The light-switch trick is a great test, as the ambient lighting in any given dream is a reflection of the location in the dream world (AKA state of mind) you are in, and can't be changed by flicking a switch.
I wanted to mention that there are also degrees of lucidity. It's a full spectrum, from acting out of sheer habit, completely unaware that you are dreaming, to acting as you usually do in the dream world to being aware that it is a dream, aware of your waking self, and controlling everything - including waking yourself up at the end to write it all down.
And lucidity can come and go as well - you can become lucid for a couple minutes and then lose it by becoming distracted by something. Distraction is the enemy of lucidity. My dream self knows this. I was once lucid and someone else in my dream was trying to show me a picture in a magazine. I resisted looking at it, because I knew I'd become interested in the picture and go into it (what I call a gateway) - at which point I would lose my lucidity. My dream self knew all that, and only upon waking myself up and remembering it did my waking self come to know it.
As a long-time lucid dream seeker and gamer, I've found that playing games before bed often results in what I consider "stupid" dreams of gaming. The context of the dream is the game, and you're running around playing it. It's a mix between waking physical reality and the game reality. There's usually not a lot of value to these dreams, I've found.
On the other hand, my dream self has become quite aware of himself as an personality in the dream world, with a continuing story from night to night, and has an understanding of the laws of the dream world and how to attain and maintain lucidity. I wonder if my love of games contributes to my ability to project myself into a new dream world or context or if it's the converse - my ability to project myself into the world of dreams contributes to my ability to enjoy video games.
There's no doubt dreams influence video games. The creator of Mario is a dreamer of some degree of lucidity. My first experiences flying in dreams came from taking progressively larger leaps into the air that led to flight. Fastforward a couple decades and Mario is doing the same thing in Super Mario 64.
There's an app for that. It's called Beejive. Last I checked it was $10, and if you and someone else had it, you could text each other as much as you want for free. When a text message comes in, an alert pops up on the phone and there's a sound or buzz. Then you jump into a IM chat screen and chat like that. I think I read that you can send text messages to phone numbers of people who don't have Beejive, but I'm not quite sure how that works.
That said, it leaves a LOT to be desired. You need to be logged into a chat network such as Jabber, and you get automatically logged out every few days. It's also horribly slow on the iPhone 3g, oversensitive to flipping, jumps to the middle of an ongoing chat when it flips, and has been somewhat buggy in the past. But my wife and I text on it daily for free, while her SMS bill for texting with her sister is $30/month.
Seven years ago I began a slow decline in health that completely ruined my quality of life. I suffered endless migraines, fatigue, abdominal pain, weakness, difficulty focusing, depression, loss of feeling, and social withdrawal. I went to doctor after doctor, and each gave me approximately 5 minutes of their time and couldn't figure out what it was. Very little came up in the standard blood tests.
I had several doctors accuse me of making it up, or saying it's all in my head. Most of the rest just shrugged and sent me on my way. If I had complete trust in medicine I'd have given up and had to live with this forever.
But that's not the kind of person I am. When I felt well enough to, I researched online - examining symptoms, reading up on scholarly articles from PubMed, reading patient cases, bulletin boards. I investigated everything. And 80% of the progress I've made on my condition over the years has been due to my research. I found doctors sorely uninformed on research done in the last ten years - as if after graduating they stopped picking up anything new.
Sure there are hypochondriacs out there. But modern medicine leaves a LOT to be desired, and I'm glad as hell that I have a resource like the internet that allows me to give my condition the attention it deserves.
I agree, and Final Fantasy XIII is a good example. Square Enix always does something unique with each game in this franchise, and the fighting system takes some getting used to. This specific game feels like it's in tutorial mode for the first 12 hours or so, and I've had the manual out the entire time, looking for information, getting tips, figuring out how everything works.
I recently bought Torchlight from Steam and if there was a manual I could access, I didn't see it anywhere. So I looked it up on Google and found the full manual in PDF format on http://www.scribd.com/. I'm not sure if that's authorized or not, but something like that works just fine since it's a PC game, because I'm at the PC playing it. If it were a console game, this would really only be convenient if I had an iPad or laptop nearby, so I wouldn't have to run back and forth from TV to computer to look things up.
There is a certain art and value to well-produced game manuals that I would miss.
Has anyone noticed how industries have taken "green" to mean "give you less for the same price?"
I agree wholeheartedly. While this is somewhat off-topic, I find that multiplayer can not only fail to add something to a game, but straight-up ruin it. I recently quit WoW because I was so tired of selfish and rude players leaving groups when they don't get their drop, trying to control every aspect of another player's play style, putting you down for your gear, and being generally immature and abusive. While in WoW there is the/ignore feature, it's only character-to-character, not player-to-player, so if I and this asshat each have 10 characters, I can run into him 100 times before I've got every combination of/ignore worked out.
Right now I'm playing a single-player game - Eternal Sonata - and loving it. I haven't ended a single play session pissed off. It's quite nice.
More on-topic, I got Dragon Age Origins, and it's unplayable on my top-end gaming PC from just a few years ago. I ordered more RAM but I might need a whole new computer to play it well. If I need to replace my computer every 3 years or so, it's a lot more expensive than getting the latest gaming console. That means every few years there's a frustrating period of games outreaching my computer specs and being painfully slow. An experience you don't get on consoles.
This kill switch would be the HOLY GRAIL to hackers. For foreign countries waging cyber attacks, all attention would turn to gaining access to this system, because triggering it would be the very first step in any kind of attack. But this is also a shiny prize for any would-be script kiddie out there as well. Imagine the reputation you'd get for shutting down the internet.
My mom is into homeopathy. I've had health issues for a while, and she decided to step in and send me something her homeopathic doctor recommended for my symptoms. Always wanting to know what I'm putting into my body, I did some investigation first. Turns out the active ingredient was ARSENIC. I kid you not! I called her up to see why she was trying to kill me and she said such a small amount wouldn't hurt me. Whether or not it was too small to hurt me, it was definitely not going to help me!
Buyer beware! There is some crazy stuff in homeopathic remedies!
I love the name "Operation Titstorm" and I love the audacity of flooding the government's inboxes with the very images they're trying to censor. But is it an effective force for change? I'm happy to see them bringing more attention to the issue - they are definitely accomplishing that. But no doubt they are further polarizing these people against "bad people on the internet". The main problem is that it's almost impossible for "the people" to have a rational conversation with "the government". There is very little chance your emails or petitions will be read or cared about. Once politicians are elected, their accountability to their constituency pretty much ends and they can do as they wish. Something like THIS will get their attention, just as a huge protest in the streets of Washington would.
Didn't they teach cursive because it allowed you to write more quickly? If so, and if that's a valuable thing to teach, there should be classes on the new way to write more quickly - internet shorthand. : )
Those Video Games Live bastards owe me a hundred bucks. When I heard about it, I bought two tickets immediately. It sounded awesome. My wife and I showed up for the show and they had canceled it without any announcement, and refused to refund our money. Video Games Live said Ticketmaster had to refund it and Ticketmaster said Video Games Live had to.
Yikes. If they succeed, they're going to be creating a deeply sexually frustrated society, and that will be expressed in violence. But will that violence be directed inwards to revolution or outwards to war? Probably inwards since the government will be the source of the repression.
I agree that people like that live in a troubling tautology. But there's another thing at work here, and probably the most important and successful conspiracy working today - and that is the conspiracy to discredit conspiracy theorists. The popular opinion today is that conspiracy theorists are nutters, and that's a real boon to anyone involved in a conspiracy. If they're being investigated, there's already a prejudice to dismiss the investigator as crazy. How wonderfully useful.
A conspiracy is when two or more people enter into a secret agreement to do something illegal. This happens ALL THE TIME. No doubt everybody here has been involved in at least one conspiracy. You can barely get through adolescence without it. That everyone now has a knee-jerk reaction to think of anyone talking conspiracy is crazy is a coup for corruption.
There are several core issues in regards to smoking that make it different in key respects from doing anything harmful to yourself.
1) I am all in favor of allowing things that damage oneself to be legal. That's the essence of the nanny-state discussion. So I'm with people who are against the idea of a nanny-state. BUT smoking is harmful to others. Go ahead and damage yourself, but when you damage others who have not given consent, that is crossing a line.
2) Smoking by its nature releases smoke into the air and is therefore the business of everyone that encounters that smoke. This smoke is a) addictive, b) nasty-smelling, c) a mind-altering substance, and d) causes cancer. To those who smoke, would be fine if a stranger a) put an addictive substance in your food without your consent, b) farted such a nasty fart near you that it stuck in your clothes for days, c) slipped mild mind-altering drugs into your food/drink, or d) released carcinogenic gases into your environment?
3) On mind-altering substances, I'm very much of the philosophy that people should be allowed to use them. But nobody should be allowed to MAKE me use them. Nicotine affects brain chemistry. While it may be a fix for you, it makes me feel ill and causes terrible head pain.
It's a no-brainer. The violent reaction from smokers to the thought of banning smoking from public places and even outside is no doubt related to the thought of being unable to get a fix with one of the most addictive chemicals known to man. Remove that, and you have a case where smoking causes obvious infringements to the people around you, each of which clearly should not be allowed.
If all smokers switched to the patch, the problem would be entirely solved in my mind. Do what you want, but keep it to yourself.
It's interesting that Expert Sex Change has come up so much on this thread, because essentially it sounds like Murdoch wants what they have - Google able to crawl all their news, but then when you click the link, the news isn't there - only a paywall. So this could be already accomplished in the same way.
Personally, I hope Murdoch gets his way. He seems dedicated to pulling his hateful FOX News out of the public eye, and that's undeniably a good thing.
I'm also pleasantly surprised to find I'm not the only one who is ceaselessly annoyed at seeing Expert Sex Change results on Google when looking for coding help.
Recently in Georgia a TV show we were watching (on Tivo, to boot) was interrupted for several minutes with a vague child abduction warning. No information at all was given about the child abduction - no description, no name, no last-seen location, nothing. Did they expect all of Georgia to run out into the streets looking for any old child? How did they expect people to act on this? Not only was it useless and pointless in the specific, but this is not the sort of thing an entire state needs to hear about.
In an age where everybody is interconnected with cell phones, IM, text messages, internet, Facebook, Twitter, and so on, if there's an emergency, a REAL emergency, I don't think anyone will have any trouble getting word of it. This system is entirely unnecessary and will be a real annoyance.
Um.. what? Oh, I see - you didn't get that he's talking about politicians.
He's saying that if politicians make decisions for the country based on what profits them personally (bribes, kickbacks, large donations, favor-trading), then it should be considered treason, because they are betraying the American people for their own personal profit. And I agree - that should be considered treason and dealt with accordingly.
You know, I think we could go a long way towards encouraging decent behavior if people were granted the right to slap people who insult or offend them. Think about it. Right now you can badger, harrass, defame, verbally abuse, and insult people with impunity. I realize there's libel laws but that's a huge and long endeavor, very much separated from the immediate situation. It's perfectly legal to be a complete douche and make someone's life a miserable hell and feel invulnerable because the victim can't touch you.
So take away that immunity. If you insult and mouth off to someone, they can slap you, as hard as they want, as many times as they want, and it's legal. People would think twice before opening their mouth and letting loose with a stream of vitriol and verbal abuse if there was the possibility of an immediate response.
It's behaviorism at its simplest. It's how the entire natural world works. Every social animal tests their boundaries, and if they go too far, they get bit. That's how boundaries get set. Our laws have created a consequence-free outlet for verbal abuse that is generating some truly out-of-control people.
Could this be the research that spawns the Infinite Improbability Drive?
If attempts to create the Higgs Boson result in something going wrong with the LHC, there is certainly energy involved in causing the breakdown. If that energy could somehow be harnessed and directed, say to a single failpoint - say a motor that consistently explodes when it fails - then the energy from that explosion could be used to drive the ship forward. Just keep attempting to create that abhorrent boson, and harness the explosions that result. Voila!
Or, in the spirit of the original, remove all reasonable failpoints and let it create all kinds of weird effects.
Slashdot Mirror
Great post.
The light-switch trick is a great test, as the ambient lighting in any given dream is a reflection of the location in the dream world (AKA state of mind) you are in, and can't be changed by flicking a switch.
I wanted to mention that there are also degrees of lucidity. It's a full spectrum, from acting out of sheer habit, completely unaware that you are dreaming, to acting as you usually do in the dream world to being aware that it is a dream, aware of your waking self, and controlling everything - including waking yourself up at the end to write it all down.
And lucidity can come and go as well - you can become lucid for a couple minutes and then lose it by becoming distracted by something. Distraction is the enemy of lucidity. My dream self knows this. I was once lucid and someone else in my dream was trying to show me a picture in a magazine. I resisted looking at it, because I knew I'd become interested in the picture and go into it (what I call a gateway) - at which point I would lose my lucidity. My dream self knew all that, and only upon waking myself up and remembering it did my waking self come to know it.
As a long-time lucid dream seeker and gamer, I've found that playing games before bed often results in what I consider "stupid" dreams of gaming. The context of the dream is the game, and you're running around playing it. It's a mix between waking physical reality and the game reality. There's usually not a lot of value to these dreams, I've found.
On the other hand, my dream self has become quite aware of himself as an personality in the dream world, with a continuing story from night to night, and has an understanding of the laws of the dream world and how to attain and maintain lucidity. I wonder if my love of games contributes to my ability to project myself into a new dream world or context or if it's the converse - my ability to project myself into the world of dreams contributes to my ability to enjoy video games.
There's no doubt dreams influence video games. The creator of Mario is a dreamer of some degree of lucidity. My first experiences flying in dreams came from taking progressively larger leaps into the air that led to flight. Fastforward a couple decades and Mario is doing the same thing in Super Mario 64.
There's an app for that. It's called Beejive. Last I checked it was $10, and if you and someone else had it, you could text each other as much as you want for free. When a text message comes in, an alert pops up on the phone and there's a sound or buzz. Then you jump into a IM chat screen and chat like that. I think I read that you can send text messages to phone numbers of people who don't have Beejive, but I'm not quite sure how that works.
That said, it leaves a LOT to be desired. You need to be logged into a chat network such as Jabber, and you get automatically logged out every few days. It's also horribly slow on the iPhone 3g, oversensitive to flipping, jumps to the middle of an ongoing chat when it flips, and has been somewhat buggy in the past. But my wife and I text on it daily for free, while her SMS bill for texting with her sister is $30/month.
I couldn't agree more.
Seven years ago I began a slow decline in health that completely ruined my quality of life. I suffered endless migraines, fatigue, abdominal pain, weakness, difficulty focusing, depression, loss of feeling, and social withdrawal. I went to doctor after doctor, and each gave me approximately 5 minutes of their time and couldn't figure out what it was. Very little came up in the standard blood tests.
I had several doctors accuse me of making it up, or saying it's all in my head. Most of the rest just shrugged and sent me on my way. If I had complete trust in medicine I'd have given up and had to live with this forever.
But that's not the kind of person I am. When I felt well enough to, I researched online - examining symptoms, reading up on scholarly articles from PubMed, reading patient cases, bulletin boards. I investigated everything. And 80% of the progress I've made on my condition over the years has been due to my research. I found doctors sorely uninformed on research done in the last ten years - as if after graduating they stopped picking up anything new.
Sure there are hypochondriacs out there. But modern medicine leaves a LOT to be desired, and I'm glad as hell that I have a resource like the internet that allows me to give my condition the attention it deserves.
I agree, and Final Fantasy XIII is a good example. Square Enix always does something unique with each game in this franchise, and the fighting system takes some getting used to. This specific game feels like it's in tutorial mode for the first 12 hours or so, and I've had the manual out the entire time, looking for information, getting tips, figuring out how everything works.
I recently bought Torchlight from Steam and if there was a manual I could access, I didn't see it anywhere. So I looked it up on Google and found the full manual in PDF format on http://www.scribd.com/. I'm not sure if that's authorized or not, but something like that works just fine since it's a PC game, because I'm at the PC playing it. If it were a console game, this would really only be convenient if I had an iPad or laptop nearby, so I wouldn't have to run back and forth from TV to computer to look things up.
There is a certain art and value to well-produced game manuals that I would miss.
Has anyone noticed how industries have taken "green" to mean "give you less for the same price?"
I just noticed the "correlationisnotcausation" tag. Is that just a knee-jerk reaction to studies now?
Are we suggesting that an increase in immune system activity CAUSED people to view a slide show about sick people?
I agree wholeheartedly. While this is somewhat off-topic, I find that multiplayer can not only fail to add something to a game, but straight-up ruin it. I recently quit WoW because I was so tired of selfish and rude players leaving groups when they don't get their drop, trying to control every aspect of another player's play style, putting you down for your gear, and being generally immature and abusive. While in WoW there is the /ignore feature, it's only character-to-character, not player-to-player, so if I and this asshat each have 10 characters, I can run into him 100 times before I've got every combination of /ignore worked out.
Right now I'm playing a single-player game - Eternal Sonata - and loving it. I haven't ended a single play session pissed off. It's quite nice.
More on-topic, I got Dragon Age Origins, and it's unplayable on my top-end gaming PC from just a few years ago. I ordered more RAM but I might need a whole new computer to play it well. If I need to replace my computer every 3 years or so, it's a lot more expensive than getting the latest gaming console. That means every few years there's a frustrating period of games outreaching my computer specs and being painfully slow. An experience you don't get on consoles.
This kill switch would be the HOLY GRAIL to hackers. For foreign countries waging cyber attacks, all attention would turn to gaining access to this system, because triggering it would be the very first step in any kind of attack. But this is also a shiny prize for any would-be script kiddie out there as well. Imagine the reputation you'd get for shutting down the internet.
My mom is into homeopathy. I've had health issues for a while, and she decided to step in and send me something her homeopathic doctor recommended for my symptoms. Always wanting to know what I'm putting into my body, I did some investigation first. Turns out the active ingredient was ARSENIC. I kid you not! I called her up to see why she was trying to kill me and she said such a small amount wouldn't hurt me. Whether or not it was too small to hurt me, it was definitely not going to help me!
Buyer beware! There is some crazy stuff in homeopathic remedies!
I love the name "Operation Titstorm" and I love the audacity of flooding the government's inboxes with the very images they're trying to censor. But is it an effective force for change? I'm happy to see them bringing more attention to the issue - they are definitely accomplishing that. But no doubt they are further polarizing these people against "bad people on the internet". The main problem is that it's almost impossible for "the people" to have a rational conversation with "the government". There is very little chance your emails or petitions will be read or cared about. Once politicians are elected, their accountability to their constituency pretty much ends and they can do as they wish. Something like THIS will get their attention, just as a huge protest in the streets of Washington would.
Didn't they teach cursive because it allowed you to write more quickly? If so, and if that's a valuable thing to teach, there should be classes on the new way to write more quickly - internet shorthand. : )
Those Video Games Live bastards owe me a hundred bucks. When I heard about it, I bought two tickets immediately. It sounded awesome. My wife and I showed up for the show and they had canceled it without any announcement, and refused to refund our money. Video Games Live said Ticketmaster had to refund it and Ticketmaster said Video Games Live had to.
Yikes. If they succeed, they're going to be creating a deeply sexually frustrated society, and that will be expressed in violence. But will that violence be directed inwards to revolution or outwards to war? Probably inwards since the government will be the source of the repression.
I agree that people like that live in a troubling tautology. But there's another thing at work here, and probably the most important and successful conspiracy working today - and that is the conspiracy to discredit conspiracy theorists. The popular opinion today is that conspiracy theorists are nutters, and that's a real boon to anyone involved in a conspiracy. If they're being investigated, there's already a prejudice to dismiss the investigator as crazy. How wonderfully useful.
A conspiracy is when two or more people enter into a secret agreement to do something illegal. This happens ALL THE TIME. No doubt everybody here has been involved in at least one conspiracy. You can barely get through adolescence without it. That everyone now has a knee-jerk reaction to think of anyone talking conspiracy is crazy is a coup for corruption.
Next Up: the new WoW 3.3 patch comes out next Tuesday, which will render this headline inaccurate.
You can't get to the end of something that has no end.
There are several core issues in regards to smoking that make it different in key respects from doing anything harmful to yourself.
1) I am all in favor of allowing things that damage oneself to be legal. That's the essence of the nanny-state discussion. So I'm with people who are against the idea of a nanny-state. BUT smoking is harmful to others. Go ahead and damage yourself, but when you damage others who have not given consent, that is crossing a line.
2) Smoking by its nature releases smoke into the air and is therefore the business of everyone that encounters that smoke. This smoke is a) addictive, b) nasty-smelling, c) a mind-altering substance, and d) causes cancer. To those who smoke, would be fine if a stranger a) put an addictive substance in your food without your consent, b) farted such a nasty fart near you that it stuck in your clothes for days, c) slipped mild mind-altering drugs into your food/drink, or d) released carcinogenic gases into your environment?
3) On mind-altering substances, I'm very much of the philosophy that people should be allowed to use them. But nobody should be allowed to MAKE me use them. Nicotine affects brain chemistry. While it may be a fix for you, it makes me feel ill and causes terrible head pain.
It's a no-brainer. The violent reaction from smokers to the thought of banning smoking from public places and even outside is no doubt related to the thought of being unable to get a fix with one of the most addictive chemicals known to man. Remove that, and you have a case where smoking causes obvious infringements to the people around you, each of which clearly should not be allowed.
If all smokers switched to the patch, the problem would be entirely solved in my mind. Do what you want, but keep it to yourself.
It's interesting that Expert Sex Change has come up so much on this thread, because essentially it sounds like Murdoch wants what they have - Google able to crawl all their news, but then when you click the link, the news isn't there - only a paywall. So this could be already accomplished in the same way.
Personally, I hope Murdoch gets his way. He seems dedicated to pulling his hateful FOX News out of the public eye, and that's undeniably a good thing.
I'm also pleasantly surprised to find I'm not the only one who is ceaselessly annoyed at seeing Expert Sex Change results on Google when looking for coding help.
Laugh while you can! When the robots develop religion, you'll find that they're creationists thanks to the Unix Epoch!
Hear hear!
Recently in Georgia a TV show we were watching (on Tivo, to boot) was interrupted for several minutes with a vague child abduction warning. No information at all was given about the child abduction - no description, no name, no last-seen location, nothing. Did they expect all of Georgia to run out into the streets looking for any old child? How did they expect people to act on this? Not only was it useless and pointless in the specific, but this is not the sort of thing an entire state needs to hear about.
In an age where everybody is interconnected with cell phones, IM, text messages, internet, Facebook, Twitter, and so on, if there's an emergency, a REAL emergency, I don't think anyone will have any trouble getting word of it. This system is entirely unnecessary and will be a real annoyance.
Mandelbroccoli
What a country where advertisements are being taken to task for being misleading while the news has got the legal power to report outright lies.
Um.. what? Oh, I see - you didn't get that he's talking about politicians.
He's saying that if politicians make decisions for the country based on what profits them personally (bribes, kickbacks, large donations, favor-trading), then it should be considered treason, because they are betraying the American people for their own personal profit. And I agree - that should be considered treason and dealt with accordingly.
While I agree with the main point of your post, your use of the term "mistakes" stuck me as bizarre.
A premeditated and months-long online smear campaign including a defamatory web site with the victim's name is not an innocent "mistake".
You know, I think we could go a long way towards encouraging decent behavior if people were granted the right to slap people who insult or offend them. Think about it. Right now you can badger, harrass, defame, verbally abuse, and insult people with impunity. I realize there's libel laws but that's a huge and long endeavor, very much separated from the immediate situation. It's perfectly legal to be a complete douche and make someone's life a miserable hell and feel invulnerable because the victim can't touch you.
So take away that immunity. If you insult and mouth off to someone, they can slap you, as hard as they want, as many times as they want, and it's legal. People would think twice before opening their mouth and letting loose with a stream of vitriol and verbal abuse if there was the possibility of an immediate response.
It's behaviorism at its simplest. It's how the entire natural world works. Every social animal tests their boundaries, and if they go too far, they get bit. That's how boundaries get set. Our laws have created a consequence-free outlet for verbal abuse that is generating some truly out-of-control people.
Could this be the research that spawns the Infinite Improbability Drive?
If attempts to create the Higgs Boson result in something going wrong with the LHC, there is certainly energy involved in causing the breakdown. If that energy could somehow be harnessed and directed, say to a single failpoint - say a motor that consistently explodes when it fails - then the energy from that explosion could be used to drive the ship forward. Just keep attempting to create that abhorrent boson, and harness the explosions that result. Voila!
Or, in the spirit of the original, remove all reasonable failpoints and let it create all kinds of weird effects.