Faces in Odd Places #2

Found lurking in the toilets at The Baltic - An automated toilet air-freshener or a goateed robot?

Wake and Bake...

Waking up, rolling a joint, getting high. Hardly a recipe for a successful career, unless of course your career is a marijuana tester.

In some states in America they have legalised canabis for medicinal use, and with it brought a whole new channel of career choice for the dedicated pot-head.

CNN recently reported on a guy who does just this. He gets paid to get high, and then write reviews of the weed he's smoked. I dunno about you, but if I was smoking copious amounts of high grade ganja I think I'd probably struggle to write a cogent review of the product, but hey, I'm not being paid for it.

The danger is that you end up with an utterly ridiculous situation like this:

Mind Over Matter...

So, it has finally happened.

No longer will you find yourself lying on the sofa, cursing that you need to make yourself stand-up to turn on the lights, close the curtains and find the TV remote.

A company called Emotiv Systems have developed a headset that can read your thoughts and then get a computer to do what you are thinking. Kind of like your hands, only cooler.

So far computers can only understand the direct inputs you give them, but with this piece of kit the whole realm of human interaction can be introduced into human-computer interaction. The software can intuitively respond to your thoughts, responding to your facial expressions and emotional experiences.

Just what you always wanted then yeah? A computer that judges you for being miserable and boring.

Ok, I confess, I do it a disservice. It could actually be really useful. We will soon be able to play computer games without needing to hold a controller in our hands and our on-screen avatars will smile when we smile. This is going to make emoticons a thing of the past. Man is saved!

No seriously, it does hold the potential to change the way we use computers, changing the world in the process. The possibilities are endless. People will be able to steer their electric wheelchairs using their mind. Doctors could perform highly delicate surgery using robots controlled by their brain…

Let’s just hope they don’t get distracted by the nurse’s cleavage and end up giving someone a boob job when they meant to remove their appendix.

At the moment the software is quite basic, allowing simple objects floating on a screen to be moved around using your brain. The potential is huge though, as long as we can avoid just using it for some weird virtual porn kind of thing.

Faces in Odd Places #1

Ever felt like all the faces around you have either had their personalities surgically removed, or they just never had one in the first place?

Whenever I'm in London this is my overwhelming emotion. While I sit on the tube scared that (a) a terrorist is going to try and blow me up, or (b) the police are going to mistake me for a terrorist and blow me up, I always feel that it would be nicer if the people I'm about to share my iminent death with would at least smile at me.

It was in this semi-delusional state that I noticed all around me there were faces looking at me, sometimes smiling, sometimes gurning, but never afraid to reveal their true emotions. In this vein, I'm giong to post photos whenever I see a friendly face that makes me smile...

That boy needs therapy...

The sheets were wet when I woke up; cold, damp and somewhat smelly. A bit like paper wrapped around a mould-injected blue cheese that’s been in the fridge too long. I had been dreaming a pretty standard Orwellian nightmare about Telescreens and the like, you know how it is. It was probably because of that article I had yesterday about how little machines can track Bluetooth devices wherever they go; three days ago I gave up battling the technophiles who ridiculed me whenever I pulled out my prehistoric mobile, and went and bought a new one.

But I couldn’t help feeling that this time I wasn’t just being a borderline-schizophrenic; I swear a CCTV camera had actually followed me yesterday. Then, crossing at the lights as I walked onto the next street, another one on the next corner panned around to take up the duty. To be fair, who could blame them for wanting to keep an eye on me? I definitely ticked all of the 'typical subversive' boxes: on his way to buy milk and eggs, with foisty morning breath, stylish bed hair (that no amount of ‘surf-look’ hair product would ever manage), and the mandatory Sunday morning brain-rot of a hangover. Definitely a threat to the system, better keep me under surveillance to make sure I don’t jump on a soap box outside the corner shop and start a suburban revolution.

So yeah, that night I had gone to bed worrying that the white van man who had left his Transit parked half on/half off the curb in direct view of my living room window wasn’t the painter-decorator his flaking sign suggested. It made far more sense for him to be a member of some Gestapo-type organisation paid for by a slush fund for tackling the binge-drinking renegades (well, the yearly increase in alcohol tax has got to be invested somewhere doesn’t it, and NHS billboard advertising is obviously dying on its arse, so why not?). Anyone who can have that much fun on a Saturday night with utter disregard for either their health, their bank balance or the feeling in their mushed up brain as Sunday begins to turn into Monday is definitely a danger to the well oiled status quo.

Ok, So, maybe I don’t entirely believe that, but it’s easy to think it could all be happening in secret after reading a couple of those dystopian novels on every A Level reading list. I mean, really, didn’t the school psychiatrist have the foresight to realise what reading Brave New World at the age of 16 was going to do to my cannabis-sedated mind?! Now I'm in my mid-twenties and I'm waking up in the middle of the night to find the sheets insisting on sticking to my back as if I’m a zombie trying to elude the shrink-wrap machine in the Undead Butchers. I think I need therapy.