Science can read your mind

Well, a little bit. British scientists have devised a way to communicate with people in comas. Or, people we thought were in comas.

By getting them to imagine a physical activity like tennis, they could distinguish between activity in different parts of the brain.

This does push and pull on the meaning of "death". It used to be that if you weren't breathing, you were dead. Then it moved to the heart. It's been in the brain for a while, but we didn't have the tools we have now. Now we can detect brain activity in otherwise completely immobile people.

I wonder if in 100 years we'll have brain scanners good enough for these people to participate in society. Just as our EKG machine now makes the first toilet-paper tube stethoscope seem primitive, will we one day look back on our current technology and chuckle at simpler times?

I have to tell you if I get free stuff

Apparently corporations are paying for people to shill crap on blogs. And giving lots of free stuff to bloggers. So soon, bloggers will have to reveal conflicts of interest. Tell you if the product they're reviewing was given to them for free, or if the corporation paid them to review it.

I wish they were paying me. I think it's good that blogging is maturing to the point that people are needing to develop ethical standards. I just wish more than 4 people read this blog, so I could make money selling ads and get free stuff.

Wikipedia wars

Now that we know about the group that banned Scientology members from editing Wikipedia, it's interesting to learn about the various other fierce internal wikipedia debates. Like the one about whether Lucky Charms is sold in Ireland. Or how significant it is that Bono plays the harmonica.

Thank you Internet. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to care and fight passionately about such tiny, tiny things. Thank you for making it easy to ignore torture and famine and war.

Anonymous Blogging - Ethical?

There's an interesting debate about anonymity going on right now. Two guys who disagree strenuously about politics were arguing, and the conservative unmasked the liberal who blogs under a pseudonym.

I was taught at [elite liberal-arts] College to take responsibility for my words. That writing without putting my name by it was dirty, and anonymity allows for the worst in people to lash out without consequence. Certainly on the internet it's easy for anonymity to allow the worst in people to come out.

But some are making good points about the distinction between pseudonyms and anonymous writing. You can hold a pseudonymous writer to account to a limited extent - you can form a long term opinion about a body of work, you can quote previous writings to refute current arguments. You can't put toilet paper in the tree outside their house, but that's possibly a good thing.

I don't put my full name on this blog because I'm easily stalkable. Hell, there's enough already here for you to figure out where I live, but I'm going to make you work for it. Am I ethical in trying for a little privacy? What if I used a completely fake name, like monkeydude?