Brian Micklethwait

Monkey plays pong just by thinking about it

Earlier today I talked with my friend Bruno, who told me about an unusual monkey. Unusual to me, anyway.

This monkey had electrodes inserted into his brain, and then they got him to play a favourite game of his: pong. As he played pong, he was rewarded with banana juice, which made him enjoy it even more.

He played pong with a lever. While he was doing this, they analysed his brainwaves and learned to decypher these brainwaves in real time, and used the result to control the movement of the pong thingy on the screen.

Then, they unplugged the lever. The monkey carried on using the lever because he still assumed that this was how he was controlling the pong thingy, but actually he was controlling what happened on the screen only with his brain. The same signals he was sending to his hand were being interpreted by the computer, with the result that what the monkey saw on the screen was unchanged.

The final step was to remove the lever, and get the monkey to carry on playing pong, which he was now able to do merely by thinking of how he would have controlled the lever. That worked. And there you have it, technology controlled by pure brain activity.

Video here. The application they talk about is to help people get around being paraplegic. But think about it, and you’ll soon realise that there are many, many more amazing ways that this sort of brain-only techno-control could be made to work and to change the world.

If you’ve heard about this before, fine. I too have heard about such stuff before. The difference, for me, was how clearly Bruno explained the successive stages of how they made all this work.

The man writing out the cheques for all this – or whatever you do these days to pay for things – is Elon Musk. Who, I understand, is also becoming quite successful with his rockets. So, it’s only a bit of a stretch to say that Musk is now big both in brain surgery and rocket science.

Masked beast outside St Ermin’s Hotel

There must be a million statues with masks on them these days, given what these days are still like, but here’s the first one I have actually encountered on my recent photo-travels:

Yet another photo-souvenir of the times we have all lived through (apart from those of us who didn’t).

That particular beast (what exact sort of beast it is I can only guess – Dragon? Bear?) is the one holding a sign, saying nothing at all, outside St Ermin’s Hotel, which is near to St James’s Park tube, which is one of my local tube stations.

One of the arguments I am looking forward to learning more about, as time goes by and as the Covid books start appearing, concerns just how little good and how much harm these muzzles have done, and, crucially, how soon they knew, or should have known, such stuff.

Deer with reflections photo on Twitter

I just encountered this photo by Austin O’Connor on Twitter:

This was the sort of thing I had in mind when I did this earlier little posting. For me, this photo is, if anything, too picturesque, like a very sugary pudding. But, I can definitely see why he’s proud of it. I would be if I’d photoed this, sugar or no sugar.

Strange pavement marks

A while back I started noticing occasional strange pavement patterns, which put me in mind of an old toy I once had, way back in the middle of the previous century:

Photoed by me earlier this week. I just did some Photoshop(clone)ping (contrast, sharpening) to make everything clearer, although it was pretty clear to start with.

I’m guessing these marks are made by a machine doing cleaning of some sort. I further guess that something has to be a bit wrong for this to happen. I particularly note how the pattern is in no way impeded by the joins of the pavement slabs, which suggests that quite a lot of power is being applied, by a quite heavy machine which cannot be easily deflected from the path it has been set on.

Another excellent mixed metaphor

Yesterday, in conversation with a friend, I was introduced by that friend to a delightful mixed metaphor, which I am pretty sure she just came out with in the moment. She was saying that she, or I, or the two of us, I forget which, ought to try to make the best of a bad job, with respect to something or other that I have forgotten about. But instead of that, she said that she or I or we should “milk the silver lining”. Excellent.

One for the collection. (I did those two links like that to make it clear that there are two links there, to two more mixed metaphors. You’re welcome.)

Crane and shadow outside Victoria Station

I love a good crane, especially in these almost craneless times. And I also love a good shadow. So, you can imagine how much I appreciated what I saw, outside Victoria Station, this afternoon:

Today there was rain around mid day, followed by the brightest of bright sunshine. This is the best sort of sunshine there is, because the rain washes the air before the sun shines through it.

Also present in this photo is Pavlova, the ballerina on top of the Victoria Palace Theatre. This is a very good photo, of the crane and its shadow, but not of Pavlova. For Pavlova, Try one of these.

Aerial traffic jam in 2014

Yesterday’s posting got nearly all the way to the finishing line, but I failed to push the “publish” button. Which I expect threw your whole morning out of kilter. I mean, if you can’t rely on another inconsequential posting from BrianMicklethwaitDotCom, what can you rely on? Anyway, it’s up now, and here is another posting on the same theme. Yesterday’s was about a crowd of people now, and here’s another photo of other crowds:

Only this time they are crowds of people in the air, in airplanes, one of the airplanes being the one I was in.

But alas, I did not photo this photo at all recently. Judging by the sky over London nowadays, such an aerial traffic jam still could not now be happening anywhere.

The particular one in the above photo was seen over the Channel, just after these photos were photoed.

Air traffic control must be a pretty easy job just now. Let’s hope it starts getting a lot harder, very soon.

People gathering normally

Last Thursday, late afternoon, this comforting scene was to be observed (and photoed) by me, on the other side of Victoria Street from me and a short walk from Buckingham Palace. Human beings, without muzzles on, enjoying each other’s company and drinking drinks:

Will normality ever fully return? I’ll believe what I see. But seeing that was definitely something.

On people not having to put up with too much crap at work any more

Seen today on Twitter :

A lady cleaner jacks her job in after getting a dressing down from her horrid boss. I don’t know the details, or whose fault this really was. Maybe “Julie” behaved very badly. But maybe the cleaning lady had driven Julie to distraction with her wrong ways of cleaning.

But, let’s now assume that whatever Julie’s reasons were for flipping her lid like that, it was indeed very unfair on the cleaning lady and could have been handled much better by Julie. Julie shouldn’t have bawled her out like that. Well, that means that Julie is now in some trouble, even if that trouble is only the fear of trouble. (Only!) Julie now faces being investigated by her superiors for perhaps provoking this contretemps and for making the bank look bad on Twitter.

I think the key change here is that your typical worker in a country like ours does not any longer have to take this sort of crap (assuming this was crap). Two hundred years ago, what percentage of the working population could be unemployed for a month without staring death by starvation in the face? And what is the answer to that same question now? Very different, I think we can be sure. And I think this is a very big change.

A century and more ago, this cleaning lady and all the people at her economic level, i.e. most people, just had to put up with this sort of humiliation. But not any more. Upping and leaving isn’t necessarily any fun, but for millions of workers now, it is now doable, if the alternative is made too horrible to endure.

As a result of this profound economic change, there is now a huge industry, populated by people who trained as actors and actresses (I have a couple of friends of this sort), which instructs middle managers in how to combine two things which can be hard to combine, namely being kind and polite, and yet still saying what is wanted. The danger is that if you are too nice, you’ll stop communicating clearly, which can then be torture of another kind. So you have to learn to be as kind as possible, while still being clear about what you want from your underlings and colleagues. Because such skills can be easier to describe than to master, these middle managers often have to practice doing all this, by playing out scenes, wrongly and rightly.

And note this. The process of them learning to be nice while remaining sufficiently clear and assertive has itself to be done in a way that works, but is also nice enough for them not to up and jack in their jobs because it’s all too damn humiliating and also a load of bollocks.