I Love Living in the Future

Thanks to Jordan I've just found out about this fantastic new single for the band Delaware, fantastic not for the music but for how it's presented:



True, it would be a little annoying to have to open every song in your library separately but I'd like the option. Maybe Apple will purchase and incorporate it into iTunes the way they did with CoverFlow (wishful thinking?).

I thought that would be hands down the most amazing technology I'd encounter that week until I read this on Pink Tentacle via BoingBoing:

"Scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs. Then, when the test subjects were shown a completely new set of images, such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N, the system was able to reconstruct and display what the test subjects were viewing based solely on their brain activity."

The scientists claimed that with advances in this technology we would be able to see a person's thoughts, dreams, or hallucinations but I find that difficult to believe, at least using this process. It's my understanding that the computer is only able to sort out what your mind is emitting because it has a clear example, a constant, to check it against. While I assume your mind emits the same signals for thought, without this constant it won't be able to identify the variable. And as far as dreams and hallucinations are concerned, do we really see them? And is this machine picking up the raw data entering our mind from the eyes or the data that our mind has finished processing and recognizing? And at what point do dreams and hallucinations occur? Is that monster in the corner added by the paranoid brain before or after the image is processed in your mind? I think we're safe for now.

It's not really surprising that both of these are coming out of Japan, the same people who are actively on their way towards building a space elevator...