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So, it may be a mile marker, but it isn't the end of the universe. It just happened to be when the Mayans decided to 'turn over' their long count calendar back to 0.

I will not vouch for the accuracy of this information or of the sites below. I have glanced at them and it makes sense on the surface (leaving out all of the mumbo jumbo).

THE MAYAN CALENDAR END-DATE

THE HOW AND WHY OF THE MAYAN END DATE IN 2012 A.D.

James Powell

Shamelessly stolen from the Snopes forums.

I know slashdotters hate obscure references so I'll narrow it down for ya:

December 21, 2012

http://www.levity.com/eschaton/Why2012.html

Back in my day, kids, it was widely reported that LSD caused chromosome damage. But then all sorts of commonly ingested substances cause chromosome damage in test tubes. As is usually the case in these things, that rebuttal came out some time later and was not widely reported so most people middle-aged and up probably still believe LSD causes chromosome damage.

If NBC was useful in letting someone demonstrate a logical fallacy surrounding soap, that worked out pretty well.

The old technology axiom applies:

High Speed, Low Cost, High Quality.

Pick 2 out of 3.

I've thought about this though, and you really can't have a Low Cost, High Quality product. The reason for this is that you can't rush Quality (as you stated, 2 out of 3) and Time is Money.

So here's hoping more people come to appreciate Quality and are willing to spend the Time/Money necessary to achieve it!

Regardless of what they might spew in DARE classes...

http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_writings4. shtml
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_229.html
http://www.levity.com/aciddreams/samples/chromosom e.html
http://www.serendipity.li/dmt/chromosomes.htm

I thought everyone knew that the end of the world was 2012.

http://www.levity.com/eschaton/Why2012.html

I guess Theo van Gogh was meddling in their affairs as well and was not an infidel exposing them. As well I guess Salman Rushdie is only out to get their oil. Come on guys at least offer up some evidence to your argument.

http://www.levity.com/alchemy/

If you want to find out why the drug revolution started in New England and San Francisco check out the book ACID DREAMS:
http://www.levity.com/aciddreams/
It was the good old CIA trying to find out if LSD could be used for mind control. It was code named MK Ultra. They sponsered both overt academic research and some very underground and illegal 'drug trials.' This is how Tim Leary (East Coast) and Ken Kesey (West Coast) first experienced LSD.
The CIA had access to a whorehouse in SF and they gave unsuspecting clients supprise doses of LSD. Before you make jokes, remember that some people had an exremely bad time and equally bad long term results. See:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKULTRA
Inside the CIA there was a group that would subject each other to unscheduled acid trips without warning. Someone would be slipped a dose and then be told what was going on. One person flipped out and was taken to a hotel room. He was left alone and jumped out the window to his death. It was only many years later that his family was informed how he really died.

Robotic or semi-robotic prosthesis are going to be more and more in demand because ironically of advances in battlefield armor. Current flak jackets (body armor) and helmets are protecting the vital bits of our soldiers, but often limbs (and necks) are sites of damage from explosions and firearms. Many of these soldiers are undergoing amputations either in Iraq or more commonly in Landstuhl, Germany and coming home with prosthetics of varying sophistication.

There are a couple of interesting recent additions to the Internet that cover these issues. One is an article by Steve Silberman in Wired and the other very interesting site is Stuart Hughes blog. Stuart is a world news producer with the BBC who unfortunately stepped on a landmine covering the Iraq war and now writes fairly frequently about "stumpy" and his prosthetic leg.

No, no.. that's supposed to be 2012. Around 11:11 am GMT on Dec 21st, if I remember correctly.

"And evolution has purposely kept them.'""

Evolution doesn't decide anything. Evolution is. Humans precive evolution and assign purpose and direction. See here:
The Definition of Teleology
for more details

Because the auther was British?

According to the Mayan Calendar We'll only get a year to enjoy it!

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."

"In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia."

"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

"The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history."

and, probably my favorite one,
"Winston Churchill could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war."

Just thought I'd share...

For an example of what you dismissively term "just playing records", might I suggest you check out The Avalanches. They get called DJ's, but it's a very long way away from what a DJ does at an office party (which is actually a more difficult skill than you think, having tried it). Virtually everything on there is sampled from something else, but the sources are very obscure and they're combined in ways you'd never think of.

And as for hip-hop, they're poets who work to a drum beat. Sure, Sturgeon's law applies, but I can name approximately 1 squillion mediocre rock acts. (Creed? Any nu-metal act with a misplaced "k" in their name?) A good example of the close relationship was the well-known poet Allen Ginsberg's 1996 collaboration with Paul McCartney and Phillip Glass, The Ballad of the Skeletons. Or, alternatively, you could try listening closely to Eminem's Stan. It's a very perceptive commentary on the mentality of some of his own fans, and Dr. Dre, his producer, was brilliant to figure out how well Dido's Thank You fitted with it.

Oh, and as for performances based mostly around sequencing, ever heard of 1970's German techno precursors Kraftwerk?

The end of the world is already scheduled for 12/21/2012.

"The attribute Max owns is 'bullet-time,' like Volvo owns the word 'safety' and McDonalds owns 'fast'"

Um, well actually I (and quite a few other people I imagine) associate 'bullet-time' with The Matrix. Max Payne just happened to use similar effects in the game, capitalizing on the slo-mo hype following the movie. I'm not 100% sure if my timeline is correct but I remember there being parallels to the movie effect when the game came out. Oh I'll grant that's the big hook of the game. That and metaphors that drag out long enough to make Raymond Chandler develop a nervous tic. But to say MP 'owns' bullet-time is a bit presumptuous.

Think I saw that somewhere else...

A Sterling engine wouldn't help much unless you have very high efficiencies

Not to mention that it'd be difficult to get Ol' Bruce to agree to be crammed into your laptop.

I was worried about that 2012 date myself until I found out why the Maya chose that date as the end of their time. I'm amazed at how much the Maya were able to learn and I believe they had knowledge that we've yet to discover but I'm beginning to believe now that the 2012 date is simply an astronomical event.
The Maya were deeply religious and their religion was based on astronomy. Their convictions led them to construct pyramids so they could see over the jungle canopy to the horizon. It's on the horizon where they could view the rising and setting of the stars, planets, sun, and moon. The thing they discovered that prompted them to set 2012 as an important date is the precession of Earth. As Earth precesses on about a 25,000 year cycle, the sun rises at a slightly different location for each given day of the year. The Maya discovered that they could calculate that movement and believed it held some religious significance.
For all astronomically-based religions, the winter solstice was especially significant, but the Maya saw another significant astronomical feature. They viewed the intersection of the ecliptic (the line the planets, moon, and sun follow) and the galactic plane (as represented by the milky way) as the entry point whereby one could begin the journey along the milky way to the heart of the sky (a dark area near Polaris that used to be at the celestial north pole.) But one could only enter there when an opening was created by another celestial object at the point of the crossroad.
The key thing about the 2012 date is that the Winter solstice of 2012 has the sun rising exactly at the intersection of the ecliptic and the galactic plane. To the Maya, that probably represented the closing of a great cycle after which a new era would be born. In fact, the evidence seems to indicate that they actually worked backwards from December 21, 2012 to determine their current date when the Long Count calendar was created (some say as early as 355 B.C.)
The incredible precision by which they were able to predict astronomical events is uncanny. While our calendar uses clumsy gimmicks like leap years to overcome its inherent flaws, the Mayan calendar was able to accurately predict events thousands of years into the future with perfection and no need for adjustments. If you realize the movement of the Winter solstice sunrise due to precession occurs at a rate of about one degree every 72 years then you can realize the precision it takes to accurately predict such an event.
There is so much valuable knowledge that has been lost due to our destructive and arrogant approach to other cultures and it continues today as we try to eliminate cultures that compete with western values. Maybe one day we'll come full circle and embrace our ancient past just like the sunrise will do on December 12, 2012.

More info
Also, see Hopi prophecy.

Or did you just mean to elect Howard Dean in 2004 and again in 2008 which brings us to 2012, in which case I've completely overanalyzed your sig and owe you an Emily Litella, "Never mind"?

So in the end this is what truely religious people (like monks) do, they try to reach an ultimate goal that seems impossible to the rational mind, but (some of) the byproducts of the process are quite usefull to society as a whole

Don't underestimate the power of this mindset, in particular that of thes hermetic alchemists, they where furocious explorers due to their philosophy/faith. Take a look at this timeline of famous alchemists, some of the people on there are the founders of modern science (Bacon, Newton).

They better go for 2006. 2012 might be a bit too late.

... teleology .

This may come as a shock to readers who aren't trained in biological sciences, but we presume that nature does not "begin with the end in mind." Thus, a "genetic" algorithm only loosely follows genetics, because there is some assumption about "fitness" (i.e., a particular purpose for the alogorithm) that nature never makes about a biological system.

I'm not sure what the correct semantics might be -- "self modifying algorithm" or "self evaluating, self modifying algorithm" or whatever -- but "genetic" ain't it.

Note that in his later works (e.g., "Descent of Man"), Darwin floated the concept of sexual selection, aka "survival of the sexiest." Simply put, no matter how cool & useful your new mutation may be, if you don't breed, ultimately you die & your mutation vanishes. Applying this concept to fitness-testing a "genetic" algorithm might be pretty interesting...

I think that's the missing ingredient in "genetic" algorithms -- if the algo does what it (teleologically) is supposed to do it survives, whether or not it attracts a cute algo of the opposite gender & begets a litter of fuzzy logic.

So you should pound on him? So he'd be better off dead? what?

Anyway, I like his site, and he reminds me of Ignatius J. Reilly from John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces...

He's a sort of tragicomical architecture buff, so what?

Why should we scorn him? I've never been religious, but I'm beginning to think a few "turn the other cheek"s and "love thy neighbor"s would help out around this place...

Argue all you want about the economics and politics of welfare, but don't pound this poor guy.

As for life expectancy vs toxins in the environment. Sure, we're not dying of malaria, or malnutrition, or dysentary, or what would be today's "minor" bacterial infections. Does that mean we shouldn't be looking for quality housing that produces less VOC and doesn't contain lead or cadmium or arsenic or asbestos? Come on.

Of course this guy is not normal. of course he has mental problems (if even only from relative isolation). So what? I hate to think that slashdot is full of basically mean people who want to pound on relatively helpless guys.

What if the work is the inheritence? If I were to write a blockbuster novel and die the day before it makes the NYTimes list, I would not want the work to go into the public domain until my spouse and kids have made what I would have made had I lived.

Go read John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces as an example. Toole couldn't find a publisher and committed suicide. His mom enlisted the help of a prof at Loyola who found a publisher. The book was reasonably successful (and BTW, is well worth the read). Should it go into the public domain because the author is dead?

The internet (not just the web) allows minds separated by meatspace commune as if they were right next door. It is within this mindspace that communities emerge and evolve.

[I'm intrigued by the common root of commune, communicate, and community. It seems to me that an online community is, in many ways, a truer community than that which we generally think of as a community in meatspace.]

Although usenet (really an accretion of communities) is mentioned in the article, there are other entities, many predating the web, that are more communal than the typical web-based "online community". MUDs, MOOs and their ilk are particularly interesting not only because their members interact in something like real time, but also because the "reality" of the community is a consensual construct of the members themselves. Of course, I'm thinking more of the "building" aspects of M**s, than the "game" aspects.

I recommend this article for another examination of online communities.

Actually quite intresting. I did a bit of searching:

Pictures of The Voynich Manuscript

Seems a running theroy is this man Roger Bacon may have written the book.

-You must not change the past! Don't do anything that effects anything. Unless you were suppose too, then for the love of God don't not do it.

I'd be interested to hear what fellow geeks think of the matter? Is rape too severe a word to describe what happened? Is this kind of rape as traumatic as the standard method? I say no. And if you say yes, you might just be the type that can win arguments... but what do you believe?

Perhaps some would argue that this is not necessarily "News for Nerds," but it's certainly stuff that matters.

When one thinks of the ways that the world has changed since World War II, how many of the changes that occurred came about through reasons of war and political machinery, it is staggering to realize that we really are in a "new world," where the new military-industrial complex is cloaked by bureaucracy and the old, corrupt political machines are replaced by the new, corrupt rhetoricians and wordsmiths. If Politicians, Priests, and Poets are the only real leaders, then the paradigm that separates them has changed.

Remembering Kafka's writings from college was really disturbing and revealing--nearly illuminating. Franz Kafka was one of the few brave souls of his period to declare through his writings that humankind had lost its rightful place in the world, and as a result, humans would become increasingly isolated, alienated, and cynical. I believe that the world is increasingly cynical and apathetic, and in many ways, our own private and public attitudes feed the modern conspiracy theorists and doomsayers. I don't think that the world is "All Doom and Gloom," but I shudder to think of being conquered by ideas rather than by guns. That's real bondage.

If you can deliver in kilo gram quantities, approximately what is the population of China?

love & light,
the CIA

Bob

FWIW Hunter S. Thompson is also known as Gonzo.

- j

One of the most interesting scientific minds in the modern era, Dr. John C. Lilly, is also the pre-eminent researcher on dolphin interspecial communication. The inventor of the Sensory Deprivation tank, the inspiration for the films Day of the Dolphin and Altered States, as well as one of the first researchers into the therapeutic potential of LSD and Ketamine, this man is quite a character. Interested parties are directed to certain bios.

The real question isnt what has happened in 2000, but will happen on December 12, 2012 at 11:18 Am. This is the end of the Myan Long count, and thus the start of a new cycle. On December 12 2012 the winter solstice, will see change that hasnt happened in 5000 years. This is the real date looming above that no programmers can fix, as its a nature related problem. You can find more information about it here:

The Final Illusion

The most famous case of 'Cyber-Rape' happened on LambdaMoo in 1993, not a year or two ago. A good reference to it was published in the Village Voice on December 23, 1993. A copy of the article can be found here

This sounds *exactly* like Goethe's "Faust". :-)

Frankly, I think you have to be a pretty darn boring person if drugs are going to enhance your creativity. Some pretty creative stuff has been written by people when they weren't high, and some of it is actually readable.

If you're going to use drugs recreationally, that's you're perogative, but please don't go around telling people it makes you more creative or smarter. First of all, it's a crutch. If you need drugs to perform, then that's a sign of mental addiction.

Second of all, the drug of choice among many "innovative thinkers" is marijuana. It's not too hard to spot somebody who used pot heavily during their adolescence, because they usually lag about 5 seconds behind any conversation. Certainly there are enough successful pot users (e.g. Carl Sagan) to show that not all marijuana users will suffer "amotivational syndrome". However, I think Sagan would have been an extrodinary person no matter what. But what about joe average stoner? How many of them just sit around all day eating potato chips and watching Cheech and Chong movies?

Then there's LDS. Nevermind the people who don't have a sober friend guide them while they trip and end up killing themself in some dumb way or another, screwing with your brain chemistry has nasty effects like flashbacks later in life. Whee!

The article talked alot about how this author likes esctasy. That is some dangerous #$@*. Watch Go if you don't believe me. Whoo, apparently ecstacy can cause Parkinson's disease-type symptoms. You can be just like Dr. Hawking! yay!

Actually, the only reason I'm ranting is because I'm sick of my drug culture friends always talking about how they miss doing LSD and such. Yesterday one of them was trying to convince me that Cyberia was a great book. Apparently it deals on this whole drug culture/computer culture thing.

For more about modern propaganda techniques, check out Media Virus by Douglas Rushkoff, and the whole Marcshall McLuhan canon. "The medium is the message", and the medium of storytelling is the set of assumptions that the story takes place within. The audience rationally considers the content of the story, but to do so they have to load the background assumptions and images into their imagination. This background does not get the same kind of rational consideration, as does the action in the foreground. After the show is over, some residue of the background, the costumes, props, and scenery, remains in the viewer's fund of mental imagery. The subconcious mind then files these images and assumptions, and uses them later in constructing "independent" thoughts and decisions.

This may seem pretty far out, but I can assure you of this, it is the way modern propagandists are trained to think, and forms the basis of a large amount of editorial policy in military, government, and corporate media outlets.

Drifting back towards the point... that anyone even considering that sort of thing in a nominally democratic country is ludicrous. I seriously doubt that this is in the best interest of the people, or that the majority of the people agree with it. If Orwell were alive today, he'd turn in his grave. (The same goes for Karl Marx, mind you.)

He also write s for the Village Voice.

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