The U.S. military is paying scientists to study ways to read people’s minds.

That’s the first line of a story being reported by the Associated Press today.  But what comes next leaves me a bit skeptical:

“The hope is that the research could someday lead to a gadget capable of translating the thoughts of soldiers who suffered brain injuries in combat or even stroke patients in hospitals.”

That doesn’t sound like the kind of things that the military would spend money for.  Interrogation tools directed at enemy soldiers?  Sure, that I can see the military getting excited about.  But ways to help stroke patients?  A nice thought, but not something I think the military would be so interested in.

The story reports that the research involves volunteers wearing some kind of high-tech thinking cap, then being asked to consider a specific word chosen by researchers.  The thought patterns that word creates are analyzed to see if there is enough commonality to make such a device possible.

After blogging for four years, I can already answer that question: there isn’t.  People can hear (or read) the exact same message at the exact same time, and read two entirely different things into it.

Even when it comes down to an individual word, different people will process it different ways.

Don’t believe me?  Okay:  try this one.  Think about a bear.

Go ahead.  Come on, be a sport.  Think about a bear for ten seconds.

I’ll wait.

Done?  Good.  Now tell me this:  were you thinking of a black bear, a brown bear or a polar bear?

Or Yogi Bear?

And if several of you out in the blogosphere had your thinking caps on, and some of you were thinking of a polar bear and some were thinking of a black bear.  Are we supposed to believe that these different things look exactly the same in the brain waves just because the word bear is in there somewhere?

What if, when asked to think of bear, a volunteer misunderstood and thought of bare, as in nakedness?

How is the computer supposed to know?

But let’s assume that all of that is somehow magically worked out.  And let’s assume that for some reason, you end up as a patient connected to such a gadget.

Would you really want everyone to know everything going on in your head?

Don’t get me wrong: I get that it’s important that we move toward being as “green” as possible. As a general rule, if I have two choices, one environmentally-friendly and the other not, if the prices and quality are comparable, I have no problem choosing the “greener” option.

But I think there’s a point at which you need to just chill out a little. The “Washup” is one of those cases.

It’s just a concept right now, but it combines a washing machine into a toilet, recycling wash water as toilet water and saving space by combining two pieces of basic household equipment that generally are never in the same place.

The thing is, there’s a reason they’re not in the same place.

What happens if you’re the poor sap who’s sitting there…uh, minding your own business…when the washer overflows?

How do you dry the clothes? There’s no mention of a dryer being incorporated in the mix, so that means you still have to take a pile of clean but now-damp laundry somewhere else to the dryer.

And can you imagine how much of a delight it’ll be when you’re in a hurry to get a load of laundry done when the “reading room” is…“otherwise occupied?” If you’re using the lower half of the contraption, you really aren’t in a position to help out with the top half.

Even worse, this could be the cause of World War III when it comes to whether or not we should leave the seat up. I wonder how many times an article of freshly-washed clothing falling right into the tank will make the rule for both sexes, “Seat and lid down.”

HT: BoingBoing

When some color becomes the current fascination, it is described as “the new black,” as if black is the standard by which all fashion fads should be judged.

But what happens when the standard gets redefined?

Scientists in New York have created a paper-thin material that absorbs 99.955% of light that hits it, making it the darkest substance ever created, “about 30 times darker than the government’s current standard for black.”

I wonder how many tax dollars were spent as the government came up with a standard for what black is.

The material is said to give viewers a “dizzying sense of nothingness.”  It is part of a research project designed to create stealthy cloaks that will render the wearer virtually invisible.

The obvious question would be what, exactly, the government’s standard for invisibility happens to be.

Back when compact discs were all the rage, I was still buying music on cassette tape. I guess it was the combination of ridicule from my friends and the fact that the “new” used car I got at the time that had a CD player in it were the two things that finally made me start buying CDs instead.

That was years ago, of course. Now, if there’s a song I like — and I’m actually lucky enough to be able to figure out enough lyrics to do a Google search and find the song’s title and artist — I just go to iTunes and buy that song. The nice thing there is that I can buy only that song, not a CD with 13 songs when I only really like one on the whole disc to start with.

The same thing happened when DVDs hit the scene. I was a VHS lover for a long time, having amassed a healthy collection of the old tapes. I knew how everything was organized, and I could find whatever I wanted to see quickly. The only thing that took time was the rewinding or fast-forwarding required to get to the right spot on the tape.

After it became clear that DVDs were going to stick around, I got myself a DVD player and a few DVDs. Since then, I haven’t bought another VHS tape, and I haven’t missed them. I’ve actually converted a few VHS tapes to DVD, and tossed a few other tapes that were, unfortunately, showing extreme wear.

That brings us to now and the future of high-definition. I don’t own any HD-DVDs. I don’t own an HD television set, anyway. Nor do I have any plans to buy one. When the prices come down, that’s when I’ll think about it. Not before.

But if I were the kind of person who always had to have “the latest thing,” I’d be pretty miffed right now. Toshiba has announced that it is pulling the plug on its ailing HD-DVD format. Had I suffered from the “need” for HD in a big way, HD-DVD is likely the one I would have picked. It came out first, after all. The prices were better. And even Microsoft predicted that it would be “the” format of choice.

Wonder if Bill Gates put any money on that bet.

Anyone out there buying high definition DVDs, yet?  Did anyone get burned by the death of HD DVD?  Or did you decide to wait as well?

New technology may one day keep your Coke product ice-cold without ever needing time in your refrigerator.

The Coca-Cola Company has managed to create a mechanism inside the bottle that will create ice from the drink itself from the moment the cap comes off.  It will be tested on Sprite first, and the new drink will hit shelves in the UK next year as “Sprite Super Chilled.”

I love my Coke products, but I’m not all that sure about this idea.  I think I’d rather have Coke chilled the old-fashioned way rather than by some gadget inside the bottle.  I’d be a little leery about how clean the “mechanism” is, and in this year of the recall, how safe it is.

Not to mention whether or not the price would go up (and the quanity in the same-sized bottle would go down) to accommodate Coke’s ability to “chill out.”

A Circle K gas station in West Ashley recently went high-tech with a new lighted digital sign to display the current price for gasoline. It replaced the old plastic channeled numbers that a worker would have to manually change.

Now, I imagine, someone just types a price on a keyboard and it lights up instantly.

But we all know how computers can occasionally be unpredictable. That happened this weekend, when their sign went nuts! Continue reading “Woulda Been Nice…”

Some patients of Baltimore’s Sinai Hospital may find an unusual visitor at their bedside. His Its name is Bari, which refers to the bariatric surgery the visited patients have undergone.

It’s a high-tech solution to a problem of proximity: patients want to be able to interact with their doctor, but sometimes the doc is miles away working other cases. Continue reading “But Does It Make You Turn Your Head and Cough?”

How satisfied are you with your cell phone or service? And when is the last time you saw a survey about any product or service that revealed that almost all customers say they’re “extremely satisfied” with it?

Apple’s iPhone is scoring incredibly high praise from its customers, according to an article from USA Today:

“In one of the first such studies, 90% of 200 owners said they were ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ satisfied with their phone. And 85% said they are ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ likely to recommend the device to others, says the online survey conducted and paid for by market researcher Interpret of Santa Monica, Calif. The firm surveyed 1,000 cellphone users July 6-10.”

I don’t know anyone who actually owns in iPhone, yet, but I know several who want one. And when they do eventually bring one of the gadgets home, they can recommend it to me all they want. But until Apple drops its price from the $500-600 per phone, and until AT&T drops their monthly service fees from nearly $100 to closer to half that figure, I’ll just stick with what I have: a phone that has a camera in it and few other, if any, frills.

I’ve never surfed the net on my cell phone, nor have I ever tried to read an email. I suspect that either would annoy me beyond words.

Still, that high a level of happiness with the iPhone has to have Apple’s competitors scrambling to come up with the “next big thing” of their own.

It’s probably also carries a bit of a sting for Microsoft, whose customers are less happy with the upgrade to the much-ballyhooed Vista operating system.

Theirs will probably be cheaper. But for us Mac lovers, it just won’t be the same.

In the midst of the recent iPhone frenzy, a celebrity’s publicist learned that what it takes to get one of the popular gadgets is patience, not status.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Cher’s publicist lamented not being able to land one of Apple’s new phones for her legendary client.

“Doesn’t winning Oscars, Grammys and Emmys entitle her to move to the front of the line?” she said.

Why should it? Cher’s various talents, it would seem, have already been rewarded. She already has received far more recognition than most of us “normal” folks will ever receive. How far must the “special treatment” go?

People have been lined up for days waiting to be among the first to buy Apple’s iPhone, which officially goes on sale at 6:00pm tonight.

Rest assured that I am not one of them. While I like the look of the phone and am sure that the cool factor is through the roof when you actually use one, there are two reasons why the Mac-like gadget is not in my future.

First, there’s that little thing known as cost. The phone costs between $500 to $600. Is it worth it? Who knows: if you want everything it offers and can afford such a price, then it probably is. For the rest of us, that’s a steep price. (And Apple isn’t the kind of company that offers huge drops in price over time, either.)

And that’s only the beginning. The new AT&T — so far, I prefer the old one — wants a two-year committment with service running anywhere from $60 to $100 a month. What?

I recently had my cell phone number changed to a local number here in the Lowcountry. To change the number, Verizon automatically renewed my contract for two more years. I’m sure we’ll reach a point where a call to your cell phone carrier’s 411 service will increase the term of your contract by at least a year. The difference is that my phone was essentially free and that my monthly cost is about $49. That, to me, is entirely too high.

Then there is my second objection to such a device.

How much do you really need to do with a cell phone? Sure, mine has a little calendar/reminder function, which I use. It has a built-in digital camera, which I have used occasionally. It has text messaging, which I don’t use. It has email, which I wouldn’t think of trying to use on a cell phone. It has internet, which is annoying enough on a full-sized computer.

I’m one of those purists: I prefer to watch TV on a television, to make calls on a phone, and to handle surfing and email on a computer. Putting everything into one may be convenient, but I don’t think it’s necessary, especially for that high a price. And as we’ve all learned from Mr. Murphy, if something can go wrong, it will. With technology, if something can go wrong, it will in a big way!

Just imagine the possibilities.

I’m a Mac guy…always have been. Not because I think that PCs are so bad, but they aren’t as user-friendly. And just yesterday at work, the PC I was working on gave me the “blue screen of death.” My Mac doesn’t treat me that way.

But that doesn’t mean that I want everything in my life to act like a Mac. Or to cost what a Mac costs.

If you’re one of those lunatics enthusiasts who have been losing sleep until you can have an iPhone of your own, I wish you success today. You might need it.

Yes, it’s apparently true: size does matter.

When it comes to mathematical ability. And fingers.

(The male readers out there are now breathing a sigh of relief, though they likely won’t admit it.)

Science reports on a study of the hands of 74 boys and girls aged 6 and 7. Researchers compared the measurements of the second and fourth fingers with the children’s scores on a standard UK test of math and literacy. In boys, those with a higher length ratio of ring finger to index finger tended to score higher in mathematical ability. Girls with shorter ring fingers tended to score higher in verbal skills.

Does this mean the appropriate way to have dealt with a low grade in school would have been to show our teachers the finger?

As some of you might know, I like to write out of the house using an old Macintosh laptop. That caused me a bit of a headache earlier today.

I took my trusty old laptop to a local Mexican restaurant with the intention of writing during lunch. When I opened the laptop, the desktop was grayed out and there was a strange error message telling me that some kind of serious error had occurred and that I needed to power down the computer at once. (If the computer is smart enough to know that an error serious enough to prevent me from doing anything but powering it down has occurred, it should at least be smart enough to power itself down and save me the trouble.) Anyway, I held down the power button, as it instructed, and nothing happened. It stayed on, with the error message taunting me.

After trying holding down the power button several times to no avail, I just took out the battery. That did the trick.

But the joke was on me: when I tried to restart the computer, nothing happened. No error message, no Mac error screen, no gray screen of nothingness (besides gray), no blinking question mark. Not even a flicker from the green power light.

I immediately heard a line of dialog in my head. The line in question came from a climactic scene in Dean Koontz’s Tick Tock, in which a demon attempts to break into the home of the Vietnamese woman who created it:

“This not good.”

It was more than “not good.” There on the laptop’s hard drive, which I can get to do nothing, are four chapters of my novel I’ve been working on (and re-working) over the past two months, when my Sweeps-drained brain found time and desire to actually work on it.

I tried the old pep talk that seems so appropriate at times like this: “It’ll come back on. I’ll just plug it in and give it a few minutes.”

Didn’t work.

Then I tried the second pep talk strategy: “If I sit down with the last few chapters, I’m sure I’ll remember exactly what was there. It’ll all come back to me with no problem.”

I wasn’t buying that one, either.

So I called a couple of computer repair centers and asked around. I’m not sure exactly how old this particular model of Powerbook is, but it is old enough that no computer repair stores or even the Apple Store itself will even bother to service it if something goes wrong.

I can understand Apple taking this position: they want me to buy a new computer. Got that. But it surprised me to find out that computer repair companies would be likely to turn me down as well. When I asked about this, it was explained to me that the parts are either hard to find or outrageously expensive — if not both — and I would be better off just to replace the machine. But one local guy offered to salvage what was on the hard drive this afternoon.

Holiday service? At no additional cost? This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship!

I met up with him and he was able to get those chapters to my trusty thumb drive. As he worked, I noticed that he transferred the files I needed into a folder on his laptop, and then from there onto my thumb drive. His laptop, I was surprised to discover, is a MacBook Pro.

“I’m impressed,” I said. “Most IT guys I know hate Macs. You’re the first one I’ve ever met who had a Mac laptop.”

“I wouldn’t trust one who didn’t.”

I love this guy.

After making sure the files actually made it to the thumb drive and deleting them from his computer (yes, I saw him!), he tinkered with the computer and was able to perform a “Power Management Reset” — whatever that’s supposed to be — and the machine actually came back to life. Bonus!

He did advise me to start shopping for a new laptop. He suggested the models to consider, and that the base model would be more than enough for what I needed. So eventually, I guess I’ll have to get something new. For now, though, I’m back in business. For a lot cheaper than it would have been otherwise.

So all you writers out there, kindly consider this as that friendly tap on the shoulder, a reminder to save everything, then backup everything to floppy disk or CD so that if your computer dies, your writing projects aren’t lost.

That’s my next task, too.

Am I the only one who thought, upon reading that James “Scotty” Doohan’s ashes were being sent into space, that the ashes would stay in space? Maybe that they were being blasted off toward the moon or Saturn or Jupiter? Or maybe even a distant galaxy?

Apparently, I assumed wrong. Not only was the trip into space intended to be a temporary one, a new snag has developed: the remains of the Star Trek actor, along with those of former NASA astronaut Gordon Cooper and about 200 others, are missing in the mountains of New Mexico.

The UP Aerospace rocket, a privately-funded vehicle designed to carry cremated remains and scientific experiments into space on a sub-orbital path, took off without incident. But the rocket components parachuted into the “rough and tumble terrain” of New Mexico, and scientists have so far been unable to locate the payload. Officials with the company say that the location of that cargo has been located to within 1,300 feet, but dense vegetation is making it difficult to pinpoint so far.

Suddenly, the idea of being sent into space has lost a lot of appeal.

As seen on fosfor gadgets:

As an insomniac who hates getting up in the morning, I think I could definitely use one of these!

Roger Ibars, the designer of the Gun Operated Alarm Clock, realizes that people hate their alarm clocks and believe that they should be severely punished for their treachery. There is a lot of satisfaction to be had by throwing your alarm clock against the wall or, in this case, shooting it until it turns off.

Unfortunately, it’s just a prototype for now. But if they ever start selling them, I’ll be in line to buy one.

The government should have never stuck its nose in the telephone business. There was a time, prior to the mid 1980s, when everyone relied on one telephone system. It was known as the original AT&T, or “Ma Bell,” and consisted of several smaller companies that were divisions of the big one with names like Southern Bell, Bell Atlantic, and Southwestern Bell.

There were complaints by wannabe telephone companies who wanted in on Ma Bell’s action, and in particular the then-growing mobile and modem businesses. Some consumers complained that when it came to telephone service, it was Bell’s way or no way, sometimes summing it up using the same joke I used for the title of this piece: “Ma Bell has us by the calls.”

So in 1984, Ma Bell was broken up into “Baby Bells.” Lots of other companies came onto the scene. And now, twenty-three years later, the telecommunications company is running amok with no one able to do anything if you have a problem with someone else’s customer.

Nice.

For a while, I was receiving fax machine calls from a number located in Issaquah, Washington. I would answer the phone and get those familiar beeps. I’d hang up, it would call back. It would call on weekends and in the middle of the night between 4:00 and 5:00 in the morning.

I stumbled across a website called whocalled.us, which is designed to allow people like you and me to report these jerks. As more information is collected on them, those who are being plagued by the same callers get bits of information that can help them stop those calls from coming in.

In the case of the Washington number, it would display on my Caller ID as a “Private Call” but it would display the phone number itself, which some have traced to a drug retailer. But I had Privacy Director, which was specifically designed to block callers that didn’t identify themselves. So I called BellSouth and complained raised hell. They suggested that I should switch to a different telephone package that would replace Privacy Director with Call Block and Call Trace. The former would allow me to block that number; the latter would allow me to report it to the Annoyance Call Center so that investigators could get to the bottom of it and make the bad people lay off their unwanted late-night calls.

Let me pause here for a moment. Do I really think that I can report a Washington-state number to the Annoyance Call Center, then call local police and seriously expect them to be able to do anything about it? Not for a second. But I was willing to play along with this lofty plan of theirs for a moment or two.

The BellSouth agent politely told me that there would only be a four dollar price difference, and naturally, I would have to pay more. Wait a second, I said: I’m paying forty-something bucks a month as it is. I have a specific telephone number that is harrassing me with a fax machine I can’t stop from calling me. I’ve given you the number, so do something about it. But the number was from the other end of the continent, certainly not a BellSouth number, so there was nothing BellSouth could do. I assured him that I had no intention of paying additional money because of BellSouth’s failure to handle the situation satisfactorily, and after a few minutes on hold, the agent reported that they had been able to get a deal worked out because of a current promotion on web-based orders or something…frankly, I tuned out on the “how they did it part” after he told me that I could switch for the same price.

So now I had my Call Trace and Call Block. I was ready for action. And action I got, the next day. Same number. Same beeping tones. I hung up and dialed *57, which sent the number to the Annoyance Call Center. Then I hung up and dialed *60, which allows me to block up to six numbers from ever calling. I’m sure my face was contorted into a maniacal grin as I feverishly dialed the hateful fax’s number. I hit the # button to enter it…and got a recording:

“We’re sorry, this telephone number is not available for this service.”

Never has “we’re sorry” been such an honest assessment of the telephone company’s ability to meet one’s needs. If I could have jumped through the phone, I’d have taken a hammer with me to smash the “we’re sorry” tape deck.

I called the Call Annoyance Center, and after listening to what seemed like an hour-long recording, voiced by a slow-speaking woman with a southern drawl, I learned that this revered group of people do not investigate telemarketer or “beeping tone” fax machine calls.

So what was all that those other operators were saying about tracing the call? What’s the point of having me trace them if their Call Annoyance Center apparently doesn’t consider fax machine calls an annoyance?

That’s the question I asked when I called again. The customer service representative seemed surprised when I told her that the call center didn’t persue telemarketers and errant fax machines! Apparently, this communications giant is incapable of communicating from one department to another!

I then asked the million-dollar question: how is it that, in the 21st century, when almost every made is switched by computer — those operators sitting in front of the giant patch panels are long gone, after all — that I can’t give my telephone company one specific number to keep that number from being blocked? It seems such a simple request for a system that’s operated electronically: just block the damned number! Simple. Easy.

Not so simple or easy, it turns out, because since the number isn’t one of this phone company’s number, they can’t do anything about it. If we were all under Ma Bell, one of Ma’s henchmen from Pacific Bell could have handled this by now. But because the call originates with some other company, perhaps even a cellular or internet service provider, I’m told, I can’t block the incoming call to my home, and it’ll be next to impossible, apparently, for the telephone company to do find out who owns the line.

To her credit, this agent did give me one piece of useful information: the next time a fax machine calls, sit through the tones, and when they stop, as the fax machine is trying to hang up, dial this sequence: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-*-0-#. That, she says, is a recognizable signal for fax machines to remove that number.

When Issaquah called again, I tried it, and fortunately, it hasn’t called back since.

But this weekend, I started getting calls from a fax machine in Las Vegas. This one doesn’t get the message from the keypad sequence. It seems to have been traced to a company that acts as a delivery service for customers wanting to telemarket by fax. I tried calling the number others have listed there to “opt-out,” and of course, they’re closed on Sunday. I can only hope that every five minutes, they’re getting “beeping tone” fax machine calls.

Since I haven’t been in the area for that long, I’m still in the “waiting period” for the “Do Not Call” list for my new phone number. I’m hoping that in another couple of weeks or so, when that kicks in across the board, these calls will stop.

In the meantime, I’m left to wonder why was really accomplished by slicing the original telephone company into smaller ones that can’t — or won’t — work together when their customers have a problem. I don’t think they really thought this thing through.