Wow – this interview is supremely weird. Here’s a before-and-after of Joaquin on Letterman:
I suppose there’s nothing worse than speculating about “celebrity” behavior, but simply by virtue of the fact that lots of people have seen the same clip, here we go… speculating, speculating, speculating… I can’t do it! I can’t bring myself to speculate! Just watch the clip…
DO YOU EVER want to change the way you see the world? Wouldn’t it be fun to hallucinate on your lunch break? Although we typically associate such phenomena with powerful drugs like LSD or mescaline, it’s easy to fling open the doors of perception without them: All it takes is a basic understanding of how the mind works.
The first thing to know is that the mind isn’t a mirror, or even a passive observer of reality. Much of what we think of as being out there actually comes from in here, and is a byproduct of how the brain processes sensation. In recent years scientists have come up with a number of simple tricks that expose the artifice of our senses, so that we end up perceiving what we know isn’t real – tweaking the cortex to produce something uncannily like hallucinations. Perhaps we hear the voice of someone who is no longer alive, or feel as if our nose is suddenly 3 feet long.
The reasoning goes: if people are getting cheap, wild thrills from a ping-pong ball taped to their eyes, then there’s something that just ain’t right about it… and we should probably protect our kids from it! After all, Internet Blogs are making such fantastical claims that the average teenager will be unable to resist. I submit, for your revulsion, the following excerpt from the blog called RTFA:
Yes kids, you too can start “tripping balls” (ed: this is what kids are calling it these days) thereby experiencing wild, sensory-deprivation effects as you zonk out on an intergalactic space cruise.
…but such sensational claims are never accompanied by responsible warnings: if you get too “far out” you might never come back… perhaps you wear your ping pong balls to work one day, thereby interfering with your ability to type… or you might try “tripping balls” while driving, which will interfere with your reaction time and might lead to a fatal car crash. You might even go blind – or at least fail eye exams – if you keep these ping pong balls on your eyes all the time. Will this nation stand for such cheap and shallow shortcuts to enlightenment?
You have been warned, and the following is just a taste of what you can look forward to. Ah-hahaha! POWER TOOLS ARE ZOMBIE REPELLENT!
Okay… Good fun… But seriously, Mind Hacks have been all the rage for several years, and the Boston Globe has stepped up to the plate with a bite-sized, infographic introduction to hacking your gray matter.
The tape “X”s over them actually ruins the effect. The idea is to have a uniform field thus the sacades (small motions) of your eye no longer introduce any change and very quickly, everything becomes a uniform gray. If you try this, and use a strongly colored light (blue for example), it will turn gray until there is a change (like moving your hand in front of the light) which will cause it to pop back to blue. Kinda fun.
Also, don’t use the half of the ping pong ball that has writing on it – so you actually need two.
Albert Hofmann was born at Baden, Switzerland, on January 11 1906, the elder of two children. Having graduated from Zürich University with a degree in chemistry in 1929 he took a doctorate on the gastro-intestinal juice of the vineyard snail.
After leaving university, he went to work for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals where he researched the medicinal properties of the Mediterranean squill (Scilla maritima), before moving on to the study of Claviceps purpurea (ergot).
Three years in the making, Jon Ronson’s Crazy Rulers of the World explores the apparent madness at the heart of US military intelligence. With first-hand access to the leading players in the story, Jon Ronson examines the extraordinary — and plain bizarre — national secrets at the core of George W Bush’s war on terror.
The original charter and by-laws for the League for Spiritual Discovery, founded by Timothy Leary in Millbrook, NY in October, 1966. Here, Leary and his cohort outline the structure of a new religious association that identifies LSD, peyote and psilocybin as The Sacraments used to commune with, “evolutionary wisdoms preserved in cellular and molecular structures”, and to facilitate the ritual, “to go out of the mind and to come to the senses”. Five – 8 1/2″ X 11″ pages total, with the first four pages stapled top-left, page 5 having come loose about 20 years ago.
Pretty sad, really… The way the owner acquired this was through Leary’s wife, who was selling stuff to pay for the prosecution of Timothy Leary. This document looks terrible, and should have been curated for the last 40 years, if it weren’t for circumstance which would necessitate its sale. Leary, by the way, was a very accomplished academic by the time he was ousted from Harvard. It is evident, in reading this charter document, that the premise is very sound and coherently presented.
David Anderson: Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!After struggling for days to get OpenOffice to download and work on my Mac Mini, only to find that the official version only works on the Intel model...
Chile: Thanks for your advice Andre. I followed what you suggested and it appears that you were right. Since the IR sensor is deep purple itself I thought the IR filter was present already but no....
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