From extropians-request@extropy.org Tue Nov 23 06:27:27 1993 Return-Path: Received: from usc.edu by chaph.usc.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1+ucs-3.0) id AA02044; Tue, 23 Nov 93 06:27:25 PST Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: from news.panix.com by usc.edu (4.1/SMI-3.0DEV3-USC+3.1) id AA12017; Tue, 23 Nov 93 06:27:20 PST Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: by news.panix.com id AA09085 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for more@usc.edu); Tue, 23 Nov 1993 09:10:47 -0500 Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1993 09:10:47 -0500 Message-Id: <199311231410.AA09085@news.panix.com> To: Extropians@extropy.org From: Extropians@extropy.org Subject: Extropians Digest X-Extropian-Date: November 23, 373 P.N.O. [14:10:26 UTC] Reply-To: extropians@extropy.org Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Status: RO Extropians Digest Tue, 23 Nov 93 Volume 93 : Issue 326 Today's Topics: BlackNet Investigations Needs More Detailed [1 msgs] DRUGS: Essay on LSD and Madness... [1 msgs] Drugs [3 msgs] E-Prime - a dumb question [2 msgs] Freezing Eggs, Human [1 msgs] META: Charging $ for the List [2 msgs] Memetic Schelling Point? [1 msgs] NYT: Computerized testing. [1 msgs] SF: _Cyteen_ [1 msgs] SF: _The Modular Man_ [1 msgs] Serial numbers on currency (was Tech: Truth about Canon Copiers)[1 msgs] Start-Up VirtSem: 1st step [1 msgs] Tech: Truth about Canon Copiers [1 msgs] Venture Capitalism/Extropian List Software... [1 msgs] Administrivia: No admin msg. Approximate Size: 70097 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 22 Nov 93 11:32:03 PST From: pierre@shell.portal.com (Pierre Uszynski) Subject: META: Charging $ for the List > From: David Kovar > > > A "reflector tree" is a nice idea but it might be > > high-maintenance. Who debugs mail problems, and who gets the notices > > of misdelivered mail? If the main list admin has to debug too many > > off-site problems you can bet that the price charged to people on > > reflector sites will rise, and rise... > > As a mailing list admin, reflector trees are highly frustrating. If > you pin the problem down to one bad address, how do you tell which list > has the bad address on it? Sometimes the critical header information > is gone, or never was there, and you generally have to broadcast a message > to all of the reflector admins asking them to check their lists. Then > you find out that someone created another reflector without your knowledge. > This sort of tree would require a fair degree of cooperation. Sure, I agree there is not much experience with reflector trees. I was suggesting this as a solution to the cost of sendmail calls. I think it addresses THAT problem fairly well. So, ok, now there is a management problem. Just because there clearly is a potential problem doesn't mean it's unsolvable. If the problem is solvable through clever algorithms, instead of brute force calls to sendmail, then we still have a solution (providing implementation cost is not too high). One problem that exists with ANY mailing list, is matching returned delivery errors to subscriber addresses (after mail went through aliases and forwarding mostly). One way to do that is to tag every mail that goes out the list (say with a header line), each subscriber is assigned a tag, independently from his mail address. Say: X-list-tag: 643278 (is uniquely assigned to joe.random@dockmaster.gov) You assign these tags sequentially to new subscribers, no need to reuse old tags. This way, a returned message is uniquely matchable to a list address, no matter how many forwardings happened. OK, now what happens in a reflector tree. Well we can extend the concept: As a list message goes through the tree, it gets tagged. So a message starts at X-list-tag: 24526 (assigned to that first level reflector) then is reflected as: X-list-tag: 24526-12 (assigned to the 12th address served by this ref.) and X-list-tag: 24526-13 (assigned...) and X-list-tag: 24526-14 (assigned...) ... So, in the end, when something bounces, it returns to somebody, somewhere in the reflector tree (maybe the root, maybe the leaf, who knows :-) but it returns with a map of the reflector path taken in the form: X-list-tag: 24526-15-Andy-AEFTY-A1-3 (tags need not be numerical, esp. if you are using perl). If the bouncer deleted all the header, then debug that postmaster instead of the list :-) As for implementation, procmail and perl can take care of this. The processing cost per message is not so high, and if a reflector mails to only 3 addresses, it does not matter. Locating failures is not the only problem of reflector trees, but at least this one should be solvable. Could we expect other may solvable too? (subscriptions and un-subscriptions is more difficult I think) Pierre. pierre@shell.portal.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Nov 93 15:20:32 EST From: Andy Wilson Subject: NYT: Computerized testing. Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1993 08:30:08 -0800 (PST) From: Sameer > which was WRONG! - hope it's a rare exception... And yes, the same old > emphasis on the 'knowledge' of a simple set of quantifiable facts, just Wrong questions on SATs are not rare. A college friend of mine had a mentor in the Philosphy department who was on some advisory board for one of the standardized tests, and he said that when the results came in, they would change the "correct" answers to a few questions so that the curve was better. IHMO it doesn't make much difference, since these standardized tests don't measure anything very important. The ACT is just a speed reading comprehension test. I think people should refuse to take the tests. They are just a glaring symptom of the utter failure of the government-mismanged education system. Life is the only test worth taking, and it sure isn't standardized ;-). In cyberspace information is very easy to get. Creativity, intuition, and adaptability become much more important in this scenario. The notion of the "smart" person having an encylopedic mind is becoming obsolete. Andy ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 15:29:39 +0500 From: brian@suneast.east.sun.com (Brian Hawthorne - SunSelect Strategic Marketing) Subject: META: Charging $ for the List > Sure, I agree there is not much experience with reflector trees. Excuse me? And just how would you describe something like moderated news groups with restricted distribution? Clarinet seems to be having lots of success with software that has been refined over a decade of use. There are plenty of Netnews hierarchies that are completely private, yet use NNTP and Usenet/UUCP for propagation. You limit your bandwidth requirements, providing filtering at the recipient's end, and distribute processing all over the place. I've always thought that the Extropians list is heading in exactly the wrong direction: that of increasing centralization and control. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Nov 93 07:41:05 GMT From: price@price.demon.co.uk (Michael Clive Price) Subject: E-Prime - a dumb question Perhaps this is overly simplistic, but what is the point of E-prime? It seems to be to unpack language and make explicit many assumptions that are implicit. Once these assumptions are pointed out why bother to repeat them each time you make a statement? Sounds like E' is something worth knowing about but not practising. E' reduces the baud rate. Mike Price price@price.demon.co.uk ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Nov 93 16:07:50 EST From: Tim Freeman Subject: Serial numbers on currency (was Tech: Truth about Canon Copiers) From: Charlie Stross >I'd be willing to bet that if you can come up with some of the right >kind of paper and a sample banknote you'd have little difficulty, for >example, copying whatever they use in Uzbekistan on a copier sold in the >US. (Or even in programming a workstation to print copies with >sequentially changed index numbers.) Hmm. If the currency maker has any sense, there is some cryptography involved in the serial numbers to make it easy for banks and others to check that a serial number is valid, but hard for anybody to generate a valid serial number without copying an existing bill. But such a scheme would have to be well-advertised to be useful, and I haven't seen the advertisement. Has anybody else? Or does anybody know for sure that the serial numbers on US $ are sequential? Tim ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 16:16:05 +0500 From: brian@suneast.east.sun.com (Brian Hawthorne - SunSelect Strategic Marketing) Subject: Memetic Schelling Point? > Wrong questions on SATs are not rare. Well, in the last two weeks nearly every single mailing list I either moderate or read has converged on the topic of SATs. Sigh. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Nov 93 15:56 EST From: kqb@whscad1.att.com Subject: Freezing Eggs, Human > From: Bill MacIntosh > X-Message-Number: #93-11-826 > . . . > Until then, only embroys could be sucessfully frozen. This resulted in > some interesting court cases when the couple were no longer a couple and one > of them wanted to bring to term the embroy. I believe there was a well > publisized case in Tennesse about this. Here is a June 2, 1992 sci.med posting with more information on that Tennessee case. (I just extracted it from CryoNet message #872.) As you can see, it concerns only frozen embryos, not frozen eggs. Kevin Q. Brown INTERNET kqb@whscad1.att.com or kevin_q_brown@att.com ---- > From: sje@xylos.ma30.bull.com (Steven J. Edwards) > Newsgroups: sci.med > Subject: Cryopreserved human embryos in the news > Date: 2 Jun 92 14:42:26 GMT According to a public radio report yesterday, the State of Tennessee Supreme Court recently ruled on a controversial case involving a set of cryopreserved human embryos. The embryos in question are the result of a number of successful in vitro fertalizations of a couple who are now separated/divorced. The mother sued to allow a thawing of at least one embryo and to have it brought to term (using the mother as the carrier, I guess). The father opposed this as he no longer wanted to be held financially responsible for the upbringing of the child as would otherwise be the case for parents under Tennessee law. The court ruled that the father could not be held liable for support. The report did not go into detail, but I assumed that it did not forbid the revival of the embryos; it just said that the mother could not sue for child support. A possible conclusion is that a frozen embryo just doesn't have the same rights (potential for rights?) as an in vivo embryo. Another case a few years ago in Australia also concerned several frozen embryos of a wealthy couple that later died in an accident leaving the (potential?) offspring behind. After a long legal battle, the breathing, non offspring relatives of the deceased couple successfully convinced the courts that they, and not the more closely related embryos, were the legal inheritors of the substantial estate. It seems that cryopreservation of adults will face legal obstacles even after the medical difficulties are solved. (If they ever are.) [The above opinions expressed are my own; not necessarily held by others.] == Steven J. Edwards Bull HN Information Systems Inc. == == (508) 294-3484 300 Concord Road MS 820A == == sje@xylos.ma30.bull.com Billerica, MA 01821 USA == "That Government which Governs the Least, Governs Best." -- Thomas Jefferson ---- ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 12:56:51 -0800 (PST) From: Oliver Seiler Subject: Drugs On Mon, 22 Nov 1993, Kennita Watson wrote: > > I've also heard that most of the time the insights one has while under > the influence of LSD, etc. seem much less profound after the trip than > during it. I find this discouraging from a self-discovery standpoint. I'm not much for self-discovery. I'm not really sure what it means. I think this is a result of my using LSD. I have a very difficult time lying to myself. ie., I know when I'm bullshitting myself. But on the same note, I am still an eternal optimist. Why? I know I am bullshitting myself to a great degree in many things. This attitude is something I've found to be extremely gratifying, since I don't become depressed, don't get phased when I'm shown to be wrong, accept my mistakes, and generally bug a lot of my friends because I seem so together. I think my dabbling into drugs like LSD have promoted these attributes. I've found that the reality each person lives in is their own. To a large degree we each control that reality, and for myself I've chosen to completely and utterly accept that. This is a lot easier to do when you've opened yourself up to it. I can't really say that everyone will have the same results (I have met many counterexamples), but for me my occasional use has been beneficial to me. Let the buyer beware... > > Does LSD also make for more vivid dreams? Is it any easier (or > harder) to remember them? Since it's so hard to sleep on it for me, I've never really noticed. > > [re MDMA]: Too expensive for my tastes though. > > How expensive? Up in Canada, about $35 to $40 (for something which depending on what is actually in it, may only cost a couple of bucks, if that... If it is real, I would say a dose would cost on the order of $1 to $5 to manufacture in small amounts). Supposedly before it became popular, it was available in Vancouver for $10-$15... Perfect example of market-driven economy... (this was in 1989) > > Eli writes: > "Speedy" effects are common with all classical psychedelics, though > I'd heard that they were actually less prevalent with psilocybin. > This usually means slight to moderate tremor, sometimes bothersome, > and muscle tension. This would usually not prevent you from typing > or preparing food. > > I presume that these effects happen after the hallucinogenic effects > wear off. Would friends and coworkers likely notice them? > Sounds more like when you're on it to me. Most classic psychedelics, with the exception of LSD and psilocybin, are based on the amphetamine structure. There may be a link with this to the methamphetamine feeling, although MDMA is completely different I find... I've found it quite easy to act normal while on hallucinogens, and it is actually quite a bit of fun. Unfortunately, LSD tends to do wierd things with capillary blood flow, and makes me look sort of... off. Just a bit not normal, so I think that makes people a bit apprehensive even if you are acting straight. Plus the fact that your pupils can get really huge, which makes some people look more than a bit alien... In my experiences, I've successfully talked to police, parents (when I was younger), store clerks, etc. while being fairly high on acid... (The police were a hoot...) > According to my long-time drug abuse counselor friend (I told him that > I had discussed and considered trying drugs -- boy, did I have a hard > time telling him that! He still loves me: one less thing to worry > about.), the effects in question comprise hallucinations and > delusions. I can see how these effects might or might not mimic > psychosis ("...characterized by derangement of personality and loss of > contact with reality..."), but they do more or less precisely fit the > definition of "psychotomimetic": "Tending to induce hallucinations, > delusions, or other symptoms of a psychosis." But I suppose it also depends on whether you believe them or not. I don't hallucinate anything spectacular (like giant pink dragons bouncing on the horizon, nor do I become paranoid that everyone is an alien and out to get me)... I think auditory hallucinations are also more prevalent in people diagnosed as psychotic than in LSD trips... > > Nitrous oxide lasts about that long [30 seconds], and has the > advantage of being legal. I don't find it particularly > interesting, though. > > What does it do? Does it just make one laugh, as the common name > would indicate? I tried it once. Seemed to me to be just a cheap buzz... Hardly anything great. I don't really understand the draw with drugs like nitrous or amyl or butyl nitrates (poppers, rush)... > A more accessible source [of mescaline] is Trichocereus > pachanoi, San Pedro cactus -- a popular ornamental, at least around > here. > > By "accessible", do you mean that one could simply de-spine, slice up, > and eat the cactus? Actually I think you eat the buttons on the cactus (that's pretty much what they look like)... > Well, I think Tim Leary said in one of his testimonials to > congress back in the 60's. $40,000, a chemist, and 1 weekend > can produce in 40 million hits of LSD. > > Inflated to 1993, then, the procedure would require more like half a > million dollars? Still a tidy profit at 50 cents a dose, though a > mite high in start-up cost. Can one buy it as readily as such a > figure might suggest? I have a theory that most acid is being produced by relatively few people, in crystalline form. This then filters down into the general population through channels which are probably extremely well guarded, going from crystal to liquid in varying strengths then onto blotter, sugar cubes, what have you... These channels were probably formed during the 70's.... (Sounds kinda paranoid, but what am I paranoid of? Just a speculation) I can't remember where I read this, but no major LSD labs have been busted since the late 70's... Any truth to this? This would tend to support my theory... > But *not* eating, (ie: fasting) is an effective way of > acheiving ASCs. (Altered States of Consciousness). Personally, that's > not appealling. > > Hm. When I don't eat, I become testy, then indifferent and no longer > obviously hungry, then spacey, and after a while can no longer put > coherent sentences together. Sometimes I get to the point where I > no longer realize that my problems come from not having eaten. I get > progessively slower and weaker until someone has fed me, or some > survival instinct has kicked in and I've eaten anything handy that > vaguely qualifies as food. Try not sleeping for long periods... Oh what fun... (I once new a guy who some considered a dolt, who decided to not sleep for two weeks... I heard he became a bit crazier than he already was...) > Kennita Watson | Do I want to live forever? Maybe not, but give > kwatson@netcom.com | me one or two hundred thousand years to think > HEx: KNNTA | it over. - KLW, 1993 -Oliver ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 15:26:27 -0600 From: cpresson@ingr.com (Craig Presson) Subject: E-Prime - a dumb question In <20327@price.demon.co.uk>, Michael Clive Price writes: |> Perhaps this is overly simplistic, but what is the point of E-prime? |> It seems to be to unpack language and make explicit many assumptions |> that are implicit. Once these assumptions are pointed out why bother |> to repeat them each time you make a statement? Sounds like E' is |> something worth knowing about but not practising. ^ ^ I think you have it backwards :-) |> E' reduces the baud rate. We've seen some examples where translation into E' seems to require circumlocution, but my experience indicates that, at least for expository writing, the size of a piece composed in E' differs very little from a similar expression in E. The practice of GS requires changes in a person's habits of thought. Similarly, writing or speaking in E' requires the practitioner to get certain things clear before writing or speaking. I see many other aspects of GS as much more effective and far-reaching, though, and E' as a sideshow; but E' provides a simple handle for people to grab on to. ^ / ------/---- cpresson@ingr.com (Freeman Craig Presson) /AS 5/20/373 PNO; ISGS 9/373; ExI 4/373, NRA 5/373, etc. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 17:31:46 -0600 From: pgf@srl05.cacs.usl.edu (Phil G. Fraering) Subject: Venture Capitalism/Extropian List Software... I'm about five days behind in my list reading. I'll catch up soon... anyway: Tim May writes: >Just let me close by saying that the Extropian on-line community >could turn out to produce some interesting things. I'm beginning to realize more and more that this sort of thing will be much more likely with the pay-for-extropians system than without. Hmm.... Phil ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Nov 93 16:10:37 PST From: szabo@netcom.com (Nick Szabo) Subject: BlackNet Investigations Needs More Detailed Charlie Stross makes excellent comments on net privacy, of which I only have a quarrel with this one: > Moreover I'm not entirely willing to bet my freedom on the security > offered by encryption. Encrypted messages travel in full sight, and > GCHQ/NSA have some very big computers and some very bright > cryptographers. I find it extremely improbable that the NSA or anybody else can break long RSA keys (eg, those in PGP) as long as the keys are secure (eg on the private machines of trustworthy people). Even if they could break the public keys or gain access to the secret keys, they're quite unlikely to spend TM cycles and engineer time on the outside possibility of gaining evidence for a relatively minor drug violation. Furthermore, there's so much such minor crypto traffic going around now that they would require other good information (eg traffic analysis) prior to attempting to break the codes, to discriminate the potentially important messages from the gigabytes of variously encoded trivia. On the other hand, the local gendarmes in net-heavy areas like Silicon Valley could easily hire a net-savvy investigator to monitor unscrambled groups like extropians, cypherpunks, etc. and even more trivially search back archives of Usenet, to track down networks of drug users, and the like. (For example, the apparent True Name who regularly posts a market report listing street drug prices around the world to alt.drugs!) In the future this will be even easier, and the archives will still be around. The main problem is that many net users aren't using PGP and other powerful privacy tools like anon remailers, because (a) they have "nothing to hide" from the millions of total strangers, many with violent intent, who read the net, (b) the tools are too inconvenient, and (c) lack of cultural development of pseudonymity (this is quite well developed on several BBS nets, though). These problems are being tackled on several fronts. I'm writing a user-freindly Windows GUI for PGP and anon remailers. There's also work going on to integreate PGP into traditional mailers (elm, Eudora, etc.) and the MIME standard. A culture of pseudonymity is starting to spread to the Internet (with glacial slowness, and driving control freaks like Dick Depew and L.Detweiler insane in the process). There's no reason you shouldn't be able to post about your LSD experiences and the like, but make sure you're protecting your privacy with the right tools, for goodness sake. Nick Szabo szabo@netcom.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Nov 93 18:04:39 PST From: Eli Brandt Subject: Drugs Kennita said: > "Speedy" effects are common with all classical psychedelics, [...] > I presume that these effects happen after the hallucinogenic effects > wear off. Would friends and coworkers likely notice them? > > I've ::nosent some material on this to the list; ###. > Please post the message number. Thanks. Duh. I think you can guess what happened here. Anyway, make that "93-11-843". > According to my long-time drug abuse counselor friend (I told him that > I had discussed and considered trying drugs -- boy, did I have a hard > time telling him that! He still loves me: one less thing to worry > about.), the effects in question comprise hallucinations and > delusions. To qualify as a hallucination, a visual effect must be thought of as real. If you see a pink elephant but know that there's not really a pink elephant there, it's an "illusion" or something rather than a hallucination. True hallucinations are quite uncommon with `psychedelics', though they may occur with overdoses. I'm not sure what the precise definition of a "delusion" is. It would probably involve a belief that its holder is incapable of checking against reality. This is a bit fuzzy, but I don't think such delusions are particularly common -- though probably more common than hallucinations. The literature on experimental administration of LSD and similar drugs does describe some subjects who suffered from paranoid delusions. This would be one type of "bad trip". It's not a desired or routine development. [re nitrous oxide] > What does it do? Does it just make one laugh, as the common name > would indicate? Some people find it interesting, but to me it resembles postural hypotension -- when you've been lying down for a while, stand up suddenly, and suffer a `head rush'. > I presume from the construction that an "anticholinergic" agent means > the same thing as a "cholinesterase inhibitor", but I don't know what > mental effect either of these things would have. Turns out to be the opposite: acetylcholine (Ach) is broken down by an enzyme called cholinesterase. Destroying this enzyme (as nerve gases and many insecticides do) results in a buildup of Ach, causing salivation, miosis (pupillary contraction), muscular twitching and convulsions, and other unpleasantries. Inhibiting Ach itself causes a dry mouth and pupillary dilation, but also causes long-lasting mental derangement, with true hallucinations, bizarre behavior, and loss of contact with reality. Not recommended. The military stockpile[sd] such drugs as chemical warfare agents... > By "accessible", do you mean that one could simply de-spine, slice up, > and eat the cactus? Pretty much. Minimal spines, actually, and you supposedly only need the section near the skin. It's "accessible" in that nurseries sell them in pots. > Do any of the drugs we've discussed tend to make one incoherent? > Would I know, or would think I made sense and wonder why people looked > at me strangely? The effect is canonically the opposite -- you think you're making no sense at all, but nobody else seems to notice. Some peoples' reports on alt.drugs suggest that there is a transfer of skills to the altered state: new users of LSD et al. may have trouble speaking or typing, but this impairment rapidly diminishes with practice. This has been better studied with marijuana, which frequently impairs task performance in inexperienced users, but may actually enhance it in experienced users. Eli ebrandt@jarthur.claremont.edu ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Nov 93 18:17:10 PST From: Eli Brandt Subject: Drugs > From: Oliver Seiler > I can't remember where I read this, but no major LSD labs have been busted > since the late 70's... Any truth to this? It might have been true at the time, but a Bay-area lab was busted quite recently. I don't know if it was "major", but the DEA billed it as such. Maybe somebody from the area has more details. Eli ebrandt@jarthur.claremont.edu ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 21:32:47 -0500 From: ddf2@postoffice.mail.cornell.edu (David Friedman) Subject: Tech: Truth about Canon Copiers >Charlie suggests some uses for color copiers, ending: >I wonder if advanced scams of this kind have yet made any >serious economic impact on third world countries who can't get >third-party manufacturers like Canon to defend their fiscal integrity? This reminds me of one of the century's great crimes--the successful mass counterfeiting of the Portuguese currency, I think back in the thirties. No high tech copiers. The money was produced for Portugal by a printer in England. An enterprising Portuguese got them to run off a lot of extra ones for him--which they thought were for the Portuguese government, or central bank, or whoever the issuer was. The only case I can think of where a substantial inflation was produced by free enterprise. David Friedman Cornell Law School DDF2@Cornell.Edu ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 20:59:41 -0600 From: "Phil G. Fraering" Subject: SF: _Cyteen_ (I figured, what the heck, if we're even discussing "Groundhog Day...") Over the weekend I read _Cyteen_ by C.J. Cherryh. I highly recommend it to the people on this list. It is a little long. I also would like to say that the book was split into three parts for paperback publication, but was published in one volume when it initially came out in hardback. So buying it hardback would only cost about $ 5.00 or so more than paperback. >From some of the background information in the introduction: Surely one of the more ironical outcomes of the War, the Treaty of Pell and the resulting economic linkages of three human societies, drawing on three vastly different ecosystems, now exist as the driving forces in a new economic structure which transcends all politics and systems. Trade and common interests have proven, in the end, more powerful in human affairs than all the warships ever launched. So far, at least. I still haven't read how the whole Gehenna crisis worked out. That's another book. It's a fascinating book that takes place about sixty years after the end of the "Company War" that is one of the defining events in Cherryh's future universe, and examines the impact of some of that war's technology on the society of the Union, which won its independence from Earth during that conflict, but suffered the creation of a large buffer state on its borders called Alliance (Union, of course, settled for independance; apparently they wouldn't have minded controlling the territory of Alliance or the Sol System government itself). The Union that won its independence, however, was not the same entity that set out to claim it: To doubt the integrity of the tapes was paranoid. Oh, there were a few who refused to use them; and studied higher math and business without them, and never took a pill and never lay down to dream what the masses clear across Union dreamed, knowledge pouring into their heads, as much as they could absorb, there in a few sessions. Drama -- experienced as well as seen . . . at carefully chosen intensity. Skills -- acquired at a bone and nerve level. You used the tapes because your competition would, because you had to excel to get along in the world, because it was the only way to know things fast enough, high enough, wide enough, and the world changed and changed and changed, in any human lifespan. The Bureau of Information vetted those tapes. Experts reviewed them. There was no way any subliminals could get past them. Mikhail Corain was not one of the lunatic fringe who suspected government com-tapping, Alliance poisoning of cargoes, or mind-enslaving subliminals in the entertainment tapes. That sort of purist could refuse rejuv, die old at seventy-five, and live off public works jobs because they were self-taught know-nothings. During the war Union had made use of mass-produced people called Azi, who apparently don't have all the rights of natural citizens, but seem to have some that the CIT's lack... who also vary in intelligence, some much smarter, many more a little dumber, than the ordinary CIT, but all vastly more logical. The underpinnings of their minds were _designed_ to work rationally, which the Azi consider much better than the flux-state CIT's undergo psychogenesis in. They talk about how one day they'll have to set up preserves for all the people who want to live their lives ruled by their glands. _Cyteen_ is about a fairly large number of conflicting themes, among them further development of the technology that created the Azi, to the point that CIT personalities can be duplicated across an identical geneset, as well as manipulated in ways previously reserved for Azi... about the successful near-duplication of the personality of Ariane Emory, the assasinated genius ward (and perhaps ruler?) of the state who pioneered much of the development of Azi mindsets... and the forced experiment gone awry that might force her ressurection, again and again, to determine if the human race will survive or splinter and destroy itself. If anyone wants me to, I can write a longer, more complete review, after I've reread it a couple more times. Anything more I write now might be spoilers. +-----------------------+---------------------------------------+ |Phil Fraering | "...drag them, kicking and screaming, | |pgf@srl03.cacs.usl.edu | into the Century of the Fruitbat." | +-----------------------+-Terry Pratchett, _Reaper Man_---------+ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 23:32:56 -0500 From: xiaozhou@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Dave Burns) Subject: Start-Up VirtSem: 1st step I like this thread. What qualities are most important in a person founding a startup: 1) passion to get rich 2) passion to be your own boss 3) passion to see your brilliant idea succeed 4) none of the above Well, okay, I'm a cynic. So where does that leave us? How do you take the first step toward this goal, given that the above are nice but insufficient? I won't even take a grope at the answer, beyond pointing to a technique that appeals to me. Write some freeware, then when/if it becomes popular, sell the copyright to a company that has the marketing/management capabilities to make the upgrades a profitable proposition. This still requires marketing skill, but reduces the problem. Use the BBSs and internet archives for distribution and marketing, then concentrate your sales pitch on potential buyers. It's a lot easier selling a mediocre product with an established user base than brilliant vaporware. Phil Zimmerman's PGP is an obvious example (of the technique, not of a mediocre product). Steve Dorner's Eudora is another. Versions below 1.4 are freeware, 2.0 is payware from Qualcomm. I don't know what deal Dorner got, but I bet it's nicer than the people Qualcomm hire out of college. I wish I knew more ways. Anybody want a degree from a one-man university? (I hope this hasn't duplicated effort. I tried to ::include this thread, but apparently I blew it, I've got to ::resend it again.) Dave ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 23:41:27 -0500 From: Alexander Reynolds Subject: SF: _The Modular Man_ Well, over recent complaints that my posts are a bunch of bullshit, I offer this for your perusal. _The Modular Man_, by Roger MacAllen Bride, tells the story of a man who decides to put his mind into a cleaning robot, thereby releasing him from the contraints of a dying human body. So now he's immortal, and the District Attorney wants to make it illegal for cyborgs like this gentleman to exist for eternity. The last part of the book details the show trial which goes on, etc. This was in interesting read because of the social and legislative issues it brought up in discussing immortality through machinery. It didn't preach, but it did offer one solution to the social problems immortality will cause. I recommend it for those who are interested in living forever, i.e. extropians. Hoping this soothes grated nerves, Alex Reynolds ------------- chrome@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1993 02:29:37 -0500 (EST) From: Edward J OConnell Subject: DRUGS: Essay on LSD and Madness... As long as we're talking about drugs... This is my acid madness tale--a few of you might enjoy it. It is non-fiction. Sort of. Anyway, this is a few years old, written for a small publication, Singularity. It is about my acid triggered schizophreniform disorder. You can think of this as a psychedelic 'worst case scenario.' Reading through it, I found some of the prose clunky, but there are many who've told me they consider this to be the best thing I've ever written. Kind of a sad thought, as I don't intend to do this again. ;-) One of my most amusing moments as a writer was clicking through Eastgate system's "Beyond Cyberpunk" hypercard stack, and stumbling across the Singularity entry under Zines. I hit the 'sample text icon.' And out popped a few lines from this piece. My words had come back to visit me. It made my day. [This will be my last post to Extropians, I believe. I'll be gone when the fees start up. Thanks everyone for all the verbiage--fascinating stuff, even though I've disagreed with a lot of it. It's been an education. Anyway hope some folks find this worth the bandwidth used. If it's bothering you, just hit N and send me a flame. Unless you'd rather publically humiliate me, of course.] (It's a Bonobos *ape* not monkey, isn't it? :-)) ____________________________________________________________________ There Is Only One Story E. Jay O'Connell 3500 Words [This essay first appeared in Singularity #2. Ordering/subsciption info at the end of the piece.] ...There are only perhaps a dozen or so people in the world. We resonate to the vibration of one or more of the twelve--we are archetypes all. I am always Daedalus. I believe that somewhere, the archetypes are imprisoned, drugged, chained; that only this could explain the perversity of the 20th century. The earth mother preserves me for some unfathomable purpose. Prometheus is not the only one chained to that stone. Odin and Jehovah told Zeus to change his name to Jupiter, and so Rome was built in a day... (Fragment from notebook one week before the hospital.) It was the beginning of my sophomore year at college. I thought of myself as an *artist* in those days. I had just moved out of the dorm, and into my first apartment. It was a bit of a walk to campus, through the park, and although the place was blue asphalt shingled dump, it was fairly nice inside. My room was tiny, but I didn't care. I was going to build a loft. My schedule was a little odd. I have never been able to budget my time. I spend my time freely, and only when there is some sort of deadline looming do I begin to apply myself. Peculiarities in my schedule created a hellish 48-hour "day" once a week. Afterwards I would sleep eighteen hours and feel much better. Gradually, I noticed that I really didn't need to go to sleep the next day, but could simply stay up until bedtime, creating a 72-hour day. Eventually I found that I didn't need to sleep at all. Should I mention the drugs? I did them in moderation--my circle of friends were more deeply involved than I. I smoked a lot of pot, drank less than most frat boys, and did a little acid. One hit of acid acted like a permanent catalyst. We found it on the kitchen floor, in a baggy. No one could identify either the source or type of acid. Acid like manna. We, my roommate and I, gobbled it immediately, after splitting it down the center with a razor blade I wouldn't come down for months. My relationship with my lover was coming apart, although I hadn't really noticed it at the time. I remember the last night with her, making love until she had come several times, and was getting tired of the wear and tear. She blew me for what seemed like hours, while in the muted darkness of my loft I watched kaleidoscopic patterns of color flash across my eyelids. This was the activity which had replaced sleep for me. I spent a hour or two a night in a sort of reptilian stupor, watching my own private light show. She wanted to help. She begged me to come, and go to sleep. But while I had no difficulty maintaining an erection, I could no longer come. She would quietly slip away from me soon afterwards, while I was away in the hospital. Not until I realized that she had become the girlfriend of an old friend of mine would I think to question her reaction. After the manna, I noticed I could *see* things clearly. It was like the beginning of the Acid experience, when it seems that a gray film has been pulled off the world, showing it to be a brighter and more colorful place than you had previously imagined. I could see. Photos taken of me at this time are alarming; my eyes are literally wide, open too far, the pupil almost entirely visible. I was never tired anymore, but was instead filled with a manic energy which never seemed to translate into useful work. I was too busy talking. And walking. I would walk anywhere, miles in any weather, at any time. It felt good, my body now obeyed me in a new way; I drove it like an animal. I didn't really inhabit it anymore. It was simply a beast to be bullied into submission. I made tapes, long ranting diatribes against those I had begun to feel were persecuting me, those who would stand in the way of my ascension. I dispensed wisdom freely. I played the part of mad prophet. "Reality is an emulsion...thin and fragile to the extreme. Acid gradually eats away at this emulsion, leaving scratches, and holes through which is glimpsed a light, but be careful, it burns; the trick is not to be blinded..." In the end I walked home and began drinking my father's scotch, in an effort to lose consciousness. I suppose this was what you might call a cry for help. I certainly didn't see it as such at the time. I was interested in the writings of James Joyce, of which my father was something of a student. Glancing through various works and letters, sipping warm scotch, I felt an amazing sense of kinship with the Irish writer. I believed I might well be the current incarnation of his spirit. Dedalus, father of artifice, creator of the labyrinth, archetypal artist--I happily defaced the books with my own speculations concerning the past and present of my immortal spirit. Within 24 hours my family had signed me into a mental hospital. I remember the the lounge of the ICU, the intensive care unit, as a consciously calm place. It struggled mightily in its lighting and decor to be as pleasant and neutral as possible. The result was an almost supernatural silence, a mind-numbing subliminal drone. Even the TV was turned off here, on occasion. "Oh boy, look at this one," the Constant said. "He's a live one, all right," the Genius agreed. "So, what did you do to land you here? What's your problem, kid?" the Constant asked, from within her perpetual halo of cigarette smoke. "You mean, you don't think that maybe we're all *onto* something here?" I asked. Laughter all around. It was like joining a fraternity, we that had learned that the world was simply a series of nested asylums. I struck up a relationship of sorts with the nervous anorexic Constant. A Constant is a person who can never be left alone. She would think of imaginative ways to commit suicide, if she ever were. Light bulbs, omnipresent, and potentially lethal, were her main strategy. I drew her, (I was an artist, remember?) at her request trying to subtract the pain from her face, trying to draw her as if she had never been raped and gone mad. I drew her in a shaky hand, palsied by the drug, Haldol that was my only treatment. Another friend was Trick. He was called Trick because, as a trick, a few of his friends had dosed him with over a thousand hits of LSD. He was tripping for over a week before they hauled him in. He was a wide eyed teen, with frizzy, dirty blond hair, and a thermometer protruding from his mouth. The thermometer reminded him he was alive, I think. He walked slowly and perpetually up and down the small locked hallway. The side effect of his medication was called ecesthesia. Calling it a "side effect" is funny in a way, because practically everyone on Haldol has it, a continuous nagging restlessness. Walking back and forth was all you could do about it in a locked hallway. It was a private hospital. Expensive. The food was excellent. Some people checked in with a cheery hellow at the front desk, as if this were some kind of cruise or vacation. I called it the Mars Hotel, or the Pit. The address, when I went there, was 666 South Salina. I made a fuss about the number. It was a joke, I think, because the address was changed to 672 and they started changing the number on all the official stationery while I was there. The modern psychiatric institution has no bars. That's because the prison is erected within the cranium of the patient. When the mind is caged, the body may be left to wander purposelessly. The main activities at any mental institution are cigarette smoking, television watching, and drug taking. There are therapy sessions, but I never was allowed to attend. My doctor was no longer interested in insight-based therapy. He had reduced the human experience to a pure chemical state. Nothing else had any meaning for him. Had I stayed with him, I would still be on Haldol. The long-term side effects of Haldol include wild facial tics and uncontrollable tongue extensions, not to mention the overpowering dullness that makes hallucination of any sort impossible. But the tissue drying was my major complaint. It made my eyes hurt unbearably. I wore contact lenses then, so I had to remove them. I had no glasses at that point, so I was forced to tape together an old pair, with an old prescription. (My vision is so bad that without correction, I am virtually blind.) I was not allowed my contact lens solutions, which consisted of distilled water and salt tablets, when I was moved from the adult ward to the ICU. I suppose I could have squirted the water down my esophagus and drowned. Or I could have deftly swapped the salt tablets with poison and attempted my own small scale Guyana style tragedy. I had to put my lenses in a cup of water that first night, and then try to impress upon the staff that no one should throw away the cup or accidentally drink it. The maid came by while I was sleeping and threw them away. I was convinced that my roommate, a brain damaged Czechoslovakian man who spoke no English, had drunk them in confusion. I may have mentioned that fact to someone. The staff wrote in my file that I'd drank my contact lenses in order to gain "inner vision." If you are ever hospitalized for psychiatric problems, try getting your records afterwards. They're full of bogus insights like this. Half truths and outright lies. Schizophrenia is the ultimate indictment. As with cancer, you are never considered cured, but instead, it is thought to go into remission--with the proper medication, mind you. You don't get better. The assertions of the chemical men are that, once you have exhibited this predilection, for any reason, you should probably be medicated for life. Antipsychotics do suppress the symptoms of insanity quite nicely, to the point where many think that they are a cure. However, I ask for those who have not actually experienced these drugs to reserve judgement on their value. This "cure," if not worse than the disease, is hardly much better. I remember being asked "Do you hear voices?" "Yes, " I replied, "when people are talking." "Do you hear voices of people who aren't there?" "Yes, on the phone, on the television, radio, and sometimes from sources more obscure..." Delusions of reference were my only hallucinations in the beginning. What's that? Think about it. We exist at the center of our own personal worlds. We are the main characters of our stories. This is normal. Simultaneously, we watch the media, we read the paper, and we learn of the world of others, more important than ourselves. We are intimate with the lives of a thousand strangers. Celebrities and Politicians. They make the decisions, they have their fingers on the buttons and we live in their collective shadow. And we know that nothing we say has any effect on them. Now, put that way, it is fatalism. Talking like that overlong would get you labeled as depressed. But, if you want to put it any other way, you are having delusions of grandeur. Sanity, you will learn, if you ever lose yours, is a tightrope you walk without thinking about it. What happened to me was a mixture of the outside and inside, a confusion of self and other. I saw the news as a reflection of self. I saw the headlines of tabloids, and thought it was a veiled reflection of my own life. I saw the weather as indicative of my mood. People on television talked to me, and me alone. And I knew that the world was ending. That was the reason for this mingling of souls, this telepathic contact with the powers. The end was a fireball. Ronald Reagan was its mother, and when he gave birth to it, we would be consumed instantly. the world was struggling to communicate this to me. We were the last generation. And we needed to participate in the ceremony of its dissolution. I would soon be elevated into the sphere of the greats. An apocalyptic, personal Christian mythos, as in the music of Peter Gabriel, pervaded my waking dream. I had more or less totally departed from what, for want of a better term, we can call "consensual reality". What's the best thing to do with someone who has, for whatever reason, built up a series of inaccurate ideas about themselves, and their place in the world? How do you get them to give up their delusions, and invite him back into our shared world? I'm not sure, but I'll give you a good example of what *not* to do. Don't put him in a room surrounded by intelligent people with little notebooks who write down everything he says. All my rants were dutifully taken down, round the clock, by my private team of jailer/secretaries. I felt I had been imprisoned because I had become too potent a force to be allowed to wander freely. *** I ran through the mental hospital in nothing flat--the first time. What seemed to me to be a few days was actually more like ten, but I was sleeping most of it. That was a pleasure in itself. Sleep. Pure, blissful unconsciousness. I had lost the ability to sleep, and had thought myself better off without it, but that, I later knew, was nonsense. Like it or not, healthy humans need sleep. I had taken their drugs, and watched TV, and listened to the problems of a lot of people much worse off than I was. My first roommate was a Vietnam vet. He was there because he had begun blacking out, losing days. He had been living in a cabin in the woods, drinking and smoking a lot of weed, when things began to melt away from him. He had nightmares. I heard some pretty grisly war stories. An interesting aside: I have never been as wasted as I was on these therapeutic chemicals. In fact, throughout my decade or so flirtation with what we used to call recreational drugs, I cannot remember ever having been so completely incapacitated. When I talk about major tranquilizers, don't get them confused with minor tranks, like Valium and Librium. Major tranquilizers are a different kind of drug entirely. They have no perceptible buzz, other than a certain all pervasive dullness. I remember sitting at home on a pass, tranked to oblivion, drinking beer with my family, watching reruns of the Mary Tyler Moore show. Everyone was happy. I was cured. Then my roommate gave me an article about the long-term side effects of antipsychotics. In the piece, a long-term Haldol patient's face writhes with muscular tics. His speech is punctuated by pauses for uncontrollable tongue extensions. "You have to be fucking crazy to get mixed up with psychiatrists..." I was not pleased. I switched doctors. Dr. Morrow was much more to my liking. He had a beard and a glorious disorganized manner. When we talked, there was a connection. He admitted that the world was probably a lot crazier than the average psychotic. The trouble was, to get off the medication, I had to go back to the hospital. In retrospect, this was not a good idea; my brain at that time was something like a coiled spring, packed with poisonous visions. The drugs compressed that spring, allowing me to live a "normal" life, while preventing me from rooting them out at the source. The drugs should have been withdrawn slowly, over a period of months. Instead I went cold turkey. Disaster. I couldn't sleep. I remember walking back and forth along the carpeted hall of the ICU. Ecesthesia, restlessness, a side of effect of antipsychotics, doesn't seem to want to go away. Walking and crawling, miles and miles. This was when the serious hallucinations began. I began to dimly perceive, as I trudged the corridor, translucent warriors flanking me, emerging from the closed steel fire door at the end of the hall, disappearing into the front steel door of the ICU, GIs in fatigues, with rifles and packs. They were totally silent, and although others couldn't see them, I perceived a certain nervousness in the staff when they were around. Gradually I became aware of a noise which we have all heard our entire lives, but have tuned out, like an odor that's around so much you can no longer smell it. The beast. Some gigantic, tortured organism at the center of the earth, upon whose eternal suffering we depend. It screams and gibbers constantly, roaring obscenities, calling out for help which never comes. Again, when it was at its loudest, I sensed nervousness from those around me. I wonder now if I was mouthing those obscenities without realizing it. One day I woke up, and looked out my bedroom window at the snow covered lot, to discover there was no longer any world outside at all. No cars, no people, just nothingness, a dull gray twilight sky merging with an endless field of dirty grey snow. I wandered out of my room. Static blared from the TV and radio in the lounge. The two patients there seemed stunned. The ICU door was open. I passed through the verboten door. Most everyone was together in the main lounge, where two movie projectors had been set up,. back to back, spraying light at opposite walls. Everyone was standing or sitting, milling around, staring at the movies. The projectors made a clattering noise that almost drowned out the soundtrack of the films. I heard someone talking about the amount of fuel for the backup generators. One of the nurses saw me and smiled and led me to a seat in the front row. "We've got to bring it back," she said to me. "Watch the movies, and remember what the world was like. This has happened before. We know how to deal with it. Something happened last night. " I had a blank place in my memory. "Last night?" I asked. "Yes, last night, but of course, you won't remember..." She wanders off. I have fragmentary memories of standing in my room, making some sort of deal with the beast, where I promised to lead the rest of my life as a normal, if it would bring the world back. I sank deeper and deeper into some sort of belief system whereby color was extremely important. I could only move if I was in contact with white. White purified. I crept around the edges of rooms, brushing the white baseboard, destroying red objects whenever I could. Red was the fuse for the coming inferno. The ICU seemed to disintegrate around me. Workmen were always around patching cracks that kept appearing. Extra fire sprinklers were installed. Dr. Morrow showed up one day, saw the state I was in, and prescribed Stellazine and an immediate exit from the madhouse. I had learned a lot about being insane there. He figured I would be better off just about anywhere else. We filled out the 24 hour release forms. (In New York and many other states, if you can write a coherent letter and behave in front of a judge, and if your doctor is on your side, you can be immediately released from any psychiatric institution.) Much later he told me he never expected me to stay away; he figured I would do something unforgivable and probably end up in some state institution for life. But I didn't. I escaped into this wider, freer asylum called reality. I have been happy here, although sometimes I feel a twinge of nostalgia for that lost world in which I was a far more important person, the inscrutable Agent Orange, badge number 666, caught in a cosmic web of conspiracy...sometimes, but it's just a twinge. It's so easy to romanticize. I've recently had the opportunity to watch the process from the other side, as my friend Ron had a relapse into that other state. It wasn't pretty. I'm a lot less smug concerning the value of my episode, and psychosis in general. I realize that my attitude about the whole thing at times has reeked of spiritual superiority, which I think misses the point entirely. But as suspicious as I have become of hallucinogenic wisdom and shamanic-style initiation, the experience remains an important part of what I am.b [Shareright (S) 1989 by E. Jay O'Connell for SINGULARITY magazine, 89 Mass. Ave., Suite 199, Boston, MA 02115. You may reproduce this material only of your recipients may also reproduce it, you do not change it, and you include this notice.] E. Jay O'Connell_____________________________________ejo@world.std.com "God does not play dice with the Universe"--A Einstein "No, she plays SuperScratch-Card Wingo (TM)"--Me. ____________________________________________________________________ Information Wants to Be Free PGP Public Key available by Finger ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V93 #326 *********************************