These days you get any freaky weather event, and it gets blamed on global warming. Even when it doesn't make sense.
Surely, more ice making it further north would, if anything, be supporting evidence for datasets that show the oceans are getting cooler? You might also note that some data sets suggest that the global warming trend is not present in the Southern Hemisphere.
Well, I'm not sure that it's entirely accurate to say that Perl 6 has objects at its core. That is because the concept of "core" is itself only a loosely defined concept.
The fact that the object system is defined in S12 shows that they are not exactly "core" to the language, but they are definitely deeply ingrained, and widely employed. And consistent. And inflectable. And flexible. And not conforming to rigid ideas about what they should be.
Yes, this is the point where you should get worried. Some guy has just started rambling vaguely about benefits of a system that is still very much vapourware, and promises so much that you have to wonder how it will *ever* be implemented, let alone be implemented in such a fashion that we will ever get to the point where a single Perl command might end up as a single CPU cycle.
What I've seen so far has led me to think that it might just be possible, so I have to satisfy my curiosity...
No. Perhaps I should put it into web programming terms for you.
It's more like, oh, wait, let's implement Imlib so that we don't have to screw around with drawing to the screen in our HTML renderer. We'll have to port our HTML renderer to Imlib, but doesn't that make the whole code less of a headache to work with?
This makes the code frighteningly simple, which is a good thing.
It would not have been reasonable to believe in them 200 years ago, but it would not have been reasonable to believe they never existed, either.
Precisely; I think we are in agreement. My investigations seem to indicate to the positive. If yours indicate negative, I'd be interested to hear your logic and reasoning.
Regardless of how excellent your reasons are for thinking your mind has something to do with your brain, you have no evidence that minds only arise from the functioning of brains.
Yup. Who says that the conciousness is a construct of the brain, when it might be the brain that is a construct created by the conciousness? It solves a lot of open questions, and tends to fit in and agree with psychedelic experiences, religions from around the world and the very notion that we all have that we actually have a soul, which deep down I'm sure each person knows.
Interestingly, there is also extensive evidence being formed to support theologically common ideas such as reincarnation and the existence of an eternal soul. Discussing such things extensively here would be nothing but a flamefest with a limited audience:), but I'll try and summarise it. It mostly stems from the simple fact that whilst under hypnosis, individuals often remember what appear to be memories of previous existences. Serious studies have been done into this, and many hypnosis textbooks even provide warnings to fledgeling hypnotists that these occur and are normal.
Whilst it is difficult to say what could possibly provide conclusive evidence to support such ideas, some of the results are quite startling. For instance, many of these past lives have been identified and details confirmed, with no possible way of the subject under hypnosis knowing those relevant details by any normal means. Scars from one life in some cases carry over to the next as birthmarks. Ian Stevenson prepared four volumes filled with stories like this in the 70's.
It gets even better when the hypnotised subjects are asked to remember events from the time between lives, or even in the future.
What possible evidence could you have for the nonexistence of something?
The lack of evidence for its existence.
No evidence? You are living with blinkers on:
In _Hands of Light_, by Barbara Ann Brennan (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), Brennan accurately diagnosed a uterus problem in a woman for whom western doctors wanted to perform a hysterectomy. After an aura reading and following her advice, the woman made a complete recovery within a month and bore a healthy child one year later.
Shafica Karagulla, a neurologist and psychairtrist with some pretty damned good credentials started investigating such individuals as a skeptic. She sent out "feelers" to determine if anyone in the medical industry possessed the ability to see auras, which she called Higher Sense Perception. She eventually found one that did, and arranged an appointment as a patient. Performing only a brief scan with his HSP, the doctor gave her a quick run-down of her health, including a description of an internal condition she had secretly already diagnosed. He was "correct in every detail", she says. She describes this and other experiences in her book _Breakthrough to Creativity_, (Marina Del Rey, Calif.: DeVross, 1967).
The evidence is out there if you spend the time to actually look, rather than accept the orthodox view that it's all fantasies and vivid imaginations.
Telekinese and Telephaty are suddendly no longer okay and a cool thing as soon a guy excepts it's existing gives them a name and start to file phenomens in this catagory
Let me put it another way. Matter is information. Transfer of matter/information from A to B could be considered telekinesis or telepathy, depending on how you define the terms. ie, the very act of trying to classify them into one category kind of misses the point. What if deciding that altered your own perception of reality such that it must be one or the other?
Standard physics may be useful to help your car drive, but what about... hmm, let's take a western discipline that's totally fucked up - medicine. Western medicine, where if you have a bad knee they'll operate on people who just need their posture corrected. Western medicine, that doesn't even acknowledge auras, despite millions of people worldwide capable of seeing them and being able to instantly diagnose medical problems just by looking at them.
All because people, particularly Western people, are reluctant to accept other ideals, because they've been told all along that they don't exist.
At least have a look at the link to that book; it's not written by hippies, it's written by scientists and has an extensive bibliography. It's also very accessible to educated people.
A small terminology difference. You say Telepathy is transfer of thoughts over space, but telekinesis is thoughts manipulating masses. They are not necessarily conflicting. If it turns out that thoughts are made of the same stuff as "matter", then they are the same, no?
Like I said - fascinating book; it's really the "underground" model of physics; it's a UTE, but many people don't like it because it just seems to have too many far reaching implications ("you mean we were THAT far off the mark all along?!? the theory must be bullshit!").
If anyone out there actually believes that the laws of physics as science currently see them are real, they are living in a very strange world. Miracles happen daily, people can levitate, see auras and teleport telepathically.
I am reminded of the subatomic particle the anomalon, whose properties vary from lab to lab, and the neutrino which has mass in the Soviet Union but not in the United States.
I must recommend the excellent book The Holographic Universe - by Michael Talbot - for those people that still think this high tech Physics is anything more than a few people's fantasies.
The real solution is to get our damn greenhouse emissions in order...
That would be the ideal solution, but it's just not going to happen. The negative economic impact would be too large, especially for developing countries that can't afford sophisticated pollution-control technologies.
What, you mean people might start having to ride bicycles and take puplic transport, and not eat kilos of meat (which, of course, requires a huge amount of greenhouse gases released to be produced) per week? Yeah - I can see that that will never happen. People are just too god damned greedy. Until America's bubble of greed bursts.
Pollution control comes through reduce of one's abuse of the environment around them, not sophisticated technology.
It is sad that most people will not consider it an issue until it directly affects their ability to live. By which time it will probably be too late.
Face it, TRANSIT is the ONLY solution. The vast majority of trips always are the same, day in, day out, so there is no reason that people can't use transit at least on the more used portion of their trips.
You overlook reworking the way our society is organised so that people don't have to travel so far every day... viva le teleworking!
I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA had 100's of them. I would be surprised if someone who worked there ever told anyone about it.
...and I'd be incredibly surprised if the NSA can't produce anything faster at their own fab. If they need that much processing power, they'd make their own custom chips to do it massively parallel. Spending half a billion dollars on E10k's isn't the cheapest way to crack DES keys.
Besides, after purchasing 100s of them it wouldn't remain a secret in the computer industry for very long at all. All the people that I've met that work for Sun are the sort of people that would mention this, for the greater good of letting everyone know what tech the spooks have. Sun will generally tell you a lot (although generally not specific enough to be damaging) about what customers they have around a dinner table or bar. IMHO this is because they are generally not fake people.
Well, save up your pennies, because you can run a well loaded E4500 system (including a nice 21" display) from a single 15A 117 VAC wall plug.
Although 220 VAC is preferred to give you higher wattage with less amps, it is definitely not required.
Er, I think you'll find it is required to step up from 110V if you want to get higher wattage with less amps. See Ohm's law.
Besides, why do you only want to use one wallpoint? You don't want a tripped circuit breaker bringing your box down:-). However, it is still vulnerable to the "idiot operator tripping over the power cord" DOS attack.
it's hard at first to break through the wall of routine, but you certainly don't need drugs to do it.
No, but they can certainly speed along the start of the process:-)
I have learned to see them myself to the point where they have become a normal part of my life. If you are interested, I can give you some pointers.
That would be much appreciated... my e-mail address is sam@vilain.net, or post them here - I check my user page to see if people respond to my postings, usually.
Nah, I was just about bullshitting - a lot of what I said are purely my misconceptions, and a lot of my reading on the matter comes from old books. But I sure as hell got a lot of useful information about the subject to aid my own understanding of the matter:-). Aren't discussion forums great?
To make things clear, the "Alpha", "Beta" etc labels are just that - labels of observed activity, and I've heard all sorts of definitions of what ranges each of them are. I did do a google search, and the values I gave aren't really that different from what you've listed, but you've lumped beta and gamma (I originally called that Super-Beta) into the same category.
there is no specific Hz brainwave correlation to the REM state - dreaming involves most Hz.
That's why I said "very erratic", and called it a "state" rather than "activity". If a waveform is showing most Hz, then superimposed it's probably quite close to white noise, which is pretty erratic.
The stuff about losing conciousness is my own theory. Conciousness isn't really that well understood, anyway. Personally I think conciousness is a product of the brain connecting events (like audio/visual input, thoughts) that differ only by time; and when you're in deeper mindstates, there are less familiar things around for your mind to work with when correlating events together to produce a perception of time. This would explain the gaps in your stream of conciousness when you sleep. People good at meditating are just more familiar with the transition between the mindstates - and therefore more likely to make it through a radical mindstate change whilst still connecting one moment to the next.
Although the Kirlian aura was claimed to present information about the "bioplasma" or "life-energy" of the object, actually it is only "a visual or photographic image of a corona discharge in a gas, in most cases the ambient air."
Moreover, experiments have failed to yield any evidence that the coronal pattern is related "to the physiological, psychological, or psychic condition of the sample," but instead only to finger pressure, moisture, and other mechanical, environmental, and photographic factors (some twenty-two in all). Skeptics observed that even mechanical objects, such as coins or paper clips, could yield a Kirlian "aura" (Watkins and Bickel 1986).
This is what I originally suspected that auras were, hence the UV comment. That is, your body generates em radiation, and that means electrons shifting orbits, and electrons shifting more orbits than average causes UV radiation, so you are emitting a small amount of UV. This would excite the air around you slightly, which could be perceived as a corona of glowing air. As the equilibrium of electrical activity that is your brain changes state, changes might be perceived to the aura; this group seems to have decided it didn't change, but I guess I'd have to read the methodology of their study to make a decision on that. It is always possible that changes are detectable, but it is difficult to gather any useful information from it other than whether the person is alive or dead.
I'm as skeptic as anyone else here of what usefulness auras are - but apparently some people can see them all of the time, and can tell things from them. What of that women who had tetrachromic vision reported recently? I wonder whether it was UV or IR that she saw, or whether she simply had a colour quadrilateral in the visible region. I wonder exactly how well the cornea transduces UV light; some say it's UV opaque, but I bet it's not completely.
I like to read even a "skeptic's" web site as a skeptic - scientists are well known for their ability to toss away figures in an experiment that are so wildly wrong that they don't fit their model. They seem to be working under an assumption that the universe is governed by a small set of rules, which seems to be true - but you never know. I think making assumptions is always dangerous.
I was under the impression that K-complexes showed up as one moved from theta to delta sleep.
Interesting. That makes a bit more sense, actually - perhaps as you leave delta state your theta mind would pick up new ideas, then perhaps get all excited about them or something. I say this not really based on scientific understanding of the brain, but I have personally observed a kind of seperation between the the mindstates in myself, and the way they interoperate seems to be like having multiple minds inside your head, layered - each one is best at communicating with the closest two frequency bands - and each working in profoundly different ways - it's like your body (mammilian and reptilian brains, perhaps) is your upper mind's pet, controlled like a puppet by the strings of motor nerves, pleasure centres, and pain systems. Funnily enough, the Tao Te Ching speaks of having two souls - one that "returns to the earth" on death, and one that "ascends to heaven".
The material I was reading was quite old; you don't happen to have a reference for that nugget of information, do you?
If you can enter this mind state and still see, you can see the portions of the UV spectrum that auras exist in.
What complete idiots do you take slashdot readers for?
Actually, I thought most of them would be open minded hackers who like to read up about interesting things. I think I got the bit about them being UV wrong; I must have made some assumptions at one point. But they are real, and can be photographed. See some examples.
I think it's a real shame that many scientists are so closed minded that they don't meditate or explore some of these mystical phenomenons. I think the mind is the most fascinating phenomenon in the world to study.
Moderate this bull down. I've already posted so I can't.
Just ask yourself - are you moderating this comment down because it adds no value to the discussion, or because you disagree with what the author is saying?
You could set FLASHER for a rate, and pattern and color, (neither of which really affects anything), and zone out in front of your machine trying to achieve an altered state. I think alpha worked okay, but the beta, theta, delta didn't work very well. Except when I smoked a doob, then delta would put me right to sleep.:)
Try using a stobe light, and a smoke machine to make the flashing all enveloping. Add some music with a constant beat a harmonic of the flashing and a little Ketamine into the equation and you'll get into those mindstates no problem:-)
The best DJ's I've seen use strobes quite effectively to trance out a whole dancefloor. It's really quite an amazing thing to be a part of.
First of all, what rights are you refering to? The right to use copyrighted material for your own cause, without permission from the owner of the copyright? Oh yeah, I forgot about that right.
Who gave them the right to take away our right to copy it freely anyway?
It's probably monitoring EM waves radiated by your brain.
Unfortunately, you probably can't get much information out of it - it mostly looks like noise. Interpreting it would be at least as difficult as building a TEMPEST device - that is, if we had complete design schematics of the brain. Otherwise it's orders of magnitude harder.
However, there are some interesting things you can do, using Fourier analysis. Studies have shown that the predominant frequency of waves coming off can reflect the state of mind of the wearer:
"Beta" activity - 12 to 15 Hz, normal awake state
"Alpha" activity - 7 to 9 Hz, which is the state you are in whilst daydreaming, and for a lot of the night sleeping. A very powerful mind state, as memory is greatly enhanced. It is possible to train your mind to enter this state at will, al la _The Silva Mind Control Method_ by Jose Silva, or just about any non-Western religion.
"Theta" activity - 3 to 5 Hz, which is a very deep meditative state. Most people cannot enter this state without losing conciousness, which is largely because by this stage you have lost many of your external senses, and your trains of thought stop working so rationally. Hence you don't remember the experience, which is what you experience as losing conciousness. There are some people that argue that the human mind is never actually unconcious. If you can enter this mind state and still see, you can see the portions of the UV spectrum that auras exist in.
"Delta" activity - 1 to 2 Hz - deep sleep. If you can remember anything from this state, you're either a meditation guru, or having a religious experience.
"REM" state - very erratic activity, this is what you are in when you are dreaming. Your body is in "sleep paralysis", which is how you can try to move about in your dream and not have your meat thrash about. "Awareness during sleep paralysis" is when you realise you are dreaming, and become aware of it. An ultra-cool experience, sometimes called "startrekking" because of it's similarity to being in the holodeck in Star Trek, other times "Lucid Dreaming". In fact, it's better than the holodeck - you don't have to address the computer to change things, just think it and it is done.
"Super-beta" activity - 15 to 30 Hz - quite rare and not very well studied. Your mind probably would not be functioning very stably at this point; you'd be scatterbrained and unable to hold detailed trains of thought. Not mentioned often.
"K-Complex" spikes - anything up to 150Hz; very rare, short lived spikes thought by some to be linked to moments of profound insight. Virtually unheard of.
The two common ways to explore these mind states are meditation and drugs, although often a combination of both.
This helmet could be an incredibly useful tool for amateur psychonauts/meditators for monitoring meditation and/or drug experiences. You could also build a biofeedback device to help you reach the lower states with it, or a lucid dreaming device.
Sounds like a great toy for a hacker with an interest in the mind!
Slashdot Mirror
These days you get any freaky weather event, and it gets blamed on global warming. Even when it doesn't make sense.
Surely, more ice making it further north would, if anything, be supporting evidence for datasets that show the oceans are getting cooler? You might also note that some data sets suggest that the global warming trend is not present in the Southern Hemisphere.
There is some evidence that the icecaps melting around the edges, but getting thicker in the middle. Perhaps that's because the Sun's output is a huge factor to global warming, and there are no sunspots this year?
Well, I'm not sure that it's entirely accurate to say that Perl 6 has objects at its core. That is because the concept of "core" is itself only a loosely defined concept.
The fact that the object system is defined in S12 shows that they are not exactly "core" to the language, but they are definitely deeply ingrained, and widely employed. And consistent. And inflectable. And flexible. And not conforming to rigid ideas about what they should be.
Yes, this is the point where you should get worried. Some guy has just started rambling vaguely about benefits of a system that is still very much vapourware, and promises so much that you have to wonder how it will *ever* be implemented, let alone be implemented in such a fashion that we will ever get to the point where a single Perl command might end up as a single CPU cycle.
What I've seen so far has led me to think that it might just be possible, so I have to satisfy my curiosity...
No. Perhaps I should put it into web programming terms for you.
It's more like, oh, wait, let's implement Imlib so that we don't have to screw around with drawing to the screen in our HTML renderer. We'll have to port our HTML renderer to Imlib, but doesn't that make the whole code less of a headache to work with?
This makes the code frighteningly simple, which is a good thing.
Well, there's one way to find out. Whack those bugIDs into SunSolve.
Anyone out there with a SunSolve online account care to check this?
Precisely; I think we are in agreement. My investigations seem to indicate to the positive. If yours indicate negative, I'd be interested to hear your logic and reasoning.
Yup. Who says that the conciousness is a construct of the brain, when it might be the brain that is a construct created by the conciousness? It solves a lot of open questions, and tends to fit in and agree with psychedelic experiences, religions from around the world and the very notion that we all have that we actually have a soul, which deep down I'm sure each person knows.
Interestingly, there is also extensive evidence being formed to support theologically common ideas such as reincarnation and the existence of an eternal soul. Discussing such things extensively here would be nothing but a flamefest with a limited audience :), but I'll try and summarise it. It mostly stems from the simple fact that whilst under hypnosis, individuals often remember what appear to be memories of previous existences. Serious studies have been done into this, and many hypnosis textbooks even provide warnings to fledgeling hypnotists that these occur and are normal.
Whilst it is difficult to say what could possibly provide conclusive evidence to support such ideas, some of the results are quite startling. For instance, many of these past lives have been identified and details confirmed, with no possible way of the subject under hypnosis knowing those relevant details by any normal means. Scars from one life in some cases carry over to the next as birthmarks. Ian Stevenson prepared four volumes filled with stories like this in the 70's.
It gets even better when the hypnotised subjects are asked to remember events from the time between lives, or even in the future.
Let me put it another way. Matter is information. Transfer of matter/information from A to B could be considered telekinesis or telepathy, depending on how you define the terms. ie, the very act of trying to classify them into one category kind of misses the point. What if deciding that altered your own perception of reality such that it must be one or the other?
Standard physics may be useful to help your car drive, but what about... hmm, let's take a western discipline that's totally fucked up - medicine. Western medicine, where if you have a bad knee they'll operate on people who just need their posture corrected. Western medicine, that doesn't even acknowledge auras, despite millions of people worldwide capable of seeing them and being able to instantly diagnose medical problems just by looking at them.
All because people, particularly Western people, are reluctant to accept other ideals, because they've been told all along that they don't exist.
At least have a look at the link to that book; it's not written by hippies, it's written by scientists and has an extensive bibliography. It's also very accessible to educated people.
A small terminology difference. You say Telepathy is transfer of thoughts over space, but telekinesis is thoughts manipulating masses. They are not necessarily conflicting. If it turns out that thoughts are made of the same stuff as "matter", then they are the same, no?
Like I said - fascinating book; it's really the "underground" model of physics; it's a UTE, but many people don't like it because it just seems to have too many far reaching implications ("you mean we were THAT far off the mark all along?!? the theory must be bullshit!").
If anyone out there actually believes that the laws of physics as science currently see them are real, they are living in a very strange world. Miracles happen daily, people can levitate, see auras and teleport telepathically.
I am reminded of the subatomic particle the anomalon, whose properties vary from lab to lab, and the neutrino which has mass in the Soviet Union but not in the United States.
I must recommend the excellent book The Holographic Universe - by Michael Talbot - for those people that still think this high tech Physics is anything more than a few people's fantasies.
What, you mean people might start having to ride bicycles and take puplic transport, and not eat kilos of meat (which, of course, requires a huge amount of greenhouse gases released to be produced) per week? Yeah - I can see that that will never happen. People are just too god damned greedy. Until America's bubble of greed bursts.
Pollution control comes through reduce of one's abuse of the environment around them, not sophisticated technology.
It is sad that most people will not consider it an issue until it directly affects their ability to live. By which time it will probably be too late.
Sure, but most of the energy expended to make the plant was done by someone else - the Sun/big bang :-)
You overlook reworking the way our society is organised so that people don't have to travel so far every day... viva le teleworking!
...and I'd be incredibly surprised if the NSA can't produce anything faster at their own fab. If they need that much processing power, they'd make their own custom chips to do it massively parallel. Spending half a billion dollars on E10k's isn't the cheapest way to crack DES keys.
Besides, after purchasing 100s of them it wouldn't remain a secret in the computer industry for very long at all. All the people that I've met that work for Sun are the sort of people that would mention this, for the greater good of letting everyone know what tech the spooks have. Sun will generally tell you a lot (although generally not specific enough to be damaging) about what customers they have around a dinner table or bar. IMHO this is because they are generally not fake people.
Er, I think you'll find it is required to step up from 110V if you want to get higher wattage with less amps. See Ohm's law.
Besides, why do you only want to use one wallpoint? You don't want a tripped circuit breaker bringing your box down :-). However, it is still vulnerable to the "idiot operator tripping over the power cord" DOS attack.
You didn't tear open a card that someone told you was "Snow Crash" in the metaverse, did you... tut tut.
No, but they can certainly speed along the start of the process :-)
That would be much appreciated... my e-mail address is sam@vilain.net, or post them here - I check my user page to see if people respond to my postings, usually.
More than common, I'd say - not being able to enter REM is a serious disorder.
Nah, I was just about bullshitting - a lot of what I said are purely my misconceptions, and a lot of my reading on the matter comes from old books. But I sure as hell got a lot of useful information about the subject to aid my own understanding of the matter :-). Aren't discussion forums great?
To make things clear, the "Alpha", "Beta" etc labels are just that - labels of observed activity, and I've heard all sorts of definitions of what ranges each of them are. I did do a google search, and the values I gave aren't really that different from what you've listed, but you've lumped beta and gamma (I originally called that Super-Beta) into the same category.
That's why I said "very erratic", and called it a "state" rather than "activity". If a waveform is showing most Hz, then superimposed it's probably quite close to white noise, which is pretty erratic.
The stuff about losing conciousness is my own theory. Conciousness isn't really that well understood, anyway. Personally I think conciousness is a product of the brain connecting events (like audio/visual input, thoughts) that differ only by time; and when you're in deeper mindstates, there are less familiar things around for your mind to work with when correlating events together to produce a perception of time. This would explain the gaps in your stream of conciousness when you sleep. People good at meditating are just more familiar with the transition between the mindstates - and therefore more likely to make it through a radical mindstate change whilst still connecting one moment to the next.
Fantastic site - a great resource. I read up a bit on one of the links, and I think this is the crux of the matter (from http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-05/i-files.html:
This is what I originally suspected that auras were, hence the UV comment. That is, your body generates em radiation, and that means electrons shifting orbits, and electrons shifting more orbits than average causes UV radiation, so you are emitting a small amount of UV. This would excite the air around you slightly, which could be perceived as a corona of glowing air. As the equilibrium of electrical activity that is your brain changes state, changes might be perceived to the aura; this group seems to have decided it didn't change, but I guess I'd have to read the methodology of their study to make a decision on that. It is always possible that changes are detectable, but it is difficult to gather any useful information from it other than whether the person is alive or dead.
I'm as skeptic as anyone else here of what usefulness auras are - but apparently some people can see them all of the time, and can tell things from them. What of that women who had tetrachromic vision reported recently? I wonder whether it was UV or IR that she saw, or whether she simply had a colour quadrilateral in the visible region. I wonder exactly how well the cornea transduces UV light; some say it's UV opaque, but I bet it's not completely.
I like to read even a "skeptic's" web site as a skeptic - scientists are well known for their ability to toss away figures in an experiment that are so wildly wrong that they don't fit their model. They seem to be working under an assumption that the universe is governed by a small set of rules, which seems to be true - but you never know. I think making assumptions is always dangerous.
Interesting. That makes a bit more sense, actually - perhaps as you leave delta state your theta mind would pick up new ideas, then perhaps get all excited about them or something. I say this not really based on scientific understanding of the brain, but I have personally observed a kind of seperation between the the mindstates in myself, and the way they interoperate seems to be like having multiple minds inside your head, layered - each one is best at communicating with the closest two frequency bands - and each working in profoundly different ways - it's like your body (mammilian and reptilian brains, perhaps) is your upper mind's pet, controlled like a puppet by the strings of motor nerves, pleasure centres, and pain systems. Funnily enough, the Tao Te Ching speaks of having two souls - one that "returns to the earth" on death, and one that "ascends to heaven".
The material I was reading was quite old; you don't happen to have a reference for that nugget of information, do you?
Actually, I thought most of them would be open minded hackers who like to read up about interesting things. I think I got the bit about them being UV wrong; I must have made some assumptions at one point. But they are real, and can be photographed. See some examples.
I think it's a real shame that many scientists are so closed minded that they don't meditate or explore some of these mystical phenomenons. I think the mind is the most fascinating phenomenon in the world to study.
Just ask yourself - are you moderating this comment down because it adds no value to the discussion, or because you disagree with what the author is saying?
Try using a stobe light, and a smoke machine to make the flashing all enveloping. Add some music with a constant beat a harmonic of the flashing and a little Ketamine into the equation and you'll get into those mindstates no problem :-)
The best DJ's I've seen use strobes quite effectively to trance out a whole dancefloor. It's really quite an amazing thing to be a part of.
Who gave them the right to take away our right to copy it freely anyway?
It's probably monitoring EM waves radiated by your brain.
Unfortunately, you probably can't get much information out of it - it mostly looks like noise. Interpreting it would be at least as difficult as building a TEMPEST device - that is, if we had complete design schematics of the brain. Otherwise it's orders of magnitude harder.
However, there are some interesting things you can do, using Fourier analysis. Studies have shown that the predominant frequency of waves coming off can reflect the state of mind of the wearer:
The two common ways to explore these mind states are meditation and drugs, although often a combination of both.
This helmet could be an incredibly useful tool for amateur psychonauts/meditators for monitoring meditation and/or drug experiences. You could also build a biofeedback device to help you reach the lower states with it, or a lucid dreaming device.
Sounds like a great toy for a hacker with an interest in the mind!
Indeed, scientists have known for years that laboratory testing causes cancer in rats.