Today's Topics:
9 to 5 witchery
STELARC
subgenius subscription
The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 1 Mar 93 11:44:40 -0500
From: Eric Haines <erich@eye.com>
Message-Id: <9303011644.AA07757@hemlock>
To: subgenius@media-lab.media.mit.edu
Subject: 9 to 5 witchery
You May Have Her to Thank for It When the Boss Bursts Into Flames,
by L.A. Winokur, Wall Street Journal 2/26/93
The office, you say, is getting you down. Your job appears vulnerable.
Colleagues talk behind your back. Your pet projects get lost. Not to worry.
Zsuzsanna Budapest can work some magic, perhaps.
Ms. Budapest, a self-described feminist witch in San Francisco, has written a
handbook for women suffering from a host of workplace maladies.
To cure office ills, she counsels trying some "harmonizing and purifying"
vibrations. Soak a sprig of lemon verbena (or the dried variety) in a dish of
spring water (or salted water, if you must). With a hand over the water, say
"Water wash clean! Wash away the discord from my office. Let everything that
hasn't been working now start up again." Then arrive early one morning and
scatter the blessed water around the office.
That's not all, though. She suggests wearing sandalwood oil as perfume and
burning a little sandalwood or sage incense. Your troubles, she claims, will
evaporate with the water and dissipate with the smoke.
So you want to protect your job. Here's her advice: Bake muffins flavored
with lemon or lime and put a spell on them. If the problem is a harassing
associate, there's always a special "hot-foot" powder and spell designed to
send that person running. If all else fails, there's tougher hexing she
recommends in her soon-to-be-published handbook, "The Goddess in the Office:
A Personal Energy Guide For the Spiritual Warrior at Work."
The Hungarian-born Ms. Budapest decided to help the coven of working women
after watching the Hill-Thomas hearings in 1991. "I couldn't help but think,
what if Anita Hill could do a little spell and send him packing?" she says.
Ms. Budapest concedes that her magic would work for men, too, but stresses that
her book is aimed at helping women.
Of Ms. Budapest's suggested sorcery, "if you're willing to try it, you may be
surprised to find it works," says Laurel Olson, a customer-service
representative for an equipment-servicing company in Northern California. Ms.
Olson contends that at a previous job, she rid herself of a bothersome
co-worker by drawing a picture of the person on a paper boat filled with
chocolate coins, blessing it, and chanting, "I wish you well." The colleague
almost immediately took another job on the East Coast.
---------
while we're on the topic, I thought I'd rerun this one:
from Harper's Magazine, January 1992, page 32
[Spell]
BLACK MAGIC, 9 TO 5
>From "The Office Witch," by Laurel Olsen, in the Beltaine 1991 issue of
the Lavender Pagan Newsletter, a quarterly published in Oakland,
California. Beltaine is a pagan holiday that occurs on May 1.
The topic of the day is photocopiers, which have some pretty strange
things inside them that enhance their ability to catch and hold psychic
energy. The corona wires, for example, are twenty-four-karat gold, and
some of the lenses can take a "charge" as well as a crystal can. so
obviously, copiers are very sensitive to negativity; frequent breakdowns
are the result.
My solution is to hang a totem behind the copier to attract all the
loose, unfocused energy that is directed at the machine. I take four
one-inch-wide strips of black construction paper and string them
together with cotton twine. With my glue stick, I draw a
counterclockwise circle on each strip. (The glue stick is the wand that
binds the spell.) Every two weeks or so I put up a new circle. I take
the old one to a public waste receptacle at a busy intersection near
work, dump it in, and go on my way WITHOUT LOOKING BACK.
While nothing except divine intervention can make a copier completely
breakdown-proof, what this spell does is alter the energy in the room
where the copier is located. Users have a calmer attitude, and
breakdowns due to "operator error" are reduced to nil.
------------------------------
To: Subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
cc: ndb@gs36.sp.cs.cmu.edu, amf@gs36.sp.cs.cmu.edu, jrrl@gs36.sp.cs.cmu.edu,
jscw+@andrew.cmu.edu, spot@gs36.sp.cs.cmu.edu, nix@gs36.sp.cs.cmu.edu,
ehn@gs36.sp.cs.cmu.edu, kji@gs36.sp.cs.cmu.edu, GR4302@siucvmb.siu.edu,
mgunders@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu, ab3f+@andrew.cmu.edu
Reply-to: toad@cs.cmu.edu
Subject: STELARC
Date: Mon, 01 Mar 93 01:36:54 EST
Message-ID: <19961.730967814@GS36.SP.CS.CMU.EDU>
From: Todd_Kaufmann@gs36.sp.cs.cmu.edu
here's my report on his visit. to appear in the next issue of our
alternate student propaganda vehicle.
STELARC
Report on lecture/demonstation,
Skibo Ballroom, 25 February 1993
by Stucco Toast
-------------------------------
Stelarc is an Australian performance artist perhaps best known for
suspending his body with 18 steel hooks through the skin, but this
is just part of his exploration with the body and extending it in a
cybernetic fashion.
``For me the body is obsolete,'' says Stelarc, ``in both form and function.
We've created a technological terrain that functions much faster,
functions more more powerfully than the body.''
Stelarc is thinking about ways of re-engineering and redesiging the body,
his general strategy being ``to hollow, harden, and dehydrate it.''
to overcome difficulties of sustaining the softness and wetness of the
human body off the Earth.
Having a proposal turned down by NASA, and not having a big R&D budget,
Stelarc works with the technology available now.
``To me, what's important is not perpetuating the species by male-female
intercourse, but rather redesiging the body by human-machine interface.''
After fifteen minutes of talk about his philosophies behind his work,
Stelarc gave a slide & video show which partly detailed past performances
and was part documentary on research in robotics, prosthetic devices, and
human-machine interfaces.
Stelarc has hung his naked flesh from hooks in many places around the world:
in a tree in Australia, on a wooden structure above breaking ocean waves,
from a giant crane 200 feet above the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen,
hanging from an abandoned monorail station in Yokohama,
and above the street in the East Village in New York.
This last performance brought officers with their sirens within five minutes,
who broke down the doors, dragged him back in, and demanded to see some
identification from this naked man with hooks in his body.
Isn't America wonderful?
In 1975 Stelarc started work on his third arm
(the phantom limb he never had) which he straps to one of his real flesh
arms and controls through sensors activated by flexion of the leg and/or torso muscles.
In one slide he was
holding three markers, one in each hand, and drawing a circle, square, and
triangle simultaneously. In another slide, each hand wrote one third of the word
E-V-O-L-U-T-I-O-N.
In performances utilizing his third arm, he is often wired for sound and
video as well. Sounds of body functions (heartbeat, breathing, blood flow, stomach
rumblings, brainwaves) are greatly amplified, as well as the motorized arm.
An endoscope which he has swallowed shows images of his internal landscape
(esophagus, stomach, or colon).
Besides moving his body and making contortions to control the third arm,
other movements trigger sensors which may turn his amplified sounds on or off, or mix in
inputs from several video cameras which are capturing different angles of
the performance.
Add a large, moving, industrial robot arm that he is trying to avoid,
and you get some strange movements indeed.
These movements are not some choreographed dance, but functional movement
defined by the situation of the performance he has interfaced himself into.
Along with learning a new body comes learning new body language.
When you drive a car you are talking to a machine in a special language,
though not all such interfaces admit such facile expression, some making it
doubleplus uneasy.
One of the prosthetic interfaces he told about was a Japanese
voice-operated arm that was tested by a thalidomide girl. Through simple
vocal utterances such as ``drink,'' a complex series of actions could be
initiated (move arm, bend hand, grasp cup, move arm to mouth, tilt cup,
tilt back, move arm again). The problem was that the arm would take
commands from anybody. They switched to a microphone on the larynx that
would recognize simple tunes that she hummed.
Stelarc gave a demonstration of the wiring involved in these direct muscle
to machine interfaces. Two volunteers, with sensors attached to their
forearms, each controlled a separate movement, closing or opening the hand
of the third arm. In another demonstration he plugged a battery pack in to
the electrodes on the arm of a young volunteer, controlling gross movements
of the arm and over-riding the minute control voltages of the arm's owner.
Other arm extensions of Stelarc include tele-operating it over phone wires
while it is attached to another human, and an arm operated in virtual
reality, not subject to physical constraints. This allows the virtual arm
360-degree constant rotation at the wrist, similar rotation of fingers,
elongation of fingers and arm, the ability to shoot balls from the fingers,
and a mutate command to change the arm texture or turn each finger into a
hand. Does your favorite interface have a mutate command?
Through microminiturization of robots, Stelarc thinks the next frontier is
putting robots into the human body, and is excited about housing a
sculpture within the body, rather than a sculpture housing the body.
To this end, he has made a proposal to the Australian Sculpture Triennial
to erect a swallowable, collapsable sculpture in his stomach.
It will be self-illuminating and sound-emitting, possibly motorized.
But he doesn't know how he'll get it out.
Stelarc was in quite a jovial mood, chuckling about past performances and
difficulties. But was it all so harmless?
Could Stelarc be a disinformation agent, or unsuspecting welcome-wagon host
for alien cyborgs, trying to soften us up for acceptance of internal machinery?
Could being possible fellow at CMU have anything to do with government
research in mind/body control and SEI research?
Nah, that's pure conspiracy theory, and I'll leave that for someone else.
------------------------------
Message-Id: <9303010920.AA04953@wana.pbrc.Hawaii.Edu>
Date: Sun, 28 Feb 1993 23:21:09 -1000
To: subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
From: Bill@ahi.pbrc.hawaii.edu
Subject: subgenius subscription
Please subscribe me to your list.
bill@ahi.pbrc.hawaii.edu
thanks
------------------------
Bill
Honolulu
Bill@ahi.pbrc.hawaii.edu
========================
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 1 Mar 93 19:40:01 PST
Message-Id: <9303020340.AA10013@versant.com>
To: utci'waiwa wetco'we! utci'waiwa wetco'we! <Subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu>
Subject: The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed.
From: ab fzbxvat va gur nhgbabzbhf mbar <strick@osc.versant.com>
From--larry@bullen.gatech.edu (Larry Curtin)
Subject--Important Discovery
Date--Thu, 25 Feb 93 10:06:24 EST
The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our
authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as
the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as
the light of seven days." Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much
radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much
as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all. The light we
receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the
Sun, so we can ignore that ... The radiation falling on Heaven will
heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to
the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much
heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for
radiation, (H/E)^4 = 50, where E is the absolute temperature of the
earth (-300K), gives H as 798K (525C). The exact temperature of Hell
cannot be computed ... [However] Revelations 21:8 says "But the
fearful, and unbelieving ... shall have their part in the lake which
burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten brimstone means
that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6C. We
have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C.
-- From "Applied Optics" vol. 11, A14, 1972
------------------------------
End of Subgenius Digest
******************************
