Interview with a man who cut off

Interview with a man who cut off his right hand in a staged accident because he felt that having “two hands was a defect in my body”.

So it’s irrational, but is it insane? It’s true that a major amp makes your body less functional, so how can it be sane to do it? For me, I think the answer is in what I was going through before my amp. I was so consumed by the drive to lose my hand that I could scarcely function.

Now I’ve totally lost the desire to amputate anything. I’m totally used to doing things with a hand and a stump. It’s true I need to ask for help like once a day, that I’m a bit slower at dish washing, keyboarding, and stuff like that, but is that worse than being seriously overweight, or being short of breath from smoking, or even trying to walk in stiletto heels?

Somewhat related: a demonstration video of Dean Kamen’s mechanical arm, which he calls the Luke Arm after Luke Skywalker’s sophisticated mechanical arm in the Star Wars movies. (via waxy)

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After Deam Kamen introduced his scooter, “segway”

After Deam Kamen introduced his scooter, “segway” became a popular misspelling for “segue”. Thirty years earlier, Thomas Pynchon used the same spelling in Gravity’s Rainbow: “But segway into the Roxbury hillside.”

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