure, an idea occurs to you: Why not give them a bionic/ cybernetic limb?

Sure, it's been done, but isn't that just proof of how awesome the concept is? Your character could punch/ kick through brick walls, and lift hundreds of pounds of weight with a single hand (well, they'd have to). Hell, while you're at it, you can put all kinds of blades and guns and crap in there, just to make them arbitrarily dangerous. There's no reason it wouldn't work, right?

Nope.

Oh, wait; I'm lying. Both human anatomy and basic physics regarding the application of energy would make the two former feats impossible, while the creation of a logical and consistent level of technology in your world building would make the later unfeasible.

First, a character with a robotic arm will not necessarily be able to punch an opponent across a football field and through a brick wall. As a little study of boxing, karate, or any martial art that emphasizes striking techniques will show, the power of a punch doesn't come from the arm itself. A trained fighter strikes with their entire body, bracing themselves with the opposite leg, and pivoting at the hip, focusing the power created behind the striking fist. A character with a literal fist of iron may do more damage to an enemy's soft, squishy face simply because their hand is harder, but unless the muscles in their back and sides are developed to a superhuman level, they won't deliver any more kinetic energy than a normal person wearing a knuckle-duster, cestus, or gauntlet.

The science behind kicking with a bionic leg is slightly better; emphasis on "slightly". While most of the power from a strong kick is generated in the hips and amplified by using the joints in the striking leg as fulcrums for the levers that are the bones, a sufficiently powerful mechanical limb could conceivably generate an inhuman amount of velocity and power as it unfolds. But that's when Newton's third law kicks in and causes problems. If your cyber-ninja can lash out with an unbelievable amount of force, an equal but opposite force is going to be directed back towards them. If he's striking a target with less mass than he himself possesses, he should be fine; Johnny McRoboleg could be the best damn punter football's ever known. Now, if they hit something the size and weight of a car, on the other hand... they'd be lucky if falling on their ass is the worst that happens to them.

Similarly, a character with a state of the art prosthetics won't be curling any SUV's, either. Say your character's arm is capable of holding up to the strain of lifting ten tons; what about their spine and legs, eh? If such a person tries to lift more weight with their cybernetic limb than the rest of their puny human frame is capable of supporting, the best case scenario ends with them pulling themselves down really, really fast. The worst case involves said cybernetic arm being ripped off at the point of attachment. I fail to see a need to elaborate further.

So, we see that unarmed combat may not be your cyborg's strong suite. But why should it have to be, if their bionic arm is an arsenal unto itself? What's stopping them from shooting bullets from their fingers, napalm from their palms, and a beam of high density plasma from a cannon that pops out of their forearm?

The better question is, what's allowing them to do so? Understand that while medical science has made leaps and bounds in medical prosthetics, cybernetics is a field still in its infancy. At our current level of technology, researchers are striving to make a prosthetic limb capable of working as well as your standard meat-and-bone model, while doctors are trying to work the kinks out of transplanting a limb so it won't just fall off later; it's anyone's guess as to which will be accomplished first.

If the society in your story has the technical know-how to build a prosthetic limb with fully incorporated selection of doomsday devices, and the medical knowledge to attach such a thing into a person's nervous system in a way that they can control it (nothing's more awkward than melting your friend's face as you go to give him a high five), they should probably also have the capacity to grow another arm in a vat from an amputee's DNA and staple it on. If, in your story, the science of transplanting is seriously lagging behind the technology of prosthetics, you'd better have a good reason. If both are options, and your character would choose to take a cold steel robot claw as opposed to a warm, feeling, my-girlfriend-doesn't-scream-when-we-cuddle human arm, you'd better have a damn good reason. And if every soldier, mercenary, and assassin in such a world doesn't outfit themselves with such appendages, turning themselves into invincible killing machines, bristling with more weapon-laden limbs than a Hindu war deity, you'd better have a really damn good reason.

Characters with cybernetic limbs have a long history in fiction, and it won't end anytime soon. From the Bionic Man himself to Tekken's Yoshimitsu, amputees who refuse to lie down and not kick ass will be in vogue for a while, and you may want to get in on the action. That's all right, but if so, you will want to take some time to understand what you're doing, and consider what is and isn't within the realm of physical possibility. Because if you don't, your reader will, and they won't notice how cool the machine gun your protagonist has in place of a hand is if they've stopped reading the story after a dozen paragraphs.

Insensitive Joke Hour
WyrdWolf

I’d like to present to you my menial arsenal of quadriplegic jokes. Please cover eyes if these have been used to death. Or if I seem like a douche.

What do you call a quadriplegic hanging on the wall?

Art.

What do you call a quadriplegic in the pool?

Bob.

What do you call a quadriplegic lying in front of the door?

Matt.

What do you call a quadriplegic in the mailbox?

Bill.

What do you call a quadriplegic under a car?

Jack.

On the Necessity of Limbs
felica13

Honestly, limbs are very useful. There are legs for walking, arms for picking stuff up, feet for balance, hands for dexterity, even heads! Lots of things come about because of limbs, such as the dominance of the human species due to the opposable thumb. Imagine where we’d be without limbs. Like fish, only more snake-like. And not living underwater. So... snakes. We’d be snakes.

And what’s wrong with a snake? I ask you, fellow FictionPressers, what’s wrong with a snake? Yes, some people dislike them and some are even scared of them, but this is not an article about ophidiophobia, or even herpetology. This is an article about limbs, which we have and snakes don’t. And, as previously mentioned, we would become if not for our limbs.

But enough of that! Now is not the time to ponder our snakelessness as a species. This is the time to explore! What can we do with our limbs? Well, I’m typing this up with some of mine. Including my opposable thumbs. Amazing, eh? I can also carry the copious amounts of books I need to and from school. I can open my locker. I can kick the girl who has the locker below mine. There’s a lot I can do. There’s also a lot I can’t do. I can’t climb rock walls and I can’t run triathlons and expect to win.

I’m sure there’ll be countless articles about anatomy and stuff that doesn’t have limbs (have I mentioned the snake?), but not this one! Here we celebrate the usefulness that we gain from generally having four functional limbs with stuff attached to the ends.

A List!
We can run, throw, catch, dive, somersault, jump, score a basket, make the winning touchdown, type, sit, squat, lift weights, Wellness Walk, climb stairs, push buttons, walk a balance beam, cover our eyes at the scary parts, and make nice things for Mother’s Day, because moms are best and they deserve nice things.

Despite the fact that there’s no science whatsoever in this, I hope you’ve learned something, something that you didn’t know you could do before that now you know you can. Like, for instance, type up an article for Stop the Press! Obviously anyone can do it (obviously). And, no, this is not a shameless plug. Why would you think such a thing?

In any case, enjoy your limbs while they last. Someday, we might just evolve out of them and what would we be then?

Down, Down/Forward, Forward, Why? Because It's Awesome: A Videogame Review
Disturbly

Call me immature, call me a potentially dangerous psychotic, call me what you will, but when I think of limbs, I think of martial arts. Karate, Savate, Jeet Kun Do, Muay Thai, Tai Kwon Do... fists and feet colliding with faces in a ballet of pain that goes back to the dawn of time. And when the subject of the sublime and subtle art of the beat down comes up, one video game immediately comes to mind. I think you can guess what it is.

Dance Dance Revolution: Extreme 2

Naw, I'm just jacking with you; I didn't even know that was a real title until I asked my younger sister. I'm talking about that sprite based, quarter-gobbling, mold casting/ breaking masterpiece, Capcom's Street Fighter II.

SFII may not have been the first fighting game, and it certainly wasn't the last. I'm not even going to argue that it was the best. But just because I'm not going to argue for the point doesn't mean it's not true. In every way that mattered, SFII laid the groundwork for every fighting game that came afterwards; having introduced the element of a diverse cast of characters with a range of fighting styles and their own arsenals of special attacks fighting in a tournament, it was an incredible, international hit, achieving success earlier games like Karate Champion could only dream of and later games could only hope to emulate. And even if popularity isn't synonymous with quality, how about longevity? As of this writing, Street Fighter II is more than seventeen years old, and it and its variants are still played in tournaments by professional gamers like John Choi, Alex Valle, Daigo Umehara, and many other people you've never, ever heard of.

The plot of the game, in a nut-shell, is that somewhere between eight and sixteen warriors (more on that later) have entered a tournament to determine who the greatest fighter in the world is; each character has their own motivation, for such diverse reasons as a desire for revenge, power, reputation, or a desire to get the power to exact revenge on the person who soiled their reputation. If you want more of an explanation than that, look it up on Wikipedia; Street Fighter continuity gives me a head ache like a Flash Kick to the jaw. For the practical gamer, none of that matters anyway; you pick your character, you enter the streets, you fight. The beauty is in the simplicity.

And yet, the beauty of the gameplay is in the depth. Street Fighter II is basically a series of extremely rapid chess matches, with every move taking priority over some other in a complex interaction of timing, location, and power. After nearly two decades, I wouldn't hazard that players have discovered every tactic, feint, and coup de maitre possible in the game, and they may not have them all in another twenty years; meanwhile, there will be fighting games released next Tuesday that won't be remembered six months from now. It is very difficult to argue that SFII is not a perfect game. Improvements have been made in later releases, and will continually try to be made, but the definition of what constitutes an "improvement" is a subjective one, relative to the opinions of every player. This game is very good at what it was made for, and about the worst thing you can say about it is that the sprite based graphics show their age; to that I respond, they are at least very pretty sprite based graphics.

Street Fighter II is a game that every person must play at least once in their lives; the question is, which version? The game has more ports and updated versions than I have facial hairs, and I happen to wear my beard in a Van Dyke that hasn't been trimmed in eighteen months. Personally, for my money, you can't beat the port of Super Street Fighter II for the Super Nintendo; great graphics, good sound, fluid gameplay, and the full sixteen playable characters (versus 12 in Street Fighter II Turbo; Hyper Fighting and Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition, and 8 in the original game). Failing that, if you own any video game console available in the United States between 1991 and the present, you can most likely find a port in a format for you. Failing that, the adequate Special Champion Edition can be had in a highly portable, two player capable Plug and Play controller at toy stores and websites for 19.95 US. I've also heard wonderful fables about computer programs that would allow you to "emulate" discontinued consoles somehow and play games for free; however, I understand these things to be illegal, and would encourage anyone using such a program which I don't own to send Capcom a check or money order for around twenty bucks, just for the sake of karma.

Finally, you can still find an arcade machine in a few locations, if you keep your eyes open. I for one consider myself duty bound to drop in some change and join in on the violence whenever this happens, and if you don't, I submit to you that you are a communist, and most probably a sexual pervert.

Have fun, and work on those moves; You will need more training to defeat me.

What Limbs Can Do For You
WyrdWolf

Limbs. Good for walking, grabbing, and use as a weapon in a pinch (be they yours or someone else’s). But what do limbs mean to writing?

Well, I and my crack team of myself and me went to look at it.

The first thought that came to mind was that any more limbs than the normal amount equals creepy, no exceptions. Why are spiders so creepy? The eight legs. Like all creepy crawlies, a gross amount of limbs makes for a gross creature. Centipedes. Squids and octopi. So if you’re looking to creep readers out with an image, go for the one that’s easy to convey: extra limbs. Make arms coming out of the head and feet from the crotch, if you want (but not the other way around—that’s just weird).

Fighting, of course, is rather obvious. More arms equals more weapons and more weapons equals more violence. Just make sure the character knows what the hell they’re doing or they’ll end up chopping those extra arms off—which would make for a rather interesting situation. A fighter suddenly blessed(?) with a few extra arms but having no idea how to fight like that. I’d read it.

They convey power; like Shiva, goddess of destruction, or whatever that guy’s name is from Mortal Kombat with the four arms. You take one look at a Machamp and you want to be heading in the other direction as fast as possible. Extra arms are intimidating beyond belief; they’re a biological tank. If you want to make your readers fear the bad guy in your book, give him some extra arms. The big baddie, sitting in his throne, stroking his goatee, guzzling a drink, sharpening his sword and looking at a porn magazine all at the same time is a fearsome image.

They’d also be pretty bitchin’ for playing the drums.

Tastes umai, but what does this mean?
Burnt Bread

The chemical senses; taste and smell, provide us with an immediate assessment of food. Previously, it was thought that humans only had four basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty and bitter, however more recent research supports the existence of a fifth taste: umami.

Our ability to discriminate between these tastes helps our survival. Sweetness in food indicated high calories while savory tastes may relate to a protein source. Something that tastes bitter might indicate toxic constitutes while we might consume sour items to maintain homeostasis. Each of these tastes has a specific receptor and different cellular processes.

The newest taste addition is umami, a Japanese term for ‘good taste’ but describes a meaty, savory flavor. This taste group came about from the discovery of two taste receptors that respond exclusively to this taste. It is known that amino acids and monosodium glutamate (MSG) stimulates these receptors.

Public Display of Affection
Deanna Dusold

I feel that as a female, I have certain rights. Rights that, otherwise, would never be able to be applicable to those of my opposite gender. But don’t get me wrong – I’m not some sort of feminist, here. I just like to indulge in the simple, estrogen-tastic pleasures of life every once and a while; is that too hard a wish to grant?

I want to be able to fix my makeup while driving to work.

I want to be able to buy a new dress every month without a set occasion to wear it for.

And, yes, I want to be able to feel my smooth, shaven legs in public.

I know it probably sends the little fourteen year old boys in my first level Spanish class through a whirl, to see me sit there reciting the months of the year whilst molesting my calves, but if only they understood! If only they understood the glee in my heart as I strolled out of Wal-Mart on that lovely, spring day, clutching tightly to a receipt entwined about a pack of razor heads. If only these young men could see the sparkle in my eye as I stood, unclothed in the shower, delicately attaching the new piece of machinery to my trusty Venus razor.

Then, and only then, I believe these boys would understand why it is I sit there and subconsciously stroke my lower extremities in such a devoted, yet nonchalant fashion. Obviously, nobody’s ever eyed them suspiciously for rubbing against their chin after getting a luckily close shave, unless it it’s some sort of television advertisement for the next big, revolutionary man razor.

Then again, I must admit, when it comes to the glamorous removal of body hair, females tend to be much more exuberant than their male counterparts. You never see Johnny prancing through the high school hallways, unabashedly wailing “Oh my God, Keith, I shaved this morning! It was, like, so frickin’ spectacular! Like, oh my God. Feel my face! Feel it; feel it! It’s, like, so awesome, am I right?”

It’s perfectly normal to see young women congregating in these educational institutions, feeling each other’s calves to see who has the smoothest skin to compliment their new ninety dollar miniskirt. Us fifteen-ish/sixteen-ish girls are just like your kid in the pricy, glassware section of Kaufmann’s—we need to touch everything. Just bought a new purse? We’ll touch it. Got a new necklace? We’ll fondle that, too. Just got a tattoo done not but five hours ago? Cool! We’ll touch that too.. Especially if we find out the tattoo artist shaved the area first.

Jobs That Would Be Easier With More Arms
WyrdWolf

Mechanic

Secretary

Rodeo Clown

Potter

Crossing Guard

Weatherman

Prostitute

Alien Hand Syndrome
Burnt Bread

Have you ever felt that your body doesn’t belong to you? Have you woken up to find yourself attacked by your own limbs? Alien hand syndrome describes a neurological condition where a person loses control of one of their hands. This disorder is most common when the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain is severed.

In cases of alien hand syndrome, patients report a complete loss of control for their hand, but the hand continues to move in a purposeful way. The hand will manipulate objects with the host being unconscious of the hand’s actions. For example, it might pick up a pen and draw on the table or unclasp shirt buttons while the person’s attention is diverted. The person will not be aware of what the hand is doing until it does something to draw his attention. There have been reports of the ‘alien hand’ harming the host or people around him. Sometimes, people with the disorder wake up to find their own hand choking them, or smothering them with a pillow most intently. The hand will inexplicably reach out to punch, pinch, or otherwise harass surrounding people. Actions are mostly at random.

One explanation for this condition is that patients with severed connection of the hemispheres are unable to communicate between hemispheres. Therefore, suppressed thoughts or actions are often enacted by the ghost hand. These include harmful activities, sexual acts and random impulses. Also, seemingly logical or paired actions are often reenacted by the hand. For example, if the host opens a door, the alien hand will reach out to close the door. If the host switches the light on, the alien hand will switch it off. Patients will often have to wrestle with their own hand to prevent it from performing the paired action.

There is no cure for alien hand syndrome. People with the condition are advised to train up their working hand with weights and exercises for the endless battle ahead.

Your Limbs and You
Disturbly

The human body is capable of some pretty amazing stuff; our limbs are responsible for most of the good ones.

As we exercise, our muscles break down from the strain, only to be rebuilt stronger and more durable. Our bones are continually reconstructed to meet the stresses of moving in a more optimal fashion; the cells in every person's legs' bones are structured in such a way as to respond to shock of their feet hitting the ground in a unique way, perfectly suiting their stride and walking speed. If you were to take up sprinting, the body would actually reconfigure the bone structure to compensate. One of the reasons that practitioners of certain martial arts are able to shatter bricks and solid ice is that through long practice and repeated impacts with hard surfaces, the bones in their limbs have been strengthened with extra calcium, making them far harder and more shock resistant than average.

Our hands are, without a doubt, among the most mind-blowingly intricate structures to be found in nature. Even ignoring the ability of artists to paint, sculpt, or play an instrument with incredible skill, our manual dexterity at even the most mundane tasks is awe inspiring. As we perform an action repeatedly, new neural pathways are formed in our brains, until said task becomes second nature; this is what we refer to as "muscle memory". Consider, if you will, the "qwerty" keyboard, named after the first six alphabetical letters in its top row. Standard in most English speaking nations, the qwerty key configuration was designed with the specific goal in mind of making typing as slow and difficult a process as possible; the most commonly used letters in the English are on the left hand side, where 97 of the population will have to use their non-dominant hand to reach them, and either below or above the home keys, while the punctuation symbols are placed so that they must be struck with the clumsiest "pinky" finger. This was originally implemented to prevent typists from jamming typewriters; never minding whether it was a great idea to keep this design after we invented word processors that are incapable of being jammed, you realize that if you're a typist of even moderate speed, you've managed to overcome every conceivable obstacle that could be set in front of you.

Our feet and legs can be said, without any exaggeration whatsoever, to be miracles of engineering. Bipedal motion has been described as a process of continuously nearly falling, only to recover every time (well, almost). As yet, no roboticist has ever been able to replicate this motion, or build an automaton remotely as agile as your average four year old. And that's just walking; what we all do without even realizing it. Once you start talking about sports like basketball, tennis, or football, your talking about athletes performing some extremely high-level parabolic calculus while simultaneous exerting themselves at peak physical capacity. In split seconds. Intuitively. For sustained periods of time.

Now, let's talk about ass-kicking.

The average human skull and the average coconut take about the same amount of force to break, somewhere in the ballpark of 1600 pounds of force; a martial artist is more than capable of shattering either with a punch. A Muay Thai kick boxer, delivering a knee strike at full force, can connect with enough power to drive the sternum back into the heart and lungs. A practioner of Brazilian Ju Jitsu can exert enough torque in a submission hold to tear the spinal chord in half like a rubber band. Monks studying Shaolin Kung Fu strengthen their hands by rolling them between two five-hundred pound millstones, similar in form and function to an old fashioned laundry mangle; every single fact we know regarding the properties of both stone and the human arm says that their arms have to be crushed to a pulp by this. Yet they're not.

A snake can respond to a stimulus and strike in about a fifth of a second. A martial artist can respond to a stimulus and strike in about one fortieth of a second. This has been documented. We are, potentially, eight times faster than a rattlesnake. This is science.

There is at least one documented case of a Japanese man using Judo to defend himself from a black bear. The man was sixty three years old at the time. The bear in question was a goddamn bear.

I have consciously neglected to mention any feats of endurance that I have seen members of the U.S., British, or Israeli special forces performing on camera, in front of crews of medical doctors. I spend a considerable amount of effort deliberately not thinking about that stuff.

Human beings are said to be the weakest of all creatures; but is that a fair assessment? When the potential within the human limbs is trained to the fullest and exploited to it's maximum, we find that frail homo sapiens is capable of some amazing things. The stamina to swim the English Channel. The precision to pin a fly to a wall with a thumbtack thrown from the other side of a room. The raw strength to pull a truck with a rope clamped between the teeth. Or tied around an even more sensitive area... Are these the outer limits of what a person is capable of? Or is this merely scratching the surface?

Think about it. In the meantime, I've got to get my guitar out and practice my scales. And do some push-ups...

Next Issue: Conflict and Conflict resolution

You are invited to submit non-fictional writing to Stop the Press regarding the topic of Conflict and Conflict resolution. To give you some ideas, you may want to write about character conflicts, plot conflicts, conflicts in ideas or things that just don’t add up. Conflict can also involve physical conflict and confrontation such as violence, wars, and politics. There may be conflicting motivations, cultures, the need for conflict and conflict with otherworldly forces. Conflict resolution describes how an occurring or potential issue might be solved.

You are welcome to generate ideas completely unrelated to the ones prescribed above as long as you can explain how they relate to the topic.

Submissions Due: 28th June 2008