Entry #1966.

I used to post news stories that reported traditional science fiction elements coming true in real life. It started happening so often, that i kind of gave up keeping up. Today i saw two pretty huge things, so i wanted to post.

The second thing i saw, i'll post first.

From a post from Pink Tentacle, that originally came from a Japanese site:

"Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.

The 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."

They've finally done it.

Very interesting to me:

"The researchers suggest a future version of this technology could be applied in the fields of art and design — particularly if it becomes possible to quickly and accurately access images existing inside an artist’s head."

Yes, please. I've wanted that for years.

You can see pics of the computer-genrated mind-read images at those links.


And this morning i saw this video. I knew of the robot before, but the fact that its creator dresses it as an element of a manga i love ("Chobits"), and it can identify what character a figure is, and what anime it comes from, is just win.

See what happens when geeks get to make the technology they've fanboy'd after? They make it real. So cool.
She can read off of paper, do math problems that she reads, recognize object, "feel" and react, slap people for groping her... She even gets annoyed if you move around too much if shes trying to give you something. More info at http://www.projectaiko.com/.

Amazing stuff. The world gets more like our promised "Year 2000" every day. Maybe the Year 2000 will come in 2100.


BTW: The Cure are on Leno tonight.