What's making you happy today?

[Griff]

That would be cool but I bet there is a rights issue.

[sexobon]

There's finally something in the works to help people sort through their old stored images:

US Army lab develops a way to read soldiers' brains

Military intelligence analysts spend a lot of time scrutinizing countless images from various sources, such as drones and surveillance systems. An automated program developed by cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Anthony Ries, however, can make the process a lot faster. Ries works for a US Army research facility called the "The MIND (Mission Impact Through Neurotechnology Design) Lab," which just began testing a program that can interpret brain waves. In simpler words: it can read human minds. During a recent test, he hooked up a soldier to an EEG connected to one of the lab's desktop computers and asked him to look at a series of images on screen flashing at a rate of one per second. Each image falls under one of five categories -- boats, pandas, strawberries, butterflies and chandeliers.

The computer revealed by the end of the experiment that the soldier chose to focus on images that fall under the boat category. How did it know? By taking note of the changes in the subject's brain waves. The soldier produced distinct brain wave patterns whenever he looked at something he deemed "relevant." ...

... For now, the scientist plans to continue improving the system and adding new features, including eye control. In fact, he already tested the capability at the same time by asking a soldier to play a simple video game on a separate computer. The subject was instructed to shoot a bubble at a cluster of other bubbles and to aim for the same color just by moving his eyeballs, which he successfully did.

[Ries explains:]

... One thing we have done is instead of having people view images at the center of the screen, we're leveraging eye-tracking to know whenever they fixate on a particular region of space. We can extract the neural signal, time-locked to that fixation, and look for a similar target response signal. Then you don't have to constrain the image to the center of the screen. Instead, you can present an image and the analyst can manually scan through it and whenever they fixate on an item of interest, that particular region can be flagged.

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by lumberjim

Is there any chance we might get a video of any part of this show?

Prohibited, correct call Griff.

Behind the scenes matter that all these community theater groups pay good money for the rights to put on these shows. Which in turn is why none of the actors or musicians get paid.

Is it over now? Will there be other gigs coming from this source?

Next weekend is the final weekend; two shows Friday one Saturday.

I've proven myself to be a very reliable musician to two music directors. The problem with me is that I don't read music. I prepare in advance and learn the entire show. I'm sure the director and music director of this show would bring me back instantly for any project, but I'm not a good candidate to show up and say, I would like to be your bass player for this run of "Hello Dolly". And I don't think I want to spend a few weeks learning all the music for "Hello Dolly".

However my guitarist is very involved in one of the theater groups, and knows which shows have been chosen for next season, and has basically informed me that I will be doing "Rent" in the Spring. It's a non-lame show so I will probably do it. The opportunities to make live music dry up as we get older.

[limey]

(Learning to read music is not so difficult ....)


Sent by thought transference

[Undertoad]

I would have to learn the fretboard too apparently

I understand the notes have letters... but they only use like 7 letters and I KNOW there are more notes than that

[limey]

Spend a week in our house, bring your guitar and we'll sort you out! X


Sent by thought transference

[Undertoad]

Best offer ever, plus you guys play instruments where you only play one note at a time, which is best.

[limey]

Sorted. See you soon!


Sent by thought transference

[xoxoxoBruce]

Ooh, "sorted" by Mr & Mrs Limey. Kinky.

[monster]

Even I can read music, it's not that hard, you can do it

[fargon]

If I can do it, anybody can.

[monster]

...and the thing is, I can read it but do bugger all about it.

Oh the places you'll go, Undertoad.....

Oh the places you'll go, There is Fun to be done
There are songs to be scored, a bass to be strummed
And the magical things you can do with those strings
Will make you the winning-est bassist for sings
Fame! You'll be famous as famous can be
With the whole wide world watching you win on TV

[lumberjim]

Very nice pome monsuess. Just change strummed to plucked

[lumberjim]

Oh wait. Then you'd have to change done to something that rhymes with plucked

[lumberjim]

Maybe thumbed instead of plucked