Twitter can make life meaningful

This is ultimate science: CNN Health reports:

"Adam Wilson posted two messages on Twitter on April 15. The first one, "GO BADGERS," might have been sent by any University of Wisconsin-Madison student cheering for the school team.

His second post, 20 minutes later, was a little more unusual: "SPELLING WITH MY BRAIN."

Wilson, a doctoral student in biomedical engineering, was confirming an announcement he had made two weeks earlier -- his lab had developed a way to post messages on Twitter using electrical impulses generated by thought.

That's right, no keyboards, just a red cap fitted with electrodes that monitor brain activity, hooked up to a computer flashing letters on a screen. Wilson sent the messages by concentrating on the letters he wanted to "type," then focusing on the word "twit" at the bottom of the screen to post the message."

A friend of mine- science-oriented, mathematically-inclined, crossword-solving, chess-piece-wielding, bespectacled, quark-mouthing, schroedinger-fan-- taunts me with, "What is the use of Twitter?"

Here it is: it can be useful to people locked in their brains, people who can't move, can't talk, can send tweets.

Isn't that amazing?

Incidentally, we thought twitter is useful not merely for the unhappily locked-in, it can be used with advantage by the happily brain-dead, too.

So we opened a twitter account for this blog. Here it is- vblong ...

Merry tweets.