Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by kool maudit » Thu Jul 26, 2012 6:16 am
by 82_28 » Thu Jul 26, 2012 6:56 am
by Jeff » Thu Jul 26, 2012 7:03 am
by Seamus OBlimey » Thu Jul 26, 2012 1:41 pm
by brekin » Thu Jul 26, 2012 2:09 pm
Well we're movin on up,
To the east side.
To a deluxe apartment in the sky.
Movin on up,
To the east side.
We finally got a piece of the pie.
Fish don't fry in the kitchen;
Beans don't burn on the grill.
Took a whole lotta tryin',
Just to get up that hill.
Now we're up in the big leagues,
Gettin' our turn at bat.
As long as we live, it's you and me baby,
There ain't nothin wrong with that.
Well we're movin on up,
To the east side.
To a deluxe apartment in the sky.
Movin on up,
To the east side.
We finally got a piece of the pie.
by MinM » Thu Jul 26, 2012 2:34 pm
'Jeffersons’ star Sherman Hemsley allegedly had ‘LSD lab’ and recorded album with YES singer
By Eric Pfeiffer, Yahoo! News | The Sideshow – Tue, Jul 24, 2012
Today, the world is remembering the legacy of "The Jeffersons" star Sherman Hemsley, who passed away at the age of 74. And pretty much any reference to Hemsley brings up memories of the equally famous theme song from "The Jeffersons" 1980s TV sitcom.
But Hemsley reportedly had a little-known passion for psychedelic rock music and … LSD. A former keyboardist, he even recorded an unreleased album with Jon Anderson, singer of the band YES.
The primary evidence supporting Hemsley's psychedelic leanings is a 1999 Magnet Magazine interview with musician Daevid Allen of the seminal prog-rock band Gong. During the interview, Allen describes how he was shocked to learn that Hemsley was a huge fan of his work. In fact, the actor paid for Allen to fly to Los Angeles, where he described plans to create a tribute to one of Gong's songs along the famed Sunset Strip. But things only got weirder from there:
"I thought, 'Well, even if he's a nut case at least he's coming up with the goodies.' The tickets arrived and we had this great honeymoon in Jamaica. Then we caught the plane across to L.A. We had heard Sherman was a big star, but we didn't know the details. Coming down the corridor from the plane, I see this black guy with a whole bunch of people running after him trying to get autographs. Anyway, we get into this stretch limousine with Sherman and immediately there's a big joint being passed around. I say, 'Sorry man, I don't smoke.' Sherman says, 'You don't smoke and you're from Gong?'"
"Inside the front door of Sherman's house was a sign saying, 'Don't answer the door because it might be the man.' There were two Puerto Ricans that had a LSD laboratory in his basement, so they were really paranoid. They also had little crack/freebase depots on every floor. Then Sherman says, 'Come on upstairs and I'll show you the Flying Teapot room.' Sherman was very sweet but was surrounded by these really crazy people."
And as the website Dangerous Minds points out, there's more evidence. Back in the '70s he reportedly danced to music from the band Gentle Giant during an appearance on the Dinah Shore Show. And at the end of the following clip from "The Jeffersons," during which Hemsley dances to a song from the band Nektar, his George Jefferson character says, "It's great music, what did you turn it off for?"
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/je ... 09921.html
by justdrew » Thu Jul 26, 2012 3:22 pm
by barracuda » Thu Jul 26, 2012 3:39 pm
by seemslikeadream » Thu Jul 26, 2012 5:49 pm
Rejoice! Today's a Day Out of Time!
Well, it is if you live by the 13-moon calendar, a way of measuring time that leaves an extra day spare every year
The moon rises over the Piz Rosatsch Mountain, eastern Switzerland. Photograph: Arno Balzarini/Keystone
If you are feeling a little strange Tuesday, a bit out of sorts, there could be a good reason for it. Wednesday is officially a "Day Out of Time" – for those who follow the 13-moon calendar, at least. The calendar breaks the 365-day annual cycle of the Earth going round the sun into 13 months of 28 days. If you do the maths, that comes to 364, which leaves one day spare, a day belonging to no week or month, between the end of one year and the beginning of the next. Wednesday!
The 13-moon calendar has followers in more than 90 countries and the Day Out of Time has been celebrated since 1992, when the pioneers of natural time, as it's known, started living by the new calendar. So what to do on a day that isn't really a day at all? Around 500 festivals of art, music and healing, plus gatherings of people meditating, singing or reading poetry, will be happening around the world, from a sunrise meditation at Avebury stone circle to events organised by 13 moon communities in Italy, Australia and South America.
Lisa Star, author of Natural Time: a Guidebook to the Mayan Calendars, says the Day Out of Time is "dreamlike, like the timelessness when we have our attention on the chiming clock at midnight of 31 December – only extended over a waking day. It's tremendous and transcendent."
So, if you're reading this on the commute, it's not too late to get off your bus or train.
by Hammer of Los » Thu Jul 26, 2012 9:45 pm
(T)he Day Out of Time is "dreamlike, like the timelessness when we have our attention on the chiming clock at midnight of 31 December – only extended over a waking day. It's tremendous and transcendent."
by brekin » Thu Aug 09, 2012 2:08 pm
How erasable do they think our memories are? Are we already meant to have forgotten the original Total Recall and its career-best performance from Arnold Schwarzenegger as someone whose secret agent dreams may have more substance than his humdrum reality?
It’s barely 20 years since Paul Verhoeven’s freewheeling adaptation of David Cronenberg’s reworking of Philip K Dick’s story, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, became an instant sci-fi classic. So why the remake with Colin Farrell and Kate Beckinsale that’s just been released? And why now?
Given that much of the 1990 Total Recall unfolds on Mars, it’s tempting to find significance in the new film having had its US release within days of Nasa successfully landing their largest ever rover, Curiosity, on the Red Planet. The only tiny problem with this theory, and one of several big problems with the remake, is that this time round there’s no Martian action. Maybe they didn’t have the budget to go there.
Which brings us to the reason why anyone should try – and in this case fail – to improve on a movie that revels in the bizarre possibilities of waking up to find your memories have been altered and you are not yourself.
The denizens of Hollywood’s dream factory have always been attracted to tangled tales of life as a fairground hall of mirrors, of boundaries blurred between what’s real and illusion, of virtual realties. True lies, as Arnie himself might put it. Total Recall is one of the wild cards in a pack which – off the top of my not-entirely-reliable head – includes Inception, Memento, Vertigo, Spellbound, Fight Club, A Beautiful Mind, Identity, The Matrix, The Truman Show, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, eXistenZ, Long Kiss Goodnight, Brazil and Dark City.
There are hundreds more, even if you don’t count all those horror films that attempt to inject a quick fix of thrills using dreams, dream-within-dreams and movies-within-movies. But there’s one film, which more than any other I know, provides an unexpected inside-our-minds insight into why these kind of cinematic “reality checks” remain so compelling and popular. And it’s a documentary about climbing.
Brain riddle
Touching the Void follows two mountaineers on a near fatal 1985 expedition in the Andes. The 2003 documentary used dramatised scenes with the original climbers playing themselves. There’s a sequence, not in the original release but among the DVD extras, where one of them – dressed in the gear he’d been in when he broke his leg and was later left for dead – starts to freak out. He begins to think he’s still on the original expedition trying to crawl back to base camp, and that everything that’s happened in the last 18 years is just a figment of his imagination, a fantasy his mind has created to comfort himself as he loses the battle to survive.
It’s a chilling moment – emphasised later when he angrily tells the crew: “Do you have any idea how bad it was? ... I died here!" For all the fictional examples of someone flipping between alternative realities, it’s the only instance I know where you can see it happen to someone who is a person, not a character. It shows how tenuous our grasp can be of where, when and even who we are. We continuously assemble our own universe and position ourselves in it based on our memories, our sense of self and what we are currently perceiving. Change enough of those inputs and we can switch from one version of events to another if it seems more plausible.
Most of us have experienced low-level versions of this when we wake up, perhaps in a strange bed, possibly hung-over, and briefly struggle to come up with a coherent story that fits all the known facts. It helps explains phenomena like false memories, déjà vu, or confabulation, where we effectively lie to ourselves about our own lives.
But the trickier issue isn’t why we can occasionally lose our bearings. It’s how we are consistently able to keep them. What enables the vast majority of us to develop an identity and to maintain it even though we have this nasty habit of plunging into unconsciousness every night? How can each of us be sure the “me” that wakes up is the same as the “me” that went to sleep? Is there any way to reliably tell whether what we see and feel and remember is real rather than illusion or delusion?
There’s much fun to be had – as well as a lot of heavy duty philosophy, metaphysics and epistemology to wade through – wrestling with such easy-to-ask, fiendish-to-answer questions. And even if we get past them, or at least put them to one side, that still leaves us with what’s going on within ourselves to enable all these experiences and perceptions (and deceptions) to be integrated into something, someone, with a sense of themselves.
We are still a long way from developing a widely agreed neuroscience of consciousness, with many researchers shying away from an area so overshadowed by philosophy and riddled with subjectivity. There are all sorts of theories from it arising from high-frequency resonances between different regions of the brain, to it being a form of quantum computing taking place on an atomic scale in microtubules in neurons across the brain and possibly beyond.
Some of the current thinking on this would blow your mind – if only, as we’ve established, it weren’t so tricky nailing down what we mean by “mind”. And by “your”. What we can under the circumstances be reasonably sure is true is that for all our scientific understanding of ourselves and our brains, we remain very hazy on how our selves and our brains fit together.
It’s not something we tend to think about... except perhaps fleetingly on those mornings we wake up disoriented in a strange bed having had one drink too many. Or when a movie deliberately messes with our head.
by JackRiddler » Thu Aug 09, 2012 2:37 pm
by Six Hits of Sunshine » Thu Aug 09, 2012 2:52 pm
Jeff wrote: He seemed to be a genuinely gentle man. I was saddened when he died in this reality.
George Jefferson: World’s Biggest Gong Fan?
March 5, 2009
This is one of the most mind-blowingly weird anecdotes MAGNET has ever published. Ten years ago, writer Mitch Myers profiled prog-rock legend Daevid Allen (Soft Machine, Gong), who told us of his strange encounter with actor Sherman Hemsley (a.k.a. George Jefferson). Here is the story of Hemsley’s obsession with flying teapots and his alleged den of iniquity that housed an LSD lab, a harem of naked girls and crack/freebase depots on every floor.
In 1999, I interviewed musician Daevid Allen for MAGNET at a small recording studio in San Francisco. Allen was an odd sort, with plenty of old stories to tell. Back in the 1960s, he was a founding member of wonderfully creative British band Soft Machine. But Aleen didn’t stay with the Soft Machine for long and ended up forming another psychedelic rock group called Gong.
In his life, Allen has hung out with everybody from William Burroughs, Jimi Hendrix, Bud Powell and Paul McCartney to Syd Barrett, Keith Richards, Richard Branson and a whole bunch of other famous people that he can’t remember. One famous person Allen does recall spending time with is Sherman Hemsley, a.k.a. George Jefferson of ’70s sitcom The Jeffersons. Hemsley had been a jazz keyboardist before portraying Jefferson on television, and his progressive sensibilities led him to appreciate the offbeat sounds of Allen and Gong. Apparently, cosmic Gong compositions such as “Flying Teapot” and “Pot Head Pixies” resonated with the TV star’s psyche. Years after Allen’s encounter with Hemsley, the actor would go on to collaborate with Jon Anderson, lead singer of hugely successful prog-rock group Yes. The Hemsley/Anderson production was called Festival Of Dreams and supposedly described the spiritual qualities of the number seven.
Here is Allen’s verbatim account of his sole meeting with certified Gong fanatic Hemsley:
“It was 1978 or 1979, and Sherman Hemsley kept ringing me up. I didn’t know him from a bar of soap because we didn’t have television in Spain (where I was living). He called me from Hollywood saying, ‘I’m one of your biggest fans and I’m going to fly you here and put flying teapots all up and down the Sunset Strip.’ I thought, ‘This guy is a lunatic.’ He kept it up so I said, ‘Listen, can you get us tickets to L.A. via Jamaica? I want to go there to make a reggae track and have a honeymoon with my new girlfriend.’ He said, ‘Sure! I’ll get you two tickets.’
I thought, ‘Well, even if he’s a nut case at least he’s coming up with the goodies.’ The tickets arrived and we had this great honeymoon in Jamaica. Then we caught the plane across to L.A. We had heard Sherman was a big star, but we didn’t know the details. Coming down the corridor from the plane, I see this black guy with a whole bunch of people running after him trying to get autographs. Anyway, we get into this stretch limousine with Sherman and immediately there’s a big joint being passed around. I say, ‘Sorry man, I don’t smoke.’ Sherman says, ‘You don’t smoke and you’re from Gong?’
Inside the front door of Sherman’s house was a sign saying, ‘Don’t answer the door because it might be the man.’ There were two Puerto Ricans that had a LSD laboratory in his basement, so they were really paranoid. They also had little crack/freebase depots on every floor. Then Sherman says, ‘Come on upstairs and I’ll show you the Flying Teapot room.’ Sherman was very sweet but was surrounded by these really crazy people.
We went up to the top floor and there was this big room with darkened windows and “Flying Teapot” is playing on a tape loop over and over again. There were also three really dumb-looking, very voluptuous Southern gals stoned and wobbling around naked. They were obviously there for the guys to play around with.
[My girlfriend] Maggie and I were really tired and went to our room to go to bed. The room had one mattress with an electric blanket and that was it. No bed covering, no pillow, nothing. The next day we came down and Sherman showed us a couple of [The Jeffersons] episodes.
One of our fans came and rescued us, but not before Sherman took us to see these Hollywood PR people. They said, ‘Well, Mr. Hemsley wants us to get the information we need in order to do these Flying Teapot billboards on Sunset Strip.’ I looked at them and thought they were the cheesiest, most nasty people that I had ever seen in my life and I gave them the runaround. I just wanted out of there. I liked Sherman a lot. He was a very personable, charming guy. I just had a lot of trouble with the people around him.”
Post script: After completing the MAGNET article, I ran the finished text through a computerized spell check. Upon encountering Daevid Allen’s first name, the (Word Services) Apple Events Spellswell7 instructed me to replace “Daevid” with the word “teapot.” Somewhere in Silicon Valley, a very clever Gong fan was laughing.
by seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 09, 2012 2:59 pm
"Time-dilation and time-contraction in an anisochronous and anisometric visual scenery.
Binetti N, Lecce F, Doricchi F.
Source Fondazione Santa Lucia IRCCS, Rome, Italy.
Abstract
Several studies show that visual stimuli traveling at higher velocities are overestimated with respect to slower, or stationary, stimuli of equivalent physical duration. This effect-time dilation-relates more in general to several accounts highlighting a quantitative relationship between the amount of changes a stimulus is subject to and the perceived duration: faster stimuli, subject to a greater number of changes in space, lead to overestimated durations of displacement. In the present paper we provide evidence of a new illusory effect, in which the apparent duration of a sensory event is affected by the way a constant number of changes are delivered in time, or in time and space. Participants judged accelerating and decelerating sequences of stationary flickering stimuli (Experiments 1 and 3) and accelerating and decelerating horizontally drifting visual stimuli (Experiment 2) on the fronto-parallel plane. Acceleration and deceleration were achieved by irregular sequencing of events in time (anisochronous flicker rate) or irregular sequencing of events in time and space (anisochronous and/or anisometric drift). Despite being characterized by the same amounts of visual changes, accelerating and decelerating sequences lead to opposite duration biases (underestimation and overestimation errors, respectively). We refer to this effect in terms of ATI: Aniso-Time-Illusion. This bias was observed in both subsecond (760 ms) and suprasecond ranges (1900 ms). These data highlight how the spatio-temporal evolution of dynamic visual events, asides the overall quantity of changes they are subject to, affect the perceived amount of time they require to unfold. "
The full text is from the Journal of Vision here.
---
"OK, so what is so important about this kind of research that gets George so worked up?" you're wondering.
Well, check it out: If you have ever been in an accident. remember how time changed for a short period? It is usually recalled as "time stood still" and everything was indelibly etched into your recall. got it?
OK, so what this paper is setting the groundwork for is something that has more potential than even the invention of the transistor: Which is to say the engineering of time perceptions so that people can effectively live longer and spend way more time in the eternal Now than in the past.
I've got to ask Dr. Rob to (hopefully) explain more of what this means (in scientific terms) but this paper is building foundational knowledge that will (over time, likely after I've checked out of this life, but in the pipeline, nevertheless) lead to time engineering as a division of medicine.
And no, we're not talking the BS distorted time perception that make meth-heads think they are smarter than anyone else (while lagging in reality), we're talking groundwork that could lead to breakthroughs in genuine time perception which would be way cool.
Imagine being able to control the apparent duration of things like peak moments on a roller coast at an amusement park, or that intensely beautiful sunrise, for example. Oh, yeah, and make an orgasm last for (apparent) hours...
We'll keep an eye (bad pun, sorry) on this kind of science from time to time because it is really way cool...and once the baseline science is established it resolves into an engineering problem.
I'll leave it to you to figure what the implications are relive to past ground-breaking work in the time perception field, like Dean Radin's classic paper "Time-reversed human perception..."
by 8bitagent » Thu Aug 09, 2012 3:50 pm
brekin wrote:So I know this is, was, a thread about Sherman Hemsley, bless his soul, but I'm going to appropriate it in his memory
temporarily for this story on actual timeline shifts.
Films like Total Recall remind us how little we understand about how our brain - and our consciousness - shape our realities. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2012080 ... the-mind/1How erasable do they think our memories are? Are we already meant to have forgotten the original Total Recall and its career-best performance from Arnold Schwarzenegger as someone whose secret agent dreams may have more substance than his humdrum reality?
It’s barely 20 years since Paul Verhoeven’s freewheeling adaptation of David Cronenberg’s reworking of Philip K Dick’s story, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, became an instant sci-fi classic. So why the remake with Colin Farrell and Kate Beckinsale that’s just been released? And why now?
Given that much of the 1990 Total Recall unfolds on Mars, it’s tempting to find significance in the new film having had its US release within days of Nasa successfully landing their largest ever rover, Curiosity, on the Red Planet. The only tiny problem with this theory, and one of several big problems with the remake, is that this time round there’s no Martian action. Maybe they didn’t have the budget to go there.
Which brings us to the reason why anyone should try – and in this case fail – to improve on a movie that revels in the bizarre possibilities of waking up to find your memories have been altered and you are not yourself.
The denizens of Hollywood’s dream factory have always been attracted to tangled tales of life as a fairground hall of mirrors, of boundaries blurred between what’s real and illusion, of virtual realties. True lies, as Arnie himself might put it. Total Recall is one of the wild cards in a pack which – off the top of my not-entirely-reliable head – includes Inception, Memento, Vertigo, Spellbound, Fight Club, A Beautiful Mind, Identity, The Matrix, The Truman Show, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, eXistenZ, Long Kiss Goodnight, Brazil and Dark City.
There are hundreds more, even if you don’t count all those horror films that attempt to inject a quick fix of thrills using dreams, dream-within-dreams and movies-within-movies. But there’s one film, which more than any other I know, provides an unexpected inside-our-minds insight into why these kind of cinematic “reality checks” remain so compelling and popular. And it’s a documentary about climbing.
Brain riddle
Touching the Void follows two mountaineers on a near fatal 1985 expedition in the Andes. The 2003 documentary used dramatised scenes with the original climbers playing themselves. There’s a sequence, not in the original release but among the DVD extras, where one of them – dressed in the gear he’d been in when he broke his leg and was later left for dead – starts to freak out. He begins to think he’s still on the original expedition trying to crawl back to base camp, and that everything that’s happened in the last 18 years is just a figment of his imagination, a fantasy his mind has created to comfort himself as he loses the battle to survive.
It’s a chilling moment – emphasised later when he angrily tells the crew: “Do you have any idea how bad it was? ... I died here!" For all the fictional examples of someone flipping between alternative realities, it’s the only instance I know where you can see it happen to someone who is a person, not a character. It shows how tenuous our grasp can be of where, when and even who we are. We continuously assemble our own universe and position ourselves in it based on our memories, our sense of self and what we are currently perceiving. Change enough of those inputs and we can switch from one version of events to another if it seems more plausible.
Most of us have experienced low-level versions of this when we wake up, perhaps in a strange bed, possibly hung-over, and briefly struggle to come up with a coherent story that fits all the known facts. It helps explains phenomena like false memories, déjà vu, or confabulation, where we effectively lie to ourselves about our own lives.
But the trickier issue isn’t why we can occasionally lose our bearings. It’s how we are consistently able to keep them. What enables the vast majority of us to develop an identity and to maintain it even though we have this nasty habit of plunging into unconsciousness every night? How can each of us be sure the “me” that wakes up is the same as the “me” that went to sleep? Is there any way to reliably tell whether what we see and feel and remember is real rather than illusion or delusion?
There’s much fun to be had – as well as a lot of heavy duty philosophy, metaphysics and epistemology to wade through – wrestling with such easy-to-ask, fiendish-to-answer questions. And even if we get past them, or at least put them to one side, that still leaves us with what’s going on within ourselves to enable all these experiences and perceptions (and deceptions) to be integrated into something, someone, with a sense of themselves.
We are still a long way from developing a widely agreed neuroscience of consciousness, with many researchers shying away from an area so overshadowed by philosophy and riddled with subjectivity. There are all sorts of theories from it arising from high-frequency resonances between different regions of the brain, to it being a form of quantum computing taking place on an atomic scale in microtubules in neurons across the brain and possibly beyond.
Some of the current thinking on this would blow your mind – if only, as we’ve established, it weren’t so tricky nailing down what we mean by “mind”. And by “your”. What we can under the circumstances be reasonably sure is true is that for all our scientific understanding of ourselves and our brains, we remain very hazy on how our selves and our brains fit together.
It’s not something we tend to think about... except perhaps fleetingly on those mornings we wake up disoriented in a strange bed having had one drink too many. Or when a movie deliberately messes with our head.
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