Geekery

Scientists are inside your brain, reading your thoughts

Posted on 23. Nov, 2009 by Jake.

You may find it either exciting or scary to hear that neuroscientists are working on ways to be able to use machines to map what you are thinking. They call it ‘neural decoding’, and it entails the use of brain scans and pattern-detecting software to predict what you your next thought is going to be. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, apparently we are that predictable.

Most recently, scientists have been able to create a crude visual reproduction of a movie clip that one of their subjects had been watching just by viewing their brain activity. This development became the talk of the recent Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, where some scientists claimed that neuroscience is close to being able to read memories and predict the future. So soon we will be able to tell where we put our keys but where we are going to put our keys tomorrow. Handy.

Needless to say, this new technology has started alarm bells ringing. Are governments going to use it to read our minds? Are the shape-shifting lizards going to use it to control our thoughts when a one-world government comes into being? No! Instead, scientists have been quick to be clear on the limitations of ‘neural decoding’, and have emphasised how important it could become through allowing us to communicate better with the speech-impaired, or stroke victims. It could even be used to diagnose eating disorders and other psychology-based health problems. And I have to admit the idea of this technology one day being used to visualising, say, an artist’s thoughts is kinda cool.

There is still quite a way technology could be used to actually visualise our thoughts. And as of yet, machines still cannot read our minds. But in the meanwhile, maybe try to keep your thoughts clean just in case.

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I hate your blog

Posted on 12. Nov, 2009 by Jake.

The pure socialist beauty of the blog is that anyone can have one. You don’t need a license or any form of qualification. These days they are like opinions, or arseholes, everybody has one, and many of them are full of shit. And so I present to you some of the worst blogs on the interweb:

1. Deep Thought: http://easyasfallingoffablog.blogspot.com

In its own words, this blog is about:

‘Random thoughts on subjects such as youth work, worship, God, the Church of England, films, paintings and occasional peeks at Latin, Medieval history, Merovingians and bishops along with a healthy smattering of children’s television, books, cooking and other oddities!’

If you find this interesting, you are probably the blog’s author, or a lobotomy patient, or maybe both.

2. Toast 99: http://hornytoubab.blogspot.com/

Billed as the ‘everyday musings of a middle-aged man’, the five most recent posts on this blog are about the author’s attempts to get his wife decent travel insurance. Gripping stuff.

3. Baller King: http://www.ballerking.com/

God’s gift to women now has his own blog.

It contains educational posts with titles such as ‘The Recession Will Make Getting Laid Easier’ and ‘becoming “exotic” and “intelligent” to a girl”‘.

Here is a sample of the blog’s sagely advice:

‘…when dating girls, remember two things:

1. Don’t spend too much money on them before they sleep with you. Otherwise they wont’ respect you.

2. You still need to pay for any date you go on with them though. So don’t go on any expensive dates before you stick it in her’.

I would bet any amount of hard cash that whoever writes this blog is actually a virgin with chronic BO and at least four cats.

4. Bad Hair Day: http://badhairday.typepad.com/bad_hair_day/

Yes, believe it or not this site is literally about catching people who are having bad hair days and posting the pics online. This is what happens when Heat Magazine’s rejection of your job application isn’t enough to kill your dream of being a writer.

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3 Worthwile Ways to Waste Time

Posted on 03. Nov, 2009 by Jake.

My recent post, 3 Reasons Why The Internet Is Depressing, may create the impression that, since I have been rallying against stupid internet memes (like the Numa Numa kid and lolcats) or, worse yet, disgusting ones, I am the type of person who spends all of his time online doing important things like conducting stem-cell research or reading up on quantum physics. Not so. Sometimes I just waste time like everybody else, but there are some ways to do so which don’t involve revelling in human idiocy, and here are some of my favourites:

The Tone Matrix:

This nifty little online flash music making device is a sinewave synthesiser invented by the Andre Michelle laboratory. The synth is based on an AudioTools engine and is triggered by an ordinary 16step sequencer. Each triggered step causes a force on the underlaying wave-map. Or, tranlated into non-geek, you press different squares and in the process create interesting combinations of sounds when you play with it. It’s addictive.

Fake news:

Ok, so America’s best made up news source, The Onion, is a site most people have already heard of, but it remains one of the funniest places on the net to waste some time at.

If you want some real information rather than satire, their side-project, a site on movies, music, books, games and tv, The AV Club is excellent too.

And, for a more local flavour there’s our own answer to The Onion, Hayibo, a site with the slogan ‘breaking news. Into little pieces’ which describes itself as ‘South Africa’s second best source of made up news after the SABC’. Through intensive detective work I have discovered that the site is the brainchild of author Tom Eaton and, um, some other guys.

Online Tetris
Anyone who follows this blog, and who read the Geek God post on Tetris inventer Alexey Pajitnov will have guessed that I am a fan of the world’s most addictive puzzle game. Tetris Friends is an incredibly evil waster of time for any Tetris player. One registers and gets a profile and then competes against other people online in a bunch of different Tetris-related games, each of which offers a fresh twist on the original. I started off as a Beginner, and I’m now ranked as Elite (rank 14 out of 20).

What do you get if you get to rank 20, the highest rank? A giant loser sign tattooed on your forehead, that’s what. Anyone who wants to mess with this site should know that no amount of Tetris-brilliance will gain them the admiration of the opposite sex. You have been warned.

And a whole bunch of others are listed below. Don’t come crying to me when you miss every deadline you have in the next year. I took about fourteen hours to write this little blog post, because I took breaks inbetween to ‘test’ these sites:

http://mashable.com/2007/09/08/5000-resources-to-do-just-about-anything-online

http://thisissand.com/

http://www.unkno.com/

http://www.juliasneedledesigns.com/Air%20Force%20Test%20Game.htm

http://www.jamsbio.com/games/jamsMatchSolo

http://www.miniglobz.com/games/twinspin2_en.html

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Real-life crime-solving technology that would make James Bond proud

Posted on 26. Oct, 2009 by Jake.

Based on the Majesty Geekiest Service post, I figured there’s a future for crime solving in SA. (no, duh!) Forget CSI. Truth is occasionally stranger than fiction, The Blotter, a criminal justice blog, mentions the following new criminal justice inventions that would make Q from the James Bond flicks very proud:

Sperm-free DNA Testing
Wow, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as sperm free semen. Apparently there is. Sometimes attempts to identify DNA in sexual assault cases are hampered by the lack of sperm in the semen samples – the rapists just ain’t virile enough. A new procedure overcomes that hurdle by gathering DNA from other types of cells in sperm-free semen, like skin or immune cells.

Fingerprinting Bullets
Apparently, these little babies, developed in England (the land of Bond, of course), apply an electrical charge to bullet casings to detect areas on which sweat from fingers has corroded the metal. Fingerprints can be found from a bullet in this way years after the bullet was fired, even if it’s been wiped off. Impressive.

Brain Fingerprinting
Ve have vays of making you talk. A new test, similar to a lie detector, makes hiding information on a crime a lot more difficult. This test works out whether a person has knowledge of a crime by recording the brain’s response to various words and/or pictures that flash on a computer screen in front of the subject. The test does not prove a person’s innocence or guilt, but only whether the person has information about the crime. Unlike lie detection, brain fingerprinting is admissible in court.

Touch DNA
Touch DNA hit the spotlight in America in 2008, when it was used to clear members of the Ramsey family in the 1996 murder of 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey. The process collects DNA from skin cells deposited on an object coming in contact with human skin. So anything you touch, ever, could be used against you in a court of law. Remember that, criminals!

You have to love the United States of America. While down on the southernmost tip of Africa we are forced to spend our money on frivolities like poverty alleviation and employment creation, the yanks have a little extra money to burn. Well, actually, they are in massive amounts of debt (which doesn’t really phase them since they are used to bail-outs), and this article may help to explain why – developing the devices listed above must be costly.

All I know is that we could sure use some of these devices in crime-ridden Johannesburg!

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3 of the Many Reasons Why the Internet is Depressing

Posted on 16. Oct, 2009 by Jake.

Once upon a time, in the olden days, if you wanted any new information you had to ride by horseback to the next town to talk to its wisest men and risk being attacked by a sabre tooth tiger in the process. Now we have all the info we could possibly want at the click of a mouse and what do we spend our precious time doing? Searching for pics of Britney Spears flashing her panties, that’s what. Instead of ushering in an age of knowledge, the internet is instead a celebration of human stupidity, and I’m sure I’m not the only geek out there who finds this a tad depressing. Here are some examples…

Reason no. 1:
People who shouldn’t be famous
There are a whole bunch of them. The Numa Numa kid filmed himself on a webcam badly miming to a crap Eurovision pop song and became an icon. The Star Wars kid ran around on camera making a fool out of himself with a makeshift lightsaber and gained similarly instant fame. Mahir Cagri, a Turkish guy who must have been the inspiration behind Sasha Baron Cohen’s character Borat, became internationally recognised just for propositioning women in Broken English. The Tourist Guy found fame when he was deep etched and placed on a bunch of dangerous situations and locally, a similar idea turned humble (if strangely dressed) wait-lifter Cassie Booyse into Vernon Koekemoer. And Vincent Van Gogh died, unknown, after selling one painting in his entire lifetime. Depressed yet?

Reason no. 2:
LolCats and ROFLCats
Whether you go to lolcats.com, roflcats.com or icanhascheezburger.com you will be met with the same thing – pictures of cats being unnecessarily cute with a pathetic pidgin internet English caption tacked onto it. The phenomenon was started when Eric Nakagawa found the original I Can Has Cheeseburger pic on the net and started the site of the same name. As if any proof were needed that people are mostly very stupid, the site soon had millions of hits a day. Countless imitations, including LOLDogs and, far more disturbingly, LOLBums, now exist. While we like to think we are more intelligent than animals, the fact that they don’t sit around on Photoshop making ROFLPeople suggests it’s the other way round.

Reason no. 3:
Very bad things
There are sites on the internet hosting things so disgusting that they make you question the humanity as a whole. These range from the bizarrely amusing (example – Cakefart.com, which literally is exactly what its name says it is) to the utterly diabolical, the kind of thing it one watches out of morbid curiosity and then has to work through in therapy for years afterwards. Famous examples include Goatse.com, LemonParty.org and, worst of all, the infamous 2 Girls One Cup. I will not describe the content of any of these sites to you and, if you visit any of them, I take no responsibility whatsoever for any psychological damage caused. All I know is that after viewing any one of these clips it is hard to argue that makind is inherently good.
PS: I have mercifully decided not to provide any links on this one

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