your thoughts . . . . . your keys

a little while ago, there was an article on one of the tech sites that starts off with 'what if you could one day unlock your door or access your bank account by simply "thinking" your password?'

then the article goes on to describe research taking place at a canadian university, where brain-wave signatures will be utilized to authenticate a person, much like the iris and finger-print scanners being used today.

now that makes me wonder - (assuming this concept ever materializes in the first place) is such a system going to be more effective than today's textual passwords?

say, for instance, how many doors will i be able to unlock if i go and stand in front of these scanners and start thinking of anna kournikova in different poses? :)) or milla jovovich in that killer red dress she wears in resident evil? or yasmine 'run girl run' bleeth? or sharon stone? or . . . . . (this could go on for quite a while, but i'm sure you get the point). man o man, think of all the bank accounts that i can have access to, thanks to the rudimentary & stone-aged thought process of men!!

riiiiiiiight, the system's gonna limit the user with 3 thought-guesses, and then lock the door/account if all 3 are wrong. if this is the case, then i'm sure 64 bits wouldn't be sufficient to hold the count of the accounts that would get locked in a matter of days. isn't it like impossible to think of the one thing that you want to think of, and nothing else before that? you end up thinking of the exact opposite of what you want to think of - your mind's just plain stubborn. (reminds me of this little story where a guy was warned *not* to think of a mango, no matter what!! he succeeded for e-26 seconds - that's my guess at the time taken by nervous signals to travel around in your body.)

oh by the way, if there's any good that comes out of this system, it'll be that women's doors/accounts will be impossible to break into . . . . . not just by us men, but even by other women!! i can guarantee that the *hack* that i described above would work for a huuuuuuuuge fraction of men. can anyone come up with such a generic scheme to break into women's thoughts? by definition, it's not possible :)). period.

-w

geography

a few days ago, a survey conducted by national geographic was published, which concluded that young americans (teens and tweens if i'm not wrong) have very bad knowledge about geography.

a) most of them (60-70%) couldn't find iraq on a map of the middle-east (note that it wasn't a map of the entire world!!), inspite of the huge war and overhauling of the government there and the capture of good ol' sh and everything. couldn't find iran or israel either.

b) 90 bloody % of them couldn't locate afghanisthan on a map of asia (sweet god!!), inspite of the widespread media coverage of the american led overthrow of the taliban and the search for good ol' obl.

c) half of them didn't know that sudan is a country in africa (despite the darfur tragedy)

d) 3/4ths couldn't find indonesia (tsunami)

e) half of them couldn't locate india on a map of asia (and they all cry sour about jobs being outsourced there)

yep, this is in complete accordance with the little joke that i heard back in school days whose point was to ascertain that americans didn't know what "rest of the world" meant.

but do they atleast know what is where in their own country? here's the answer:

f) half couldn't find new york state on a map of the united states (and it's called the 'center of the universe')

g) a little less than half couldn't find louisiana and mississippi (torn by katrina)

next question - do they at the very least have a basic idea about directions in general? answer:

h) 1/3rd of the participants of the survey couldn't indicate which way 'north-west' on a map was (i pity those b#^%$^#s)

apparently, there was something good that came out of the survey as well:

i) a good number of them (70%) successfully located china on a map of asia. wooooooooooooooooooooooooow, that's like totally splendid, right? you know what else should've been tested? maybe they should've been asked to identify land masses and water bodies on a standard map!! that would've been such a nightmarishly complex task for them. those b#^%$^#s!!

for those of you who say "why the hell should i care where zimbabwe is, if i'm not a geographer and all i do is commute between my home and my workplace that is 3 bus-stops away?", you're so ignorant that i'm unable to find an equivalent analogy. this means that either i'm not a very good analogist or that i've just stumbled upon the absolute dumbest a person can ever get. pick your choice.

-w