From: uunet!nyx.cs.du.edu!ahawks (andy) Subject: FutureCulture Digest #210 Date: Wed, 3 Feb 93 11:30:16 MST ______________________________________________________________________ |______________ / | | / | | u t u r e <___________ u l t u r e | _______________________________________________________________________| Issue #210 Wednesday, February 3rd 1993 Today's Topics: --------------- Alfred Korzybski Re: Religion (Was Re: Persian citizens) Clinton's Address + Zen Mu-zings How to win friends and influence people and get rich quick and get Lame Gurus Lame Gurus (fwd) lsd/dmso Neural interfaces Re: Masonicks Re: Time Magazine article Re: Future Religions Re: Religion again.... Re: religions Re: UT? Religion again.... religions Smart Drug book... Time, Article for your reading pleasure. __________________________________________________________________________ Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1993 23:40:38 -0800 (PST) From: Al Billings Subject: Lame Gurus (fwd) Here is an interesting (or maybe not) current use for one of the anon remailers. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 2 Feb 93 22:44:09 EST From: aliquis To: future@nyx.cs.du.edu Subject: Lame Gurus Yawn. CYBERPUNK: Virtual sex, smart drugs and synthetic rock 'n' roll! --TIME cover 8 February 1993. Sure, but do they know how to set their umask values so that people can't peek? La-de-dah, let's check on one of the gurus... (BTW, if you enjoy this, & you can get on the WELL, try some of the other cyberpunk.gods from B. Sterling on. Not that they have anything much of interest....) [Actual session script, edited only to protect the guilty.] ============================================================== $ telnet well.sf.ca.us Trying... Connected to WELL.SF.CA.US, a SEQUENT-S27 running DYNIX. This is The WELL DYNIX(R) V3.1.0 (well) Type newuser to sign up. Type trouble if you are having trouble logging in. login: xxxxx Password: Last login: Tue Feb 2 XX:XX:XX from Xxxxxxx.xxx.xxxx DYNIX(R) V3.1.4 NFS #2 (): Tue Mar 31 12:38:27 PST 1992 ======================================================== You own your own words. This means that you are responsible for the words that you post on the WELL and that reproduction of those words without your permission in any medium outside of the WELL's conferencing system may be challenged by you, the author. Thanks for dropping into the WELL. If you haven't changed your password since October 15, 1992, please do so now. Type: change password at an OK prompt. **************************************************************** well 1: grep "Tim Leary" /etc/passwd timleary:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:9339:200:Tim Leary:/uh/39/timleary:/usr/shell/menu well 2: cd /uh/39/timleary well 3: ls -l total 54 -rw-r--r-- 1 timleary well 728 Jun 12 1992 1 -rw-r--r-- 1 timleary well 441 Jun 12 1992 240 -rw-r--r-- 1 timleary well 479 Jun 12 1992 29 -rw-r--r-- 1 timleary well 403 Jun 12 1992 359 -rw-r--r-- 1 timleary well 535 Jun 12 1992 42thnnks -rw-r--r-- 1 timleary well 1096 Jun 12 1992 60 -rw-r--r-- 1 timleary well 1096 Jun 12 1992 62 -rw-r--r-- 1 timleary well 2051 Jun 12 1992 animatemcs -rw-r--r-- 1 timleary well 11360 Jun 12 1992 animatemike -rw-r--r-- 1 timleary well 4141 Jun 12 1992 barlow -rw-r--r-- 1 timleary well 523 Jun 12 1992 barlow2 -rw-r--r-- 1 timleary well 0 Jun 12 1992 c -rw-r--r-- 1 timleary well 11 Jun 12 1992 cbf.002464 -rw-r--r-- 1 timleary well 0 Jun 12 1992 cbf.005371 -rw-r--r-- 1 timleary well 527 Jun 12 1992 cbf.022859 -rw------- 1 timleary well 4 Jun 12 1992 dead.letter -rw-r--r-- 1 timleary well 727 Jun 12 1992 hlr -rw-r--r-- 1 timleary well 403 Jun 12 1992 info -rw------- 1 timleary well 16663 Jan 9 23:43 mbox -rw------- 1 timleary well 452 Jan 9 23:36 q -rw-r--r-- 1 timleary well 341 Jun 12 1992 xmodem.log well 4: cat 29 >From rusirius Sun Jun 24 11:58:18 1990 Received: by well.sf.ca.us (4.12/4.7) id AA02393; Sun, 24 Jun 90 11:58:15 pdt Date: Sun, 24 Jun 90 11:58:15 pdt From: rusirius (Mondo 2000) Message-Id: <9006241858.AA02393@well.sf.ca.us> To: timleary Subject: Re: Masonicks Status: RO Yeah, great to have you virtually in the kitchen. Hope Steve might be helpful. He's advising us. Good business head! Ill further discuss the Burroughs thing with Mu & be back to you during the week. well 5: echo Heh He He He Heh He He He well 6: exit well 7: logout Connection closed by Foreign Host $ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To find out more about the anon service, send mail to help@anon.penet.fi. Due to the double-blind system, any replies to this message will be anonymized, and an anonymous id will be allocated automatically. You have been warned. Please report any problems, inappropriate use etc. to admin@anon.penet.fi. ______________________________ From: hanson@leland.Stanford.EDU Subject: Neural interfaces Date: Wed, 3 Feb 93 0:27:17 PST Re the recent thread on neural interfaces and prosthetics... Some recent research that I've done in poking through the university abstract databases has yielded the following recent research (whee! I love huge online databases.... and sorry in advance for the monster vocabulary. You know academia....) 1. "Micromachined silicon sieve electrodes" for "long term recordings from single afferent sensory fibers" were implanted in rats; after 101 days nerve regeneration was sufficient for functional regeneration of taste, thermal and mechanoreceptors. My Translation: Direct nervous system stimulation recordings on their way, mayhap? 2. A simulator for evaluating the command channels through which a quadriplegic patient controls an upper limb neural prosthesis. The patients moved an animated hand on a video screen through shoulder motions. Optimal combinations of shoulder command-channel parameters are subject-specific. My Translation: Hm. Not quite as useful... though recall the character of Ratz at the Chatsubo... The subject-specific bit means that it won't be as simple as just walking down to the local bodyshop and picking up a new arm, though. 3. Biopolar electrodes implanted in the ears of squirrel monkeys: "results did not demonstrate the characteristic adaptation seen in auditory-nerve neurons in response to acoustic stimulation." Translation: Auditory prosthetics are a long ways off... these guys are just now beginning to figure out how the nerves work. 4."The cone electrode: A long-term electrode that records from neurites grown onto its recording surface." This one was a little too technical for me to even figure out what to quote... but the concluding sentence is interesting: "unique opporunities for...accessing the central nervous systems of patients with severe paralysing and communicative disorders." Translation: Well... add "and folks who just want to get at their central nervous system" to the end... 5. "Visual sensations produced by intracortical microstimulation of the human occipital cortex." Okay, I actually read this one for a class last quarter and we talked to the author even... what they were doing is putting these iridium probes into the occipital cortex of people who were conscious put anaesthesized for brain surgery. What the people saw were colored blobs of various shapes and sizes; the colors and shapes seemed to depend on how far apart the probes were placed. The good news was that the interesting stimuli were on the surface of the occipital cortex, not down deep. The bad news was that they were not able to determine much structure. Significance: A grid of electrodes, placed across the occipital lobe and using proper software, should be able to reproduce lots of visual stimuli (good news, in other words). I actually do seem to remember reading something a year or two ago about a very simple prosthesis that allowed blind people to see a simple grid of dots (4x4 or something like that). It may actually have been dealing with direct stimulation of the optic nerve, rather than stimulation of the occipital cortex. The optic nerve is actually pretty well understood, as I seem to have read, so stimulating it might not be that difficult. Anyway, the datajack is while off yet. But the research is being done... if anyone wants to probe their local database, I used keywords "neural" and "prosthesis" and received 8 citations. Hope this whets your appetites... (Oh, and re the other threads floating around: Atheist (yes I know its faith) with taoist tendencies Clothes: functional (<-- why did this one get so much bandwidth???) And what the hell do you think you're doing, abusing an open system?? This isn't about hacking for the joy of breaking the rules any more!! The world may not be nothing but information YET... but its going to be soon enough... and those of us who know it are responsible for treating it with the most respect!!!! And read _Stand on Zanzibar_ early and often. An incredible book.) P.S. Did everyone get a look at the Steve Jackson Games trial reportage?? Sure, the EFF might not be the knight in shining armor anymore, but they made the trial possible... and it was beautiful to read about the judge reaming that Secret Service guy out... score one for the future! P.P.S. If anybody out there doesn't know about the SJG mess and the ensuing Constitution issues... pub/SJG has most of the info at ftp.eff.org; and the news is available on alt.cyberpunk, alt.comp.acad-freedom.talk (I think?), anywhere else I don't know about? ------- Michael Hanson: hanson@leland.stanford.edu Stanford University, Symbolic Systems & Computer Science And no, in case you were wondering, these are NOT the views of the University, the Government, the Illuminati, OR the Old Ones. ------- ______________________________ Date: Wed, 3 Feb 1993 05:53:23 -0500 From: Sean Michael Carton Subject: Re: Time Magazine article I saw the article too, and I just figure that its another yippity doo da thats not gonna do much either way. I don't think that its exploiting a scene (like Wired kinda is) but it is a little hyped and a bit overblown. As for the Hypertext--yeah, I think you should go back again. In a way I am really committed to the idea of hypertext/hypermedia as the only viable means of postmodern expression that we have left. The book is dead and the avan-garde must take over a new form. Brenda Laurel writes about the computer as a medium an it is--an entirely new medium that for the first time allows the combination (potentially) of all mediums. In effect, I would disagree with Laurel--the computer is not a medium but a _metamedium_ for expression. In our non-linear, densely packed age, one cannot represent the truth artistically through the old linear media. I know, I know--books, linear e-zines, etv, blah blah still have their place-- who wants to have to deal with some po-mo fashion statement every time that they want to look something up. Also, the argument about cross-platform compatibility is not going to last forever. I was recently reading about some Adobe cross platform graphics/text/layout standard. I think that the revolution in hypertext/hypermedia is waiting for the tech to become sufficently advanced to deal with the boring stuff like individual machines. Same goes for the old "I don't want to have to turn on my computer every time I read a book" complaint. There are early versions now of small, unobtrusive book readers (Bookman) and more to come with the Newton and other PDA's. We're at the stage now with e-lit that people were at right before the beginning of the printing press. Just wait. Finally, if I can toot my own self I just wanted to say that if anyone wants to read more about this hypertext stuff, I did my thesis on it and would be happy to send copies to people to read. Any takers. Oh, and yeah yeah--it is linear and in Microsoft Word 5.0 format for the Mac. I had crossplatform compatibility problems with making a hypertext version--most of my committee didn't have computers! Sean ______________________________ Subject: Re: UT? From: david.brooks@cutting.hou.tx.us (David Brooks) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 93 3:32:00 -0600 Liq says: DF> a while back, i saw someone refer to UT (Universal Time) as a DF> time DF> zone. does aonyone know what this is...and what exact timezone itr DF> correlates to? liq Universal Time is synonymous with Greenwich Mean Time. David * Q-Blue v0.7 [NR] * ---- +---------------------------------------------------------------------+ | The Cutting Edge BBS (cutting.hou.tx.us) A PCBoard 14.5a system | | Houston, Texas, USA +1 713 466 1525 running uuPCB | +---------------------------------------------------------------------+ ______________________________ From: StevenJ Subject: religions Date: Wed, 3 Feb 93 7:39:02 CST I guess I'd call myself a deist but recent events have shown me that the Pagan/Wiccan religion actually holds more truth, for me, than I ever knew. Blame my girlfriend for that. 8-) Steve J. White homoNuevo ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The goal of science is the destruction aragorn@convex.csd.uwm.edu of all mystery." - B.F. Skinner aragorn@csd4.csd.uwm.edu ______________________________ Date: Wed, 3 Feb 93 8:51:36 EST From: Tim Driscoll Subject: Re: Religion (Was Re: Persian citizens) I, also, was raised Catholic, and stayed pretty devout until I got to Nam (1968). No flash of light or anything like that, I just sorta came to my senses. Maybe war can do that? Now there is no dharma, at least in the religious meaning. Although I *do* from time to time think of myself as a frisbetarian. ***Fighting Mad Kilo_3rd BN 3rd Regmt 3rd Mar Div_ Jan 68 - Feb 69*** ______________________________ Date: Wed, 3 Feb 1993 06:42:12 -0800 (PST) From: Loveweasle Subject: Re: religions On Wed, 3 Feb 1993, StevenJ wrote: > I guess I'd call myself a deist but recent events have shown me that the > Pagan/Wiccan religion actually holds more truth, for me, than I ever knew. > Blame my girlfriend for that. 8-) > I would also call myself a Wiccan, but only recently have I begun to explore it. fisel@eskimo.com the loveweasl ______________________________ Date: Wed, 03 Feb 93 10:17:17 EST From: JessieZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZoldak Subject: Alfred Korzybski hey all -- I came across a reference this morning in a book I'm reading (Cosmic Trigger II - Robert Anton Wilson) to a guy named Alfred Korzybski, who came up with a neurolinguistic theory that words literally can hypnotize us. Anyone know anything about this theory? I think it was in the 1920s... -- JessieZ jessie@harvarda.harvard.edu ______________________________ Date: Wed, 03 Feb 93 08:37:28 MST From: Juggler Subject: Religion again.... Hmmm...after reading several answers to my question about people's religious preference, there seems to be an inclination toward Eastern, Pagan, and non-religion. I find the people who are Wiccans to be an unusual group for future culture. I dunno, it's probably just ignorance but...Don't Wiccan's have a "spiritual" connection to Mother Earth and all that? I mean, it seems kinda wierd that someone who has so much love and connction with Gaia that he/she wouldn't be into some other group with great interests in technology and the advancement of such. Speaking of which, what place DOES nature have in the future. I see a lot of talk about great networked societies, virtual reality, smart drugs, and all that, but where does nature fit in? -Juggler -------------------------------------------------------- | Juggler | This space available | | IH23@utep.BITNET | for rent to a mult- | | IH23%utep@utepvm.ep.utexas.edu| million $ fascist | |******************************************|corporation| | Sysop of Three Ring Circus (915)564-0026 |------------ -------------------------------------------- My school has nothing to do with me. EVER. ______________________________ Date: Wed, 03 Feb 93 08:42:21 MST From: Juggler Subject: Smart Drug book... Hey, just one small question....How useful is the book, "Smart Drugs and Nutrients"? I've been interested in purchasing it, but wanted to find out if it's worth the dough and time. Thanx. -Juggler -------------------------------------------------------- | Juggler | This space available | | IH23@utep.BITNET | for rent to a mult- | | IH23%utep@utepvm.ep.utexas.edu| million $ fascist | |******************************************|corporation| | Sysop of Three Ring Circus (915)564-0026 |------------ -------------------------------------------- My school has nothing to do with me. EVER. ______________________________ From: hassinge@sfu.ca Subject: Re: Religion again.... Date: Wed, 3 Feb 93 7:48:55 PST from the mouth of Juggler ] Speaking of which, what place DOES nature have in the future. I see a ] lot of talk about great networked societies, virtual reality, smart ] drugs, and all that, but where does nature fit in? ] ] -Juggler a little tiny box. ] ] -------------------------------------------------------- ] | Juggler | This space available | ] | IH23@utep.BITNET | for rent to a mult- | ] | IH23%utep@utepvm.ep.utexas.edu| million $ fascist | ] |******************************************|corporation| ] | Sysop of Three Ring Circus (915)564-0026 |------------ ] -------------------------------------------- ] My school has nothing to do with me. EVER. ] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -fold here- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Ha!sSinge # "well we had to drown the gat, but we saved you two gittens" ------> Sebastian Hassinger, dehabiltated net.lurker: hassinge@sfu.ca <------ "run, run as fast as you can, you can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man!" -- ______________________________ Date: Wed, 3 Feb 1993 07:46:01 -0800 (PST) From: John Frost Subject: Time, Article for your reading pleasure. Howdy, I just spent all day installing a complete Macintosh network at work, from cables to server, and I feel like i've got a weeks more work to do before it is completely operational and the pc-users converted to my new religion. I managed to take a few minutes off to read the TIME cyberpunk article and was generally impressed cut by heavy disappointment in a few areas. Anyway, my wetware is about to crash from exhaustion but I thought I would type in as much of the article as I could. If someone could take up where I leave off, that would be (ugh) mondo kewl. Environmental descriptions are surrounded by "<< >>" and ed: notes are surrounded by "[ ]"'s. "Hypertext" imitations are set off by two indents. ENJOY! [The following article is copied without permission] <> By Philip Elmer-Dewitt Time, February 8, 1993 In the 1950s it was the beatniks, staging a coffeehouse rebellion against the 'Leave it to Beaver' conformity of the Eisenhower era. In the 1960s the hippies arrived, combining antiwar activism with the energy of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Now a new subculture is bubbling up from the underground, popping out of computer screens like a piece of futuristic HYPERTEXT (see indentation). Hypertext - In this article, words printed in color [not here] are defined or expanded upon in marginal entries coded to the same color. In a computer hypertext article, electronic footnotes like these actually pop up on the screen whenever you point your cursor at a "hot" word and click the button of your mouse. They call it cyberpunk, a late-20th century term pieced together from CYBERNETICS (the science of communication and control theory) and PUNK (an antisocial rebel or hoodlum). [Well I guess we can stop the debatre on alt.cyberpunk now =) ] Within this odd pairing lurks the essence of cyberpunk culture. It's a way of looking at the world that combines an infatuation with high-teck tools and a disdain for conventional ways of using them. Originally applied tooa school of hard-boiled science-fiction writiers and then to certain semitough computer hackers, the word cyberpunk now covers a broad range of music, art, psychedelics, smart drugs and cutting-edge technology. The cult is new enough that fresh offshoots are sprouting every day, which infutiated the hardcore cyberpunks, who feel they got there first. Cybernetics -- Norbert Wiener of MIT was designing systems for World War II antiaircraft guns when he realized that hte critical component in a control system, whether animal or mechanical, is a feedback loop that gives a controller information on the results of its actions. He called the study of these control systems cybernetics (from Kybernetes, the Greek word for Helmsman [Anybody want to deconstruct this one]) and helped pave the way for electronic brains that we call computers. Punk -- Cyberculture borrows heavily from the rebellious attitude of punk music, sharing with such groups as the Sex Pistols a defiance of mainstream culture and an urge to turn modern technology against itself. Stewart Brand, editor of the hippe-era 'Whole Earth Catalog,' describes cyberpunk as "technology with attitude." Science-fiction writier Bruce Sterling calls it "an unholy alliance of the technical world with the underground of pop culture and street level anarchy." Jude Milhon, a cyberpunk journalist who writes under the byline of St. Jude, defines it as "the place where the worlds of science and art overlap, the intersection of the futureand now." What cyberpunk is about, says Rudy Rucker, a San Jose State University mathematician who writes science-fiction books on the side, is nothing less than "the fusion of humans and machines." As in any counterculture movement, some denizens would deny that they are part of a "movement" at all. Certainly they are not as visible from a passing car as beatniks or hippies once were. Ponytails (on men) and tattoos (on women) do not a cyberpunk make -- though dressing all in black and donning mirrored sun- glasses will go a long way. ANd although the biggest cyberpunk journal claims a readersh approaching 70,000, there are probably no more than a few thousand computer hackers, futurists, fringe scientists, computer savvy artists and musicians, and assorted science-fiction geeks [hmmm where do I fit in] around the world who actually call themselves cyberpunk. Nevertheless, cyberpunk may be the defining counterculture of the compute age. It embraces, inspirit at least, not just the nearest thirtysomething hacker hunched over his [sic] terminal but also nose-ringed twentysomethings [wait - was that an insult???] gathered at clandestine RAVES, teenagers who feel about the Macintosh computer the way their parents felt about Apple Records, and even preadolescent vidkids fused like Krazy Glue to their Super NIntendo and Sega Genesis games -- they training wheels of cyberpunk [Look Ma! no hands.]. Obsessed with technology, especially technology that is just beyond their reach (like BRAIN IMPLANTS), the cyberpunks are future oriented to a fault. They already have one foot in the 21st century, and time is on their side. In the long run, we will all be cyberpunks. [ugh - Goddess Save Us All ] RAVES -- organized on the fly (sometimes by electronic mail) and often held in warehouses, raves are huge, nomadic dance parties that tend to last all night, or until the police show up. Psychedelic mood enhancers and funny accessories (white cotton gloves, face masks) are optionals. [what, no ubiquitous Cat-in-the-Hat has?] BRAIN IMPLANTS -- Slip a microchip into snug contact with your gray matter (a.k.a. wetware) and suddenly gain instant fluency in a foreign language or arcane subject. The cyberpunk look -- a kind of SF surrealism tweaked by coputer graphics -- is already finding its way into galleries, music videos and Hollywood movies. Cyberpunk magazines, many of which are "zines," cheaply published by desktop computer and distributed by electronis mail, are multiplying like cable-TV channels. The newest, a glossy, big-budget [where'd all the money go to?] entry called "WIRED," premiered last week with Bruce Sterling on the cover and ads from the likes of Applie Computer and AT&T [Boo... Hisss...]. Cyberpunk music, including ACID HOUSE and INDUSTRIAL, is popular enough to keep several record companies and scores of bands cranking out CDs. Cyberpunk-oriented books are snapped up by eager fans as soon as they hit the stores. (Sterling's latest, "The Hacker Crackdown," quickly sold out its first hard-cover printing of 30,000.) A piece of cyberpunk performance art, Tubes, starring Blue Man Group, is a hit off-broadway. And cyberpunk films such as "Blade Runner," Videodromve, Robocop, Total REcall, Terminator 2, and The Lawnmower Man have moved out of the cult market and into the mall. Acid House -- White-hot danced music that falls somewhere between disco and hip-hop. INDUSTRIAL -- Mixing rhythmic machine clanks, electornic feedback and random radio noise, industrial music is "the sounds our culture makes as it comes unglued," says cyberpunk writer Gareth Branwyn. Cyberpunk culture is likely to get a boost from, of all things, the Clinton-Gore Administration, because of a shared interest in what the new regime calls America's "data highways" and what the cyberpunks call CYBERSPACE. Both terms describe the globe- circling, interconnected telephone network that is the conduit for billions of voice, fax, and computer-to-computer commmunications. The incoming Administration is focused on the wiring, and it has made strenghtening the networks high-speed data liks a priority. The cyberpunks look at those wires from the inside; they talk of the network as if it were an actual place -- a VIRTUAL REALITY that can be entered, explored and manipluated. CYBERSPACE -- SF writier William Gibson called it "a consensual hallucination ... a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every cojputer in the human system." You can get there simply by picking up the phone. VIRTUAL REALITY -- An interactive technology that creates an illusion, still crude rather than convincing, of being immersed in an artificial world. The user generally dons a computerized glove and a head-mounted display equipped with a TV screen for each eye. Now available as an arcade game. Cyberspace plays a central role in the cyberpunk world view. The literature is filled with "console cowboys" who prove their mettle by donning virtual reality headgear and performing heroic feats in the imaginary "matrix of cyberspace. Many of the punks' real-life heroes are also computer cowboys of one sort or another. "Cyberpunk", a 1991 book by two New York TIMES reporters, John Markoff and Katie Hafner, features profiles of three canonical cyberpunk hackers, including Robert Morris, the Cornell graduate student whose computer virus brought the huge network called the internet to a halt. [that's it... sorry gotta go to bed] ______________________________ Date: Wed, 3 Feb 1993 08:44:47 -0800 From: William Dale Bradshaw Subject: lsd/dmso >In addition to curving such addictions as nicotine, what about >using these derm patches for chemical enhancement purposes? >(Such as cognitive enhancers, amino acids, vitamins...) >It makes sense that the chemical would have to be h20 soluble..but >what about combining it with a chemical such as DMSO? >Me, with a squirt gun full of lsd and dmso, in the pentagon...Wheee! 8-) >(just kidding fbi...) Yes, this does work. Was a major drag at Dead shows a few years back. Now, everybody does no that it is WAY UNCOOL to be dosed without your knowledge or consent, right? ______________________________ From: Visceral Clamping Mechanism Subject: Clinton's Address + Zen Mu-zings Date: Wed, 3 Feb 93 8:51:06 PST For the record, Clinton's address is (or is purported to be): 75300.3115@Compuserve.com ______________________________ From: what!rusirius *** Quoth John Frost : > Does ahawks have Buddah nature? Buddah Nature: there's a great name for a cheap American beer! The buddah nature is the unfocused focus of the deep hack. The buddah nature is being a happy busy Caltrans worker. The buddah nature sneaks up on you when you don't expect it. Perhaps even when you are piercing your scrotum. The world is a very strange place. > frost, mu? =?= moof? Would mondo 2000 know the buddah nature if it bit them on the ass? I doubt it. The buddah nature is not expressible in Zapf Chancery. -- atman@rahul.net || "Burn hollywood burn!" "I hanker for a hunk of cheese." ______________________________ Date: Wed, 3 Feb 1993 12:42 EST From: Matt Willis Subject: How to win friends and influence people and get rich quick and get Well, after message thirteen of "how did you get your grant", I figured out that I'd better just post to all parties of the second part. Well, first off, it's an educational grant from an institution here in FL. 1) I'm a full-time student at Stetson University 2) I'm working on a CS degree 3) I know the man in charge of funding for Anonymous Institution I'm given almost entire control over the project, but, as an educational institution, there are certain limitations... However, I get to take it out on Weekends and licence it to local establishments :) The money I get from these establishments is allocated back into the VR project and in "Operator Maintenance Costs".... namly, ME.... ;) As the programmer who writes the source, I have full copyright priveleges of the code and the code is considered my property, but the hardware can be yanked from me at any time... By the head of the CS department. However only he and I have access to the project, and maybe another local I'm considering cutting in on it... I had a meeting with the CS head and his bosses and it was interesting how we got this one through... I said basically, that there were VERY few institutions (in the SothEast) with VR Labs (I love using the term "Lab", when I work in an office building with lawyers and accountants). Life is good, where else but lovely America, would they let someone who doesn't yet have his degree play with tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Life is definately good. There are definate advantages to being in a technologically deficient area. There is a much larger demand for the educated and a lot less of a demand for explanations. +-------Matt-Willis--------------------------------+ | Matt Willis ASTMWILL@STETSON.BITNET | elsewhere: | Matt Willis Head of the Underground | mwill@mindvox.phantom.com | Matt Willis Robotech PBM List | +-------Matt-Willis--------------------------------+ "Absolutely alone in awareness of the mechanism." -Agrippa by WG ______________________________ Date: Wed, 3 Feb 93 12:19:20 CST From: raunn@cs.tamu.edu (Raun D Nohavitza) Subject: Re: Future Religions I have been fundamental southern baptist, methodist, bahai, wiccan, I have practiced new age religions ranging from crystal lore to rune-casting and tarot. I've read the entire bible and much of the koran, and several pieces of wiccan literature as well. Right now I am an athiest. I am not anti-religion, however, I think that even organized religion has it's place, although I don't agree with it. So what conclusions are we drawing from this data? Aside from the numerous athiests and agnostics on the net, I've noticed quite a few of the eastern philosophies represented. What about the loa? :) Raun raunn@cs.tamu.edu _________________________________________________________________________ | | | That's all for today! | | To send a message to the list: future@nyx.cs.du.edu | | To subscribe/unsubscribe/change format: future-request@nyx.cs.du.edu | | All other requests: future-request@nyx.cs.du.edu | | List Maintainer is: (andy [aka hawkeye]) ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu | |_________________________________________________________________________| | | | The opinions expressed in FutureCulture are those of the individual | | author only. | |_________________________________________________________________________|