Drunken guy warbles up to me at a party and slurs : “Do you know my PIN number?”. I pissed myself, and he was taking the piss – but at the heart of my laughter lurked a fear of memory loss and the ever fragmenting attention spans that curse this century. Here’s a step course to reclaiming your attention span.
Step 1: Admit You Have a Memory Problem
Politicians often have trouble remembering meetings they’ve had with multinational corporations, or briefings about issues of national importance, so perhaps a toy doll of a reputable leader placed beside your bed, might aid acceptance of your problems. For example, the 12″ Action Figure of George W. Bush – U.S. President, which features a realistic head sculpt, fully detailed cloth flight suit, helmet with oxygen mask, survival vest, g-pants, parachute harness and much more. The realism and exacting attention to detail demanded by today’s 12-inch action figure enthusiast are met and exceeded with this action figure.
Step 2 : Make Sense of The World
Pattern recognition is much more difficult if you’re feeding on white noise. memory.jpgThis much is well understood by Takaratoys from Japan – who have cleverly turned their voice reognition research to the canine world, and produced Bowlingual, a device for translating dog barks. The hapless dog wears a device on their neck – and when it whimpers, this noise is analysed and a message comes out on the owners electronic pad – suggesting what the dog may have meant. It also delivers a summary of the day’s barks, letting you know how your dog’s day has been while you slaved away at the sausage factory. A similar device for cats has taken much longer to develop because of the relatively increased complexity of those moodies. And the meowlingual has recently been usurped by the Babylingual which was claimed on a Korean news web page to ‘translate the baby’s cry for an elementary mama’ and ‘shows a baby’s feeling by five, a hungry feeling, sleepiness, stress, and inconvenient, and the degree of correctness exceeds 90%’.
Step 3: Optimise Your Information Intake
Obviously, you need an Internet Toilet Roll Browser. Seriously – there’s a gadget that allows you to search the Internet whilst sitting on the toilet and print out any pages you are interested in on your toilet roll. No sheet~!
Step 4: Externalise Memory Wherever Possible
How? Keep a Phonecam Blog. Remember – just like you won’t forget any phone numbers as long as they’re stored in a machine, you can also store endless trivial, banal and mundane details online. And so a blog is like a ‘web-log’, a freqeuently updated online diary of sorts. And for those with phonecams, coders amongst us have figured a way to enable a photo from your phone to go directly to a webpage. Example phone diary = www.buffoonery.org, joi or even www.audblog.com – which lets you publish audio from your phone – a feat also accomplished by the www.indymedia.org kids at last year’s Woomera refugee detention protests. Free software for uploading your mobile phone photography >> textamerica
And memory challenged Djs can email a scratch here to a robot that scratches based on your message >>
scratchrobot.com
Step 5: Remix a Mammoth
Now that they’ve got cats and dogs sorted out, Japanese scientists are seeking to clone prehistoric woolly mammoths, and are currently preparing their first frozen DNA samples in a bid to bring the beasts back to life. Remnants of what scientists think is from mammoth bone marrow, muscle and skin were unearthed last August in the Siberian tundra where they had been preserved in ice for thousands of years. Researchers at the Gifu Science and Technology Center and Kinki University want to use the genetic material encased within the cells to clone a wooly mammoth, but there’s a few catches – they need to determine whether the five specimens are really from mammoths, and whether the DNA locked inside is well enough preserved for cloning to proceed. And I’m guessing – finding the right elephant with a hair fetish?