Little bitty gates and little bitty tells

On the bus this morning I heard a story about some guy who agreed with a level of torture that didn't sit well with other people. He was trying to get a spot in the CIA and the legislature didn't like his views on the levels of pain that could legally be inflicted in order to get information out of someone.

This got me thinking. Someone needs to come up with a way to get information out of a human brain without using the human body to retrieve it. We need a brain scanner. I vaguely remember an old SciFi movie that had something like this. Then there is the magic lasso from Wonder Woman.

This goes hand in hand with a discussion I had at work with a colleague yesterday. We spoke of how bits of electricity flip gates inside a chip. You have steps in the process where you read what is there and verify that things are working properly before you ever execute the "command". The little gates are basically physical switches that are thrown by the charge of electrons flowing past them.  you could do something similar with water and gravity on a much larger scale.

Brain cells work on a similar manner. We just don't have the design notes. Our brains are black boxed, or closed source. There will come a day when we can scan a brain perhaps to the detail of telling what it is thinking or what is stored in RAM. There won't be any need to torture any one at that point. Won't that be a wonderful day? (not)

You have heard of people having 'tells' when playing poker. Well, Homeland Security is trying to come up with a system that will look for little signals that someone is pissed off at airports to catch them before they commit crimes. This works off of emotions of discontent. Were the 9/11 hijackers discontent with their surroundings? I say they were quite satisfied that they were at least trying to do something that they perceived would make their world a better place in their eyes. Their lives for the last several years had built up to that moment. If anything, they might have looked happy or satisfied.

It really sounds like Homeland Security depends on voodoo these days.