Today's Topics:
Ithaca Journal?
[Mitchell Porter: ReSubGenius]
(plus 1 message with no subject line)
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Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1993 01:36:01 -0400
From: Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com>
Message-Id: <199309280536.AA28800@world.std.com>
To: Subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Cc: Subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: Ithaca Journal?
>The Ithaca Journal (9/25/93) keeps putting these weird things on page 1.
Was Ithaca Journal ever bought out by Gannet (or was that Gannet
clinic I was lying in having feverish delusions? How many "t"s in
Gannett anyhow?)
>The Ithaca Journal (9/25/93) keeps putting these weird things on page 1.
Oh, right, and I'm sure they look at the front page of the Cornell
Daily Sun and say ``ah-yup, quality reporting there! gotta live up to
this, ah-yup''. Believe it or leave it, fraternity rush week doesn't
make it to the front pages of most newspapers elsewhere...
Besides, what better place for the con to practice than Ithaca?
-b, as in high aboooooove cayoooga's water, there's a funny smell
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Message-Id: <9309280516.AA28286@media.mit.edu>
To: subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: [Mitchell Porter: ReSubGenius]
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 93 01:16:54 -0400
From: Michael Travers <mt@media.mit.edu>
------- Forwarded Message
Subject: ReSubGenius
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 93 2:53:45 EDT
From: Mitchell Porter <Mitchell.Porter@lambada.oit.unc.edu>
please put me back on the subgenius digest if it still exists
ps have you ever read the part in the cyberiad where the computer poet says
"Bernoulli would have been content to die
"if he had known such [insert mathematical expression]
something like a^2 2 cos psi
do you have any clue what Lem was talking about there? is that an
expression out of polar geometry, or something?
you might care to forward this message to the digest, and to
HailOtis@socpsy.sci.fau.edu, which is the home of Purps, the online digest
of the OTISians, and probably the great competitor of the subgenius digest.
the reason i suggest you forward this to the otisians is that one of their
number [doc simpson] is both in poland and on bitnet, so he might have
some clue how we could reach lem himself.
email from lem would certainly make my day, and in fact i want to discuss
with someone who knows what i'm talking about, the concept of 'toposophy'
out of GOLEM XIV, which [i was told by an architect i met the other day,
at a showing of 'liquid sky'] is actually known in certain circles of the
AI community - which is news to me! i have never seen the sheer brilliance
of the "GOLEM's" lectures acknowledged properly anywhere.
i have to run off, but i would appreciate correspondence on THAT topic
more than any other, and i don't care who from; so please feel free to
make a little memetic virus out of this message and pass it on to friends,
families, acquaintances, religious leaders, [wasnt pope john paul ii in
school with lem?], every newsgroup on usenet, etc.
yours faithfully,
mitchell porter
sometime compiler of 'high weirdness by email'
founder, 'conspiracy of psychic youth'
author, 'book of the shubgenius'
inventor, xepernet concept
discoverer [so far as he knows] of the notion of 'fractal teselation' as a
descriptive term for entities such as escher's art, but which could also
apply to the 'memetic maelstrom' of a place like usenet,
which concept he is seeking to explore in a more formal context very soon,
namely via a vacation scholarship at the department of mathematics at the
university of queensland, st lucia, brisbane, queensland, australia;
the deadline for applications for this scholarship closes very soon and i
have no experience in drafting such applications, so i would appreciate a
line or two from anyone who has any experience in, say, drafting
"curriculum vitae"-type documents;
perhaps you should think of me as one of those semiilliterate but earnest
young mathematical hopefuls who sometimes come to the west from places like,
well, wherever ramanujan came from.
which is a pretty awful comparison to make since [i] ramanujan certainly
wasnt illiterate [ii] i dont have any corpus of already-proven theorems to
send to the hardy of today.
more to the point: i have no clue what sort of person i should try to
direct this message toward. i mean, it's already addressed,
'mt@media.mit.edu', but thats because it started life as a request to get
back on a mailing list he runs. at some point it became a diary entry.
*
Okay, TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
My name is Mitchell Porter.
I am a dropout [two years' standing] from the BSc program of the
University of Queensland, St Lucia. I quit because I felt that the
university environment was leading me nowhere that I wanted to go, and
that even if I did see out the completion of my degree, I would not be
able to use hat credential any time soon to do anything of any significance.
I have, to the window on the right of this screen, a note announcing a
seminar on "Polynomial Factorization, Graphs, Designs and Codes", on
tomorrow. If I were to summarize the abstract, the summary would read: "I
can show you how to apply polynomial factorization techniques to certain
combinatorial problems." The fact that such a sentence appears nowhere in
the abstract typifies to me a regrettably common feature of human
discourse, namely, the difficulty human beings seem to have in getting to
the point. The very email communication in which this message is embedded
is an instance of such evasion on my own part.
I am seeking, somewhere, somehow, the resources to act on my
potentialities. I can point to nothing in the way of peer-reviewed
publications; I have to struggle mighty hard to even get my _ideas_
peer-reviewed.
My talents, judging by the history of my interests, are probably most
pertinent to mathematical physics. I would love the opportunity to
actually learn something more about what is going on in topological
quantum field theory, beyond what I can infer from print-outs of papers by
John Baez and Louis Crane. In what time I have been able to get online, I
have managed to email to mathematicians, who both sent me papers: they are
Ralph Abraham and Louis Kauffman, and to them I am eternally grateful.
A note to the mathematicians in the audience: LK sent me a little book
called "Map Reformulation" in which he suggests that a sort of
diagrammatical calculus invented by G Spencer Brown (of _Laws of Form_
fame) permits a proof of the Four Color Theorem much more economical than
the one due to .. well, whoever it was in 1976. (Sorry guys!) I am still
at an early stage in trying to work through the booklet, owing to the
presence of nonmathematical interests in my life. I would like to see a
discussion of the relevant ideas on Usenet.
Frankly, what I would really like to do is as follows.
Madonna's most recent major CD was, it seems, "Erotica". I have read on
the alt.fan.madonna newsgroup that she has another project in the works,
"Politica", in which she runs for US President on a platform opposing
Neo-Nazism.
What I want is your help in putting together a "concept CD" called
MATHEMATICA.
Now clearly, this will require, to begin with, communication with Stephen
Wolfram, or whoever it is that owns the copyright on the Mathematica
software. That's one constraint that must be satisfied. Another is that
Madonna herself must have creative control.
Work out a scenario in which both of those constraints are met, and
anything can happen. You could even have (for example) a proof of the
Four-Colour Theorem in the CD liner notes. You could have a pocket history
of set theory, concentrating on high points such as Cohen's 1963 theorem.
You could have messages from female mathematicians about what it is that
they do as professionals, and whether they think sexist prejudice has ever
hindered their careers. You could have an appraisal of not just the
intellectual contributions of women to mathematics, but to the whole of
human culture. You could have a dialogue between, say, Ralph Abraham and
Marija Gimbutas, on the status of mathematics in Goddess cultures.
And all this can be yours for the low low price of $29.95!
Not much of a price to pay for an alternative to "TIME HAS INERTIA" as the
image of mathematical thought.
"A lot of people don't ask for what they want;
That's why they don't get what they want."
-Madonna
Yours,
"Mitch"
PS My address is
254 Sir Fred Schonell Drive
St Lucia Q 4067
AUSTRALIA
Phone number +61 7 8705793
PO Box 1620
Toowong Q 4066
AUSTRALIA
Any of those should work should you try hard enough.
Feel free to send any part of this message ANYWHERE (and hack it about to
suit the audience in question).
------- End of Forwarded Message
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Date: Tue, 28 Sep 93 02:12:03 -0400
From: Subgenius-request@mc.lcs.mit.edu
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From: Automatic Subgenius Digestifier <@mc.lcs.mit.edu:Subgenius-request@mc.lcs.mit.edu>
Reply-To: Subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: Subgenius Digest V4 #184
To: Subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Subgenius Digest Tue, 28 Sep 93 Volume 4 : Issue 184
Today's Topics:
Apocalypse now? Scholars debate
Fax God; get published
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Date: Mon, 27 Sep 93 10:53:24 -0400
From: Eric Haines <erich@eye.com>
Message-Id: <9309271453.AA14480@hemlock>
To: erich@hemlock.eye.com, subgenius@media-lab.media.mit.edu
Subject: Apocalypse now? Scholars debate
The Ithaca Journal (9/25/93) keeps putting these weird things on page 1.
Definitely check out the last paragraph:
Apocalypse now? Scholars debate
The Associated Press
If war is hell, can peace lead to the Apocalypse?
In the Middle East, where every major event is seen as holding a clue to the
end times, the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord is sending some prophecy
interpreters back to the Bible to see whether the step toward peace is also a
step closer to Armageddon.
Two of the primary books apocalyptic forecasters refer to - Daniel and
Revelation - speak of false peaces and duplicitous alliances prior to a period
of destruction before they believe Christ will return to rule over a world that
has the lion lying down with the lamb and swords beaten into plowshares.
Charles Dyer of Dallas Theological Seminary said the accord between the
Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel does not fulfill any particular
biblical passage but, "My personal feeling is that it could be part of the
setting of the endstage events."
Other interpreters are more cautious, particularly since some would-be prophets
had seen the Persian Gulf War as the "war to end all wars."
"I don't care what anyone thinks of Yasser Arafat, he is not the Antichrist,"
said Paige Patterson, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in
Wake Forest, N.C.
Fifteen percent of Americans in a Gallup poll said the Gulf War was Armageddon,
and there is little doubt attempts will be made to fit the new peace accord
into biblical prophecy, some scholars said.
- Eric Haines (157th Incarnation of the Inexorable World Egg to my friends)
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Message-Id: <9309280020.AA13445@media.mit.edu>
To: subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: Fax God; get published
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 93 20:20:14 -0400
From: Michael Travers <mt@media.mit.edu>
[Forward removed]
HEAVENLY HOT LINE GETTING SECOND NUMBER. "BEST-OF-BOOK"
By: Arieh O'Sullivan, Associated Press
JERUSALEM - Faxing notes to God has been such a hit that the Israeli
phone company has opened another line to the divine and plans to publish a
book of the best prayers and messages.
In January, the national phone company, Bezek, decided to make a
business of the hundreds of notes stuffed each day into the crannies of
Jerusalem's Wailing Wall.
It opened a fax line to receive the messages, which are copied and
sent by messenger to the wall, Jerusalem's holiest shrine of Judaism.
On Tuesday, Bezek set up another line for those seeking divine
intervention but unable to get to the wall personally to plant a note.
Author Joyce Shira Starr will use the best of the messages from the
new second line in a book she'll start writing next spring.
But for those who want their innermost desires to remain between
them and God, the first line set up in January will continue to be
confidential.
About 70 faxes are sent daily from around the world, mainly
originating in the United States and Europe. While God presumably
understands any language, only faxes sent in English will be considered for
publication in Starr's forthcoming book. Starr and Bezek will share jointly
in the profits from book sales.
<end quoted story>
The number of the original (and still confidential) fax line in
Isreal is +972 2 612222, while the new line for publishable faxes to the
Wailing Wall is +972 2 235555. Calls to both numbers are chargeable to the
orginating party at international telephone rates as applicable to a call to
Israel.
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End of Subgenius Digest
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