June 14, 2002
Every once in a while, I see something on Headline News that makes it worth having it on in the background all day. Today was one of those days.
I'll forgive you if you think this sounds like something straight out of Star Trek: There are five people in Canada who have had electrodes implanted in their brains that, when connected to a computer attached to a pair of sunglasses with a camera in them, let blind people "see" in a low-resolution grayscale similar to a dot-matrix printout. When I say it's low-res I mean it -- I doubt it's even 100x100 -- but it's a start.
Maybe the only mistake Roddenberry made with Geordi LaForge (a blind character who uses a half-inch-thick device over his eyes to see) is that we'll get to that point long before the late 24th century.
