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