How a 1960s Discovery In Neuroscience Spawned a Military Project 112
Harperdog writes "This is pretty fascinating: The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an article about a DARPA project that allows researchers to scan satellite photos, video, etc., and have a computer pick up differences in brain activity to tell whether an image has been seen...images that might flash by before conscious recognition. From the article: 'In a small, anonymous office in the Trump Tower, 28 floors above Wall Street, a man sits in front of a computer screen sifting through satellite images of a foreign desert. The images depict a vast, sandy emptiness, marked every so often by dunes and hills. He is searching for man-made structures: houses, compounds, airfields, any sign of civilization that might be visible from the sky. The images flash at a rate of 20 per second, so fast that before he can truly perceive the details of each landscape, it is gone. He pushes no buttons, takes no notes. His performance is near perfect.'"
Re:Welcome to the future (Score:5, Insightful)
Drink Coke.
Re:Welcome to the future (Score:1, Insightful)
google goggles is going to be DOA if a real product ever comes out of it. They look stupid; glasses are obtrusive; and I really can't think of a bigger way to broadcast that you're a dork than walk around with those on your face. Oh, and if you're wearing those and having a conversation with me in person, I will definitely want to punch you in the face. It's like a more irritating version of putting your face in your phone while talking to someone.
Re:Welcome to the future (Score:5, Insightful)
Google Glasses can be disguised, and roughly half the population wear some form of glasses anyway.
No, they will not be DOA, they will be wildly successful, especially if they can be made to look like regular sunglasses or prescription glasses.
Do you run around punching people who wear Bluetooth headsets in the ear?
Re:See, the brain is a great computer (Score:4, Insightful)
What API? It's self-modifying software / hardware that many societies are so fed up with, they try running a virtual machine on top that does what they want it to do. That's what 12+ years of education is about, paring you down to the least common denominator, until you match a wine-drinker's normal model.
Lower / middle / high school -> punishment before the Almighty hierarchy depending on how well you conform to your peer's standards. College / real life -> working hard at a job to earn money so you can try to retrieve the relative peace of mind you once had when people didn't expect anything of you. When you're younger, you try to grow up, to get at those privileges denied to you by your seniors, when you're older, you try to stay the same age. And when you're really old, you look forward to death as some form of rest.
Someone, somewhere, thought that if you're borderline sentient, you wouldn't be able to be unhappy, or that you'd be so busy with trivial problems that you wouldn't get bored enough to die. Hence schools belt out kids, year after year, that appear to be successively less knowledgeable, in pursuit of some golden "Ignorance is bliss." Well, it's not. However, there are things we can do, somewhat independent of intelligence, that we can enjoy until we discover sentient life somewhere else in the universe / multiverse / whatever. My personal favorite, of course, is watching anime and reading manga, which as I am terrible at foreign languages, should keep me preoccupied with a pleasantly futile task until sometime after the last star cools. Pick a task you're not particularly good at, and stick with it; for some of us, this will be rising at an early hour, for others, this will be evolving / designing cats that yodel (going to need a Bass, a Soprano, a Falsetto...and since they're cats, getting them to do something as a group is the futile task).
Re:See, the brain is a great computer (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the user manual, not the API documentation. If you cannot tell the difference, hand in your geek card!
Re:Welcome to the future (Score:5, Insightful)
Looking at someone while talking to them conveys much more information then just the speech alone. Does one person have a confused look on their face? Is the other party trying to stop you from speaking so they can ask something non-verbally? Does the other person look like they totally don't give a fuck?
I do hope you understand the importance of nonverbal communication [wikipedia.org] in conversation. Engagement [wikipedia.org] is a very important part of communication, and is much of the reason why people still travel long distances to have face to face meetings in business. It's not just some people, it's most people that feel important when you look at them when you talk, especially the people that have the greatest monetary influence on your life, bosses, girlfriends, customers...
A lot of geeks and nerds get the label, not because of their obsession with their trade, but the inability to communicate with other people properly.
Q: How can a woman tell the difference between a geek and a jock?
A: A jock stares at her breasts, a geek stares at her shoes.
Re:See, the brain is a great computer (Score:5, Insightful)
too bad you didn't stick to your education until the magic happens and you realize that it's teaching you how to think
I think you guys are conflating 'education' with 'schooling'. "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain