The End Of Nintendo-Thimb?

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The following recent article from Live Science was just too good to let go. In fact, it’s so good I’m Ctrl + V’ing it, just in case The Live Science site gets eaten by three-headed green monsters spewing toxic waste from their arses. Such articles are deemed to be ever ridiculed, regardless their actual validity.

The days of attacking aliens with a joystick could soon be over thanks to a breakthrough technique where a teenager played Space Invaders using only signals from his brain.

With a technique that takes data from the surface of the brain, a 14-year-old boy from St. Louis was able to play the two-dimensional Atari game without so much as lifting a finger.

In Space Invaders, a popular computer game from the 1970’s, players control a movable laser cannon in attempts to shoot rows of aliens that move back and forth across the screen. The objective is to kill the aliens before they have a chance to get to the bottom of the screen. Once they land, the game ends. The aliens can also shoot at the cannon, so the player has to try and evade the shots.

The boy, who already had grids implanted to monitor his brain for epilepsy, was connected to a computer program that linked the video game to the grids. He was then asked to move his hands, talk, and imagine things. The researchers correlated these movements to the different signals fired by the brain.

They then asked the boy to play Space Invaders by moving his hand and tongue and then to imagine those movements without actually performing them.

“He cleared out the whole Level One basically on brain control,” said Eric Leuthardt, a researcher at the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. “He learned almost instantaneously. We then gave him a more challenging version in two-dimensions and he mastered two levels there playing only with his imagination.”

A couple of years back, Leuthardt and colleagues performed this research on four adults. But they wanted to explore possible differences between teenagers and adults. Although it’s too early to tell from testing just one teenager, Leuthardt thinks that teens may win this game.

“We observed much quicker reaction times in the boy and he had a higher level of detail of control—for instance, he wasn’t moving just left and right, but just a little bit left, a little bit right,” Leuthardt said.

Forget the Wii, the revoution has truly begun.

Offending God (Or His Followers At Least)

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One of my work colleagues has just been through a rough time in school. Whilst she was cleaning her desk of papers and rubbish she threw away a small and dilapidated pamphlet of Arabic writing, assuming it to be some old photocopied homework or reading exercise: it turned out to be from The Koran.

Even though the teacher does not speak Arabic and even though the pages were immediately taken from the bin, rumours started to spread like the proverbial wildfire, and parents were informed by rumour-bloated children.

Some parents kept their children away from lessons as a protest, and Naged (the assistant headmaster) was apparently rung up at all times of the night by irate parents. The teacher has been feeling generally shite for about two weeks now, although the ripples from the recent event have subsided.

I have some more respect fro Naged after this. The slew of telephone conversations he has had to endure must have worn him down and disrupted family life, but he has stuck by the teacher and sorted things out. The kind of thing a real headmaster does.

McDonalds Goes To School

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As part of Freya’s current food project at school, some of the children have assembled a McDonald’s pastiche which was displayed on the wall in the play/dining area. Jo alerted me to this, so I took a proper look for myself. True enough, there were a couple of pictures of the children standing outside a local “restaurant”, along with some paper-art burgers and, most worrying of all, french-fry boxes on which the children’s names were written as “McAlice” and so on.

I mentioned to one of the educators that I thought this was not something I wish my daughter to see every day, and I was greeted with mild empathy and excuses for the display. I then wrote an open letter to the school, explaining that we have no problem with junk-food being discussed, but for it to be given a face in the form of a brand-name was tantamount to free advertising.

The offending posters have been taken down, and I await further comments to arise from my letter being discussed in a future teacher meeting. It is a testament to McDonald’s marketing that no-one in the nursery school found this synonymity concerning; one of the first comments I received was “if it makes you feel better there are pictures of vegetables on the walls, too”. It doesn’t, since there is no company called “Vegetable”; I would be equally anxious if pictures of Nike products were used in a clothes project.

Sadly, when I was in the dining area of my school the next day, I saw a similar pastiche about food in Arabic. Amongst the vegetables and fruit loomed two french-fry cartons. Thankfully, they were almost indistinguishable, and were hidden by the other foodstuffs and the hugeness of the dining room itself, something which cannot be achieved in Freya’s school.

The Second Eurovision Party Of The Year

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The second qualifying heat of the Eurovision Song Contest gave us the opportunity to host a little get-together with Chris, Tanya and Mats yesterday evening. We ate pizza, drank varying amounts of alcohol, and had a generally excellent evening. I actually didn’t get into the mood of things as much as I’d wanted to, this being due to shaking off some kind of illness, but I appreciated the company nonetheless.

As it turned out, the two chaps spent a solid three hours in front of the screen trying to sort out our problem with connecting the Nintendo DS through a recently purchased USB wifi connector. This is a fair amount of time for anyone (or, in this case, two), but these guys know their stuff when it comes to computers, so I’m mightily impresses with the result, which looks like the problem is solved. I just have to wait for Carrie to get back to her house so I can check the connection. Even if there are further problems, huge steps have been taken in the right direction.

Personally, I have learnt a bit about my firewall, which is where the problem stems from.

It was a long time ago we socialised with these three, and considering they all live within a few kilometres of us, it’s ridiculous we don’t do it more often. Hopefully we’ll “see” a bit more of Chris, though, since he’s looking to buy a DS himself.

Tales Of The Toilet

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It just goes to show how effective it has been in drilling Freya with certain routines. The other night, at 4am, Freya woke up needing a wee. She walked to the toilet, turned on the light, went to toilet, dried herself, drew out the chair, climbed up on it, washed and then dried her hands, turned out the light and went back to bed.

It is really amazing how well she has learned these routines, and she has yet to wee the bed.