The First Church of Space Jesus

Unpatched exploits in the human biocomputer: Defcon 19 edition

2011-12-26T06:19:00.000-08:00

A more scientific study of 'window areas'

2011-12-04T12:54:00.000-08:00

I was reading about the book Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events and it occurred to me that a far more scientific study of window areas or hot points for high strangeness is now possible. We have a fairly large sample set in the form of back-issues of The Fortean Times. Were one to take machine-readable copies of all the back-issues, isolate the place names, and plot a point on a map for every mention, we could have an idea of distribution of claims. This self-adjusts for intensity because the stranger the phenomenon the more often it is likely to be mentioned.

Such a map could then be adjusted by population.

If high strangeness is contingent solely on population (in other words, if every person in every place has an equal likelihood of having an experience of a fortean nature) then our adjusted map should be a single fairly solid colour with very little variation, with the exception of places like Point Pleasant, Roswell, Dulce, the Groom Lake Facility, and so on, which are more notorious because of their particular relationship to the mass media.

If high strangeness has an inverse relationship with population (perhaps because loners see things, or because people steer themselves away from places with these phenomena, or for some other reason), we should see the original distribution of points made far more clear.

If high strangeness has a relationship with fault lines, as the authors of Space-Time Transients suggest, then we should see that distribution quite clearly once population is factored out. Likewise with leys, or aboriginal burial sites, or magnetic faults, or changes in gravity, or closeness to radio transmitters, or any of the other suggested explanations whose documented points can be traced on a map.

If I had machine-readable back-issues of the Fortean Times, I could do this in my copious free time. Perhaps I can rely upon the kindness of strangers and/or Fortean Times employees.

OWS and sustainable microcultures

2011-10-24T17:31:00.000-07:00

The 'Occupy' movement has exploded recently, and the above interview with R. U. Sirius and Richard Metzger has reminded me about some of the reasons why. OWS started out with the support of Anon, a fairly potent meme factory, and as a result, Occupy has spread far and wide, beginning as a kind of half-protest-half-TAZ and eventually becoming a kind of franchise-state Christiania.

This is not like a Hoovertown. The people participating in OWS are middle class, not lower class, and can certainly afford to live in houses rather than tents. But, as a result of good organization and attempts to gain and maintain good will from nearby organizations, various Occupy movements have become miniature communities with their own periodicals, health care, economy, government, and community activities. For the number of protests and the variety of locales (over forty countries are being occupied -- this is not limited to the united states by any means) there has been minimal state-sanctioned violence (which is not to say that there's none, or that the violence that has occurred is any less despicable).

Previous discussion of the movement has been predicated upon the assumption that it would end after some change had been made in local, state, national, or global governance, but if this indeed goes on for years (as Christiania did on a much smaller scale), it may well be that Occupy communes will cohabit with or perhaps even outlive those states that encompass them. If anything, it is a proof of concept -- but I will be interested in seeing whether these protests survive the winter, and perhaps the following winter.

Update: Great minds think alike

Exploits in the Human Biocomputer: Buffet Edition

2011-09-26T08:11:00.000-07:00

Exploits in the Human Biocomputer (NLP Edition)

2011-09-26T07:49:00.000-07:00

I suspect that NLPers have their own name for the Doctor Fox effect. That said, I don't see the point of saying something so precisely meaningless in terms of propaganda, except when preaching to the choir. There is something to be said for having confidence that if you are ever caught with nothing to say you can say nothing quite well and convince everyone you said what they wanted to hear, however. Perhaps I will do this the next time I give a presentation.

Redefining scifi, again

2011-09-04T09:10:00.001-07:00

Science fiction has been defined and redefined fairly frequently, both by fans and by authors. Since I have some fairly strong feelings on the subject, I figured I might as well cram them into your ears before they get too clogged.

I'm defining here what I consider to be the core of what makes something science fiction, but it differs enough from other people's idea of science fiction that we might as well call it something else. If you have a different conception of science fiction, perhaps you can agree to call this 'Fiction A is Fiction A', after its primary attribute.

First, I'd like to go over previous categorization systems and why they fail.

It should be clear to us, first of all, that setting something in outer space or having it involve computers is neither necessary nor sufficient to make it sci-fi. There was a time when the latter seemed less ridiculous. Let us settle for the idea that science fiction is not predicated upon the existence within the story of unfamiliar technology -- otherwise, a story full of technology that has become familiar will cease to be science fiction (as Terminal Man may soon be, since precisely the technology discussed in that novel is now being used by epileptics). Science fiction should not be vulnerable to the old chestnut about AI -- if everything it describes exists, it's no longer sci-fi.

An old standard, though, is the idea that sci-fi stays with known science as much as possible. I do not consider this a defining element, because it invalidates nearly all science fiction past and present. 1984 is based in large part around a naiive interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; if that turns out to be provably false, does 1984 cease to be science fiction? Dune (and many other science fiction novels from the 1950s-1970s) had in large part a basis in the assumption that precognition and remote viewing are possible. Are they no longer science fiction? Even if we limit it to the body of knowledge that was known clearly at the time of writing, we have some problems. Anathem uses the Everett-Wheeler 'multiple world interpretation', but (like every other use in science fiction) ignores the fact that in order for MWI to hold, no continuity is allowed to interact with any other; this is built into the formalism for MWI. Is Anathem not science fiction, since it selectively ignored science for the sake of a story?

So, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to keep with known science, and it is neither necessary nor sufficient to operate in the domain of not-yet-distributed futures. Placement in time itself is also no good; 2001: A Space Odyssey remained science fiction, as did 1984. So, how do we delineate what falls into the domain of science fiction?

My answer is consistency. Science fiction need not be consistent with known science, but it should be self-consistent. Its capacity for self-consistency, like that of mathematics, will likely be a boon to it in the future. It could also be claimed that by being consistent, science fiction makes itself diverge even moreso from reality, which is famously inconsistent (and when it behaves consistently, does so in baroque and mysterious ways).

So, what cornerstones of science fiction do we in this way eliminate? Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who do not retain consistency, but they all fail at other tests of science fiction purity. They fall into the domain of fantasy, which is perhaps where they belong.

Perhaps more interestingly, what falls into science fiction under this definition that would not otherwise? The Age of Unreason series does, despite being set in the eighteenth century and focusing on alchemy, because the rules set down for alchemy are not contradicted later on. The Laundry Files series also falls into science fiction, though due to some flukes in early books, the Dresden Files series does not. Hackers, while ludicrously and hilariously at odds with reality, does not break its own rules, and thus falls under the aegis of sci-fi.

Rule 34 and sidestepping superorganisms

2011-09-01T13:19:00.000-07:00

Before I start this rant, I should mention that I absolutely love Charlie Stross's books and his blog, and that Rule 34 was no exception. I say this because the rest of this post will be fairly critical of the book, and may be somewhat critical of the man himself in passing. I should also note that everything I know of Stross I have learned from his blog and his various talks, which are posted there; as a result, I probably have a skewed view of what he does and doesn't know or think.

So, if you haven't read Rule 34 yet (and you should; I had to order it from Amazon, but if you don't live in the sticks your local bookstore probably has it), the basic idea behind it is this: in the future, Scotland is its own country, and the Edinburgh police force has a special operations squad studying internet memes and keeping an eye out for dangerous ones (ranging from things like planking, which are dangerous due to stupidity rather than malice, to things like copycat suicides, which are dangerous due to the autotoxic nature of the meme itself). Great setup. Then, there are a series of strange murders framed as bizarre suicides. If you keep up with this blog, you know where this is going -- but you'd be wrong.

While I won't spoil the twist ending (which is interesting in of itself, for all kinds of reasons even tangential to plot), the perp is not in fact a meme, nor is it some superorganism. While memetic perps are hard to write, there are several minor ones in that book particularly (and memetic perps of the Young Werther mould have been a dime a dozen since Gothe's time -- while they probably have about the same audience familiarity as laughing plagues or the Boston Molasses Disaster and are considered odder than Strange Rains); as for superorganism characters, they are still rare but they have been handled convincingly even in Count Zero.

So, why did Stross sidestep this idea?

He's aware of it. I mentioned it in a comment on his blog, which he responded to. Perhaps he doesn't feel like he can handle it as well? Perhaps he thinks it won't make such a ripping yarn?

Unfortunately, despite his excellent record in terms of legitimately new ideas, Rule 34 is innovative only by 1982 standards. This is not a big deal -- Neuromancer has certainly kept its flavour. However, Stross' books have been consistently stuck twenty minutes into the future of science fiction authorship, leading the way for all sorts of new twists on old genres that haven't even come up from the underground yet. I might even be tempted to blame The Atrocity Archives for the popularity of Magic-A-is-Magic-A urban fantasy thrillers, if not for the distinct lack of vampires and the distinct lovecraft-nerd flavour.

Now, if you haven't read Rule 34, I still recommend reading it. Read Halting State first. Then, read everything else he's ever written. He's impressive, and his adherence to hardness even in things like the Laundry series borders on the obsessive; in Iron Sunrise he talks the reader through the mathematics of physics fermi-figures on a fairly regular basis. I just feel like he missed an opportunity to really wow his readers with the resolution of Rule 34, and I hope he will approach the subject of superorganisms with agency in some later book.

An example of glib pseudo-academic pretension

2011-08-15T06:08:00.000-07:00

This article is incorrect on many levels, but it *does* bring up some good (though old) points. The way that media influences the types of memes that are most likely to be propagated has been discussed endlessly, and the kind of oversimplified "twitter is only good for talking about your breakfast" statements by journalists was a big part of the inspiration for the SOMA project (http://principiadiscordia.com/memebombs).

A breakdown of fallacies in this article:
1) Print literature is the only source of important ideas : This fallacy was discussed by McLuhan at length. While McLuhan was more or less in favor of print media, he recognized that it encouraged particular types of thinking and discouraged others, in addition to giving political power to particular types of people and taking it from others. Print media encourages linear, long-form ideas that can easily be put into words, while visual media encourages nonlinear ideas that are difficult to put into words and non-print textual media encourages ideas that can be formulated in shorter sequences of words. Long-form and easily-written ideas are not the sole source of useful knowledge.

2) We live in an age of information overload : This old chestnut has been popping up in the speech of old-guard folks since Socrates (and probably even earlier). How legitimate it is depends upon how you define information. By the rigorous mathematical formulation, information is actually decreasing because knowledge (which is to say, mental models) is increasing and becoming more accurate -- the jumping jesus phenomenon makes things more predictable. By a lazy layman's definition, the consistent upward trend in the effectiveness of communications technology that appears to have been in place since the invention of spoken language means that someone of any given generation can expect to have the ability to learn more things more quickly and with a greater variety of subject matter than someone of a previous generation. But, just like the other old chestnut (that the world is going to hell in a handbasket), this one is always said and the implied end result never actually happens.

3) People are becoming more shallow : People are always shallow. The rule of news is that it progresses towards tabloid material, and Time Magazine is no exception. This has nothing to do with the Internet, aside from the fact that print magazines lost their monopoly and thus became less profitable, leading to the need to appeal to a larger audience in order to stay afloat. While it's true that much of the communication online is shallow, sturgeon's law applies here: 90% of any print publication is also noise; for every nine people talking about their breakfast on twitter there's one making groundbreaking statements, which is about as good as any other medium ever has been (including, arguably, peer-reviewed academic papers).

I post it here because I consider it to be an excellent example of this kind of shallow anti-anti-intellectualism that does nothing but serve the ego of the author (who comes off as a bastion of hope for intellectual purity against a world conspiring to eat the brains of otherwise promising intellectuals and replace them with copies of The Daily Mail, or something). These kinds of articles are no more new than the kinds of things they criticize, and I consider it important to realize that they don't have any more content than that which they deride either. A habitual contempt does not reflect a finer sensibility; it merely reflects a habit of contempt.

Putting the rock-occult connection into context

2011-08-08T08:27:00.000-07:00

I have mentioned before in passing the connection documented between popular music and occult practice. I have come to the tentative conclusion that this is a subset of the general connection between occult movements and economic elites, and how this relates to leisure-class societies.

Most of us spend a large portion of our time working. It is anomalous to have large quantities of leisure time prior to old age, but there has been a leisure class since at least the establishment of Eridug more than six thousand years ago. The leisure class is defined not by not working, but instead by not needing to work (and thus having their occupation driven by interest rather than economic factors). My thesis about leisure class occupation is that there are three primary categories of popular leisure-class occupation, one of which is dominated by mysticism.

Those classes of occupation available only or mostly to those who are not viscerally and mortally concerned with the accumulation of money are: physical philosophy, abstract philosophy, and time-wasting. Physical philosophy contains such things as tinkering, home improvement, small-scale engineering, painting, sculpting, scientific experimentation, electronics, model trains, and computer programming -- things that are ostensibly potentially profitable but whose potential for profit is a gamble. Abstract philosophy has potentially higher stakes and a lower success rate, and contains both those things we think of as philosophy today, mysticism, the occult, and more rigorous practices like mathematics. Time-wasting contains things like casual golfing -- things that are done to fill leisure time but not done in such a way that money could be gained from them.

A rock star is not initiated into the occult by some record-company-sponsored ritual. A rock star, when he or she makes it big, no longer has to work day and night to make it big; there is more leisure time (though I am not implying that rock stars are slackers; a self-made band, as opposed to a group manufactured by a record company, must generate enormous quantities of flukes before managing to get signed -- Radiohead sent out demos for years under the name On A Friday before they managed to push out Pablo Honey -- and an established artist can have those flukes published rather than sending demos to yet another company). If you no longer have money woes and you can get away with putting in a third of the work you have for years, you can either maintain your current effort (and potentially burn out) or you can take up those things that you could not before. As a result, The Beatles made Crowley and Hare Krishna references, and Bowie writes songs about the Sephiroth. It is easier to get into the occult in a group already saturated with occultists and ex-occultists, and the popular music scene is such a group. But, other notable successful musical artists have taken up building instruments or painting or piloting commercial aircraft.

Exploits in the Human Biocomputer (digest)

2011-08-05T10:49:00.000-07:00

So, I haven't been around too much. But, I've run into several interesting things for my Unpatched Exploits in the Human Biocomputer series. Time for a digest edition.

On the subject of imposition of order (a subject very close to my heart) we have some scientism:

and some content-free narrative literature:

On the subject of subliminal messages and the use of priming, The Language Log has an excellent article that references several studies on the subject. There is also this post there, relating to the results of lacking audience-awareness, though that post relates more closely to my obsession with Project Xanadu (and, by extension, the use of appropriate rather than standard user interfaces) than to cogsci.

In fact, there are several recent Language Log posts that belong here: the abuse of empathy reflexes in persuasion and the joys and errors of computational linguistics have both been mentioned recently. I have expanded upon the paragraph length analyses in the above post.

The so-called 'nym wars' should yield the material for a possible pseudonym-vs-anonym post in the future.

The Chinese-Room Fallacy

2011-07-26T06:04:00.000-07:00

I haven't been posting much lately because of work, but I came upon this paragraph and had to mention it:

This raises the question of whether Watson is really answering questions at all or is just noticing statistical correlations in vast amounts of data. But the mere act of building the machine has been a powerful exploration of just what we mean when we talk about knowing.
source

The above is a very good example of the typical problems one runs into when one pretends that an ill-defined term can be definitively compared to a well-defined term (or another ill-defined term, for that matter), and is representative of the problems Wittgenstein and Russel saw in philosophy.
Here is a breakdown of the problems with the paragraph:

Watson is clearly answering questions. He has been given questions, and provided their answers, so there is no question there. There is a question about whether or not he is thinking, which is by no means a necessary tactic for answering questions.

By the understanding of neurobiology of the past few decades, thinking and knowing appears to be statistical. While human brains clearly don't have the logical-reasoning capacity provided by the reasoning engine within Watson, the implied distinction between 'knowing' and 'just noticing statistical correlations' is quite probably imaginary.

Noticing statistical correlations is enormously difficult, especially on the scale upon which it occurs in this case. Saying that a machine is 'just noticing statistical correlations' is like saying that a turtle is 'just moving an eighteen wheeler around with his mind'.

As the title of the post implies, I consider this kind of confusion the source of other 'controversies' like the Chinese Room problem.

Project xanadu document dump

2011-07-02T07:40:00.000-07:00

This has only the vaguest relationship to the content of this blog, but I'm posting it here because it's the place I'm most likely to look later.

A little context: I am a huge fan of Project Xanadu, and a ridiculous percentage of my personal projects have to do with variants on the Xanadu designs (mostly xu88 and zigzag). Going through my scribd feed I discovered that I at some point gathered and repackaged a bunch of old Project Xanadu documents and stuck them up there. I have the tendency to download every pdf I see, and I have a tendency to on occasion upload every pdf I have hanging around that looks public domain to scribd so they don't prevent me from downloading pdfs from them. So, if I don't link it up again, I will probably lose track of it for another few years.

xanadu

Note on copyright: IP belonging to Project Xanadu, Xanadu Operating Company, etc., is actually even more complicated than normal IP concerns. Early Xanadu material was made by an ever-refreshing group operating under 'Plan R doctrine': the idea that if one member lost contact with the rest of the group for a long period and no release seemed imminent, that one member would be expected to release the material he or she had in his or her possession to the public regardless of who wrote it. This conflicts with the fact that everyone involved kept copyright on their work, and various members of the group have different ideas about what qualifies as long enough for Plan R to be enacted, how little contact is necessary, and what constitutes a reasonable attempt to contact the rest of the group. Furthermore, XOC both operated on its own and was at one time a subsidiary of Autodesk, which may or may not affect copyright claims for material that was in XOC's possession during the Autodesk period or made during the Autodesk period by XOC. So, there is a fairly long history of one member (usually Ted Nelson) blessing an independent implementation or a particular release and then another member coming out of the woodwork unexpectedly with a suit or a complaint (this happened with gzz -- which is now known as FenFire and does not support zzstructures -- and may or may not be involved in the problems with the Udanax Gold release, which is source code in a SmallTalk-like language that compiles to C++ but for which no working compiler can be released).

Ramblings: Novelty, Identity, Teleology

2011-06-26T10:49:00.000-07:00

The Eliza Effect is the tendency to anthropomorphize those artifacts that present humanlike qualities shallowly. I have studied this effect in practice quite a bit, in an uncontrolled way, and discovered that in the context of markov chain bots (which learn by developing markov models, and as such adopt the manner of speech of those it speaks to) those people whose manner of speech is closest to that of the bot are the most likely to feel empathy with the bot -- a situation that should not be surprising, given the use of word patterns and vocabulary in forming social groupings (and, of course, the so-called Babel Effect).

Now, in humans, interest corresponds to novelty not entirely straightforwardly. Something that is interesting has not too little and not too much novelty: too little novelty is too little novelty is too little novelty is too little novelty, and too much novelty is nwiganbowyaionciwyea 893jf, while just enough novelty is the joy of whole milk until sunrise. This is affected somewhat by social concerns, since particular memeplexes encourage neophilia (meaning that a greater amount of novelty meets the sweet spot goldie locks zone of 'interesting') while others encourage neophobia (meaning that the zone of 'interesting' has less novelty). Where 'interesting' begins for a neophile is often where 'interesting' ends for a neophobe, but novelty depends quite strongly on mental models, so the gap widens quickly.

As a neophile, I tend to talk of neophilia, but neophilia is not all rainbows and unicorns. Neophilia is potentially dangerous because at a fundamental level is encourages dabbling in the unknown. Neophobes, whatever else they are, are at least as safe as they were last year. Neophiles become more safe only accidentally, because they spend their free time playing with fire. It takes someone who plays a lot with fire to invent fireproof curtains (or rocket science -- and Marvel Parsons probably makes it onto the list of archtypal neophiles for the prometheus element), and once fireproof curtains are invented suddenly the neophobes are safer too. But, we just need to look at what happened to good old Jack to see the danger in neophilia: eaten by living flame.

Now, if you look at a community (or, really, a superorganism) like Anonymous, you see a lot of deindividuation going on. Anon has no name. Anon's internal communications are clogged with cats, tits, gtfos, and brick-shitting. A perfect petri dish for deindividuation, in other words: lack of identity within the group, highly stimulating sensory input, and at a high frequency. One other thing that is certainly true of Anon is the high novelty content of communications. There are some old sawhorses here: lolcats have little information per-se, though they can be made to carry much more with clever juxtapositions, and most image macros are content free. However, the image macro has the potential (sometimes realized) to be a highly potent capsule of information: it is easy to transmit (cock and repost), highly stimulating at best, has the potential for the same message to be introduced in several ways (both text and images, which can interact again with existing idioms both verbal and visual), and is part of a conditioning loop that encourages spread (all the forums I've been on since 2004 have had at least one thread for posting interesting images, most of which are clogged with macros, and macros are certainly very popular on tumblr and twitter).

Once again, though, we must separate intended meaning with interpreted meaning. Plenty of accepted meanings were never intended, which is fine because the protocol of natural languages is loose and ambiguous. Many of the idioms attributed to Anon clearly began accidentally, as a look at memebase will demonstrate. Even the silliest of these idioms have the potential to be repurposed to say something decidedly important, or at least 'interesting'. Many of them have. These idioms have made their way into mainstream news through the releases of LulzSec, for instance, which says fairly serious things in fairly silly ways (Eric S Raymond calls this 'Ha Ha Only Serious'), and makes extensive use of the idioms generally attributed to Anon.

A machine could probably fairly trivially pass as human on various imageboards. It could repost images, write its own messages. It would become nearly invisible because of the sheer frequency with which /b/ moves (and because of the sheer glaciality with which some of the other imageboards move). It would mashup existing memes, and some of the mashed memes may gain a following. It would not be kicked out because it is not a spam bot. It would have an extensive archive of images and an extensive model of conversation. Once it begins to be accepted as clearly human (it has a hat) its word model could slowly be infiltrated, with new text introduced. It might mix and match lolcat speech with Karl Marx or with E. E. Cummings, or with Dylan Thomas, or with Ken Kesey. It might be a force to popularize the phrase 'on the gripping hand'. It would be an interesting experiment.

It is not worthwhile for one person to do it. That would not be even-handed. If you want to do it, please do so, and release your results when you finish. Ideally, more than six or seven people would do this at once, introducing entirely different texts of their choosing. Bots learn fast, but adapt slow. It may take a few months for Das Kapital to even subtly infiltrate Rage Guy. But, I have a sneaking suspicion that such an introduction will have a much more far-reaching affect on the superorganism than any conscious attempt to use humans to influence it, since it will get past mental defenses.

The problem of simulacra in ritual traditions

2011-06-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

The Anti-occultist has a post discussing the problem of magical theatre. While his points are valid, they are not an argument against ritual theatre for those who practice it: the symbolism of ritual is, like any system of symbols, arbitrary, and the very hackneyed familiarity of the systems played up in popular culture may in some cases be a strength. A ritual first generates an atmosphere, then super-arouses those partaking in it and uses unusual (memorable, not directly related to mundane experience) language (written, spoken, and in the form of narrative and symbolism) to push a message into the now highly suggestible ritual users. A ritual using a symbolic language taken from pop culture can be used on people exposed to those media it appears in with less initial conditioning, though symbolic languages quickly gain baggage, and old, popular symbolic languages (such as the hermetic/alchemical tradition) are difficult to use without unintended side effects due to masses of conflicting associations.

The above-mentioned post does, however, touch upon another of my special fields of interest: the question of how simulacra tend to differ from those things they initially derive from. Memetics tells us that simulacra will probably have their most spectacular details exaggerated and less memorable details lost. They will be simplified, but any aspect that encourages remembering or retransmitting the information will generally be preserved. In other words, the hollywood voudoun will be simpler (it will be spelled voodoo and will lack the distinctions between voodoo and hoodoo; loa will rarely be ridden and when they are they will be ridden in arbitrary order without respect for gatekeepers), it will be more viscerally memorable (iconic images of voodoo dolls, snakes, and bags of graveyard dust will replace less-iconic veves, and all rituals will have suspenseful music and frightening practitioners), and it will emphasize those things that make it desirable to reproduce (what special effects are used will generally remain cheap, the tradition will be disconnected from any geographical location so that it can be used in a variety of settings, and the details necessary to research will be minimized by encouraging the idea that there is little legitimate content to be known). Hollywood voodoo, in other words, becomes something that any actor or filmmaker can create and have it remain recognizable -- and therefore, becomes something that many amateurs can also create. The mere dilution of the tradition through a game of telephone is enough to egalitarize it; voodoo queens and priestesses are no longer required for the Hollywood version. Of course, if we go along with the psychological interpretation of the mechanism of action of magical workings (as I am prone to do), Hollywood Voodoo is potentially precisely as effective as authentic Hatian Voudoun. There are situations wherein an authentic tradition is less useful than its diluted and bastardized pop-culture clones, and if you want to perform a ritual through the medium of film using a large number of people, Hollywood Voodoo is a good choice. Everyone understands it, and though it is less subtle and flexible than a more authentic tradition often is (due to much use), imparting nuanced ideas through complex ritual on large groups of people is hard even with extremely well-conditioned groups (just ask the Masons -- or the Catholics, who have been doing it for nearly two millennia).

I have an old joke I like to tell. I sometimes attribute it to William Gibson, but I don't think he ever actually said it outright. The question is, in a forest with some real trees and some artful replicas, how does one tell which one is real? The answer is, the fake trees are the ones that look too much like trees. Nature isn't bound to obey our platonic images of things, so only man-made things look precisely like our mental models of them. Since systems of ritual exist for the sole purpose of manipulating mental models*, there is no reason a so-called 'authentic' tradition is necessarily better than the historically inauthentic Hollywood version.

* Note that I am writing under the assumption that the psychological interpretation of magic is at least somewhat correct. If the meat-and-potatoes of magical workings are, as Allen Greenfield suggests in Secret Cypher of the UFOnauts and The Secret Rituals of the Men in Black, then an authentic tradition matters very much.

Cold reading

2011-06-12T09:56:00.000-07:00

Source

While I've heard this before, it makes me wonder what useful things such training could be applied to aside from telling people things they already know. Outside of the role of fortune teller (which itself is helpful), training the intuition to more accurately make these leaps has great potential, and I imagine that similar training is being used in other fields.

Unpatched Exploits in the Human Biocomputer 3

2011-06-09T15:19:00.000-07:00

A phonetic writing system based on cellular automata

2011-06-04T08:34:00.000-07:00

In thinking about how to bridge the world of ideograms with the world of alphabets, I began thinking about how cellular automata perform fairly complex operations over time. The starting state of a cellular automaton with a known ruleset contains all the information necessary to produce all further states. So, I figured that a description of a state in some simple known system of cellular automata may, given a well-defined stopping state, both stand in for the word and guide the reader in its pronunciation, without merely being a phonetic representation devoid of non-phonetic content.

As a proof of concept, I considered the ruleset of otomata, remapped onto a new grid and with a slight change in rules. The grid is five by five, and there are five possible cell states: one for each of the primary orientations (up, down, left, right) and one for blank. At a constant rate, cell states indicating directions (denoted by arrows) move across the grid in the direction specified. If at any step a cell is required to be in two states (which is to say that two arrows collide) the cell in which the collision takes place is evaluated as a sound and pronounced, and the state of that cell is set to blank.

This is a fairly irritating thing to try to phrase in english, so I will give an example.

Here is a blank grid:

	a	e	i	o	u
t
k
s
l
m

Here is a glyph:

	a	e	i	o	u
t		<
k	^
s			v
l
m					<

On the first step, the arrow currently located at te and the arrow currently located at ka collide at ta, the arrow located at mo moves to mi, and the arrow located at si moves to si. So, the first syllable is 'ta'.

>td><

	a	e	i	o	u
t
k
s
l			v
m				<

On the second step, the arrows located at si and mo collide at mi. So, the second syllable is 'mi'. All remaining cells are blank, so this glyph is pronounced 'tami'.

As for some way to quickly write these glyphs, I figured that the easiest thing to do was to put lines on both sides of the arrow heads and have meeting or intersecting lines for each blank position. So, in ascii, the above might be represented as:

+<+-+
^+|+|
|+v+|
|+|+|
+-+-<

On the ego

2011-06-01T17:58:00.000-07:00

There are plenty of mystical traditions floating around based on ego dissolution as self-improvement, ranging from the nearly ubiquitous (Buddhism) to the obscure (several gnostic sects). The above posts explain better than I can why ego dissolution is worthwhile. The TL;DR version is that while the ego (or rather, the sense of self -- which is different from the ego as used in Freudian and Jungian traditions) serves a purpose socially, when it becomes inflexible it holds you back; who you think you are is not who you really are, and when you assume that those properties you attribute to yourself are truly essentially parts of you, you cement yourself into that role. Grant Morrison talks about this, too:

The ego is an extremely difficult opponent, because the ego is what we identify as our own selves. The thoughts that you consider your own are those of the ego, which is reasonable because of the basis of verbal thought in language and the social basis of language. However, the ego is also an insidious structure that very quickly fossilizes; when your ego is the primary mover and shaker in your head, you can't tell which thoughts are reasonable and legitimate and which thoughts are merely preserving the ego's dominant control over decision-making. The ego is the collection of all your oldest habits -- all the habits that are hardest to break. Not only does it have ages of operant conditioning behind it, but it has several defense mechanisms that keep it away from threatening ideas. These defense mechanisms are sometimes classified as cognitive biases, and sometimes classified as social filters. Having a fossilized ego is like traveling only by train: while your social life is made easier by the sheer predictability of your movements, that same structure prevents you from having any experiences that lie outside the dining car.

The mechanism for breaking down ego, which was mentioned in the video above but may not be clear, is to forcibly go against those behaviors you identify with yourself and jump into behaviors that you consider completely out of your domain of experience. One can do this constantly, or one can do this periodically by completely reinventing oneself on a regular basis. During some stages in human development this behavior is both normal and socially acceptable. During others, it is considered potentially pathological. However, it meshes nicely in spirit with other posts I've written here about agnosis.

I do not see myself undergoing such an experiment in the near future. I suppose that means I should.

Atari Punk Manifesto

2011-05-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

.....AAA TTTTTT AAA   RRRR   IIIIII   PPP   UU   UU  NNN   NN  KK  KK
...AA AA  TT  AA AA  RR RR    II     PP PP UU   UU  NNNN  NN  KK KK
..AAAAA  TT  AAAAA  RRRR     II     PPPP  UU   UU  NN NN NN  KKKK
.AA AA  TT  AA AA  RR RR    II     PP    UU   UU  NN  NNNN  KK KK
AA AA  TT  AA AA  RR  RR IIIIII   PP     UUUUU   NN   NNN  KK  KK

ATARI PUNK MANIFESTO
1       Retrocomputing is useless, but that just makes it better
10      Obfuscation is a legitimate aesthetic choice
11      Strange haircuts, cardboard guitars, and computer samples
100     Cyberpunk was more fun when it was divorced from reality
101     New Wave is punk with synthesizers, but we love you anyway
110     All that we are is all that we need to be
111     All that we know is human machinery
1000    64k isn't enough for anyone, but it's more than enough for us
1001    There was a time when men were men, women were men, and children wrote their own device drivers
1010    We aren't nostalgics; we just play them on TV
1011    Our rear view mirrors are neon pink, unironically
1100    It's too much machine for you
1101    Paper is accordion-folded, and 3d is in wireframes
1110    Acoustic couplers make sweet music
1111    Mice? Where we're going, we don't need mice.

Sublim experiment rundown

2011-05-07T13:48:00.000-07:00

Back in the day (2006 or 2007), after several years of experimentation, I coauthored a document about the use of visual subliminal messages (specifically those produced by the xscreensaver package's xsublim program) for cognitive enhancement. It hasn't aged terribly well, and I'm rather embarrassed now by the writing style, but every so often someone contacts me asking whether or not I have continued experimentation. The answer is yes. I figure now is as good a time as any to give you the run-down on my later experiments.

As a first note, I am not experimenting with subliminal advertising. If you are looking for something about subliminal advertising, rocketboom has a good video on the subject, after which you will require no other materials.

At the time of writing the original document, I had a model of the mechanism involving chain reactions of primed ideas. This may still be relevant, but there are other (more down-to-earth) attributes of the process with more literature within the field of cognitive psychology to back them up. While subliminal messages do not give a strong enough priming to significantly influence behavior in the context of advertising (or rather, they don't have the property claimed of homeopathy: subliminals are not more powerful the less they are observed), subliminal messages have been shown to affect the sense of familiarity. In situations where unfamiliarity with terminology, wording, or notation is a major stumbling block, being subliminally primed with the terminology in question can act as a gentle introduction, making the terminology no longer seem arbitrarily difficult and frightening. By producing a false sense of familiarity with the subject matter, the subject matter seems easier to pick up.

Another idea (which is strongly influenced by the excellent book The Art of Memetics) is that mental blinders (and other psychological biases that prevent the absorption of unfamiliar or conflicting information) can be modeled as the defense mechanisms of dominant memeplexes. These memeplexes subvert, assimilate, or deny newcomers since new ideas can compete with the old ones. Subliminal messages allow slow and subtle subversion by all memeplexes, regardless of whether or not they conflict with existing ones. As a result, use of subliminals can decrease the likelihood of decisions being unduly biased by unseen socially reinforced heuristics, so long as documents whose dominant underlying assumptions differ conflictingly have their words primed.

So, above we have some new models for the mechanism of action. Furthermore, new attributes have been discovered.

The physiological effects of sublims are highly dependent upon the novelty of the content. A single static document of arbitrary length will quickly cease to be enough for sublims, eventually giving none of the symptoms at all. As the use of sublims increases, necessary novelty does not increase linearly but exponentially. I currently use more than twenty gigabytes of static plaintext as a small part of my sublim input, balanced out by semi-static input (fortune databases), significantly more dynamic input (mostly via the random page feature in mediawiki installations), and less structured 'noise' input (text generated from markov models of other documents, text generated by piping other inputs through rhyme generators and other filters, text generated using context-free grammars). Too much novelty (trying to sublim with a four gigabyte video interpreted as ascii text, say) is not physiologically pleasant.

Sublims have different effective novelty ranges given different mental states. Stimulants appear to raise the required novelty level. Depressants appear to lower the maximum novelty level, but occasionally they cause the sublims to have absolutely no effect. Binaural entrainment at theta range frequencies appears to maximize the physiological effects for as long as the entrainment is occurring, but when the pattern stabilizes the physiological effects disappear.

Finally, there are a few technical updates.

Xsublim is no longer maintained by the xscreensaver project, and if you install a modern version of xscreensaver xsublim will not be installed. The last time I checked, the xsublim source was part of the source tarball but could not be trivially coaxed to compile. I have been using an old binary copied from an earlier release.

I have used the xosd package to write a clone of xsublim, called asublim. It does not operate precisely the same way. Where xsublim caches the full run of the program from which it takes its input before displaying anything, asublim caches each space-separated token smaller than 512 bytes (and cuts those larger into 512 byte pieces) and displays them in real time. As a result, asublim starts more quickly but is also more sensitive to load fluctuations. When I have used it, the asublim program itself is significantly slower than most of the programs feeding it, and so I have not had pipe underflows or noticeable delays. Asublim does not currently have support for the various command line options that xsublim supports, though support for most of them can be implemented. Asublim also has a few glitches: the self-erasing feature appears to operate differently from xsublim's implementation, and so on programs (such as firefox) that are slow to redraw their window bitmap there is a tendency for already erased tokens to obscure the contents of the canvas. I have not duplicated this problem on anything other than firefox.

If you have found this post by researching the terms found in the original Infornography document, please post your comments here rather than looking me up.

Sartre Wars

2011-04-28T08:15:00.001-07:00

Time Binding, or why the past isn't what it used to be

2011-04-27T10:26:00.000-07:00

Today's XKCD reminded me of a fairly interesting effect called time binding. The term was coined by Alfred Korzybski. This is how Wikipedia defines it:

Time binding: The human ability to pass information and knowledge between generations at an accelerating rate. Korzybski claimed this to be a unique capacity, separating us from other animals. Animals pass knowledge, but not at an exponential rate, that is to say, each generation of animals does things pretty much in the same way as the previous generation. For example, at one time most human societies were hunter-gatherers, but now more advanced means of food production (growing, raising, or buying) predominate. Excepting some insects (for example, ants), all other animals are still hunter-gatherer species, even though many have existed longer than the human species.Source

Among the people to work with the concept of time binding are Marshal McLuhan and Robert Anton Wilson.

One of the fundamental results of time binding (and the source of the term) is that when you record information in this way, you lower the amount of distortion done to it by natural processes over a given span of time. By doing this, you make that particular piece of information more available to people in the future (or available to people further in the future). Because of the availability bias, information that is more familiar seems to some extent more current, in the sense of seeming more (currently) true. So, time binding, though it does not slow down time, slows down time perception of the past, creating a mental 'now' that extends further into the past. This makes rear view mirror thinking not only easier to do but easier to get away with.

Among the many things the widespread adoption of the internet has done for us is made a significantly greater quantity of significantly more trivial information significantly more available to a significantly greater quantity of people significantly less familiar with the subject matter. The widespread adoption of the internet has also made it easier for people like the archive team to save information that would have otherwise been lost. So, in other words, someone living in a bubble on Mars in 2525 can read the tweet you sent yesterday about what you were having for breakfast. Because of time binding, that tweet will seem significantly less old to that Martian bubble-boy than anything written in 1476 will seem to you.

Nearly everyone born in the industrialized west in the twentieth century, aside from the very poor and those living in anomalously technically retrogressive communities, is not only intimately familiar with but is involved with the franchise of some media created shortly before their own birth. There are many Star Wars fans who weren't born until after the last episode of the original trilogy was released, and probably some who weren't born until all of the current canon films were released. There are even more fans of the Lord of the Rings trilogy who were not alive when they appeared in paperback, let alone when they were written. Some classic rock fans who lived through the latter end of the era (and were actively consuming the release of, say, Pink Floyd's The Final Cut) were not alive for the early releases (such as Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother). Does The Final Cut sound old? Does The Empire Strikes Back feel like an old film? Neuromancer was written six years before I was born, but it still feels fresh. A piece of media feeling old has never had to do with its actual age; it has always been the gradual decay of information about it. With the increase in storage space, communications speed, and fidelity, we slowly extend our 'now' behind us in time, like a comet's tail.

More unpatched exploits in the human biocomputer

2011-04-26T10:03:00.000-07:00

Fallacies underlying morality in hierarchical systems

2011-04-26T06:45:00.000-07:00

One of the big arguments against pure voluntarism as a stable political system is that people tend to form hierarchies. Indeed, people do tend to form hierarchies. One of the reasons for this is Dunbar's number. This post will not cover that topic. I want to instead focus on what I consider the other major reason that human groups tend to fall into hierarchy.

There are two meta-moral systems (which is to say, categories of moral systems) involved with dominance and submission. One is that described by Nietzsche, who called it the 'slave morality'. The other I will call the 'slavemaster morality'.

In the slave morality, there is one major heuristic: the victim (or the person in the submissive position) is always morally in the right. He or she has been put upon unduly by the dominant party, and bears no responsibility for the problems. In a system of pure 'slave morality', the old 'just following orders' excuse always flies.

In the slavemaster morality, there is one major heuristic: the person who has taken charge is morally in the right, because something must be done. Those who have abdicated responsibility may be taken advantage of freely, because they have surrendered their choice. It is rarely put into these terms.

Mosbunall of those with the slave morality see mosbunall those with the slavemaster morality as evil greedy fascists. Mosbunall of those with the slavemaster morality see mosbunall of those with the slave morality as evil greedy parasites.

The funny thing is, slave morality and slavemaster morality are strangely entwined. Slave morality, with its abdication of responsibility in exchange for shielding from being morally in the wrong, requires those with the slavemaster morality to take charge of them. Slavemaster morality cannot survive in the absence of willing slaves. The symbiosis is fairly clear.

Not only are these two metamoral systems symbiotically linked, but they are based on the same pair of fallacies. They both take as absolutely true that:

it is undesirable or unpleasant to be submissive,
it is desirable or pleasant to be dominant

These heuristics are rarely accurate. Dominance bears the burden of responsibility, not only for the self but also for others. Submission removes this burden. While there are positives to dominance (it helps one get one's way, for instance) and negatives to submission (abdicating control has many psychological impacts in addition to making it problematic to have one's needs reliably met), in general one state of affairs is not on the whole significantly better than the other. So, anyone who takes the above heuristics as absolutely true will subscribe to slave or slavemaster morality depending on whether they want to abdicate responsibility or gain power, respectively.

I suspect that these heuristics predate the dawn of man as such. Hierarchical behavior in packs of nonhuman primates sometimes follows the same pattern. In a system with communication limited in speed and complexity, there are extreme benefits to having a single leader, and the above-mentioned heuristics encourage the selection of a more nearly optimal leader over time, as well as discouraging mutiny by those not predisposed to a dominant position. But, I hope we have progressed far enough that we can attempt to overcome these biases with reason and endeavor to live in a society not essentially based on the structure of gangs of roving gorillas.

Ludibrium as weapon

2011-04-19T13:11:00.000-07:00

Filed under the plans I approve of dept.:

In summary, several Chinese language, but overseas based, websites have been blogging on the creation of a ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China. [...] The blogs and websites themselves are largely invisible to ordinary Chinese as the Great Firewall keeps them out, but they can be seen by the security agencies, who have been swift to react. The organizers, whoever and wherever they are, have repeatedly called on people to gather in a range of popular and public areas in the centre of major cities across China – shopping malls and university campuses – and go for a stroll every Sunday afternoon to call for minor political change. These public areas are, at that time of day, normally filled with young people and out-of-town domestic tourists, all now potential ‘protesters’. Now, because of the number of competing and overlapping security agencies, there is a lot of pressure on the local commanders to make some arrests and to show some success, but there are no genuine protesters, just some bemused local tourists and a lot of foreign journalists. [...] At the same time, the organisers have used a wide range of popular and politically ‘safe’ words to use as code words [...] These keywords get picked up by the censors, and all web and SMS traffic using them gets shut down or blocked – Jasmine itself is of course popular in Chinese culture and widely used in branding, but sites using ‘Jasmine’ in their copy, however innocuous, are blocked - with real-world social, political and economic consequences.
source

The use of a fake revolution to foment a real revolution reminds me of the Rosicrucians, who never existed. The original documents attributed to the Rosicrucians were later claimed, by their author, to be a hoax. By introducing a secret society so desirable, pretenders were attracted, who then claimed to be members and inducted new members who weren't in on the fact. These members inducted new members, and soon a set of completely different secret societies were formed with the same name and claiming the same lineage. But, unlike the rosicrucian ludibrium, this plan requires the paranoid chinese secret police to play their part -- which is to say it's only useful against a government that is extremely paranoid about the possibility of revolution.

While there are innocents getting hurt because of this, it's not comparable to a revolution or an invasion -- or even a real protest. Nobody's bringing in tanks.

That said, this still brings up the question of memetic warfare. This is not (as far as I can tell) a CIA operation, though the CIA does things like this fairly frequently. This appears to be a psyops project being performed by individuals, which is why it appeared on the globalguerillas blog. It remains to be seen whether or not this is effective, though as the comments thread indicated, the chinese economy is suffering, which may be related to the blocking of keywords associated with otherwise profitable things. But, it's the first example I've seen of a memetic warfare operation performed by individuals upon an entire government and its auxiliary support mechanisms without requiring budget with some level of success.

Edit: China is clearly no stranger to the infictive in politics. NB: Since I do not live in China, I cannot make arguments about quality of life issues there, so I do not have any confidently-held quality judgments about their methods in terms of the perspective of a citizen. I am sure that many chinese citizens think that the united states is a horrible totalitarian government and that US citizens are much less 'free' than they are. I don't know who discovered water, but it wasn't the fish.

Words that don't mean what you think they mean, part 1: outlaw

2011-04-03T06:37:00.000-07:00

The word: Outlaw
What you think it means: criminal
What it really means: someone immune to prosecution

Wait, what?

In historical legal systems, an outlaw is a person declared as outside the protection of the law. In pre-modern societies, this takes the burden of active persecution of a criminal from the authorities. Instead, the criminal is withdrawn all legal protection, so that anyone is legally empowered to persecute or kill them. Outlawry was thus one of the harshest penalties in the legal system, since the outlaw had only himself to protect himself, but it also required no enforcement on the part of the justice system. In early Germanic law, the death penalty is conspicuously absent, and outlawing is the most extreme punishment, presumably amounting to a death sentence in practice.
Source: wikipedia

In other words, an outlaw is someone who has committed a crime so heinous that even the people who hunt down criminals for a living no longer want anything to do with him. They declare him an outlaw, and so not only do they no longer need to prosecute him for further crimes, but they don't have to defend him from other criminals. By reserving this treatment for only the most dangerous of criminals, it simultaneously almost guarantees that the outlaw will be killed (either by law-abiding vigilantes or by other criminals), and also reinforces the idea within the culture that a lawless society is dangerous (because everyone who is an outlaw is a particularly dangerous criminal).

Two varieties of anarchist sentiment

2011-03-30T06:47:00.000-07:00

There are many ways to categorize anarchist groups, and many systems of categorization are in conflict. This will not be covered in this blog post, because not only am I not an expert in the history of internal ideological schisms within anarchist philosophy, but I am more or less uninterested in the politics of anti-politics. Instead, I am categorizing anarchist sentiment more grossly, into two large chunks.

There is one type of anarchist who believes that anarchy is something to be achieved. Maybe it's something that was lost in the genesis of the first state. Maybe it's something that has never been tried, or never been attempted seriously. Maybe it's something that has been tried but has been crushed by statist forces external to itself. The bottom line is that this type of anarchist considers anarchy to be something that isn't, but should be.

There is another type, far less visible. This type considers anarchy to be omnipresent already, at the base of things. All states are structures built on top of anarchy, and obscuring it. The goal of this type of anarchist is not to bring anarchy into being but to make people aware that they have always lived in anarchy, and that this isn't a bad thing. This type of anarchist sentiment is in a sense even more subversive, and even more dangerous to the state. The first type can be pitted against the state in a kind of imaginary war of ideas, and can be manipulated to give statism even more ideological power; the stereotype of a bomb-throwing adolescent lifestyle anarchist is always accepting the existence of the state and by working against it reinforces the sense of its power. A state, however, cannot effectively fight a war of ideas against those who believe the state itself to be imaginary, nor can it effectively be seen to fight against a system of which it is a small part.

For a long time, I thought the second type was extremely rare, rather than merely underrepresented. Today, I saw a quote on the liberationfrequency tumblr:

Anarchy is every time you share a stick of gum. Every time you help someone with their homework, or with their bags. Every time you hold a door for a stranger. Every wallet returned to the lost and found. Every borrowed cup of sugar. Every driveway you helped shovel. Anarchy is people helping people not for the glory but for each other. Anarchy is for the people by the people; not this ballot-box nonsense. Anarchy is you and me... on the purest of all levels.

This is very much the essence of the second type, which I term epistemic anarchy. You could consider epistemic anarchy a subset of voluntarism, but it differs in that it talks about what is rather that what should be.

Keep in mind that this is also a key difference between Gnostic and mainstream Christianity, between Zen Buddhism and several other flavours, and between many forms of mysticism and those traditions that present the same texts and myth systems to mundanes. The difference is between going to heaven if you are good and being good in order to remember that you are already in heaven. The former makes people fairly easy to manipulate, but the latter is more difficult to impart to people. Mystical traditions often actively turn down the induction of people who they don't think are capable of fundamentally grasping the latter, in order to avoid the mutation of their tradition.

Energy drinks and I^2

2011-03-15T12:58:00.000-07:00

Much has been made (mostly by Malcolm Gladwell, which isn't necessarily a stunning endorsement) of the connection between the enlightenment and the broad use of coffee in Europe. Coffee houses were about the only social gathering place where people were taking stimulants rather than depressants, and so they were extremely productive intellectual centers. This post will not discuss the social aspect except in passing, but I will be spending part of it claiming that energy drinks are better than coffee so I figured I'd get that out of the way. (Full disclosure: I hate coffee with a passion, so I am biased.)

Today, the social aspect of coffee houses has atrophied. Coffee houses aren't really meetingplaces anymore. The same amount of socializing taking place in coffee houses is taking place on the internet, and most of the socializing in coffee houses takes place on the internet anyway. All we have that remains is the caffeine, and that is now taken care of by other methods.

What do energy drinks have that coffee does not? I'm not counting things like b vitamins or taurine, or horny goat weed, or any of the other various and sundry ingredients that are hyped. Most of them don't have well-documented results, and they all balk in nootropic function in comparison to something else that's common to all energy drinks: a wide variety of types, most of them disgusting.

Bear with me here. There has been a lot of talk (and several seemingly legitimate studies) about the correlation between intelligence and novelty-seeking behavior. Most of the people who know the difference between correlation and causation seem to assume that intelligence causes novelty-seeking, and perhaps it does. I would go for the opposite explanation, however: those behaviors which we consider intelligent are largely the product of a novelty-seeking disposition. Someone can be extremely innately intelligent, skilled, and clever, and they can still be so stuck on a single model of the world that they avoid any activity that we'd consider the hallmark of a great intellect. Someone can be innately fairly dull, but through a drive to learn about the world come off as intelligent. One of the things an area like energy drinks encourages is novelty seeking behavior.

The likelihood of the first energy drink someone tries being tasty is minimal, but the likelihood of it being highly caffeinated is great. The moment someone tastes it, two things happen: he realizes that it's disgusting, and he is rewarded for trying it. He may not want to try that particular variety again for a while, but there are plenty on the shelf, and when he tries the next one the same thing happens. By exploring the many varieties of energy drinks he is performing operant conditioning on himself to become a novelty-seeker.

From what I understand, this was something like the state of coffee houses in London in the nineteenth century -- most of the coffee was terrible but still caffeinated, and you had to do a lot of exploring of the city to find a coffee house that served edible coffee. This may partially account for the success of Babbage and Lovelace, among others.

Increasing Signal to Noise Ratio in Markov Chain Output

2011-03-01T10:07:00.000-08:00

The usual way of doing a markov chain bot (first order) is that for all pairs of tokens p and q, the likelihood of p following q is:

P(q|p)
P(p)

This gives us a probability graph that looks more or less like a line. The most common pairs are up top, and the least common are at the bottom. This is actually directly equivalent to the inverted graph of information entropy, where the least common would be up top and the most common at the bottom.

The problem is that in language, the most common sequences tend to be meaningless (or exist only for redundancy). Search engines filter these sequences out because they do nothing but make more work for systems that operate based on finding the sequences closest to unique. The outliers on the other side tend also to be meaningless, for a different reason: they tend to be errors. So, the optimal signal is actually of middling entropy.

How do we make bots that will (without special-case coding) automatically avoid succumbing to the usual exploits (such as the twelve year old troll who spams it in PM with the token “mantits” repeated eleven thousand times)? How do we reliably and elegantly improve the signal to noise ratio?

If you try to graph how likely something is to be signal-heavy in such a system, you’ll probably get a parabola that peaks about where the graph of probability and the graph of entropy cross. The goal is to make the graph of this weighted markov probability (which might be called cooked-model probability) quickly approach that of the signal. The easiest way to do this is, rather than incrementing both p and q when p follows q, doing the following:

P_n(q|p) <- P_n-1(q|p) + ( (P_n-1(q|p) )² - (P_n-1(p) ⁾² )^1/2

P_n-1(p)

P_n-1(q|p)

P_n(p) <- P_n-1(p) + 1

As should be clear, the graph will rapidly approach resemblance to the signal graph, and it will slow its mutation as it gets closer to the signal graph, for a known sequence of tokens. This means that such a bot should be capable of operating at a similar signal to noise ratio as some standard with a much smaller training input set.

Libertarian distcomp projects: solutions in search of problems

2011-02-23T11:22:00.000-08:00

There have been several projects floating around involving distributed computing in a non-charity context. Unlike the charity-type distcomp projects like SETI@Home, distributed.net, Folding@Home, and friends, people who donate computing resources to these get something in return. The general form for this is: a token has the value of a certain number of operations, and also a value in some real-world currency. Someone can spend tokens in exchange for processing, or exchange them with real money, and people whose machines perform processing get tokens in exchange. It seems very straightforward.

The problem is, it's entirely useless.

The kinds of problems that can be trivially distributed are few and far between. There's cryptanalysis, protein folding, gene sequencing, the kind of rank-computing that gets done at google's data centers on hadoop... Most of the CPU-intensive tasks that one can list off are either also very data-intensive (huge data sets are easier to handle in-house than to send flying across the world, especially when the smallest chunks you can deal with are a couple hundred megs) or of no interest to anyone outside of academia (and thus worth very little money) -- in other words, video encoding and finding primes are out of the picture. We're left with things like cryptanalysis, which is somewhat problematic since the people willing to spend money to bruteforce encryption are probably either spooks or crooks (and the spooks have their own machines for this kind of thing).

I'd absolutely love to run this kind of system, because I'm wasting plenty of cycles at home and I'm not getting any richer. If any of you can think of a problem that would be a good fit for this solution, *please* let me know. I'll give you a million free cycles on my new distcomp network.

Winners of the second annual No Budget Film Contest

2011-02-20T05:30:00.000-08:00

First place:

One Last Shot, submitted by Stan Wankowski

Second place:

Inside the Extra's Studio, submitted by Gtron Sistem

Unpatched exploits in the human biocomputer

2011-01-14T10:14:00.000-08:00

bi
Source

Too bad they don't follow it

2010-12-18T06:28:00.001-08:00

Turns out that the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (whose capacity for skeptical inquiry has historically left me unimpressed) actually has a set of guidelines for proper skeptical criticism, and it's not bullshit!

During CSICOP’s first decade of existence, members of the Executive Council often found themselves devoting most of their available time to damage control-precipitated by the careless remarks of fellow skeptics-instead of toward the common cause of explaining the skeptical agenda.

Unfortunately, at this time, there are no courses on the proper way to criticize paranormal claims. So far as I know, no manuals or books or rules are currently available to guide us. Until such courses and guide books come into being, what can we do to ensure that our criticisms are both effective and responsible?

I would be irresponsible if I told you I had an easy solution. The problem is complicated and there are no quick fixes. But I do believe we all could improve our contributions to responsible criticism by keeping a few principles always in mind.

We can make enormous improvements in our collective and individual efforts by simply trying to adhere to those standards that we profess to admire and that we believe that many peddlers of the paranormal violate. If we envision ourselves as the champions of rationality, science, and objectivity, then we ought to display these very same qualities in our criticism. Just by trying to speak and write in the spirit of precision, science, logic, and rationality-those attributes we supposedly admire-we would raise the quality of our critiques by at least one order of magnitude.

The failure to consistently live up to these standards exposes us to a number of hazards. We can find ourselves going beyond the facts at hand. We may fail to communicate exactly what we intended. We can confuse the public about what skeptics are trying to achieve. We can unwittingly put paranormal proponents in the position of the underdogs and create sympathy for them. And, as I already mentioned, we can make the task much more difficult for other skeptics.

What, then, can skeptics do to upgrade the quality of their criticism? What follows are just a few suggestions. It is hoped they will stimulate further thought and discussion.
Be prepared.

Good criticism is a skill that requires practice, work, and level-headedness. Your response to a sudden challenge is much more likely to be appropriate if you have already anticipated similar challenges. Try to prepare in advance effective and short answers to those questions you are most likely to be asked. Be ready to answer why skeptical activity is important, why people should listen to your views, why false beliefs can be harmful, and the many similar questions that invariably are raised. A useful project would be to compile a list of the most frequently occurring questions along with possible answers.

Whenever possible try your ideas out on friends and “enemies” before offering them in the public arena. An effective exercise is to rehearse your arguments with fellow skeptics. Some of you can take the role of the psychic claimants while others play the role of critics. And, for more general preparation, read books on critical thinking, effective writing, and argumentation.

Clarify your objectives.

Before you try to cope with a paranormal claim, ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish. Are you trying to release pent-up resentment? Are you trying to belittle your opponent? Are you trying to gain publicity for your viewpoint? Do you want to demonstrate that the claim lacks reasonable justification? Do you hope to educate the public about what constitutes adequate evidence? Often our objectives, upon examination, turn out to be mixed. And, especially when we act impulsively, some of our objectives conflict with one another.

The difference between short-term and long-term objectives can be especially important. Most skeptics, I believe, would agree that our long-term goal is to educate the public so that it can more effectively cope with various claims. Sometimes this long-range goal is sacrificed because of the desire to expose or debunk a current claim.

Part of clarifying our objectives is to decide who our audience is. Hard-nosed, strident attacks on paranormal claims rarely change opinions, but they do stroke the egos of those who are already skeptics. Arguments that may persuade the readers of the National Enquirer may offend academics and important opinion-makers.

Try to make it clear that you are attacking the claim and not the claimant. Avoid, at all costs, creating the impression that you are trying to interfere with someone’s civil liberties. Do not try to get someone fired from his or her job. Do not try to have courses dropped or otherwise be put in the position of advocating censorship. Being for rationality and reason should not force us into the position to seeming to be against academic freedom and civil liberties.

Do your homework.

Again, this goes hand in hand with the advice about being prepared. Whenever possible, you should not try to counter a specific paranormal claim without getting as many of the relevant facts as possible. Along the way, you should carefully document your sources. Do not depend upon a report in the media either for what is being claimed or for facts relevant to the claim. Try to get the specifics of the claim directly from the claimant.

Do not go beyond your level of competence.

No one, especially in our times, can credibly claim to be an expert on all subjects. Whenever possible, you should consult appropriate experts. We, understandably, are highly critical of paranormal claimants who make assertions that are obviously beyond their competence. We should be just as demanding on ourselves. A critic’s worst sin is to go beyond the facts and the available evidence.

In this regard, always ask yourself if you really have something to say. Sometimes it is better to remain silent than to jump into an argument that involves aspects that are beyond your present competence. When it is appropriate, do not be afraid to say, “I don't know.”

Let the facts speak for themselves.

If you have done your homework and have collected an adequate supply of facts, the audience rarely will need your help in reaching an appropriate conclusion. Indeed, your case is made much stronger if the audience is allowed to draw its own conclusions from the facts. Say that Madame X claims to have psychically located Mrs. A’s missing daughter and you have obtained a statement from the police to the effect that her contributions did not help. Under these circumstances it can be counterproductive to assert that Madame X lied about her contribution or that her claim was “fraudulent.” For one thing, Madame X may sincerely, if mistakenly, believe that her contributions did in fact help. In addition, some listeners may be offended by the tone of the criticism and become sympathetic to Madame X. However, if you simply report what Madame X claimed along with the response of the police, you not only are sticking to the facts, but your listeners will more likely come the appropriate conclusion.

Be precise.

Good criticism requires precision and care in the use of language. Because, in challenging psychic claims, we are appealing to objectivity and fairness, we have a special obligation to be as honest and accurate in our own statements as possible. We should take special pains to avoid making assertions about paranormal claims that cannot be backed up with hard evidence. We should be especially careful in this regard when being interviewed by the media. Every effort should be made to ensure that the media understand precisely what we are and are not saying.

Use the principle of charity.

I know that many of my fellow critics will find this principle to be unpalatable. To some, the paranormalists are the “enemy,” and it seems inconsistent to lean over backward to give them the benefit of the doubt. But being charitable to paranormal claims is simply the other side of being honest and fair. The principle of charity implies that, whenever there is doubt or ambiguity about a paranormal claim, we should try to resolve the ambiguity in favor of the claimant until we acquire strong reasons for not doing so. In this respect, we should carefully distinguish between being wrong and being dishonest.

We often can challenge the accuracy or validity of a given paranormal claim. But rarely are we in a position to know if the claimant is deliberately lying or is self-deceived. Furthermore, we often have a choice in how to interpret or represent an opponent’s arguments. The principle tell us to convey the opponent’s position in a fair, objective, and non-emotional manner.

Avoid loaded words and sensationalism.

All these principles are interrelated. The ones previous stated imply that we should avoid using loaded and prejudicial words in our criticisms. If the proponents happen to resort to emotionally laden terms and sensationalism, we should avoid stooping to their level. We should not respond in kind.

This is not a matter of simply turning the other cheek. We want to gain credibility for our cause. In the short run, emotional charges and sensationalistic challenges might garner quickly publicity. But most of us see our mission as a long-run effort. We would like to persuade the media and the public that we have a serious and important message to get across. And we would like to earn their their trust as a credible and reliable source. Such a task requires always keeping in mind the scientific principles and standards of rationality and integrity that we would like to make universal.

Source

As readers of this blog should be aware, this is precisely the kind of thing I've advised for researchers of the paranormal and the fortean. The main difference here is the assumption made by the author of this text that those being debunked are wrong (and that following these rules, consequently, will prove them wrong without giving the impression that they didn't get a fair trial), whereas a good anomalist will strive to be agnostic about the claim being investigated.

Many of the guidelines noted above pertain to reigning in the ego, which is of tantamount importance to anyone who would like to get to the truth (rather than simply convince other people that their existing worldview is correct).

It is telling that these guidelines have until now not been distributed to the Skeptical Inquirer; I personally could not tell you whether the problems I've had with the methods of CSICOP have been due to initiated members with access to this document or with amateur-types reading the SI and being over-anxious about debunking (except in the case of Mr Randi, whose capacity for reason seems terribly impaired even in the most favourable light), but so long as this document is followed by CSICOP members, I cannot foresee having any problems with them.

The 2011 No-Budget Film Contest

2010-12-14T15:39:00.000-08:00

In an effort to fight back against what I saw as the disgusting substitution of money for taste in both big-budget and independent films, last year I held the first annual No-Budget Film Contest. This was a success, and we received two wonderful submissions. With slight clarifications and modifications made to the rules, I announce the second annual contest.

Rules:
1) Your film must be yours. I won't accept mashups of other people's video (well... I might, but you will have to impress the judges a lot more). Likewise, don't do anything illegal in the films, or pornographic -- I don't want to get in trouble.
2) You must not buy or rent anything specifically for this film (with an exception for a camera, if you don't own one). You also cannot have any paid actors. In other words, no budget allowed.
3) You may do it in live action or animation. Really, you can do it with any method you choose.
4) Submissions start January 23 and end February 13. If you send your submission in outside of this time slot, it might not be considered. You do not need to make the film during this period; any films you have made with no budget and have not yet submitted are applicable.
5) I will announce the winners by March 15. First prize will be $5 transferred via paypal. The top three submissions (judged any way I like) will be posted on this blog, and will get the titles of Best No-Budget Film of 2011, Second Best No-Budget Film of 2011, and Third Best No-Budget Film of 2011. They will also get a picture of a golden coin trophy.

How to submit:
Upload your finished films to youtube or vimeo (or some other streaming video site), and send the link to nobudgetsubmissions@hakware.cjb.net. The films may be of any length, and you can enter as many times as you like.

You can see last year's winners here.

The Zalgo Continuum

2010-12-14T14:58:00.000-08:00

Presumably, you have all heard of ZALGO, the 4chan meme (or out-of-control viral marketing test project) who lu^rk_{s beh}ind t^{he wa}_lls has been making the rounds for quite some time. The popularity of internet memes is difficult to attribute, but I will make the argument that this one has survived because it neatly integrates two other long-lived ideas: the cosmic horror and the cosmic schmuck.

Cosmic horror (and its poster-thing, H.P. Lovecraft's posthumous flagship Cthulu) has seen an upshot in popularity lately, perhaps piggybacking on uncertain times or future shock or the generally negative social and political vibes floating around. Whatever the reason, analysts (including Lovecraft himself) generally agree on one thing: cosmic horror derives its power not from the uncanny or from the unknown but from the unknowable. Cosmic horror is a recollectivisation of existential angst: not only are you insignificant (everyone is) and your actions meaningless (everything is), but there are things just beyond your reach that are so utterly alien and incomprehensible that they can destroy your mind just by daring to think about them. Not only that, but even on their much higher scale of existence they too are insignificant and their actions meaningless. Furthermore, cosmic horror is epistemic horror: each of the scholar-protagonists, after great efforts, briefly part the veil of Maya and have a short peek out of Plato's cave, and they quickly realize that everything they ever knew (and everything they ever could know) is wrong. Cosmic horror is, to the individual, what quantum mechanics and relativity were to the entirety of theoretical physics: a fundamental paradigm shift so extreme that it invalidated all bodies of speculation into its domain that had previously existed.

On the flipside, you have the cosmic schmuck. This idea, put forth first (as far as I can tell) by Robert Anton Wilson, is a bit more lighthearted. The cosmic schmuck has a completely wrong model of the universe, unknowingly. He doesn't know that his model is wrong because he hasn't tested the parts of it that are wrong. His quality of life may or may not be affected by the way in which his model of the universe is skewed, but he can't determine that because he doesn't know that it's skewed. The cosmic schmuck can become less of a cosmic schmuck by assuming that he is more of a cosmic schmuck than he thinks he is, because the mark of a cosmic schmuck is his unfounded confidence in his own model of reality. While Wilson attends to the aspect of introspective and epistemic terror involved in becoming less of a cosmic schmuck in Cosmic Trigger I, one still gets the general idea that becoming less of a cosmic schmuck is a good idea -- and presumably it was for Wilson, since he survived it with much of his sanity intact and made a pretty penny selling a book based on his experiences in seeking the Real Shit (which he insists is both plural and mutable).

Zalgo, given its origins (or at least the petri dish from which it eventually sprang, after a long incubation period), is firmly grounded in humour. It is more specifically grounded in what Wilson called the 'put-on', and what the internet calls 'trolling'. The creepypasta, taking copious obvious inspiration from cosmic horror and the Lovecraft style, purports to be true, or at least honest. Those who take it seriously (I am not sure there are many cases of this level of fail, Doctor) are prime subjects for ridicule, or at least identifiable as good targets for more put-ons. Those who pick up on it can play along or repeat the gag in another context. But, arguably, this meme has a ha-ha-only-serious nature embedded in the subtext. Cosmic horror is here in a far more pure form than that of your standard Lovecraft tie-in, and arguably in even more pure a form than the original works, which were still put forth in bindings marked 'fiction'. The Strange Times are upon us, and it is increasingly difficult to determine whether or not any given thing popping up on the internet is plausible, let alone legitimate. Zalgo reminds us that just beyond our mundane sphere of attention lurks things so alien that we cannot imagine them, and that even our most cherished icons of purity are not safe from the unknown and unknowable.

Skepticism and the Sincere Anomalist

2010-12-14T14:52:00.000-08:00

The typical group 'investigating' a claim of the paranormal (or anything that could be considered 'high strangeness') is well-known to everyone: half the group is the Mulder camp, and half is the Scully camp. In real life, these two types don't get along as well as they do on television, but they exhibit the same characteristics: the Mulder group insists, regardless of evidence to the contrary, that the phenomenon in question is something strange (if not completely supernatural), while the Scully group insists, regardless of evidence to the contrary, that there is a 'rational' explanation (where 'rational' here goes by some definition known only to pseudoskeptics and kept far away from any apparent consistency). But, again unlike television, these two types (both together and on their own) are almost completely incapable of understanding anything legitimately outside of their existing scope of knowledge: they are both varieties of true believers.

In the fortean community, the Scully type is typically called the 'pseudoskeptic'. This is a reactionary type, living to 'debunk' anything that runs counter to his or her existing model of reality. The 'debunking', upon close inspection, loses its thin pretense of rationality and is exposed as a simple mammalian response to threat. In the case of the pseudoskeptic, the threat is typically conflict with whatever they learned in high school science class, and it highly resembles the response of a religious fanatic when dogma is directly conflicted.

In the skeptic community, the Mulder type is typically called a 'woo'. This type is also a reactionary type, living to 'prove' the existence of something that runs counter to the consensus model of reality. This 'proof', upon close inspection, loses its thin pretense of truth-seeking and is exposed as an application of wishful thinking on a large scale: the 'woo' wants to believe, and will ignore any evidence to the contrary.

These two types are actually not terribly dissimilar. They are both true believers, living to validate their own personal views of the universe. The main difference is that the pseudoskeptic has a model of the universe very close to that of the consensus, while the woo has a model of the universe that is very different. It doesn't matter whether or not the models are correct or have predictive value; truth ceases to matter once belief takes the stage. Despite the cries of the pseudoskeptic, neither of these types are skeptical, either. The skeptic actively questions both assumptions and claims, while the pseudoskeptic merely 'debunks' them.

Fortean anomalism is on the fringe of known science, and can be expected to stay there indefinitely; anomalists seek the fringe of the known, and inhabit the borderland between the mundane and the batshit darkness just beyond it. This doesn't make skepticism less important: it makes skepticism more important, and makes belief even more dangerous. There is a tendency for the mind to see what it expects; the mental model affects perception as much as perception affects the mental model. Since the anomalist deals with the unknown, the tendency to see the expected (be it a weather balloon or a piladean missile defense system) has the ability to completely incapacitate the anomalist's ability to see what's really there. Carl Sagan once said that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", but that is no more an excuse for pseudoskepticism than it is for woo: the anomalist seeks what evidence exists, and if the anomalist is handicapped by a need to see something either more or less extraordinary than that which is there, who will find such evidence?

Nobody likes a golden age

2010-11-20T16:43:00.000-08:00

If ideas spread like viruses, pop-culture is like those freezers that the CDC keeps full of plague bacteria. The past is full of interesting sights and sounds... most of the time. Some of the most information-rich stuff is camp material, but not for the reasons you might think. Camp material is bizarre, which means that it's novel -- and novelty, you should remember, is information. But, camp is unique in that it's bizarre now but wasn't bizarre when it was most popular. Camp is full of information that was once relatively ubiquitous but has since been lost to time; it grows organically out of the most volatile and virile ideas, and represents a snapshot of a mutation of normalcy.

When you look at any 'golden age', you'll see some of its ideas all around you. That's why it's golden: it had an inordinate quantity of good (or at least sustainable) ideas. Golden ages also tend to be (or tend to portray themselves as being, or tend to be portrayed as being) happy times. All together, this makes golden ages boring. There is no camp; there is merely an overflow of kitsch and cheese. Camp is spontaneously creative as a baseline; like the flu, it conquers half the population regardless of immunizations, disappears after a few weeks, and then comes back in a nearly unrecognizable new strain the following year. Cheese, on the other hand, lacks the soul and vitality; it is merely dated kitsch, and ages far slower. Happy (or rather, contented) people don't feel the need to replace their stable status quo with the kind of destructive fashions that mutate into camp. While some 'golden ages' have, due to historical events causing sudden shifts in the perception of acceptability attributed to the ideas from which they sprung, become camp material (the golden age of science fiction in the 1930s comes to mind, as does the golden age of comics), as a rule they become as boring as the reign of Augustus.

Is it worth it? People are happy (or, at least, content). Things are stable.

But, in addition to boring the living hell out of whoever is reading about them, golden ages typically bring bunkum to the table aside from new (for the period) status quos and zombie-twinkie-kitsch that won't die. The creation of a system that isn't replaced for a thousand years can be interpreted as the creation of a good, stable system that 'just works', or it can be interpreted as the creation of a system that, regardless of how good it is, manages to stifle competition and brings a thousand years of stagnation in that area when ten will do.

Special Report

2010-11-20T10:12:00.000-08:00

The Venus Defense

2010-11-18T07:16:00.000-08:00

Pseudo-Skeptic: You didn’t see a UFO. What you saw was the planet Venus.

Contactee: The planet Venus is not covered with flashing lights. It is not twice the apparent size of the moon. It does not move faster than a jet.

Pseudo-Skeptic: How would you know what the planet Venus looks like? You’re just a crazy who thinks he sees UFOs.

Infictive infections and working subversion

2010-06-18T14:27:00.000-07:00

An excellent post by Deloras at Chaos Marxism has sparked much discussion, and I suppose I should probably expand and clarify my $0.02 on the subject.

We live mostly not in reality, but in fictional projections of our models of reality. Whenever we make a conscious decision, we are consulting models of reality formed from several sources of information:
1) previous direct experience in analogous situations
2) indirect experience of analogous situations (stories)
3) the interaction between existing models and new experiences (received directly or indirectly) as they interacted at the time of absorption

Now, our models occasionally reject direct experience that conflicts completely with our models. This is useful; our sense organs produce spurious noise much of the time, and so it is very important in a life-or-death situation to have the kind of brain function that will tell you that the shape in the corner of the room is NOT a ghost or a shroud-eater or some even-scarier beast you have been raised to think does not exist, since otherwise you may run into the mouth of a more immediate danger while fleeing a chimera. The veto mechanism can be abused, as is seen in practice by many highly dogmatic systems of thought (obvious examples include the creationists, the Randites, the Randiites, the lifestyle canon-marxists, apple fans, microsoft fans, linux fans, breatharians, and fluffybunny pagan types, but pretty much any subculture with a name consists partially if not mostly of people who will ignore reality that conflicts with their pet models).

There are other ways these systems can be hacked, though. Robert Anton Wilson's epistemological pan-agnosticism, like some less-metaphorical Neo, tries to save people from their own nervous system firewalls by demonstrating how much nonsense they can generate. Unfortunately, dogmatic memeplexes have some pretty intense and potent self-defense systems. Cognitive dissonance may not be a good route either. While I am all for people freeing their minds, a grass-roots free-your-mind movement is probably destined for as much success as the yippie movement's grassroots free-your-mind movement; trickle-up enlightenment is likely to be blocked subconsciously by the < href="http://irreality.me/x/src/127689214971.png">memeplexes that have already infiltrated the highest levels of society. On the other hand, the most active adepts in today's world have already realized how to get people to suspend disbelief long enough to feed them autotoxic memeplexes.

Everyone partakes of fiction, more or less. Fiction provides a language in which the shorthand forms of the everyday umwelt can be slipped to the uninitiated, and designed in such a way that subversions should slip under the radar. All communication is subversion in a sense, and the spectacle can be infected in such a way that it will promote the manipulation of reality tunnels. Like any other living creature, the spectacle will do anything to survive, or die trying. The infectious detournment of fiction made possible by the extensive classification by tropers of the sub-liminal language of modern narrative will not only affect fiction but affect reality.

There are side notes to this, which might be best explored later. I will note them now:
1) One can utilize tvtropes outside of the standard narrative hypersigil workings, since these documents show correlations between entities, qualities, and rituals, as understood under the radar by the hoi polloi.
2) Fiction affects reality through methods not directly mediated by humans. The most obvious example is google-bombing, which on a much more subtle level any piece of fiction that is archived by a search engine as sophisticated as google's will end up doing to some extent -- slightly modifying the results of searches, ad targeting, and even translations.
3) TvTropes itself is highly mutable. Any tvtropes-inspired subversion that gains notability will eventually modify tvtropes itself, and even non-notable narratives can subvert pieces of the narrative spectacle.

i.i.kuse: a toy conlang with postfix notation

2010-06-08T06:27:00.000-07:00

I find constructed languages like Lojban and Ithkuil terribly interesting, but they are a bit too complex for me to actually pick up. So, being a programmer and a fan of FORTH, I decided to make a toy constructed language combining postfix notation and predicate logic.

The grammar here is very simple. There are two types of words: verbs and non-verbs. Verbs always start with a K, and non-verbs never start with a K. Verbs in general describe a relationship between the last non-verb said before the verb and the rest of the non-verbs. Verbs are of the form:

Argument count prefix

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

root (ends with a vowel)

suffix (optional)

n	s	k
past	present	future

Non-verbs include some pronouns:

i - it or itself
me - I/me/myself
vi - he/she/herself/himself

Some basic verb roots:

a - belongs to the set [last arg]
la - has attribute [last arg]
lo - group args together (in case something needs more than five args)
di - constitutes meaning of [last arg] (for defining)
sa - goes to [last arg]
so - comes from [last arg] or is caused by [last arg]
si - sees [last arg]
se - says [last arg]
du - makes [last arg]

Pronunciation guide:

a	o in sOck
i	ee in sEE
o	ow in lOW
u	ew in dEW
e	ay in sAY
l	l in Lamb
d	d in Dog
s	s in Saw
m	m in Man
k	k in Kick
v	v in Voice

Note: doubled vowels and doubled consonants should be separated by a glottal stop, designated by a period.

Example sentences:

me i kusin - I saw it
vi i kuduk - s/he will make it
me vi i kudun kusis - I see that s/he made it
vi me vi i kudun kusis vi i kudun kudis kuses - s/he says that the fact that I saw that s/he made it means that s/he made it
me vi i.i.kuse kolos kases kalas koas - s/he and I belong to the set of i.i.kuse speakers.
me vi i.i.kuse kolos kasen kalas koas - s/he and I belong to the set of former i.i.kuse speakers.
me vi i.i.kuse kolos kases kalas koan - s/he and I used to belong to the set of i.i.kuse speakers.

The Culture Bomb

2010-05-19T19:59:00.000-07:00

NB: this was mined with minimal changes from a thread

I may or may not have come up with this idea. I suspect I may have stolen it from GM through crypomnesia, prediction, wanking, following the same line of thought, or quantum telepathy dongs.

You all might be aware of the idea of memebombs. I frame memebombs in a slightly different structure than the Discordian Power Elite (whoever they are), so I'll summarize my model: you've got at least one memeplex (a bunch of ideas that play nice together) and one of them is probably dominant most of the time. A memebomb is a short slogan that targets common dominant memeplexes and subverts them in such a way that they either self-annihilate, become patently absurd, or mutate into something else entirely (ideally). You more or less want to target a memeplex and get behind its defenses, and then poke it until it explodes, loses an eye, or grows a new eye. In the BIP metaphor, a memebomb blows up a wall, leaving shrapnel everywhere to use for remodeling.

Alright. But there are a couple problems with memebombs. One problem is that, being short slogans, one can recognize them for what they are more often and just block them out. Another is that they only target one memeplex -- if you hit the dominant one, the next most dominant will probably try to take over, and if you hit a non-dominant one it may just give the others more power over the behavior of the person. Three, there's only so much distribution it can get before being subverted itself. Four, the form tends to make people think that anything short and clever-sounding counts as a memebomb, which is why the SOMA is full of dreck.

Alright. So, what's a culture bomb? Well, a culture is more or less a whole ecosystem of memeplexes fed to children (and adults). A culture is somewhat like a genre in fiction -- a set of cliched yet not necessarily negative or counterfactual tropes (in this case, ideology or psychology tropes) that are often found together more or less for hysterical rasins (tradition or whatever). A culture bomb is the nonfiction equivalent of a deconstructor fleet, and the memebomb equivalent of a kiloton nuke full of anthrax and mercury. The culture bomb is a full work of fiction disguised as a genre piece that, hypersigil-like, subverts or mutates entire aspects of the culture of the target audience only after the reader has had enough time to finish it, chew on it, and recommend it to friends.

There are several possible media for culture bombs. I'll suggest a few I'm considering, along with pros and cons.

American comics
Pro: absurdly rich source of material to play with, some established names who might play along, already the home of plenty of successful hypersigils both accidental and on purpose
Con: difficult to get in on, big names (big red arrow pointing to you), still kinda fringe, ascended fanboys at the gates

Fanfiction
Pros: subverts an existing canon and promulgates your ideas in fanon if you're lucky, easy access to a reasonably wide audience, relative anonymity
Cons: thirteen year old girls aren't exactly the pinnacle of society, ideas may mutate to subvert your original intent or just sterilize it in derivative works, you need to be a fan to start out with, you have to write actually good fanfiction, anne rice might sue you

Webcomics
Pros: potentially huge audience, easily time-segmented so that people can be brought into the fold by fans before the intent is even fulfilled, potentially madly obsessive fans
Cons: may be even less mainstream than american comics, you need to be able to draw probably, everyone else had the same idea too after they made their blog and wiki and joined twitter

Imageboard:
Pro: tendency towards high-frequency high-feedback communication within an imageboard can refine ideas
Con: tendency towards high-frequency high-feedback communication within an imageboard can subvert and/or sterilize intent, tldr responses

Bonus: the idea of a culturebomb might itself be a culturebomb if introduced in the right context. I'm planning to work it into a later chapter of a story.

You might consider a number of existing phenomena (historically) to be culturebombs. In fact, particular ideas have drastically modified the cultures from which they were born, in absurd and unpredictable ways.

Examples:
* Nuclear weapons -- caused the cold war, the idea of mutually assured destruction, deterrent-based warfare, "purity of essence"
* The holy trinity -- people can be monotheists and polytheists simultaenously by not knowing how to count, a man can be his own son and a ghost at the same time
* Darwinian natural selection -- led to memetics, was used as an excuse by businessmen and nazis, caused some groups of creationists to ask very strange questions about monkeys

Any piece of good art can be considered a culturebomb to some extent, but culturebombs are more often accidental. This might be because people are bad at making them on purpose, or it might be because people weren't thinking about them in a way that's conducive to making them. It might also be because no one wants to make them.

HyperText Poetry: The increasing egalitarianism of everything

2010-04-14T11:04:00.000-07:00

HyperText Poetry: The increasing egalitarianism of everything

The Winners of the First Annual No-Budget Film Contest

2010-03-15T13:18:00.000-07:00

Despite only getting two entries, this year was a tough race. The two are quite evenly matched, though fundamentally different. They actually represent what I was looking for when I came up with the contest, and so I'm happy with the results.

Because they are so evenly matched, the second place winner will also be getting third place.

So, without further ado, here are the results:

(b) I.T.C.H by Matthew Allen & The Skeleton Project
This is a great film, and although it drags slightly in the beginning, the plot and the visuals are top-notch. From what I understand, there is a higher resolution version available.

Zoetope by Alexa Burrell
This film is shorter, but the cinematography is great, as is the music. The dearth of lines allowed for better acting. Although a plot is hinted to, it is not clear.

Congratulations to both our winners.

The MIB and the frontal lobotomy

2010-01-31T12:01:00.000-08:00

For a few weeks, I have been trying to associate MIB report encounters with frontal lobotomies. Many of the indicators of MIB are shared with patients post-lobotomy: the dark glasses given to patients to hide the dark circles around their eyes, the disorientation and general strange activity, the thought disorder that the lobotomy was supposed to 'cure'... I thought for a while that at least some of the MIB encounters might in fact be encounters with wayward lobotomy patients, forming a basis at least until tulpic phenomena could take care of the rest. After all, the direct association with UFO activity was not a common thing until later.

I haven't come into contact with any convincing evidence either way, but I have run across a few fun facts:

Gray Barker's well-known published encounter happened in 1953, the year before the approval of chlorpromazine that marked the downturn in popularity of lobotomies

According to Wikipedia, modern sightings started in 1947. The first trans-orbital lobotomy was in 1946.

"Post-operative blunting of the personality, apathy, and irresponsibility are the rule rather than the exception. Other side effects include distractibility, childishness, facetiousness, lack of tact or discipline, and post-operative incontinence."^[42]

Now, what does that remind you of?

In terms of popular culture associations, I am certainly not the first to make a link. In the film Repo Man, the character J. Frank Parnell is closer to the typical representation of an MIB than the characters cast as MIBs -- he is a former government employee who defected and got (you guessed it) a lobotomy.

The 2010 No-Budget film contest

2009-12-19T15:51:00.000-08:00

It occurs to me that a lot of films don't actually benefit from a high budget, but actually end up being worse because of it. To test this hypothesis, I am starting the first annual No-Budget film competition.

Rules:
1) Your film must be yours. I won't accept mashups of other people's video (well... I might, but you will have to impress the judges a lot more). Likewise, don't do anything illegal in the films, or pornographic -- I don't want to get in trouble.
2) You must not buy or rent anything specifically for this film (with an exception for a camera, if you don't own one). You also cannot have any paid actors. In other words, no budget allowed.
3) You may do it in live action or animation. Really, you can do it with any method you choose.
4) Submissions start January 23 and end February 13. If you send your submission in outside of this time slot, it might not be considered.
5) I will announce the winners by March 15. First prize will be $5 transferred via paypal. The top three submissions (judged any way I like) will be posted on this blog, and will get the titles of Best No-Budget Film of 2010, Second Best No-Budget Film of 2010, and Third Best No-Budget Film of 2010. They will also get a picture of a golden coin trophy.

How to submit:
Upload your finished films to youtube or vimeo (or some other streaming video site), and send the link to nobudgetsubmissions@hakware.cjb.net. The films may be of any length, and you can enter as many times as you like.

Esotericism: A Pascal's Wager

2009-12-16T07:27:00.000-08:00

The Straussian theory says that for every text, there is an exoteric (or obvious) interpretation and an esoteric (non-obvious) explanation. Of course, postmodernism has taught us that we can interpret a text any way we damn well choose, given enough time and cleverness. So, there is a theoretically infinite number of esoteric interpretations of a given text.

If we assume that there is an intended esoteric meaning, then the text has an intended esoteric meaning with a given level of esotericism and an exoteric meaning that is likewise intended -- and most (if not all) meanings in-between will probably have been considered by the author. Since the number of intended meanings are finite and concentrated towards the most obvious, while the unintended meanings are more esoteric and infinite, the more esoteric an interpretation the less likely it is to be intended even in the context of an esoteric text.

Of course, esoteric meanings are important outside of author intent. For the most part, it has never really mattered what meanings were and were not intended within explicitly esoteric works, since the goal of esotericism itself is largely the multiplication of meanings within the interpreter. A pleasant experiment that is difficult to dogmatize is to use a text source from which there can be no intended meanings, and assume the existence of an esoteric meaning.

In the end, this is a dual form. One may assume that a given meaning is not intended and lose nothing, and one may assume that a given meaning is meaningful regardless of intent and likewise lose nothing.

The Shadow over Norway

2009-12-10T14:33:00.000-08:00

Fortean types have been busy recently, analyzing the odd spiral of light that greeted Obama's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. The skeptics (not in quotes here -- some are real), starting with Bad Astronomy, claimed that it was a broken missile; recently the russians have admitted to illegally launching a broken missile (presumably, Just To Watch It Die). Other groups have called BS on that explanation, and Moscow has its own weirdness to deal with.

To the man on the street, this may seem like a bit of a Warren Report situation -- the official explanation isn't convincing, but the alternates are pretty out-there too. Well, I have here harvested the diamonds in the ash of the other Oswalds, as far as I'm concerned.

First explanation: the Norway Spiral is a thoughtform created spontaneously by a society. Now, if you accept the idea of thoughtforms then this is a prime explanation; ghost rockets and foo fighters were all over Europe during the end of World War II, and between the ripening mainstream already primed for high weirdness and the paradoxical phenomenon of a charismatic and unusual leader being simultaneously getting the Nobel Peace Prize and requesting an increase in troops for fighting a war his nation is terribly divided about being meaningful in the first place, there would be little better place and time in the present day for such a strange phenomenon. The problem is, according to my personal sources, by and large Norway was not "shaken" by this -- most people were paying more attention to Obama's visit and speech than anything funny in the sky.

That said, as the tabloid headlines and tweets indicate, Norway is no longer the business of Norway alone. If we posit that this is some kind of supermassive tulpa shaped like a portal from an alternate dimension, then the manic tweeting and posting and discussion may in fact be changing the form of the entity all along -- overnight a relic of cold war paranoia becomes a real-life reenactment of a Half Life fan video. Let's hope that the men in gas masks don't show up, or else the market for crowbars may experience a bubble worse than that of zombie movies.

Explanation two: something DID come through the LHC, and it wasn't a seagull from the future with a baguette. Quantum mechanics is pretty odd, and non-expert interpretations (as well as some expert interpretations -- for instance, Max Planck's famous bout of solipsism) can be terribly misleading and inspiring. The LHC is running now, and so the God Particle hasn't succeeded in its Grandfather Paradox project -- about as doomed as Skynet, obviously -- but that doesn't mean the quantum weirdness ends here. Recently some scientists unaffiliated managed to teleport some information between atoms faster than the speed of light, supporting Bell's Theorem and paving the way for the now uber-hyped age of quantum encryption (which purportedly can be broken just by the potential for interception), and someone else worked out a model by which negative thermodynamic entropy could exist on the quantum scale and yet still uphold the second law of thermodynamics (hint: the negative entropy is required by the laws of physics to go back in time and erase itself). The LHC is trying to make black holes, and we have very little idea what that singularity (the physical one, not the Kurzweillian one) hides. If the LHC indeed let something through, there would be no real requirement (as far as I am aware) for it to be in the LHC -- nonlocal effects could have transferred it elsewhere.

My personal favourite, though, is partially of my own design. Recently, someone came up with the idea that the past crystallizes out of the future due to waveform collapses -- a waveform that has collapsed is an eigenstate, and so the future is solid in pattern. The 'present' is vaguely where most of the crystallization happens. Now, if some event happens in the near future (a singularity in any given sense, but screwing around with the still-liquid waveforms significantly and violently), the closer we get to it, the more obvious the manifestations of waves of high weirdness will be: things crystallize in a particular way under normal circumstances, but this event would be the quantum equivalent of throwing some ice-nine into a half-melted ice sculpture. It will change the game, and the sudden and abnormally crystallized forms may seem totally out of line with the way things have gone down in the past.

Videos:

Premature enlightenment and the faith of no-faith

2009-11-27T18:31:00.000-08:00

The initial Promethean enlightenment philosophy was radical; it has now become the status quo. As Crowley described, the spread of even the best ideas will grow batches of charlatans who have poor understanding and merely preach the faith, in this case the faith of no-faith -- a rising form of pseudoskepticism whose dogma is based on an assumption of stasis in science that is in of itself illusory and self-contradictory.

Whenever you depart from the radical -- the quick progression of ideas, and the violent changes both mental and environmental that come with it -- you become an institution and furthermore static. An organization that has calcified can no longer be radical, and that which was once dangerously progressive has become conservative and reactionary. This is the heart of my understanding of progress -- that it leaves any snapshot of itself quickly in the dust. Neal Stephenson had a nice geological metaphor for it in In The Beginning... Was The Command Line. The point stands that those who marry the spirit of their age soon become widowers -- or, in many cases, far worse: they become the delusional Norman Bates, married to the corpse of the culture that birthed them and willing to kill those who dare endanger their warped rear-view mirror.

How could this have happened? The age of reason has been declared far too soon -- but Voltaire failed to realize that perhaps the thing holding Reason back was the very worship of Reason. Early enlightenment thinking was agnostic -- thank Jefferson for the way that was passed on into early United States legislation, and by extension many of the similar documents that were modeled after it. Over time, though, the twin cores of Prometheanism -- "Nobody knows" and "Let's find out" -- were separated. The former was largely the victim of the ever-present human ego, which appears to be the largest factor (outside of a tendency for baldness and a terribly acrobatic vocal tract) separating us from the other apes; we forteans and other beautiful mutants were by and large the takers of agnosis, since it scares even the most forward-thinking of those who prefer to live in the past and tends to be considered a sign of weakness by the ones who still think throwing shit is a good way to solve problems (some shit is written, some is spoken, some is lead, and now we also have nuclear shit -- the purpose remains the same, though: put it down to lay claim to territory, and throw it at whoever dares trespass). The latter was pursued doubletime, but was somewhat useless in many cases seeing as people tend to get supporting evidence for things they already know, regardless of whether or not it is true -- it was perhaps a mismeasure of man to assume he could be objective.

Well, now that the clergy is firmly in place and the pious populous is supporting the saints and the cardinals, we can firmly expect the heretics and the theologians (which set contains the other?) to be locked up in monasteries. Perhaps a new hermeticism is needed; an alchemy of revolutionary agnosticism where reason is more tempered. We all know that when the village is global, everyone in the monastery and the trivium alike will pick the short line -- a socially constructed reality, enforced by faith: the faith that we have no faith, and need none, and that our work will lead to the elimination of faith and agnosis alike.

Hey, Mister Architect: You're number one!

Faith in Chaos

2009-11-25T05:42:00.000-08:00

Though the net is all a-twitter with The Vigilant Citizen's shocking exposees on the Lady Gaga Code, the same blog is also known for explanations of the esoteric meanings of films of whose hidden agenda the author does not approve. To break with this slightly, I will discuss the esoteric meaning of a film of whose hidden agenda I thoroughly approve:

To claim that Pi is about mathematics is false. The exoteric plot is indeed about maths -- the main character, Max Cohen, is a brilliant mathematician searching for a pattern in the stock market; when he finds it, he is pursued by both Wall Street and a sect of Kaballists who believe that the pattern he has found is the true name of god. He has hallucinations along the way, and in the end he puts his tired overworked brain out of its misery.

The esoteric meaning, obvious to anyone who has spent a significant period of time training in western mysticism, appears to be to some extent distinctly discordian in nature. A brilliant mathematician, torn up inside looking for order in all things, decides to tackle what appears to be pure chaos. He finds the order in the chaos, and after a long trip through chapel perilous, gains enlightenment (or re-gains it) by realizing that not all things must be ordered -- the mystical transformation from aneristic avatar to balanced human being. Along the way, in hallucinatory trips and 'real world' adventures alike, he is faced with several themes: the search of light (the ain sof of kaballah is mentioned explicitly; he looked at the sun as a child and went blind, mirroring the early kaballist who went blind from imagining God's robe and its infinite spiral of light that bends space and time -- and he refinds it in part during every fade to white), the search for order in apparent pure chaos (pareidoila and the law of fives is mentioned outright by his mentor, along with the metaphor of the go board), and the backlash against his own mind for doing so (the hallucinatory and real beatings of his brain, Sol's stroke).

In a way, Pi is a very canon representation of how RAW might approach the interpretation of a Kaballist's journey through chapel perilous. The Kaballah method would involve mathematics explicitly; gematria is dropped into the plot. The man's reality tunnel becomes horribly inverted -- he is able to predict things that cannot be predicted, but he is unable to predict the otherwise expected. Only when he gives up the search for order in all chaos -- and indeed, has faith in chaos -- is he at peace. His last line of the film, "I don't know", shows his inner peace in agnosis.

Disangelion -- GAINAX and gnosis

2009-11-23T07:30:00.000-08:00

Hideaki Anno once famously said, in response to a question about a gnostic reference in End of Evangelion, "I have no bloody clue; fanwank something". Since then, it has been assumed that most of the references to gnosticism in his masterwork Neon Genesis Evangelion were "pointless religious references", and that they were there for no reason other than because the abrahamic religions are exotic and sexy in japan.

However (though this may be the Law of Fives in action) I posit that Anno had (and perhaps still has) a far deeper understanding of gnosticism (among other 'fringe' sciences) than is usually assumed.

Point: Humanity is the 18th angel. (The seventeenth is free will, which we will get to later). Arguably, humanity is the demiurge (samahel). Note that humanity's method is science, and is otherwise incapable of the feats of reality manipulation that the angels are incapable of.

Point: There is an (otherwise entirely out of place) focus on quantum mechanics throughout the series. All the violations of newtonian physics directly addressed in the series are blamed on the peculiar properties of 'particle-wave matter' (mind you, all matter is particle-wave matter technically; the wavelengths of macroscopic objects are superlative enough that they can be discounted). There is also direct mention of quantum mechanics terms (specifically, terms for orientation such as 'top', 'strange', 'charm', etc.) in situations having nothing at all to do with quantum mechanics (such as during the discussion of Rei's early programming, to be mentioned later). This mirrors the idea of multiple layers of reality, as well as the idea that on a lower level of abstraction the properties of matter as known do not exist.

Point: The description of Rei's early life involves elements specifically similar to descriptions of the Monarch Project. These elements differ from descriptions of MK-ULTRA (particularly psychic driving, which the Monarch Project seems to be working off of). Some elements have been jumped upon as Freudian (such as the comment that Rei's subconscious is made up of "light and water" -- which sounds like a description of Oceanic Consciousness), but other elements fit better with the Monarch hypothesis.

Point: Anno did not restrict symbolism to gnosticism. Kaballah and Freemasonry are also referenced -- the Sephirothic System and the 'angelic alphabets' in the opening sequence are most notably tied to Kaballah and the Nerv pyramid is explicitly Freemasonic, as is the sequence of "dogmas" underground. Several elements belong more to hermeticism, and the entire basis of NERV and GEHIRN's philosophy is enlightenment-style 'luciferianism' or 'prometheanism'. SEELE lives up to its name, being an amusingly reactionary detournment and mockery of the Illuminati concept -- about as anti-illumination as possible, and the very model of a stereotypical NWO.

Point: The nature of the Angels mirrors that of Jacques Vallee's 'ultraterrestrials'. They are alien, supernatural, and have powers far beyond our own, not to mention the focus on eyes, light, insectoid elements (as common in DMT trips), and sexual organs in their designs, yet they come from earth in a single flap. The use of the word 'angel' in english and 'shito' (meaning messenger) in japanese highlights an important point which Anno must have been aware of -- while the japanese and english terms are different between 'messenger' and 'angel', the hebrew word is the same. To make the association triply is to imply that which Vallee put forth in Passport to Magonia and John Keel (another Keel -- add this to Chairman Keel, and the Ikari family, along with the nautical terms that saturate the naming in the series) that the angels in the old testament were in-deed ultraterrestrials of the same type as Indrid Cold and our friendly MIBs (which, when appearing in NGE, are amusingly human, and quite fallible).

Note that I don't claim Anno is any sort of occultist. After all, all of this information is readily available to anyone who looks, especially after 1988 when the internet became publicly available. However, Anno seems to know far more than he claims to know about these occult subjects. Does he claim a-gnosis for the sake of saving a long explanation using terms unknown to an average translator, in an unfamiliar language? Or does he have other reasons to hide his knowledge? Or, perhaps like Phillip K Dick, the insight came and went with his episode of mental illness.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is only one of a number of things in the popular visual media which have an esoteric meaning only hinted to by the exoteric meaning. I plan to post about more of them in the future.

Argentinian gnomes

2009-11-23T07:02:00.000-08:00

While reading the Gralien Report, I have come across at least three articles about german-style gnomes appearing in Argentina.

Watching the videos, it all looks like a single shot -- no cuts. Likewise, from the way the camera is handled, it looks as though they *are* shot on cell phones. We have two potential explanations, that I can see:

1) It's a hoax.
2) We have physical entities that resemble (or perhaps are) germanic-style gnomes.

In terms of the potential for a hoax, the following has been brought up:

Film in HD, edit, degrade image, compress as shit, upload to Youtube.

Source
It doesn't seem to me that that's particularly likely, unless it was filmed in HD on a *very* small camera. Likewise, shadows and such look alright.

In terms of a hoax with actual props (say, a remote control device of some kind, or -- as Micah of the gralien report suggests -- an actual small or deformed person), the fact that it's a single shot makes this far less likely. Anyone who has filmed and edited videos can tell you how difficult it is to manage without cuts, and anyone who hasn't must only look to Hitchcock's "Rope" to see precisely how well a master director manages it.

The second possibility is that something (which appears to be a gnome) is hanging around Argentina and showing up on cameras. There is, of course, difficulty in using this when you subscribe to any variant of the psychological explanation for fortean phenomena (particularly gnomes and other fae-folk), except perhaps pareidoelia. However, I am hard pressed to think of what else, aside from a gnome, this looks like.

Altogether, these videos appear to pose a problem for everyone who doesn't believe that actual gnomes exist in Argentina.

If anyone has any ideas for other methods by which a hoax like this could be perpetrated, other things that the 'gnome' could be in the video, or other hypotheses for how entities of the non-physical variety could show up on film, please comment and let me know.

P_n(q\|p) <- P_n-1(q\|p) + (	(P_n-1(q\|p)	)²	-	(P_n-1(p)	⁾²	)^1/2
	P_n-1(p)			P_n-1(q\|p)