Personally, while I’m all for experimentation and humanity’s insatiable lust “to know”, I can’t help but think this is probably THE STUPIDEST IDEA ever put into action.
“The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) that lies under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC is in the final stages of construction and commissioning, with some sections already being cooled down to their final operating temperature of approximately 2K. The first beams are due for injection mid June 2008 with the first collisions planned to take place 2 months later. The LHC will become the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. The LHC is being funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and “missing links” in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why gravitation is so weak compared to the other three forces. In addition to the Higgs boson, other theorized novel particles that might be produced, and for which searches are planned, include strangelets, micro black holes, magnetic monopolessupersymmetric particles.”
While I was thinking about all this (I’ve known about the development of the SuperCollider and this one for a while, but a discussion with a mate the other day reminded me of how bloody soon they’re gonna switch this thing on now!) a Bible verse popped into my head…
2 Peter 3:10 (King James Version)
But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
Now… I’m not trying to be some kinda prophet of doom or anything, but I pondered a bit more, and couldn’t help but wonder if the “thief in the night” bit was actually more to do with the potential “darkness-related” implications (dark matter/black holes etc. “stealing” from our space) rather than the traditional interpretation of the verse. So I popped the phrase into Google and registered that there’s a second very similar verse in Thessalonians…
1 Thessalonians 1-4 (King James Version)1But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you.
2For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.
3For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.
4But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief.
I also came across a few interesting bits’n’pieces from folk who had evidently had the exact same thoughts (and not-quite-so-similar ideas):
So, anyway, I’m not gonna turn this blog into some doomsday freak-out or anything, but I will keep an eye on the situation and start transferring this info and any other cool/scary/weird related info onto my Babylon Molatov page… if you’re blogging about this, it’d be cool to get some comments or at least notifications if anything worthy pops up… if not, seeya in the void!
I created this small partial map of the Internet from the 2005–01-15 data found here using a slightly different rendering technique than was used to generate the maps there. Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes. This graph represents less than 30% of the Class C networks reachable by the data collection program in early 2005. Lines are color-coded according to their corresponding RFC 1918 allocation as follows:
Dark blue: net, ca, us
Green: com, org
Red: mil, gov, edu
Yellow: jp, cn, tw, au, de
Magenta: uk, it, pl, fr
Gold: br, kr, nl
White: unknown
Big BIG HUGE (probably unusable in articles) version can be found at [1].
Throughout history, humans have observed this seasonal milestone and created spiritual and cultural traditions to celebrate the rebirth of sunlight after the darkest period of the year. The Winter Solstice demonstrates the enduring cycle of the heavens by an event that has been directly observable, year in and year out, century after century, for millions of years. The New Solar year begins with the turning point of the Winter Solstice, as it has down through eons-an unending cycle of dark and light, waning and waxing, ultimately representing nature’s birth, death, and rebirth. The Winter Solstice is a time to affirm our spiritual ties to nature through celebrations and traditions that are thousands of years old.
With over 80 local, National & International Producers, Dj’s & bands, performing over our 3 stages, The Winter Solstice Festival musical line-up has something for everyone & is not just about the music, we offer a huge array of different forms of entertainment.
The Festival features over 50 site artists including Roving Performances, Installation Art and Site Installations as well as our Children’s space, Dining by the River, an Indoor Cinema featuring Kiddies flicks & Mind expanding documentaries, Art & Music creation Workshops, Market stalls, Swimming Holes, Ice Art creations, The Healing Haven, Open Mic Jam session, Mask Making, Canvas creating, The WizDome, International Food Fair, Roving Markets, Bushwalking and much more. All of this, combined with hanging out in the great Aussie bush with all your friends makes for a great weekend of fun & adventure.
The Winter Solstice Festival has something for everyone.
Remember – The Winter Solstice Festival is a sustainable event. Please take note of the practices we have in place at the Festival to minimise the impact on our environment.
LIVE
Seb Taylor (UK-Shakta/Digitalis/Hibernation)
Ace Ventura (Iboga, Israel)
The Nomad (Freshaudio, NZ)
Fyah Walk (Nnsw)
Tribalistic Society (Domo Rec – Denmark)
Zennith (Kuranda)
Tom Cosm (NZ)
Spoonbill (Omelette, Melb)
Shadow Fx (Zenon, Melb)
Mystic Beats (Nnsw)
SunControlSpecies (Iboga, Melb)
Positive Thought (UP Rec,Nnsw)
Autonomech (Zenon, Melb)
Grouch (Cosmic Conspiracy, NZ
Hefty Output (Doof Rec, Melb)
Lost Noise (Melb)
Tetrameth (Zenon, Melb)
The Blank Theory (Hunab Ku, Melb)
Merkeba (Syd)
Bent Intent (Hunab Ku, Cairns)
Akin (R.E.G.E.N, Syd)
Daheen (R.E.G.E.N, Syd)
Hedonix (Electric Power Pole, Syd)
Urban Monkeys (Open Rec, Hardplace, Bus Rec – Cairns)
Dabas (Cairns)
Insight (Open Rec, Cairns)
Anatamous Audio (Open Rec, Cairns)
Jekyll (Cairns)
One Tasty Morsel (Zenon, Cairns)
Product Placement (Cosmic Conspiracy, Cairns)
Wow & Flutter (phar psyde,tribe of frog, UK)
Rachael Shields (Lakota, Kuranda)
DJ The Cook & the Chef (On the sauce, Melb)
Paul Abad (Open, Subterran, Bris)
Seraphim (Zenon, Bris)
Jandalz (Cosmic Conspiracy, NZ)
Huckleberry (Fyah Walk, Nnsw
Shards (Brisbane)
Ketamind (Doof Rec, Nnsw/Israel)
T.D Shagga (Somatica, Melb)
No Msg (D’Psyfa, Syd)
Scott (LAB, Melb)
Gavin Martin (Open Rec, Melb)
Josh Niyama (Bandikoot Concepts, Nnsw)
Launchpad (UP Rec, Nnsw)
Player One (Dooflex, Melb/Cairns)
Ghettafunkt (Gi’iwa, Cairns/Nnsw)
Spliffun (Nnsw)
Rudekat Soundsystem (Rudekat Rec, Bris)
Drewan (Open Rec, Cairns)
Seed (Nnsw)
Dakini (Submerge, OZ/NZ)
Solatek (Freeform Collective/Open Rec)
Psymon (Freeform Collective)
Suspekt (Open Rec, Cairns)
Ian/Woodsman (Zenon, Open rec, Cairns)
Eegor (Open Rec, Cairns/Syd)
Lysdexic (Dada Stream, Melb)
Billy Dread (Dreadagade Soundsystem)
Offer (Nnsw)
Cinii
Deejital
Stampedey/Buffalo Pilot
Kho Fx
Isaiah
Konsoto
Lazarus
Tompletoon
Soljah
Moti
Waltek
Backwards Man
Reseteser
DeanO & Venus
Mojo Rising
A Deadly Creature
Jarno
Phloem
Några tänkvärda (?) saker från The Risen av Peter Whitehead:
The Greek word psychosis means the “transforming action of the soul“. UR, yes, it does. But dreams are psychotico-mimetic, they tell us… In the Greek Alchemical text entitled KOR KOSMOU: i. e. “The Universe Maiden” (lovely title!), we find; “Taking from himself sufficient pneuma, and by an intelligent mixture uniting it with fire, he brewed it up with certain unknown substances, accompanying himself with certain secret incantations he agitated the mixture, till there boiled up to the surface, a sort of matter, subtler, purer, more transparent than the ingredients of which it was made. This was made translucent and only HE saw it. God called this composition: PSYCHOSIS.”God is psychotic; is a psychosis…
Dreaming so closely resembles being under the influence of such a drug, that the body must create its OWN psychedelic drug, provoking a momentary psychosis. A rare blessing! A drug related to LSD, mescalin, psilocybin, no wonder dreams are often so fascinating! Well, we found a drug produced during REM periods of sleep, and called it HYPNOTAMINE… So why do we think we merely dream useless dreams? Only reason thinks they’re useless. We dream because a chemical called HYPNOTAMINE is released into the blood stream and the mind becomes psychotic, is trance-formed, capable of being transformed by messages, from the R-Field of re-versed time… Eating the crystal confirms that Hypnotamine provokes the psychosis we call dreaming. Ignore them! Unless you’re one of those enlightened people who knows that psychosis leads to a higher form of truth. In dreams are involutes of knowledge worth unravelling, visions of the future, and messages from other beings trying to be reincarnated through your consciousness, from other networks. From the virtual-time reality network!
…but here was another psychotic idea! Was there not a drug that might even be responsible for narrowing consciousness, responsible for the greatest crime of human history, reason? R D Laing tells us about reason: “A consciousness can exist with or without a sense of ego, an identity. We are clear that the ego is a mental construction intimately chemically conditioned. It can be dissolved in two seconds by nitrous oxide…” And we live by it, depend on it, worship it? And ignore the unconscious that took a hundred million years to create us?
Looks like Sacred Texts are starting to get some pretty intriguing and diverse texts online with extreme speed and regularity! Have a look at this (I’ve only just started reading it and it seems reasonable and sane)
…I don’t like to believe in telepathy, because I don’t know what to make of it… and I would a whole lot rather give all my time to my muckraking…I don’t expect to sell especially large quantities of this book… In short, there isn’t a thing in the world that leads me to this act, except the conviction which has been forced upon me that telepathy is real…–p. 229
Upton Sinclair took a gamble publishing this book. A lifelong Socialist who ran for high office several times, a muckraking author who had exposed the abuses of capitalism, was dabbling with what was seen as the occult. The impetus for this was his dear wife, Mary Craig Sinclair, known as ‘Craig,’ who had been aware all her life that she could sense things that had not yet happened, or which she had no rational access to. In the late 1920s, this came to light when Craig had an odd feeling that their friend Jack London was in mental turmoil, just prior to London’s suicide. The Sinclairs started to investigate how deep this particular rabbit hole went…
The core of this book is a series of doodles which Upton and others made outside Craig’s presence, which she was able to duplicate, apparently telepathically or through clairvoyance. Sinclair claims that Craig had over a 75% success rate over 290 tests, including 25% matches, and 50% partial matches. This success rate is obviously a lot higher than probability, considering that the potential set of drawings is a lot larger than, say, a deck of cards.
Sinclair’s top reputation as a ‘speaker of truth to power’ was actually a compelling reason to take this book seriously. The response to Mental Radio was very positive, impressing academics in the field of psychology and other scientists, including Albert Einstein, who wrote the introduction to the German edition. William McDougal, Chair of the Psychology Department at Duke University, who wrote the introduction for this edition, conducted his own experiments with Craig. McDougal and J.B. Rhine later went on to found the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke, which conducted the first academic investigations of ESP. Walter Franklin Price, founder of the Boston Society for Psychical Research, asked the Sinclairs if he could analyze their research notes. In April 1932, Price published an analysis of the Sinclair experiments in the Society’s Bulletin in which he concluded that the data could not be explained by coincidence or fraud.
They’ve also just popped up the previously mentioned “Extra-Sensory Perception” by J.B. Rhine!
Extra-Sensory Perception
by J.B. Rhine
[1934]
ContentsStart ReadingPage IndexText [Zipped]Although this was not the first appearance of the term ‘Extrasensory Perception’ in print, this book was the first one which brought ESP to the foreground. Even in Mental Radio, which preceded this study (in 1930), there was no general agreement as to what to call the phenomena.
J. B. Rhine, the author of this study, and the organizer of the famous Duke ESP laboratory, attempted to create standardized terminology and methodologies (such as the Zener card deck) for studying these mental abilities. Rhine empiricized the study of ESP; instead of making wild speculations about ghosts, angels, spirits, or the akashic plane, he started from the point of view of a scientist. Rhine asked questions such as: How do we measure this in a controlled experiment? Can we reproduce the results? What parameters of the experiment can we alter, and what effects of this can we measure?
Rhine found that some individuals could reliably demonstrate telepathy and clairvoyance in laboratory settings. The subjects did better when alert, and therefore, not surprisingly, caffeine seemed to improve ESP. Accuracy did not seem to drop off at distance (even hundreds of miles), which probably means that it is not some kind of inverse-square-law radiation. Alas, ‘Mental Radio!’ Mental Internet is probably closer to reality…
ESP is very puzzling, and more common that might be expected. Decades later, we are still waiting for some kind of explanation of this from conventional science.
It’s the psychedelic drug that inspired Hendrix and The Beatles – and shaped the music, art and literature of a generation. As the world bids farewell to the bicycling Swiss chemist who created LSD, John Walsh explores his mind-altering legacy…
The letters LSD once denoted English money in pre-decimalisation days: librae, solidi, denarii, the Latin forms of pounds, shillings and pence. From the mid-1960s, however, the letters had only one meaning: they stood for the most powerful mood-altering drug in the world.
Those who experienced the 12-hour “trip” it engendered would report back with all the fervour and awe of travellers returned from mystic lands, desperate to relay the sights and sounds of their wild adventures, but frustrated by the impossibility of making their listeners see or understand their experiences. Sometimes, they’d been on a physical journey (usually no further than the garden or local shops); but mentally, the trip had taken them into a new realm of consciousness that was a) hard to evoke and b) very boring to listen to. They talked about the blinding sensory enhancement, and the synaesthesia of hearing colours and smelling the stars. They saw profound truths in cracks in the pavement and cosmic harmonies in a match flame. They tended to mention God, several times. The man who invented the stuff had a lot to answer for. He was a Swiss chemist called Albert Hoffman, and he died on Tuesday morning.
The fact that he reached the age of 102 seems a tribute to the efficacy of his invention. But its importance to the 20th century isn’t as a therapeutic medical treatment. It may have altered some lives for the better, but its real importance is cultural. For LSD gave the Sixties a brand-new concept to embrace and apply to every area of life, especially the arts: psychedelia. The word was spelt wrongly – it should, strictly, be psychodelia – but its meaning was clear. It meant the making-visible of the soul: opening up your inner, half-glimpsed metaphysical self for inspection while in a state of profound relaxation and pleasure.
The English writer Aldous Huxley had, of course, been there years before, when he experimented with mescaline in the early 1950s. His 1954 book, The Doors of Perception (the title is taken from William Blake – “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite”) argued that altered-state-inducing drugs were good for you, if you were sufficiently clever.
“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by the Mind at Large – this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual,” he said. But LSD was, by 1968, becoming available to all, and seemed, for a time, a thing that could change the world.
In theory, the entire young “counterculture” of the West, the same young people who listened to rock’n’roll, smoked dope, rejected the values of their straight, bourgeois parents and demonstrated against the Vietnam War, could all drop acid, discover their transcendent inner being, forsake their redundant ego and refuse to cooperate with the ordinary forms of society. They could, in the immortal phrase of Timothy Leary, LSD’s greatest fan and most articulate zealot, “Turn on, tune in and drop out.”
They could share with each other soul-perceptions that were denied to the straights, the military-industrial complex, the politicians and judges…. It didn’t happen. But, for a few years, it felt as if the doors of perception might budge an inch.
The first acid trip was on 16 April 1943. It was an accident. Dr Hoffman had been conducting experiments with LSD-25, which he had synthesised from lysergic acid in 1938 and was trying to make again, having a “presentiment” that it could possess “properties other than those established in the first investigations”. The doctor got some of the stuff on his fingers. In the afternoon he felt dizzy, couldn’t work, went home to bed and wrote later that he entered a dream-like state. Behind his closed eyes, he saw streams of “fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours” for a whole two hours.
Three days later, with a Dr Jekyll-like foreboding, he put himself through a guinea-pig experiment. He took 250mg (a colossal dose by blotting-paper standards) and went for a bicycle ride. Wherever he looked, the landscape became distorted as if seen through a funfair mirror. Though he was moving fast he felt completely stationary, as though the fields were whizzing by him.
Back home, he experienced the world’s first bad trip. He became convinced that he was possessed by a demon, that his neighbour was a witch and that his furniture was trying to kill him. The doctor was summoned, found nothing wrong beyond a dilation of the pupils, and packed him off to bed. Hoffman’s panic subsided and he started to enjoy the visions and exploding colours, the shifting kaleidoscope of shapes breaking up and folding into themselves. Every noise from the street became a visual event.
He woke next day full of beans, refreshed, reborn. His breakfast tasted delicious. In the garden, looking at birds and smelling the flowers, he described his senses as “vibrating in a condition of highest sensitivity, which persisted for the entire day”.
“Bicycle Day”, 19 April, was later commemorated by acid enthusiasts because it was the first conscious “trip” and it had had – just about – a happy ending. But the doors to perception are, for some truth-seekers, booby-trapped and dangerous. When LSD was co-opted by medical staff for recreational use, two decades after Hoffman’s bike ride, users learnt the hard way how impossible it was to control the wild ride once it had started.
At Oxford in the early 1970s, we were frankly intimidated by the drug’s reputation. We all wanted to try it, but were too chicken. The word in the quad was: if you had any secret hang-ups, mental instabilities, phobias, sexual inadequacies or social insecurities (the kind that surface in dreams,) you were wise of steer clear of acid. We knew when one of us was going to try it. “Tonight,” I’d hear during dinner in hall, “Roger’s tripping for the first time. But he’ll have Will and Ollie with him, so he’ll be OK.”
I’ve always remembered Roger’s first trip (so, I’ll bet, has he). We all knew he’d be fine because he was so perfect: cool, handsome, easy-going, a hit with the girls, a dead ringer, with his corkscrewy curls, for Marc Bolan of T. Rex. And he was rich; he owned a Morgan, which he casually parked in the back quad. We knew Roger would survive the experience and bang on about it, like he banged on about his Bang and Olufsen state-of-the-art hi-fi. And anyway, Will and Olly would look after him.
The evening started well. The three students took a tab each, drank some wine and waited for results. An hour later, they were happily tripping on the college lawn, listening to the grass grow and hearing their voices transforming into harp notes. They went to Olly’s room, smoked, listened to Tubular Bells in a haze of bliss. Then Roger went the gents. This proved a mistake.
After using the facilities, he washed his hands, dried them and looked in the mirror. Something caught his eye. He looked closer. Just below his cherubic lower lip, there was a spot. It’s wasn’t huge or septic, but it was unquestionably a skin eruption, a blemish. As he watched, it grew bigger and bigger until it took on the size and texture of a Brussels sprout. Roger was transfixed. He looked on in horror, as the distended spot grew wobblingly larger, and began to pull his features into its green heart. His nose disappeared, his cheeks and eyes began to twist down, his Marc Bolan curls hung uselessly over his aghast, imploding face.
Roger, you see, was indeed a near-perfect human being but he was as vain as a canary. And discovering a spot on his immaculate physiognomy played straight into his worst insecurity: that he might secretly be unattractive. He ended up imagining his whole head was a great blob of pus; and sat screaming with paranoia for two hours as his friends dosed him with orange juice (vitamin C is the only known cure for bad trips). Other occupants of his staircase, alerted by the noise, called in to discover a scenario straight from the locked unit of Bedlam hospital, circa 1880.
During the Cold War, both the British and the US governments were keen to exploit LSD‘s unique qualities, for “social engineering“. They were convinced it would be useful as a “truth drug” during interrogations – a rather prosaic understanding of the kind of visionary truth revealed by communing with one’s soul.
In 1953 and 1954, scientists working for MI6 drugged servicemen with LSD without telling them what to expect; the scientists told them they were looking for a cure for the common cold. One soldier, aged 19, reported that he saw “walls melting, cracks appearing in people’s faces… eyes would run down cheeks, Salvador Dali-type faces… a flower would turn into a slug.” Not surprisingly, the experiment failed; MI6 reported that LSD was of little practical use as a mind-control drug. It took 50 years for the human guinea-pigs to be compensated for what they’d been put through.
Just thought I’d draw your attention to this. Many thanks to digitalseance– I’d never come across Etidorhpa before… I downloaded it the other day and have been sucked… right… in…
Take a Victorian scifi premise, say, a trip to the center of the earth, and by the way, it’s hollow. Add a tale of a soul condemned by the Illuminati to a perilous underground quest to find the Goddess of Love (spoiler alert: spell Aphrodite backwards). Top it off with a wild magic mushroom trip. That’s Etidorhpa!
This may be the very source of the ‘adepts living in hollow earth who abduct humans’ meme, later developed by Ray Palmer, and many others. The book is larded with long passages of speculative science. The structure of the hollow earth and the effects of gravitation at various places is much better worked out than some of the ‘nonfiction’ hollow earth books (e.g. Reed or Gardner).
The journey of ‘I-am-the-man’ is a not-so-subtle allegory of spiritual progression to being a disembodied adept. Along the way he loses his youth, loses sunlight, becomes weightless, stops breathing, can hear without ears, then his heart stops, … and still he lives. Each of this steps is symbolic of a progression to a more ethereal plane of existence.
At times, the narrative recursion is three levels deep. This is an acquired taste. L. Sprague de Camp called Etidorpha ‘unreadable.’ Modern readers accustomed to consuming multiple narrative streams at the same time (i.e. channel hopping), with long recursive breaks (i.e. commercials) might do better.
Except for the titular Etidorhpa, there are no female characters. And she only appears briefly in a hallucination. Why such a small part in the book? Other genre novels, such as Atlantida and The Lost Continent, are driven by strong female characters. And once the main character is inside the hollow earth, it just halts. He doesn’t even get to meet Etidorhpa again. Whether the author ran out of steam, or the ending was only supposed to be implied, is unknown.
I thought that, in light (or spite) of much of the other material that I’m beginning to present in this blog, I should pop this up for a bit of abstract perspectivism…
The ship was sinking—and sinking fast. The captain told the passengers and crew, “We’ve got to get the lifeboats in the water right away.”
But the crew said, “First we have to end capitalist oppression of the working class. Then we’ll take care of the lifeboats.”
Then the women said, “First we want equal pay for equal work. The lifeboats can wait.”
The racial minorities said, “First we need to end racial discrimination. Then seating in the lifeboats will be allotted fairly.”
The captain said, “These are all important issues, but they won’t matter a damn if we don’t survive. We’ve got to lower the lifeboats right away!”
But the religionists said, “First we need to bring prayer back into the classroom. This is more important than lifeboats.”
Then the pro-life contingent said, “First we must outlaw abortion. Fetuses have just as much right to be in those lifeboats as anyone else.”
The right-to-choose contingent said, “First acknowledge our right to abortion, then we’ll help with the lifeboats.”
The socialists said, “First we must redistribute the wealth. Once that’s done everyone will work equally hard at lowering the lifeboats.”
The animal-rights activists said, “First we must end the use of animals in medical experiments. We can’t let this be subordinated to lowering the lifeboats.”
Finally the ship sank, and because none of the lifeboats had been lowered, everyone drowned.
The last thought of more than one of them was, “I never dreamed that solving humanity’s problems would take so long—or that the ship would sink so SUDDENLY.”
Benny Shanon is Professor of psychology at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem (Israel). His main foci of research are the phenomenology of human consciousness and the philosophy of psychology. His publications include The representational and the Presentational (1993) and The Antipodes of the Mind (2002). At present, he is working on book devoted to a general psychological theory of human consciousness.
The Chapel Feralous 
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