Hello Steve,

At this very moment, ABC World News Tonight, is airing on local television.
Ned Potter is reporting on a special segment called "Medicine on the Cutting 
Edge."  Tonight they're focused on Matt Nagel who's paralyzed, yet is 
controlling a computer via technology developed by Cyberkinetics.  The
segment was very brief.  It concluded with Matt saying he'd been dealing
with this for three and a half years and he'd had little hope.  Now, he 
says, because of the technology, he has hope.  They showed Maatt sitting
up in bed, with an artificial hand on the sheet in front of him.  The 
fingers of the hand were closing and opening. Matt was apparently doing
this via thoughts conveyed via the Cyberkinetics technology.  The segment 
showed a chip and compared its size to that of a penny.  The chip was
smaller.  The segment also showed an illustration like an x-ray of the 
skull, with an outline of the brain, and the chip sitting like a small 
thimble-shaped beacon on top of the brain.  It wasn't on screen but for 
a few seconds and, to be honest, I don't know if I captured all of the 
details here correctly.  There was also a glimpse of a video monitor
and what appeared to be a demonstration of Matt moving a cursor around
the screen by thoughts.

A few minutes prior to the airing of tonight's "Medicine on the Cutting 
Edge" segment there was mention of a special report that Peter Jennings 
is to give tomorrow night, I think, on the use of chip implants to track 
people.  Interesting, eh?  

Just before posting this message I was doing a Google search for ABC 
and "chip implant" and one of the links it turned up was to a report
on "Thought Control" or "Mind Control."  It mentioned a
book called
"Cybernetics" by ... hmmm... I think his name was Norbert Weiner.
I'll check that later.  I just thought the similarity between 
Cybernetics and Cyberkinetics was interesting.  I suppose the people
behind Cyberkinetics may have been influenced by the Cybernetics work.

Well.... I'm off to do a little more web surfing.  :-)

 


 

--- Maximus/2 3.01