Weird world - the blogger plant

Maybe you´ve heard of it already, maybe not. I just saw it in a television show and I found it blogworthy: a plant with its own blog. Its name is Midori, and it lives in Japan, of course (William Gibson must have written about it somewhere). Midori can be found at Bowls Café in Kamakura, southwest Tokyo, and is the work of a university engineer who has been studying how to communicate with plants using electrical signals.

He devised a sensor which he attached to "Midori-san" that measures bio-electric signals. These are converted into data by a computer next the plant and then translated into Japanese in the form of a blog. One of the entries, for instance, reads: "It was cloudy today. It was a cold day."

If nothing else, the story is interesting because of the translation program: what are the criteria used to translate a certain signal into this or that word? I couldn´t find anything about it, but it´s food for thought - and maybe for a good story as well.