Links to stuff I like – Page 13 – Cubilone's Dimension

I Can Now Run 8K

It is done! Almost three months after I ran my first 5K, I’m now proud to say that the previous week was my last for Gateway to 8K, and it was a success. I managed to put one foot in front of the other, with one of them always off the ground, at 149BPM, for 50 minutes straight. And I did that three times last week. My bragging rights I’m exercising before you.

But I’m not stopping here.

I’m not telling what I have in mind, either; they say that announcing your goals is the first step to not achieving them, because part of you has already derived satisfaction from the act of sharing and from the relevant -usually positive and supportive- reactions, thus making you less determined to actively work towards them.

On the other hand, of course, “publicly” announcing your goals can be used to hold yourself accountable if you give up. Saving face, even when it’s definitely only you and your ego who’s interested in whether you make it or not, may be a good incentive for sticking to it when the going gets tough, uncomfortable or requires certain sacrifices.

In any case, I generally prefer the former type of incentive, if only for the free drama build-up that comes along with it! >:}

For now, my thanks go to Zapaden Park, Sveta Troitsa Park, The Cracked Podcast and Podrunner for helping, in their own way, make running for 50 minutes not as tiring or frightening as it sounded at first but something to look forward to.

Review: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

You ask me what I think. Think. Neurons flashing up, millions, billions, zeros, on an array of pixels my primitive mind is not fully equipped to understand. The bright lights! “Yes! Follow them”, and they did just that, his super-ergo, his ego, the animus, the shadow self and all of the other assorted invisible, conscious, subconscious, unconscious and extended entities, tied together by the zeitgeist of the universal… Now. Nobody was better fit to understand it but him -or is that them– in that room, with that assortment of pages and memories and experiences and images, in that city that they in the South – but it wasn’t just the South – had no idea about, but who does really? And the assortment of pages, which we borrowed from the city library in Sofia, that city known for the cold but living the heat, “great day today, record highs!“- it took some time, some bits of now, of one-ness and possibilities and pages and memories and experiences and all of that, to decode and understand. But how much of it stuck? Does it even matter? And it’s not like I haven’t dipped my toes in this stuff, mind you. Beginning to understand and creating the dots on the screen this 01010010010100010 111011101010101010 in vast, immense, unfathomable bzzzzzzzz, only harnessed by the computer, the ultimate being, the judge, the jury, the executioner, the Wikileaks activist, the troll and the Spyder – it’s a superbeing unleashed by the lowly beings, that’s it. The Computer -it has to be with a capital C now, don’t you see?- will take my decoded neural flashes and make them into this text that, if people watch carefully, will see that it’s not more than it is. Which part exactly? Hah! So many interesting questions. Tell me more about how much you want to learn about the world.

This was my subjective experience of reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and beginning to write a review for it. What? You didn’t get it? Tsk. First of all: I didn’t ask you for your opinion, and much less did I write it to suit your needs; what part of “self-expression” do you find so difficult to understand? Figures: you’re one of those square types that can’t appreciate a description of an indescribable experience for what it is, aren’t you? For chrissakes, why do you have to push meaning into everything? Look how much good your meaning has done us!

OK, enough with this. Because I do value meaning, I’ll stop here. I hope, however, that this was enough for you to get the picture. You see, Tom Wolfe did something remarkable, though quite representative of his time (that’s 1968 we’re talking about here): he tried to document and tell a story without caring too much about whether the readers would understand it or whether it would make sense at all, but insisting on a specific style to prove a point. The magic of what really happened, which we’ll get to in a second, apparently gave him the impression that having his story mirror what its main actors must have experienced while actually living it, would make for a breath-taking read…

…no-no-no. Let’s put it this way. Suppose the people you wanted to document the life of, their life as seen through their eyes, were tripping on LSD for most of the duration. Bad idea, right? Well, let’s just say that this is the book that had to be written for people to learn why it’s not a good idea.

Actually, the story itself that The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test sets out to tell is super-interesting: it’s the documentation of the events that made LSD hit the mainstream, the story of the Merry Pranksters, the absolutely bonkers mix of gang, pilgrims, troupe, nomad tribe and religion led by Ken Kesey and how they took over the US underground in the ’60s. Obnoxious and inspiring in equal measure -okay, maybe slightly more obnoxious- they travelled all over the US in that painted old school bus that turned magic and ended up becoming a symbol of their later activity, the Acid Test parties, underground events that in their own right founded a big part of what we understand today as the recreational drug, clubbing and hippie scenes.

Reading about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the crazy things they did filled me with wonder and amazement: so that’s what happened; that’s what living in those times and following this ground-breaking movement must have felt like, being an acid-head cyberpunk 20 year before anyone had even thought of the word. They thought then, whenever they weren’t “zonked out” of their brains, that they would change the world, only they didn’t, and maybe you can understand why -and where things might have gone different- by reading this story.

It’s not Tom Wolfe’s “subjective” style that gives this effect, though. Reading something that felt like it was written while everyone involved was tripping did not make me have a clearer picture of what really took place. On the contrary: the segments of the book more akin to real journalism, the parts where Wolfe decided he could give us readers a break, were the most interesting by far for me to read. However, I can see what he was trying to do: using this kind of language he only wanted to convey the indescribable that is the altered state, the psychedelic experience. Back then it must have felt like a revolution to put it in this way, the culmination of a million different things guiding your hand and voicing the feelings and memories of an entire generation (it says so in the description of the book anyway: “They say if you remember the ’60s, you weren’t there.”) But now, one or two generations later, it all comes across as rather bad writing. He might as well have invented a new language to try to describe the inexplicable, the “you must live it!” factor. Maybe the new language would have been easier to read through, even.

This is a significant book documenting important and interesting events that distill the countercultural mythology, don’t get me wrong. If you’d like to get a feeling of the psychedelic indescribable by reading it, though, maybe it would be a better idea to watch a recently released cut of The Movie known as Magic Trip – the 16mm film Ken Kesey and the rest of the Merry Pranksters shot during their journeys with Further. I know I will.

Book borrowed from the American Corner of Sofia City Library

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Our Flappy Dystopia, by Mattie Brice

I just came across this website among all this Flappy Bird talk and read this brilliant article by Mattie Brice, Our Flappy Dystopia.

What role does capitalism play in what is and what is not accepted as a game by the mainstream games culture? What does it take for a title to become an indie darling? What kind of segregation is at play here?

She mentions three games as examples of atypical indie titles that push the boundaries while at the same time making people sift awkwardly in their seats: dys4ia, Problem Attic and Analogue: A Hate Story. I have only played the first one and hope that the other two are as intriguing as it. I won’t say more, you’ll have to try it for yourself – it will only take you 5 minutes.

Alternate Ending as a whole is quite a find. Brice’s criticism on games and gaming culture are coming from a different and unusual place, but one that I’d definitely like to hear more often from, however: minority sexuality and social injustice.

Review: Tricks of the Mind

Tricks Of The Mind by Derren Brown

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this book, Derren Brown, famous British “illusionist, mentalist, trickster, hypnotist, painter, writer, and sceptic”, sets out to reveal the secrets of his work and actually tell people “I have no real powers, and I hope this settles it!”. We get to see all of the above sides of his: amazing breakdowns of his work and shows and spectacular analyses of what parts of human psychology and neurology he manipulates and why. Most of all, however, we see his sceptical side.

Derren Brown dedicates the majority of his book and prose on an excellent and thorough debunking of things like parapsychology, homeopathy and alternate medicine. He goes through them with an aura of “I would like these things to exist but they cannot, and here’s why”. The idea is that they’re all a mix of delusions, confirmation bias, psychological tricks and many other “flaws” of the human psyche he actually explains are the reason he can trick people.

Now, my personal opinion still is that the scientific method is far from perfect and that a lot of what we see that works in these fields but shouldn’t, based on what we can know and understand about the world, is not necessarily less real than what can be proven; conversely, the scientific dogma is trying to concvince us that if it can’t be proven, it shouldn’t work. However, anecdotal evidence from countless sources (which Mr. Brown rejects based on the fact that they cannot be integrated into a greater theory, but how could they ever be?) tells us a different story.

Repeatabiliy, correlations between cause and effect and the need for evidence are concepts inseparable from the scientific method, but the scientific method is only one way of looking at things. You might say it is the one that works more reliably, but that doesn’t mean that it always works or even that reliability should be our end-all-be-all criterion when creating our world theories. For example, how does reliability and repeatability fit in with the double slit experiment? Or how about the decline effect (excellent article by the New Yorker), which questions the whole idea that once something is proven, it should be able to be repeatedly proven anew? What if it fails to? Is it a problem of the experiment or an incompatibility of the nature of things with the idea that, given the same known and unknown conditions, A should always lead to B? Maybe Douglas Adams had it right all along:

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

In short: if Derren Brown is an open-minded sceptic, I choose to be the unorthodox researcher, the explorer of the fringes, the one who looks for the truth that slips between the seams, what gets misunderstood by the scientists of its time, ridiculed, rejected by the dominant paradigm, including the rhetoric of this book of course. “I have the rational intelligence to be a scientist, but it’s not in my personality to fill in cracks in established mental models. I seek anomalies that open cracks.” ~Ran Prieur (there’s more from him coming up)

I believe that the author’s bias towards positivism is a resulf of him, as discussed in the book, being religious at a young age and at some point changing sides completely. Since then he seems to have kept insisting that the paranormal or parapsychology must have the same psychological root as religious belief. This is a bias which can also be seen in the studies he chooses to cite to prove his points, as well as the books he recommends at the end of the book for further reading; most of them are, predictably, reinforcing what he already talked about in the book – more scepticism in line with The God Delusion (which I’m curious to read). Is he making the same mistake of maintaining reverse cognitive and confirmation biases, the very same thing he set out to point out to us that everyone is doing?

All that said, even if I disagree with his scope and can see the limitations of his argument (which could be a cognitive bias of my own, mind you), I did enjoy his argumentation and have to commend his style. He didn’t insult people who fall into the cognitive mistakes he outlines and who believe in these irrational behaviours he has taken advantage of to become who he is now; he didn’t try to hold the scepticist view just to prove a point or win the argument, as too many people to count are used to doing, themselves becoming the very zealots they swore to destroy; he was gentle and careful with his explanations and approached the topics with an genuinely, not just a supposedly, open mind; his whole style gave off the impression that he is actually interested in the truth, that he has the real spirit of a researcher and isn’t just the pretention of one. If we disagree in scope and -naturally- look at things from different perspectives… So be it. All I know is that I gained something from his healthy scepticism and his book is now serving as a platform for further investigation of mine in all directions.

An excellent example: from the books section of Ran Prieur’s website:

Charles Fort was the first paranormal investigator, and he’s my favorite natural philosopher. He spent 27 years in libraries collecting notices of physical phenomena unexplainable by science, and put them together into four books in the 1920’s. You don’t have to be into weird stuff to appreciate his style of thinking: that all our attempts to make sense of the world only seem true by excluding stuff at the edges that doesn’t fit, and we can keep updating and revolutionizing our models to fit new observations, but there is no end to this process. This should not make us feel troubled, but awe-struck and amused. The Book of the Damned is Fort’s first and best book, and his one-volume Complete Books are still in print. Here’s another source of Fort online.

[…]

I’ve been into paranormal and new age writing for most of my life. My advice is not to exclude it completely or your mind will become cramped and inflexible. It’s safe to dip your toes into it, but if you go into it deeply, you have to commit to going all the way through. Because you’ll reach a point where your mind cracks open and you’ll think you suddenly Know the Truth, and you’ll be tempted to stop and set up camp. You must not stop, but keep looking at different perspectives. Then you’ll think, wait, now this is the Truth, and now this… Hold on here! It’s looking like reality itself is so packed and multifaceted that it’s easy to make any nutty system of thought seem like the Truth — including the dominant paradigm itself. Now you’re getting it!

The smartest and most thorough book on the “paranormal” is The Trickster and the Paranormal by George P. Hansen. Even though his writing style is aggressively clear, it’s still hard to read because the ideas are so difficult. He covers anthropology, literary theory, shamanism, stage magic, UFO hoaxes, psychic research, and more, and the general idea is that it’s the very nature of these phenomena to only exist on the fringes. How can this work? The answer is simple but sounds so crazy that even Hansen only hints at it. Another big idea is that real unexplained phenomena and hoaxes are not opposites, but blend together.

I love the books of Fortean paranormal researcher John Keel. They’re all great, but my two favories are The Mothman Prophecies and The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings. Like Keel, I think UFO’s are an occult phenomenon (which means something very hard to explain), and an even smarter author who thinks like this is Jacques Vallee, whose most important book is Passport to Magonia.

A great source for all kinds of fringe books is Adventures Unlimited.

Some books that try to merge woo-woo stuff with hard science: The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, The Field by Lynne McTaggart, and The Self-Aware Universe by Amit Goswami. And for a critique of the untested assumptions that underlie science as we know it, check out The End of Materialism by Charles Tart or The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake.

[…]

So when Wilhelm Reich developed physical tools to work with the esoteric energy he called “orgone”, or when Royal Rife cured serious diseases with precise frequency generators, or when Louis Kervran found biological creatures transmuting chemical elements (his book is Biological Transmutations), or for that matter, when ordinary people experience UFO abductions or miraculous healings, these are not hoaxes or delusions. They are honest and accurate observations that fail to be integrated into consensus reality… so far!

*deep breath* Okay. I’ve written this much already and I haven’t even mentioned any of the more practical things covered. Mr. Brown included tricks for improving one’s memory and memorising things (like the incredible Method of Loci), techniques for spotting lies and deception, and others shared with the foundation of NLP for disconnecting with bad memories and reinforcing positive visualisations. You can even find the fundamentals of hypnosis in there, but it’s a topic which, to be honest, he muddled through, unable to tell us precisely or convincingly what it is but very keen on telling us what it isn’t. Now all I’m left with is “what’s hypnosis finally?”

Yes. This review is too long. If you skipped to the end, let me tell you that this book is worth it. It will make you think and it will make you look into real techniques that are both impressive and useful, if only you can just sit down and practice them (which it’s doubtful I will, not because of lack of interest but because of lack of dedication – for now).

To think I haven’t even watched his shows…

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qbdp episode #4: Being employed in the 21st Century

Download here.

In Coffee House, Sofia - Bulgaria — In Coffee House, Sofia – Bulgaria. Picture by Zanda

Is employment still relevant today? What is there left than needs doing? What’s going to happen to the world’s unemployed? What does automation have to do with all this? Is there an alternative? This and more in this episode of qbdp.

In addition, I mention this episode of The Cracked Podcast (it’s called “What America can’t admit about the Millennial generation” – trust me, it applies even more to the European South). You really need to give it a listen, it’s a must if you’d like to hear more about what unemployment means today, what more it could mean in the following years and why you shouldn’t be listening to your parents when they’re telling you that when they were your age they had already gone through 14 jobs or so. You should check out the rest of their episodes too, they’re doing a fantastic job.

“The many reasons (32 so far) why we DON’T succeed in learning languages, and retorts for why we can”

Daphne had been insisting that I leave the inn in HabitRPG I had so cozily settled in the past few weeks; thatTrapper Santa boss would certainly not kill itself! I actually did, but actually I hadn’t. By some mistake I didn’t really click on the button which makes you leave the inn (or the flipping site/my laptop/our internet was being unresponsive) and thus missed my opportunity to join the party and fight the boss. This made me very angry indeed. I started fidgeting around the site trying to find a way to undo this when I clicked on “Challenges“.

One of the top ones was “Learn a Foreign Language“. I was intrigued of course and swiftly followed a link sending me to an article titled the same as the title of this post on a site called Fluent in 3 Months.

While the author is plugging himself in more ways I considered possible, it’s a very encouraging and thorough read for someone like me whose ambition is to become a polyglot, but it could be just as useful for anyone aiming to learn a foreign language . You’re probably going to get information overload from that one but it’s worth a try and anyway it’s a valuable resource. Even I had no idea all these sites existed dedicated to all these different kinds of language practice. I had probably just never looked hard enough for them, subconsciously following some of those 32 excuses myself…

Winter Solstice 2013

This unusual and artistic image, made using a technique known as “solargraphy” in which a pinhole camera captures the movement of the Sun in the sky over many months, was taken from the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope on the plateau of Chajnantor. The plateau is also where ESO, together with international partners, is building the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The solar trails in the image were recorded over half a year and clearly show the quality of the 5000-metre altitude site, high in the Chilean Andes, for astronomical observations.

Caught from Wikipedia.

Cracked: 5 Reasons the Video Game Industry Is About to Crash

The link. Got the article from Mario, who shared it from Facebook. He said:

Yes. Reminded me of my recent musings on Steam and my slightly less recent retelling of my conviction that my hacked Wii is the perfect embodiment of the next generation of gaming.

Review: On the Map: Why the World Looks the Way it Does

On the Map: Why the World Looks the Way it Does by Simon Garfield

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I bought On The Map from Schiphol Airport when it caught Daphne’s eye in an AKO. It looks at cartography from numerous and very different angles: the digital (or tabletop), imaginary map of the contemporary game; the history of cartography from Ptolemy to Eratosthenes and from Blaeu to Mercator -and the fight between different projections and why the one bearing the latter’s name escaped its intended use for navigation and remained revelant in the 21st century; neurology’s attempts of mapping the brain; the medieval spirit of map-making that was vastly more interested in the representation of myth and fable than of actual space; the revolution -and problems- brought about by the introduction of GPS; even a more in-depth look at how men and women look at maps differently -note: not necessarily with the men being flat-out better at reading maps as is commonly believed, it’s a bit more complex than that- and many more.

My main problem with the book was that it was too geared towards Brits: there were just too many chapters on the Ordnance Survey, the creation of the London A-Z, John Snow and how he stopped cholera (don’t laugh!), the story of the London Underground iconic -and first of its kind- stylised chart (okay, that one was interesting) and others that were just too specific for me. Plus, Simon Garfield’s style was somewhat… dry, I’d say. It couldn’t convey the thrill I usually get from looking at maps (or creating them, as is the case with many of my favourite PC games), letting my imagination and abstract mind go crazy in the process. There was some magic lost here.

The chapter on the world’s atlases, on the other hand, had me salivating all over. Just for a taste: Blaue’s Atlas Maior (1665), The World Geo-graphic Atlas (1953) and The State of the World Atlas (1999, with recurring editions – nine to date). Unfortunately, the book’s black & white illustrations, scans and pictures, while indeed helping to keep the price low, didn’t help with making the maps look their best. Thank you ~~Google~~ DuckDuckGo.

To cut a long story -okay, maybe not so long- short, I’d say that the book was okay; a useful reference but not as mind-tickling as I’d have liked it. If you like maps though, don’t let me stop you: by all means give it a flip and see what you can get from it. To carry on with the whole British thing, there’s bound to be something in there that’s your cup of tea.

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Birdy Nam Nam – Abbesses

Finally, I have found you… As discovered first by listening to THC.