Nag Hammadi Library

Alexandria: philosophy, cosmology, myth and culture

Miltonic Evil as Gnostic Cabala
"Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threat'ning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven" --John Milton

GeekPAC needs bloodlust

Smart Mobs

The Assayer is site for user- contributed book reviews, with a special focus on reviewing free books.

ibiblio archive: one of the largest "collections of collections" on the Internet

Dr Fun

"NetLogo is a programmable modeling environment for simulating natural and social phenomena. It is particularly well suited for modeling complex systems developing over time. Modelers can give instructions to hundreds or thousands of independent "agents" all operating in parallel. This makes it possible to explore the connection between the micro-level behavior of individuals and the macro-level patterns that emerge from the interaction of many individuals."

Comprehensive review of linux CD burning apps

Partition planning

08 / 08 / 13,200,002,002 - 13:19:52
You are looking at the Clock of AllTime. This is the most accurate clock on Earth and, possibly, in the universe. This is the only clock that tells time from the beginning of time, the Big Bang.

Institute for Propaganda Analysis

Bioluminescent Organisms

LSD Blotter Art Galleries

"Contamination is everywhere. I see people sneezing onto the tape cases. They cough wetly into their palms right before handing me change... They forget about the security cameras downstairs and pick their noses with wild abandon and astonishing force. Still, the only thing that realy freaks me out is the semen... The only thing we can do is use the hand sanitizer. I use it so much that I lose all finger traction and can't open our plastic bags..." --True Porn Clerk Stories

ShowerShock: Caffeinated Soap

Gotta get me one of these...

"To date no human being since ancient Maya times has entered the tomb under Palenque's Temple XX. But in May of this year a Project film crew composed of David Pentecost, Alonso Mendez, and Alfonso Morales managed to lower a video camera through the small hole into the tomb..."

"In the age of market research, newspaper editors have decreed that their readers just don't care about books."

Profiles of Japanese Comic Authors and Illustrators

"A Pleasant Valley High School student's art class painting that showed him shooting a police officer ( "in the back of the head, blowing away pieces of her flesh and face" ) who had cited him for possessing marijuana did not constitute a criminal threat, a state appeals court has ruled."

Geometric Sculpture

Esoteric Topics in Computer Programming

Barefoot Gen

Forced Labor Camps: online exhibition

"The old doctrine was that nuclear weapons were far too big and nasty to use, and now they've moved towards developing nuclear weapons they can actually use"

Nuke by ZIP code
(Thanks to Joel)

PixiPort Galleries

"'So, this is the part where we kill you,' Moore says to the reporter. It takes a second for the joke to register, and everybody laughs..." --the perils of methamphetamine manufacture

The goal of the Twin Peaks Third Season Project's web site is, of course, to write a third season for the television show, Twin Peaks.

SPIKE helps reverse engineer new, unknown network protocols.

"Iraq, faced with the threat of an American invasion, invited the U.S. Congress on Monday to send a mission to Baghdad and said it would be given free access to any site alleged to be developing weapons of mass destruction.

The White House dismissed the invitation, saying there was no need for discussions," exposing their excuse for invasion for the sham that it is

Rubber-hose-squad:

We will never be able to show that Alice has revealed the last of her keys. Further, even if Alice has co-operated fully and has revealed all of her keys, she will not be able to prove it. Therefore, we must assume that at every stage that Alice has kept secret information from us, and continue to beat her, even though she may have revealed the last of her keys. But the whole time we will feel uneasy about this because Alice may have co-operated fully. Alice will have realised this though, and so presumably it's going to be very hard to get keys out of her at all.

Alice:

I can never prove that I have revealed the last of my keys. In the end I'm bound for continued beating, even if I can buy brief respites by coughing up keys from time to time. Therefor, it would be foolish to divulge my most sensitive keys, because (a) I'll be that much closer to the stage where I have nothing left to divulge at all (it's interesting to note that this seemingly illogical, yet entirely valid argument of Alice's can protect the most sensitive of Alice's keys the "whole way though", like a form mathematical induction), and (b) the taste of truly secret information will only serve to make my aggressors come to the view that there is even higher quality information yet to come, re-doubling their beating efforts to get at it, even if I have revealed all. Therefor, my best strategy would be to (a) reveal no keys at all or (b) depending on the nature of the aggressors, and the psychology of the situation, very slowly reveal my "duress" and other low-sensitivity keys."

"Who are m-o-o-t? An informal group of (mostly) civil libertarians who include cryptographers and programmers. We aren't exactly secret, but some of us don't want to be identified. Some of us are very good at not being identified, and I don't know who you are!"

Their product "will consist of one CD which will boot on as many computers as possible. There will be a suite of email, w/p, spreadsheet, graphics etc programs on the CD. Access to local storage (hard drives etc.) will be disabled, and the system will shut down if the CD is removed. Data and mail will be transmitted and stored in encrypted form split between off-shore data havens."

"In the life of a man his time is but a moment, his being, an incessant flux, his body, a prey to worms...Observe, in short. How transient and trivial is all material life: Yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of ashes..." --Marcus Aurelius vs The Buddha

Secret arrests, indefinate detentions without trial or accusation, secret hearings, military tribunals, denial of legal representation... Judge Young... added: "This is the most profound shift in our legal institutions in my lifetime and - most remarkable of all - it has taken place without engaging any broad public interest whatsoever."

Instead of stirring up public outrage with rhetoric such as, "If you've got nothing to hide...," Senate leaders fear taking a lie detector test when they're the targets.

Evolving keyboards

"Hello and good day to you, fellow American! You'ver eached the automated voice response system for TIPS.

Please choose from one of the following options:

- If you'd like to report suspicious behavior by a co-worker, press 1
- If you'd like to report suspicious behavior by a friend, press 2
- If you'd like to report suspicious behavior by a family member, press 3
- If you'd like to report suspicious behavior by yourself, press 4"

Ghost In The Shell TV series

There is no escape...
(Thanks to James)

Bad Flash: if you've trashed your computer's BIOS
Wim's BIOS
motherboards.org
Motherboard Manuals Data and More
SysOpt
The Masters Estate

"If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire could ever warm me, I know that it is poetry" --Emily Dickinson

Wendy

Living In Greytown

Flem

The original Sesame Street shows "were built around the notion that Israeli and Palestinian children (as well as puppets) might become friends. Now, reflecting the somber mood in the Middle East, producers see their best hope as helping children to humanize their historic enemies... The utterance of every Muppet is potentially inflammatory."

"Rock and roll is readjusting itself from its previous anti-war, anti-establishment stance"

"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?'" --Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation

"The Memory Hole Website" is a nice idea, but has many practical weaknesses. Those weaknesses are addressed by the following projects, among others:
Permanent web publishing
HiveCache(originally MojoNation, then MNet )
and Freenet

"In George Orwell's novel 1984, news articles containing inconvenient facts were thrown down a memory hole to be incinerated. Now The Memory Hole Website rescues knowledge in danger of being forgotten, ignored, or suppressed.

The reason that literal memory holes don't exist is that they don't need to. Thanks to litigiation, spin control, self-censorship, media laziness, and info-glut, a lot of important facts are buried. Websites disappear. Articles from the Associated Press are changed. The New York Times buries a major revelation in the 18th paragraph of an article on page A23. The FBI withholds evidence. Transcripts of Congressional hearings go out of print after a week. Crucial government documents are never put online. Citizens have to pay hundreds of dollars for a single Freedom of Information Act request. Investigative books reveal startling facts, but who has time to read 900-page exposes? There are lots and lots of reasons why important facts often don't get the exposure they deserve." --Library Juice vol 5
(Thanks to Jesse)

"It's Difficult to Comprehend how Insane Some People Can Be, Especially When You're Insane"

Anvil Firing
(backup links: 1 2 3)

"...a man that I met asked me if I had a cellular phone and then asked me to lift up my shirt." Mor-Yosef, who doesn't speak Hebrew well, didn't respond. "I thought it was a game, then he pulled out a gun and shot me" 14 times!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hearings on whether to attack Iraq are a sham.

Stevens Johnson Syndrome
(Thanks to James)

Type your zip code in to one of the blanks at "NETWORK and it will help you find issues and action you can take.

"'We’ve got to do whatever it takes – if it takes sending SWAT teams into journalists’ homes – to stop these leaks,' admonished James B. Bruce, vice chairman of the CIA's Foreign Denial and Deception Committee."

AS Internet Graph: "The graph reflects 1,224,733 IP addresses and 2,093,194 IP links, (immediately adjacent addresses in a traceroute-like path) of skitter data from 16 monitors probing approximately 932,000 destinations spread across over 75,000 (70%) of globally routable network prefixes."

Francene Hart

"He who kills one is a murderer.
He who kills many is a hero.
He who kills all is a god." --Alphonso Lingis

Sloterdijk "seeks the answer in Gnosis. This is a path followed by many philosophers and artists before him: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Cioran, Beckett and Baudrillard. Without exaggerating, we may say that a discussion is underway regarding the dissidence potential of the language of Gnosis in the post-historical media age. Within this debate Sloterdijk's position is that a new `epoch-making' revolution is possible, and that, analogous to Gnosis in the past, it must come from an individual revolution of the soul. His study of Gnosis resulted in a massive work published in 1993 with T. H. Macho, entitled Weltrevolution der Seele, Ein Lese- und Arbeitsbuch der Gnosis. The book is not an attempt at a religious-historic consideration of a phenomenon of the past, but rather a collection of texts from past and present which offer a sense of what Gnosis could mean today. This meaning is more closely explained in a book published shortly afterward, Weltfremdheit. Sloterdijk's thesis on unworldliness is that, for the first time in history, Gnosis has formulated a dualistic principle which makes it possible to live in this world without being of this world.

The Gnosis investigation provides Sloterdijk with a set of instruments for making a diagnosis of our age which demonstrates that our culture displays signs of a sort of neo-Gnostic turn. After two hundred years of attachment to the world, many people are now turning away from it and thereby spontaneously following the second path of Gnosis."

New commenting system installed. Relevant thoughts welcome.

Theses/Dissertations on Philip K. Dick

An account of the creation of the Alchemical Tarot deck

The Cunningham Dax Collection of Psychiatric Art

"I see nothing but distress, disorder and madness everywhere; but justice mocked, but the right betrayed, but falsehood. And I wonder what life could bring me that matters, what does all this mean? What is it all going to lead to, and the rest? In what an absurd mess humanity is sinking, how and where to escape?" --Andre Gide (1936)

"The madness of one man is terrible enough, the madness of millions... is unbearable... one has to build private shelters against it not to be contaminated and maddened by it." --Anais Nin (1942)

"I loathe politics. Because of politics, all that I love is in danger; it is a menace to individual liberty, a menace to happiness, it disturbs my work. I wholeheartedly believe in works of literature and works of art. This belief is entirely foreign to political preoccupations." --Julien Green (1932)

"Singer studied 141 three- and four-year olds, and found that 65% reported having imaginary playmates. The children who reported having such companions were less aggressive, more cooperative, smiled more, were better able to concentrate, were less frequently bored, and were more linguistically advanced than their companionless cohorts. They were clearly cognizant of the difference between external reality and the worlds of their imagination..." from Invisible Guests by Mary Watkins

United States loses fight to block U.N. vote on torture convention (but the battle's not over yet)

"the Hermetic system was the earliest in the West to propose a mystical initiation, consisting of multiple experiences, that is simultaneously a journey through places and a series of changes in the ontology of the self. Its ascension to the sky compares with Jewish and Christian apocalypticism; but its division of ontological states compares with Neoplatonic distinctions among sensibles..." --Stages of Ascension in Hermetic Rebirth

Irlen Syndrome
(Thanks to Matt)

"If there's another terrorist attack, and if it's from a certain ethnic community or certain ethnicities that the terrorists are from, you can forget civil rights in this country." --Peter N. Kirsanow (member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights)

In a bioterrorism exercise "a Manhattan building was deliberately contaminated with anthrax by terrorists and a New York Police Department official was asked what he would do. 'And he said he would bring in the tank,' Perkins said. 'I said, 'The tank?' And he said, 'It's a show of force.'" --A Lack of Teamwork

Operation TIPS-TIPS: Report TIPS informants
(Thanks to Mike)

Americans are "happy to do some spying," for the government.

Second law of thermodynamics no longer applies

Imagine three different boxes. One is large, one is medium, and one is small.
Now, imagine seeing something different in each box.
Write down what you see in each size box, then click here

"One day Nasrudin was out walking and found a man sitting on the side of the road crying.
'What is the matter, my friend?' asked Nasrudin. 'Why are you crying?'
'I'm crying because I am so poor,' wailed the man. 'I have no money and everything I own is in this little bag.'
'Ah-ha!,' said Nasrudin, who immediately grabbed the bag and ran as fast as he could until he was out of sight.
'Now I have nothing at all,' cried the poor man, weeping still harder as he trudged along the road in the direction Nasrudin had gone. A mile away he found his bag sitting in the middle of the road, and he immediately became ecstatic. 'Thank God,' he cried out. 'I have all my possessions back. Thank you, thank you.'
'How curious!' exclaimed Nasrudin, appearing out of the bushes by the side of the road. "How curious that the same bag that made you weep now makes you ecstatic.'" --Roger Walsh

"At Harvard in the 1890's Professor William James had in his classes a rather wonky, stubby talkative Jewish girl from California. She was late for classes, didn't seem to understand what was going on, misspelled, knew no Latin -- that sort of typicall mess, the girl who couldn't get it together, a 'typical neurotic' as we might say today. But William James let her turn in a blank exam paper, and gave her a high mark for the course, helped her through to medical studies at Johns Hopkins. He saw something unique in this pupil. She was Gertrude Stein...

In a Southern small town a man named Phil Stone, who had some literary education at Yale, took under his wing as coach and mentor, a short, wiry, heavily drinking, hihgly pretentious lad of the town. This young fellow wrote poems, pretended to be British, carried a walking stick and wore special clothes -- all in smalltown Mississippi during the First World War. Phil Stone listened to the boy, whom we might call today a 'typical puer' and perceived his uniqueness. THe man went on to become the William Faulkner who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949...

In the year 1831 one of those marvellous old-fashioned scientific expeditions was to set forth; a schoolmaster named John Henslow suggested that one of his former pupils be appointed naturalist. The lad was then 22; he had been rather dull at school, hopeless in maths, although a keen collector of beetles from the countryside; he was hardly different from the others of his type and class: hunting and shooting, popular member of the Glutton Club aimed for the clergy. He had a 'typical family complex' as we might say today, soft in the mother and dominated by a 300-pound father. But Henslow saw something and persuaded the parties involved, including the pupil named Charles Darwin, that he make the journey." from Egalitarian Typologies versus the Perception of the Unique by James Hillman

"Many artists go so far as to engage in conversations with more than images and art materials; some even with the developing work... One artist describes the give-and-take that occurs: "I always listen to the work. I will sit and talk with it a long time". Another artist relates specific information about the negotiations. For her, not only did the painting ask for assistance, but she voiced her affirmative response: "This is what I'm gonna be," it says, "Can you help me become that?" And I say, "Okay. How can I help you?". Another artist, in describing her conversations, performs a vaudeville-like routine, physically and vocally enacting both roles--the artist and the painting: "Paintings are a dialogue between the artist and the picure. You have to listen to what the painting wants you to do. It's a dialogue between the two of you. It says, 'I want a little bit more blue over here.' And you say, 'No, you were supposed to be white.'"" from Creative Transformations by Helane Rosenberg

"If someone gave Manuel a common stone, he would hold it in his hand and look at it eagerly. In a few seconds, it would begin to shine and he would see that it was made of silver, then of gold, then of the most precious things imaginable, until the glitter died
Roberto would hold the same stone and would murmur, "Mmmmm, , , What is this good for?" But he wouldn't know the answer.
Marta would hold it in her hand for just a moment, and without a thought, would throw it away.
I, Consuelo, would look at it wonderingly. "What might this be? Is it, could it be, what I have been looking for?"
But my father would take the stone and set it on the ground. He would look for another and put it on top of the first one, then another and another, until no matter how long it took, he had finally turned it into a house." from Children of Sanchez, by Oscar Lewis

My blog archives are working again! (Usually you'd want to look for the "Earlier blog entries..." link at the bottom of the page)

Nice HTML color table

The RAVE Act holds rave promoters responsible if people use drugs during their rave.
(Thanks again to Joel)

A monster /. thread on electronic music.
(Note the subsequent page links at the bottom: "1|2|3|4|5|6|7...") (Thanks to Joel)

Georges Perec's A Void was originally written in French (as La Disparition). It completely avoided using the letter "e". As you know, the letter "e" is the most common letter in the English alphabet. Without it you can't use "the", "he", "she", "love", or about three quarters of the words in English. Since French uses even more e's, I am told that that constraint excluded seven eighths of all French words from being used in the composition. The translation that was subsequently made in to English managed to keep the same constraint.

Perec did all sorts of other interesting constrained writing experiments, many in conjunction with Oulipo (a group that included Italo Calvino), who were also particularly interested in constrained writing. One of their other members, Raymond Queneau created a work called 100,000,000,000,000 Sonnets, which "consisted of ten pages of 14 lines, cut into strips so that one could lift a strip and make up to 10^14 combinations, thus the title. If you attempted to read all the sonnets contained, it would take 190,258,751 years until you finished it."

"You see symbols were made to be doorways. You don’t stop at a symbol and say, here, this is an equal armed cross with a circle around it. You're supposed to go through that symbol and find out what’s behind it... for me, a symbol is just a beginning. To what is behind the symbol. It is not just a pretty decorative pattern. You take it and you chew it... You take it apart. You look at it, and can use any one of a dozen ways... Look at it, wait and see if another symbol comes up, add that to the first one. Wait and see if another one comes up. When you’ve finished all that lot, kind of sit and look at the symbol... you make a friend of your symbol. And you give it a name. ‘Hi Fred! How are you doing?’ And the symbol sits there and says, ‘I’m doing O.K. What would you like to know today?’ ‘Well listen Fred, I’ve been thinking. You know, you’re always drawn in this way, can you give me an aspect of yourself that was before this?' ‘Well, let me think.’ says Fred, ‘I used to be drawn like this...’ --An Interview with Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki

"Suffering is the fastest horse that leads to perfection" --Meister Eckhart

"FEMA, the federal agency charged with disaster preparedness, is engaged in a crash effort to prepare for multiple mass destruction attacks on U.S. cities - including the creation of sprawling temporary cities to handle millions of displaced persons..."

Stickers
(Thanks to Mike)

"It may be that after this life we shall perish utterly, but if that is our fate, let us so live that annihilation will be unjust." -- Etienne de Senancour

The Queen of Spades --Alexander Pushkin
Igitur --Stéphane Mallarmé

An Entheogen Chrestomathy

A Modern Perspective on Classical Technologies for Personality Restructuring: Processes of Ecstatic Initiation in Ancient Eleusis and Pompeii

"On the Beach tells a simple story. Some kind of complicated mix-up happened, and nuclear war has devastated the Northern Hemisphere. Who is to blame? The explanations would be hilarious in their complexity, if not for the implied question: who is not to blame? The people of Australia wait the 7 or 8 months for the radioactivity to drift southwards. Then everyone dies. Their dogs die. Their infants die. Either messy deaths due to radioactive poisoning, or swift deaths due to cyanide pills. Radiation approaches, they die, the end..."

"From the day of its foundation, in 1866, the Societé Linguistique de Paris let it be known that it wouldn't accept papers claiming to explain how human language had originated. The savants felt they had a right to be spared the at best ignorant and at worst lunatic theorizing of those who believed they had an answer to this seductively remote question.

Historical linguistics had become a subject reserved for those who dealt in facts, and the extra-historical matter of language's origins could be left aside, exciting for sure when addressed by a Rousseau or a Herder, futile when addressed by madmen or amateurs led on by the new fashion for thinking in evolutionary terms. The situation wasn't promising therefore for the man whose theorizing was, it's safe to say, the most lunatic of all, so strange indeed as to have been cherished now for more than a century, whether as an example of what André Breton called the "humour of reception", which is when we laugh at something that wasn't intended to be funny, or as a crucial resource in the study of linguistic misapprehension. This was Jean-Pierre Brisset..."

"Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." --Blaise Pascal

"Luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow." --Aristotle (paraphrased)

"Character traits are secret psychoses." --Sandor Ferenczi

"Nor wonder how I lost my Wits;
Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia shits!" --Jonathan Swift

"Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 per cent
Of everything you think and
Of everything you do
Is for yourself -
And there isn't one." --Wei Wu Wei

The nonduality of Life and death: A Buddhist view of repression

"The Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants (one in 24 Americans) than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police."