Loosely Assembled

also, his blue bag video is well worth watching, if you feel like letting your anxiety level rise

(Via worms.)

The metro police department in Africa’s largest city claim that a car thief SHAPE SHIFTED INTO A GOAT to avoid being caught. It didn’t work, the cops got him, and paraded him around in front of news media (having trouble finding a clip).

Imagine the NYPD officially saying that a murderer had his sentence reduced because the victim was raised from the dead.

My thoughts and questions on this:

• are they holding tho goat still? will he go to trial? be fined? be imprisoned?
• if that goat actually belongs to someone, how will they convince the cops to give back their property?
• i realize i hold a naive assumption that urbanization reduces superstition
• religiously based world views of reality are insanely tenacious

Looks like the government is all creeped out by black magic already, this story tells of a related event. Apparently this is Islamic black magic as well, certainly a new concept for me.

Lawmakers in the Nigerian State of Ekiti are recruiting “prayer warriors” to assist them in their fight against Black Magic assailants.
The voodoo plot is alleged to centre around Ekiti State House of Assembly speaker Femi Bamisile who was impeached on the 9th July after being found guilty of the theft of 18 fire extinguishers from a university in 1989.
On Wednesday this week chaos ensued when a Juju act took place in the assembly chamber. Despite the chamber being securely locked a fetish substance was left on the seats of the lawmakers in what is believed to be an attempt to pervert the course of justice.
“We were jolted by the reports that marabouts had invaded the Assembly chambers to plant fetish substances on the seats diabolically to harm legislators who might be too strong to break.” Said a spokesman for the assembly.
“The intention of the hatchers of this heinous plot was to sacrifice not too few honourable members as eternal ransom to an ousted legislative leadership that had expired in morals, virtues and value.”
Some of the 26 lawmakers that attend the assembly have vowed never to step foot in the chamber until they are certain of their spiritual safety, and others are in fear of their lives.
A prayer session was held on Thursday to try to nullify the fetish, one lawmaker gave this comment,
“we believe with the prayer, whatever the juju was meant for would not come to pass, because the power of God is above all other powers,”

Scientists extract images directly from brain: “

Pink Tentacle reports that researchers at Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed a system that can ‘reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor.’

The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.

Then, when the test subjects were shown a completely new set of images, such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N, the system was able to reconstruct and display what the test subjects were viewing based solely on their brain activity.

“

“In the olden days, we used to do this kind of stuff and call it art.”

The mannequin swap seems most interesting. Partly because it seems like a harder jump (the stiff POV seemingly like a monstrous hurdle), and partly because of the material/surface exchange (getting “out of body” is so sfai, but alchemy of the self, actually mutating and changing the material interface that you think you have with the world, is really out there).

My extension of this experiment

Body Swapping:

from mannequin

to scarecrow

to huge billboard image

to panicky wild animal

to pile of mud

to the great pyramids

to the earth itself.

update: watch the video

If some people have a propensity to benefit from medical treatment that is bogus (placebo effect), while others don’t, and if this is a genetic difference, then I’d like to propose that it’s really a “mind over matter” gene which makes that difference. These people (everyone among the group raise your hands proudly) truly have the ability to manipulate physical reality simply with their beliefs/ideas/visualizations. I know I consider myself to fall slightly into this category (having some pretty intense visualization experiences becoming immediately real), yet have always just kind of assumed it’d be available to everyone.

Anyway, here is the article.

Who needs men anyway?

Story.

just found a stimulating new thing to look at, scroll through, and share:
http://spacecollective.org/gallery/

Truman Show Disorder: “Montreal psychiatrists Joel and Ian Gold are studying the Truman Show Delusion, a mental illness they’ve identified where individuals are convinced that they are the stars of imaginary reality TV shows. By the way some people act on Flickr and YouTube, I’d say that this disorder, with varying severity, may be more common than we realize. From Canada.com:

While (Joel) Gold says they could have easily called their new disorder the EDtv Delusion or the Matrix Delusion — both films that refer to an unreal existence– three of the five patients he treated at the storied mental health hospital directly likened their plight to The Truman Show, the 1998 film about Truman Burbank, an affable suburbanite who slowly becomes aware that his every movement is broadcast 24/7 to voyeuristic viewers around the world.

The five patients Dr. Gold treated were white men between the ages of 25 and 34, the majority of whom held university degrees. ‘I realized that I was and am the centre, the focus of attention by millions and millions of people,’ explained one patient, an army veteran who came from an upper-middle-class upbringing.

‘My family and everyone I knew were and are actors in a script, a charade whose entire purpose is to make me the focus of the world’s attention….’

‘The wish for fame is a form of grandiosity, and the fear of threats such as surveillance can bring about paranoia,’ said the Montreal-based (Ian) Gold, 46, who specializes in delusion.



‘New media is opening up vast social spaces that might be interacting with psychological processes.’

Truman Show Delusion (Canada.com, thanks Lyn Jeffery!)

“

(Via Boing Boing.)

If someone lives actively in the two cultures of their bilingual repertoire, they gain the added possibility of hosting divergent (not really independent) personalities. This doesn’t really come as much of a surprise to me though. I wrote a paper years ago showing dramatic personality shifts from relationship to relationship, interaction to interaction, proposing a model that would define individual names to each relationship a person had, a hybrid being comprised of both parties’ traits, needs and expectations.

If someone acts and feels and responds differently when they are in different situations, does that make them a different person? Is their interaction with you any less or more valid? At what threshold of difference would we declare them to be a fully different person ready for psychiatric help?

the link: How switching language can change your personality – being-human – 25 June 2008 – New Scientist

A new study points out the possibility that the universe might spiral out and out and out to much farther reaches than conventional models. The fractal nature of this model could also be thought of as some kind of optical illusion, or quantum mirroring effect, where a small handful of galaxies are replicated infinitely across space, relying on the existence of an observer.