telepathy
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Tom DeLonge needs your help funding his next UFO obsession
Former Blink-182 singer and guitarist Tom DeLonge is taking his fascination with/conspiracy theories about UFOs to their logical conclusion point: He's partnering with former government officials on a public benefit corporation studying "exotic technologies" from Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) that the consortium says can "revolutionize the human experience."
Barely Related: The Rock is Black Adam, telepathy exists
Today, let's take a moment to stop and revel in how amazing, terrifying and grand the world is. Our lives are composed of dark, light and every shade in between. That's why, when we get serious shade thrown our way, we can absorb it and move on. Welcome to Barely Related, a conversational Friday column that presents the non-gaming news stories that we, the Joystiq staff, have been talking about over the past week. And no, we're not stopping our focus on industry and gaming news. Think of this as your casual weekly recap of interesting (and mostly geeky) news, presented just in time to fill your brain with things to discuss at all of those weekend shindigs. Grab a fresh drink, lean back in your armchair, and get ready to talk nerdy with us.
Stick It To The Man grabs Wii U Gamepads this Spring
Having already conquered Steam, the PlayStation 3 and Vita, Stick It To The Man will next bring its pink-limbed telekinesis to Nintendo's Wii U. Developed by Swedish indie studio Zoink!, Stick It To The Man is a puzzle-platformer starring Ray, an unassuming fellow who somehow finds himself with a giant pink arm jutting out of his brain. Thanks to video game logic, Ray can use this inexplicable limb to manipulate the world around him and read other people's thoughts – a helpful attribute given that Ray is framed for a crime by "The Man" and must use his powers to avoid paying for a crime he didn't commit. Unique to the Wii U incarnation of Stick It To The Man are Gamepad controls. Though we lack an exact description of how this new element functions, Zoink! describes it as an "innovative way of using the GamePad to mindread characters in the game, further separating the mindreading world from Ray's world." So far no price point has been established for the Wii U version of Stick It To The Man, though with the Steam version at $15 and the PlayStation iterations at $13, it seems likely that the Wii U game will be somewhere in that area. [Image: Zoink!]
Harvard lets human minds control rats, private rodent armies remain distant (video)
Sure, we've seen rats control other rats, but that won't give us a legion of mind-controlled creatures to unleash upon an innocent public, will it? Harvard Medical School may unwittingly assist with solving our (rather misguided) plight, as it just experimented with a system that lets a human mind trigger actions in a rat's motor cortex. The test had sensor-equipped humans watch a screen that flashed in sync with their EEG brain patterns for visual stimulation; as soon their attention shifted to controlling the rat, they triggered an ultrasonic pulse that twitched the rodent's tail. There's a few problems with the implementation beyond the obvious lack of autonomy for the poor target creature, though. The rat's anaesthetized state likely affected the results, and the system isn't currently sophisticated enough to map specific thoughts to corresponding actions. The Harvard team is working to refine the technology, however, and there may be a day when we can satisfy our megalomania... or at least, put the Pied Piper on notice.
Duke melds two rats' minds through the internet, Spock may not approve
Some would say the internet already lets us share every minute detail of our thoughts, much to our followers' dismay. Duke University isn't deterred by our behavior -- if anything, it just took oversharing literally by connecting two rats' minds in an experiment, first in a lab and ultimately online. Electrodes attached to the brain of a host "encoder" rat in Brazil processed the motor-oriented mental activity for a desired behavior, such as pressing a lever on cue, and converted it into a signal that was then received by a "decoder" rat as far away as Duke's US campus. The majority of the time, the decoder rat performed the same action as the encoder. Researchers also found that rewarding the encoder alongside the decoder created a virtuous loop, as treating the first rat for a job well done focused its attention and improved the signal strength. We're not sure that Vulcans would endorse this kind of mind meld, though: apart from immediately depriving the decoder rat of self-control, prolonged testing led to the same rodent developing additional sympathetic reactions to the encoder. There's also concerns that the test was too binary and didn't reflect the complexity of the whole brain. All the same, Duke's study is proof enough that we can export brainwaves in a meaningful way.
Addon Spotlight: Cooldown tracking
I'm certainly not going to pretend even for a second that this is a comprehensive list of raid cooldown tracking addons, encompassing every addon that exists with this purpose. I'm starting off today's column with an addon suggested to me via email. If you want to suggest any addon for review, do email me with download links, a brief description, and why you think I should test it out! Today's topic is the start of a set of raid-related Addon Spotlights. I'm really hoping that our commenters will provide more addons that they consider vital for raiding, with links and all, and that I can have a look at them so we can do this again next week. Inevitably, you'll have raiding addons I don't use, or maybe ones that I don't even know about. Tell me about them in the comments! And, of course, today's addons could also be really, really handy for PvP! Anyhow, a while back in late October, Frego of The Wyld Hunt on The Sha'tar (EU-H) sent me an email regarding an addon he thought I should take a look at.
Review: Emotiv EPOC, tough thoughts on the new mind-reading controller
We live in exciting times. You can, today, right now, actually buy in real life the kind of sci-fi gear you only expect to find in a video game. Controlling things -- anything but your own body, really -- with just your thoughts is a fantasy and sci-fi staple, whether it be Darth Vader force-choking some mouthy Imperial admiral or Professor Xavier commanding the X-Men from the comfort of his wheelchair, finger pressed to temple in grim concentration. But that fantasy is now reality, and you can control things (well, a thing) with just the power of your mind. Think it and your computer does it, no more pesky mice or keyboards or even voice commands. Or so the people at Emotiv would have us believe. Being the kind of guy who absolutely cannot wait for the day when, as Jonathan Coulton sings, "the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away," I pre-orded Emotiv's thought-controlled EPOC mind-computer interface device as soon as I thought I had $299 to spare. As it turned out, being the first on your block with the new toy comes with a real risk: you might end up buying a frustrating experimental prototype for the cost of five new video games. %Gallery-83470%
Ground combat! Star Trek Online community answers, page 2
Arachnidus: Also, as has been constantly stated, with diplomacy and scientific options being available in space combat, will those possibilities be applied to ground combat as well? Diplomatic, exploration and scientific gameplay can occur in both gameplay modes, ground and space. One Tactical officer might choose a bunch of security skills and focus on defending your allies with abilities like Security Team, a power that beams down a few redshirts to guard a target.
DARPA working on "Silent Talk" telepathic communication for soldiers
We're no strangers to crazy DARPA projects around here, but this one especially strikes our fantastic fancy. The agency's researchers are currently undertaking a project -- called Silent Talk -- to "allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals." That's right: they're talking about telepathy. Using an EEG to read brain waves, DARPA is going to attempt to analyze "pre-speech" thoughts, then transmit them to another person. They first plan to map people's EEG patterns to his / her individual words, then see if those patterns are common to all people. If they are, then the team will move on to developing a way to transmitting those patterns to another person. Dream big, that's what we always say!
All the World's a Stage: WTF is IC - OOC? WTB RP! OK THX, CU L8R
All the World's a Stage is brought to you by David Bowers every Sunday evening, investigating the mysterious art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.While many online gamers are famous for using "leetspeak," there's a certain portion of the community that places a great deal of importance on complete sentences and good spelling. Roleplayers, as a whole, are friendly and communicative, but nonetheless have special ways of interacting that other gamers may not understand. As a new roleplayer, I remember having to figure a lot of these things out, although I was blessed to befriend many people who kindly explained things to me as well. The first and most important concept I had to get a grasp of was the idea of "in-character" versus "out-of-character" communication (usually abbreviated to IC and OOC), and in what situations the use of either sort would be appropriate.It's fair to say that on an RP server where roleplaying is still the rule rather than the exception, anything in the /say or /yell channels should be "in character." That's to say, it should be phrased with good spelling and proper punctuation, and should only refer to happenings within the WoW universe. In situations where one must say something out-of-character in these channels, it is polite to at least couch your OOC words in double parentheses to clarify your meaning.
Researchers test telepathy in virtual world
Those mad scientists at the University of Manchester are at it again, first repairing broken bones with inkjet printers, then simulating velociraptor attacks, and now trying to determine once and for all if telepathy is real -- using virtual reality, of course. About a hundred individuals are expected to take part in the experiment, which'll also test if telepathic abilities are stronger between people that already know each other. In the tests, two subjects will be placed far apart from each other, on different floors of the building (to avoid cheating), each donning VR helmets and gloves that plop then into a virtual environment. One of the individuals is then presented with an image that they're supposed to concentrate on and interact with, while the other is shown four items, from which they must pick the other person's object. We give this about an 80% chance of being inconclusive, a 10% chance of it proving that telepathy is real, and a 10% chance that things go completely haywire, giving everyone involved super telepathic abilities.
