Monkey Mind Pong & 4 More Weird Projects

Neuralink taugtht a monkey to play video games with its mind.

I have no idea how to feel about Elon Musk.

On one hand, he is advancing humanity’s effort to get rid of diesel cars and spearheading a push to Mars.

On the other, he does some pretty weird stuff and seems to be able to control the stock market with his Twitter account.

When he’s not organising space launches or running one of the two car companies to never go bankrupt, Elon has a side project called Neuralink. Neuralink’s stated goal is to “create the future of brain interfaces” and the primary way they are going to accomplish this is by implanting chips in your brain that will allow you to control your devices with your mind.

No human has been implanted with this kind of chip yet (that we know of).

But a monkey has.

Elon revealed on the new social media platform Clubhouse that Neuralink has successfully managed to insert a neural implant into a monkey and it can now play video games on a screen using only its mind.

He also dropped the bombshell that they are looking into the possibility of having two monkeys play “Mind Pong” against each other.

Keep an eye out for news on Neuralink’s progress as it’s not inconceivable that human trials start within the next 5-10 years.

The MSCHF collective let the internet control an armed robot.

You may or may not have seen Spot the Robot Dog built by the ridiculously talented Boston Dynamics.

If you haven’t, Spot is basically a super agile and resilient four legged robot that can navigate almost any terrain and is commercially available if you have a spare £53,000.

Spot also appeared in Boston Dynamic's recent video of their robots doing a very cool or very chilling dance, depending on your stance on robotics.

The internet collective MSCHF bought a Spot the Robot Dog and fixed a paintball gun to it.

They then allowed visitors to their website to control the armed Spot robot as it traverses an art gallery, because trusting strangers on the internet with any type of firearm is a swell idea.

The art piece has a darker reason for it’s creation; it is designed to protest the proposed use of Spot robots by both the police and the military in America.

Boston Dynamics has naturally condemned the project, but dependent on how Spot is used in the future, this stunt could be either a bit of fun or an eerie bit of foreshadowing.

Github is burying all of the code stored on their website in a bunker in the Arctic.

Github is an absolutely gargantuan repository of code, allowing millions of developers to upload, store and collaborate on billions if not trillions of lines of code.

Having access to this amount of code is a heavy burden.

Open source software is naturally of historical significance, and there needs to be a foolproof way of storing this data for future generations, or even more morbidly, preventing it being lost in the event of a massive apocalyptic event.

Enter the Archive Program.

Github captured a snapshot of absolutely every line of code on their site, dug a hole 250 meters into the permafrost of the Arctic and is burying these snapshots of code in a vault there. Stupidly I didn’t have my code saved on Github though, so the aliens sifting through the ruins of Earth won’t get to hear my thoughts on stuff.

Scientists have managed to contact people during their lucid dream.

Lucid dreaming is basically a superpower.

If you are unaware of what it is, lucid dreaming is the ability to consciously change or alter your dreams due to the fact you are aware that you are dreaming.

It’s not a fully understood phenomenon but an international team of researchers has managed to do something previously thought to be impossible: they actively communicated with people within their dreams.

The way they did this was by getting the participants to go to sleep, checking they were in a stage of sleep called Rapid Eye Movement sleep or REM for short.

REM sleep is where you dream.

They then asked these people questions like “what is eight minus six” and the participant would respond with a predetermined pattern of eye movement. 18% of participants responded with clear and accurate answers.

What’s really cool is that some of the participants actually remember the researchers voices appearing like a voiceover in their dream, which means that even if someone is sleeping, you should save the backstabbing until you're far enough away that they can’t hear you.

The Sigil Engine is changing reality with it's magickal symbol creation tool.

Ever wanted to bend reality to your will, but don’t have the time or energy to learn occult magick? There’s an app for that!

The Sigil Engine is a project designed to speed up the process of creating magickal symbols called sigils, which are imbued with psychic energy designed to influence events in the creators life.

Before the internet, the process of creating a sigil was laborious and involved a fair amount of legwork for the creator, but The Sigil Engine has made the process seamless. Just enter whatever you want to happen in your life, sit back and it's code will create a custom sigil for you designed to make that happen. You just need to imbue it with your energy and wait for the results!

Try it out if you fancy at https://www.sigilengine.com/