I'll share my experience, too: I live near Glen Park and was in Bello that day, taking up one of those coveted seats, as all this was happening. I recall being aware of a lot of police cars outside, and perhaps seeing the phalanx around Ross as they walked past the window. Clearly something big was going on, but I stepped outside and the street was already back to normal. Shrug, perhaps I'll hear about it on the evening news. Not a peep. :-)
It was only some months & years later that I heard about Glen Park, the library, and Bello being part of the drama, and other local landmarks. To this day I keep hearing about other local details. (I learned a few months ago that his group house was on Monterey Blvd, not far from the conservatory).
Looking back, I had noticed a number of 'out-of-town' business people in Bello around that time. Glen Park is a busy local scene, but gets very few visitors, so they stuck out. Clean cut, business casual, but not FiDi types. They were cheerful but not interested in chatting. Who would go to a cafe and not want to socialize, I wondered? I thought perhaps realestate people.
I went to Bello frequently then, and must have seen Ross there a few times too, but I only vaguely recall once or twice. Something drew my attention to his laptop, maybe it had an EFF sticker on it? But he likewise didn't seem interested in conversation. I do recall once he was talking with an older man, in his 50's or early 60's, about libertarianism.
Loved this film for ages. First the Wally character, then decades later the Andre character. Film-wise it also took me ages to realize how carefully crafted it was; it comes off as casual at first but step through a few scenes frame-by-frame and you realize the depth.
I experienced such states on several occasions, usually randomly once every two or three years. I resolved to explore it if it happened again, and sure enough I was ready when it did.
I soon discovered you don't have to wait years; it can happen a few times a week.
Simple technique:
- wait until you've woken up after a dream. (so technically hypnopompic, not hypnagogic, but more powerful imho)
- Any dream will do, but be careful not to drift back into normal consciousness (so don't think of work, taxes, todo's, etc)
- instead, imagine something fanciful. Like swinging at a baseball in dodger stadium in slow-motion, or, my favorite, imagining you have the worlds smallest record player between your fingers & playing a song you like (funk music is good for this)
- stay with the humorous feeling, let it grow awhile
- after a minute or two, you should find the dream state has stabilized
- once it's stable, and only then, call up a problem or life situation you'd like insight into, or just explore the landscape (what's behind that circus tent?)
- try not to get too intellectual or willful, it can dispel the state
NB: no drugs required. But caffeine in the evening can increase the odds of waking after dreaming.
This is essentially lucid dream induction. Lucid dreaming is when you become conscious that you're dreaming while dreaming... and once you are consciously dreaming you can direct the dream actively rather than experiencing it passively. This can happen spontaneously during sleep, or it can be induced with techniques such as what you're describing.
I feel it sometimes when I think about holding the mouse, it feels like my teeth are extremely large and my hands are crazy tiny heaving the mouse along.
your thing on smallest record players between fingers really described that feeling for me, very cool.
What worked for me years ago was writing down my dreams. After a while I got really good at recalling them and even lucid dreaming at times. It was really cool, but I was single. Now I wouldn't want to wake my wife.
I used to do that and I had to stop because my recall of the dreams was so detailed that it took me an hour to write it all down in the morning. The details were too vivid to gloss over or not write down, and eventually I wanted that hour back so I stopped writing the dreams down. It was very cool while I was doing it though.
Reminds me of a strange story of mysterious 'modern art' arrangements, of leaves and twigs, that appeared every morning on a workshop stoop (spoiler, it was a fieldmouse):
"Elena's Messages: From Her Big Sur Sanctuary"
https://www.amazon.com/Elenas-Messages-Her-Big-Sanctuary/dp/...
> Science simply hasn't FOUND [...] I personally believe in time we will
Lets call that Scientism. Beliefs about what may be discovered later are just beliefs, something that should be considered anathema to science itself. (Of course these beliefs may or may not come true, and curiosity about them may indeed provide insight that allows their eventual discovery.)
But in the meantime unfounded beliefs may indeed hamper further scientific insight and discoveries. Ironic, given the history of science & faith, that science might be stymied by limitations of its own faith.
> All questions that find an answer will have come through a science by definition of what science is.
No, that's a definition of scientism, which is very much pseudoscience. Your idea is so wrong that is excludes all answers to mathematical questions, which are, in fact, unscientific.
Several billion are being carried around right now in people's pockets, actually: the baseband processor in mobile phones use ATDT/Hayes commands to talk to the host processor(!).
I kind of wish I'd never read that. Every time something like this comes up I remember a quote from A Deepness in the Sky [0] and shudder at the thought that we will be stuck with crappy software forever.
[0] " There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.
"
One of the things I love about that book is how he attacks below their layer of abstraction. This is a pattern you see over and over again in real life, people build a secure system at one layer, but don't consider all of the implications of the layers below. Indeed there is so much complexity hidden in those abstractions that it takes experts years to learn enough about them to understand the attacks. The people who do work in those layers aren't interested in security, they're just trying to get the things to work in the first place.
Spectre/Meltdown are a good example of what happens when (after a couple of decades) the security guys finally understand what the architecture looks like at that level and start looking for vulnerabilities.
This is also why you should be wary of devices and especially device drivers. This is why binary blobs in drivers are such a butt clencher. And then you're talking about drivers that are stupendously large and are more or less attached directly to your web browser.
Kind of. One of the problems with being attacked from the lower layers is that it can be outright impossible to defend against in some cases. In other cases the defense involves significant tradeoffs, usually in performance.
Not realistically unless I have a lot of experience with driver programming. After all, I can technically hand-edit the machine code of a binary blob too.
I think of this every time I watch a package manager compile the dependencies of dependencies of dependencies of dependencies [...] of the thing I am actually using.
Some of these GSM modems have AT-commands to upload & run sophisticated, persistent LUA scripts. (Scripts that can can make tcpip connections over GSM, communicate to host hardware via I2C or uart, send SMSs, etc). The possibilities are wide ranging, using officially supported features; no hacking necessary.
It was only some months & years later that I heard about Glen Park, the library, and Bello being part of the drama, and other local landmarks. To this day I keep hearing about other local details. (I learned a few months ago that his group house was on Monterey Blvd, not far from the conservatory).
Looking back, I had noticed a number of 'out-of-town' business people in Bello around that time. Glen Park is a busy local scene, but gets very few visitors, so they stuck out. Clean cut, business casual, but not FiDi types. They were cheerful but not interested in chatting. Who would go to a cafe and not want to socialize, I wondered? I thought perhaps realestate people.
I went to Bello frequently then, and must have seen Ross there a few times too, but I only vaguely recall once or twice. Something drew my attention to his laptop, maybe it had an EFF sticker on it? But he likewise didn't seem interested in conversation. I do recall once he was talking with an older man, in his 50's or early 60's, about libertarianism.