The Inner Game of Tennis

Here's a video that I've been trying to track down for a while. I saw it once during a lecture in one of my college Computer Science classes, and it has stuck with me ever since. I was recently telling some friends about it, and decided to give it another Google.

It's a presentation by computer pioneer Alan Kay, in which he plays a clip of Tim Gallwey, author of The Inner Game of Tennis, from a 1975 segment on ABC's Evening News (with Harry Reasoner and Howard K. Smith). In the segment, Gallwey teaches a "55-year-old lady, 40 pounds overweight, 5'2" in a mumu", who had never tried the sport and had not exercised at all in years, to play tennis in under 30 minutes.

Is it possible to get someone to hit balls consistently — that too using a wooden racket with a 65 sq. in. head — just by having them watch another person and say "bounce, hit, bounce, hit" to the rhythm of their shots? See for yourself:



If you're interested in user interfaces or computer history in general, I'd recommend watching the entire video. It's quite fascinating.

Alternate Links:

• YouTube — Part 1, Part 2
• webcast.berkeley.edu — Real Player format [via]
• The Internet Archive — Higher Quality downloads

[Found via Talk Tennis at Tennis Warehouse, which saved me a lot of time clicking around at Berkeley's webcast site.]

Put On Your Tinfoil Hats

Every time it seems like the fantastical visions of the future from Sci-Fi are slipping further away in real life, there's a new development that reels them back in.

As reported across the web, Japanese researchers used fMRI technology to study test subjects' cerebral blood flow while viewing 400 random 10x10-square black-and-white images, to the point where they could reconstruct and display a totally new set of viewed images — the letters of the word "neuron" — using only fMRI data. Scientists are saying that techniques like this may be the first step towards the ability to basically read minds.

So, readers, does news like this amaze you or terrify you?