An interesting night of television...

And that's saying a lot, coming from me. Or maybe I'm just tired.

I don't usually watch 60 Minutes, but happened by last night when they broadcast a piece presented by Mike Wallace on "brain fingerprinting." This idea - which apparently was of interest to the CIA to the extent that they funded it for a million dollars or more - is that when people are exposed to something they recognize, their brain emits a little "pulse" of recognition. Literally.

So the idea is that if you monitor the brain waves of a person, and you expose that person to, say, facts surrounding a crime that only the perpetrator of the crime would know, you can tell whether that person is (or is not) the criminal.

The focus of the piece was a black man who was convicted of murder twenty-some years ago when he was 16, and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. He volunteered to be a test subject for the scientist who developed the technique, and based on the scientific evidence, the inmate's responses were consistent with what he said he was doing that night (attending a concert), and inconsistent with committing the crime.

This is an interesting development, and reminds me of an effect I once saw The Amazing Kresgin perform, back when I was a close-up magician...in fact, it was one of his trademark effects. First, Kresgin would have his evening's paycheck hidden somewhere in the auditorium. Then, he would tie a handkerchief to an audience member who saw the check being hidden. Finally, he would ask the person to start walking around, the idea being that the person would lead him - via different levels of resistance of motion - to the person with the check.

This is not to say that the funded research is hokum. Far from it. In fact, what is disturbing about it is that the response is involuntary and involves your own brain. It might come about that brain fingerprinting will become, like ordinary fingerprinting and DNA testing, an effective weapon for fighting crime. On the other hand, it may eventually become a way of forcing people to give testimony against themselves.

However that day is a long way off, for now. There are other fish to fry.

Cheers...

An interesting night of television...part 2

Last night's episode of The X Files was absolutely the best thing I've seen on the tube in a long time.

As usual, the teaser opener leaves us guessing really hard as to what the hell is going on. It turns out - at least in my case - that I am always a couple of steps behind the protagonist, who is played by Joe Morton (who, by the way, played the role of Miles Bennett Dyson, the man who invented the technology that made the "Terminator" possible. We all remember "Terminator 2"...the one with Robert Patrick as the new-and-improved killer android?).

Morton plays a prosecutor, Martin Wells, who wakes up, in jail, not knowing what has happened over the past few days. While being transferred from one jail facility to another, he is shot dead by his father-in-law, ostensibly because it appears he (Wells) has murdered his wife.

He wakes again, except this time, it's a day earlier. And the plot thickens, day by day, and thickens yet again, until it is so thick, you can erect tall, heavy buildings on it. As the hour was coming to a close, there was no way of telling what was going on, or when, or what the possible outcome of it all might be.

In the end, I realized that this episode ("Redrum") is a variation on the theme introduced by Dickens in A Christmas Carol: the idea that unexplainable things happen to a person, who is thus offered a "second chance." Those things change his life forever...presumably for the better. The only difference, though, is that the actions that befall Scrooge and the changes in him that result are understandable to the reader, who can feel some measure of superiority over poor Ebenezer, since the path being traversed in the story is easily understood, as is the path that must be traveled in the future.

Not so in last night's tale, where we, the viewers, were kept as much in the dark as possible, requiring Wells to vocalize his "Aha!" moments so that we could follow along.

Kind of.

Wells was living his future in the present, with no knowledge of the past, which was being gradually revealed to him. Once the episode was over, with Wells again in a jail cell, it all snapped into focus for me. Martin Wells had been given a second chance.

Enough fooling around...I've got to turn to, and do a little editing.

Cheers...

Overheard in the lunch line...

"So, let me get this straight...the people in Florida who can't figure out how to vote are the people we're going to let count the ballots?"

Cheers...