Come on MSNBC. Morning Meeting with Dylan Ratigan was mocking a toy that suggests you can train to be a Jedi, and also mocks scientists who suggest they can read minds using not-so-similar technology. In that last case, they read the word Neuron from a persons brain.
I think certain people, who fail to realize the impact of cutting edge, and bleeding edge technologies shouldn’t mock them. As the saying goes, it is better remain silent and thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt. Ratigan, Huffington [of the Huffington Post], and Capehart [of the Washington Post] proceed to mock a toy that assists children and the curious in combating ADD, ADHD, and other attention deficit disorders. Perhaps if they were a victim of the trait they wouldn’t be so cavalier about it. They also “hope to hell” that all of the topics in that segment were just talking points, but again, they fail to realize that more than 18 years ago, people like me noticed that fMRI technology can indeed be used to detect awareness by “reading a persons mind” and in my case, it was used as a polygraph machine. In theory, with enough data sets, you can detect a person consciously lying. Eighteen years ago, the technology was in its infancy in the medical field and I was told it wouldn’t work, now the resolution is much greater and can probably work to the resolution the doctors in the study have found.
One problem is that it has to be coded to detect a message, it can’t detect anything it is not programmed for. Like decoding an ancient language, you need to create a Rosetta Stone.
I’m saddened that these people are so jocular about it. They are entertained, probably excited to fanatical yelling at a TV screen for such things as football, baseball, basketball and politics; but fail to be so for things that change the world in singular and profound ways. They would laugh about someone talking about the research they are doing in detecting the spin on an atom, but have no idea that the research would lead to secure computing.
I’m just disappointed in MSNBC that they would encourage someone to be so dense.
What do you think?