tangent: please don’t carve an emoticon in my skull until I’m dead

by Violet Blue on May 11, 2006

A night ago I finished reading Body Brokers: Inside America’s Underground Trade in Human Remains by Annie Cheney (great companion book to Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death). It was fascinating. In it, Cheney mentions bone retooling machines called FADAL, and describes them as sort-of CNC/VNC machines without stating as much. My self-educated guess was that they are CNC milling machines, but for human bone.

So I go on a Google tangent looking for milling machines used in bone harvesting and shaping, because I’m really curious about what they look like and stuff, and I come across this research project for a haptic/vr temporal bone surgery simulator. The reward is in the scrolldown. “The simulator can also be used for free form design.” Yikes! Next, I hit paydirt — a page with an actual photo of leg-on-a-lathe (milling machine). It proves to me that CAD can indeed be used against humans.

Violet Blue

The London Times named Violet Blue "One of the 40 bloggers who really count" and Self Magazine named TinyNibbles one of the “Best Sex Resources for Women.” Blue is an autodidact and pundit on sex and technology, hacking and security, porn for women, privacy and bleeding-edge tech culture. She is a journalist for ZDNet, CBS News, CNET; she's an educator, speaker, crisis counselor, volunteer NGO trainer, and the author and editor of over 40 award-winning books.

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