Until the computers take over and start making all the decisions (thanks to James Cameron, we know how that ends), military analysts have a keen problem: too much data. Everything, from digital phone records to constantly updated satellite imagery, must be sifted, interpreted and employed by the intelligence services to make Very Important Decisions. Managing all this data has been an insurmountible task, but time, it rolls along, giving us shinier gadgets and sleeker iPhones. And according to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) just might have come up with a solution.

Essentially, neuroscientists have devised a computer system that tracks the brain activity of analysts as they follow visual stimuli; there is a measurable spike whenever they respond to a scene or an image that seems to contain information. So, analysts wired up to electrodes will have as many as 20 images per second flit before their eyes, and a computer keeps track of the ones that excite their brain with tantalizations of possible meaning. The system isn't fully automated—it's piggybacking on the analysts' ability to discern sense from dross—but it greatly compresses the amount of time needed to needle-hunt in haystacks of visual data.

There are several interesting aspects to this technology, if you can get past the fact that it's being used to more efficiently direct military decisions. The main one, I think, is that it relies on latent capacities of the individuals whose heads are being scanned. There is no way to externalize the sense-finding capability of human sight (yet), but by scanning the way in which seasoned analysts passively respond to stimuli, the DARPA project makes visible what would seem to be an invisible part of our habitual, reflexive interpretation of reality. Because the snap of recognition that information might be present—it occurs about 300 milliseconds after a stimulus appears—passes so rapidly, a person's conscious inclinations or beliefs do not enter into the situation.

Which of course makes you wonder whether this tech could be used to reveal our most cherished, and unvocalized, assumptions about the world. Hitch somebody to the rig, flash a series of images in front of their eyes, and measure their response: you could find out if they can discern script from chickenscratch, what sort of body ellicits the most excitement, and probably whether they harbor prejudice toward specific types of person. The hidden aspects, the habituated, reality-informing reflexes that incline our minds to see this or that as a bearer of significance, could be teased out, investigated, and responded to.

The military probably won't be very interested in these personal DARP-lications, except maybe in determining which circle of hell to condemn folks to at a black site. But, just as Big Dog gave us Roomba, you can expect cortex-scanning products to trickle down into consumer markets. In the Chronicle article, they postulate a catalog you don't even read: there's merely a flit of images, and the computer lets you know what struck your fancy.

In the future, you won't even have to admit your own desires to have them gratified.

Image: Qubik Design

I am color deficient: red, green, brown and sometimes gray blur into a muddle in my sight.1 Probably because of my troubles with color, I've been fascinated by culture's approach to divvying up the visual spectrum. Which is what makes "The Crayola-fication of the World" so interesting to me. In this super-viral two-part article, Aatish Bhatia describes how Japanese people call green traffic lights blue, even though they have the physical capacity to distinguish the two shades. Still, because of the history of the cultural practice of naming colors in Japan, the green "go" light is labeled blue. Awesome, and strange, eh? It gets better.

It seems that the development of color words follows a predictable path: you start with two, which in English we might feel as analogous to white and black, and from there you progress to three, which would be analogous to our red (well, yours anyway), and which further progresses until you get to the infinitesimal division of the rainbow.

Looking at the history of colors entering languages, you might feel like it's only a matter of time before English speakers employ a color vocab that makes the big box of Crayolas look puny. Well, rein in that pride: there are limits to your eyeballs, and human perception of color, even that of the freak ladies2 with four color receptors on its outlying limits, is drab compared to that of other creatures. Like the mantis shrimp. Of course, crustaceans don't speak, which means all that vibrant visual acuity is mute.

But I wonder about the forms of metaphor in languages that lack the barrier between colors we know. Would a phrase like this one I dreamt up, the sky, lime-like in midday under a yolky sun, be sensible to a culture that didn't distinguish between blue and green? I'm inclined to think not, because even if we used the same word to describe the color of blue and green things, the sky certainly isn't similarly hued to a lime—it's not like we're calling it plum-like. Which would make it a bad, bad metaphor.

Then again, no one knows what to make of Homer's epically confusing "wine-dark sea."

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1. It might interest you full-spectrum types to learn that total color blindness, the inability to distinguish any color from another, is exceptionally rare; and that we who have trouble with specific color pairs or ranges are overwhelmingly male. Blame it, as I do, on the Y-chromosome.

2. There are a select few women who have an extra color receptor, or cone, in their eyes, which allows them to see further into the ultraviolet spectrum than most of us. Lucky them. Maybe they should paint.

Image: flickr user bortwein75

Both The Guardian and the NYDailyNews recently posted articles about a new study that seems to suggest that modern writers are becoming less and less influenced by past literature. In trying to come to grips with the terms of the study itself – ‘influence’ was measured by non-content word usage, measuring style not content, the sampling was of books available on Project Gutenberg that were published between 1550 and 1952 (which were then all written in English?) – I’ve come to a few of my own conclusions.

Conclusion #1 There are more people who know how to read and write now. Or, I should more accurately say, more people knew how to read and write in 1952 than there were people who knew how to read and write in 1920, let alone 1870, or 1660, etc.

Conclusion #2 More books became more available as more people had more time and money to read them. There were also an increasing number of people writing who weren’t rich white males, though I bet it was still pretty difficult in 1952 to get published if you were not male or not white.

Conclusion #3 Just because I have a shitty attitude about widespread generalizations based on out-dated source material quantified in meaningless ways doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get very upset and all up in arms about society crumbling because we’re all not reading the classics.

Conclusion #4 All of the people I’ve known who studied the Classics – as in Greek and Latin Classics – were incredibly dark and fatalistic. They were the smartest people I knew but by and large the most dangerously depressive.

Conclusion #5 Dead authors I’ve personally been heavily influenced by: Dostoevsky, Sherwood Anderson, Chekov, Raymond Carver, John Updike, Nabokov, Hemingway, Faulkner. Dead authors I could write like without coming off as a complete and total ass: 0.

Conclusion #6 Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow.

Image: sodahead.com

Will you participate in the March Madness that is the Tournament of Books?

You could even ask your best brogrammers to help you trick out your bracket.

Just don't underestimate the power of erotic housewife novels, especially if they're Twilight-centric.

Then again, erotic sci-fi is also giving it a run for its money.

Whatever erotica strikes your fancy, you can bet that the Brooklyn Public library will print it out on demand.

But make sure you're reading those books at the same rate you're churning them out.

And if you're writing rather than reading, make sure you're citing your Tweets in MLA format.

In fact, make sure your entire online curatorial style is completely up to date.

Then test it out by trying to spot all the references in this insanely intricate Cartier commerical.

Image source