I realize I might be alone on this one, but 2008 has already started for me.  The last time Brainsturbator was cranking, I was writing about time: the concept of the Chronon, a series on Chronobiology, and a meditation on synchronicity.  Appropriately enough, in the past month my perception of time has changed radically.  A single day can take me up to a week.  I just spent 8 hours in a vocal booth that felt like a 20 minute workout routine.  Weirder still, I find myself experiencing moments from the short-term future in advance lately.  I will explain this (to some extent) later on.

Most of what I write about myself is a self-depreciating joke.  However, most of the emails I write these days are an explanation of Who I Am and What I Do, and I can’t keep rephrasing the same content.  I do love you all, but I want to love you all efficiently and effectively. In the past I have used many names and many outlets, and the challenge for 2008 is clearly going to be integrating everything back into, like....a single human being.

Brainsturbator has covered South American torture camps, the fractal Universe, and the UFO phenomenon, yet the most difficult article I’ve written turns out to be a simple accounting of my own life.  Allow me to reintroduce myself.

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When I started Brainsturbator, I still had a lot to learn about good web content.  Most of the early material in the archives is pretty weak, and I’m gradually fixing that.  The UFO Library probably needed an update the most, because there’s not enough good information online. What I mean is, it’s very difficult to find data about UFOs, but it’s very easy to find theories about what they are.  I’m much more interested in getting people to ask their own questions, than in summarizing my opinion about what the important questions are. 

Just the same, this libary is shaped by my own biases. I see the UFO phenomenon as fundamentally unexplained, and probably involving multiple causes that human science in 2007 cannot explain or predict.  This phenomenon is real, global, weird and important.  This library is my humble effort at making it a little easier to answer your own questions.  Enjoy.

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When you come across someone who is going to change your life, you know it immediately.  Looking over my life in retrospect, I think that’s been nearly 100% true.  You never know how, why or when, but that basic super-electric charge is there the second the connection is made.  I’ve been learning many things from many people, here on these internets, but I owe more to Ben Mack than pretty much anyone else I can think of.  I am writing this as a thank you to Ben, and as a heads-up to you, the reader.

There are serious problems in the world today and I have no interest in complaining about them. Whatsoever, yo. I expect my friends to slap me as hard as they can when I start backsliding like that.  Because when I find myself asking “Why?” at this point, I’m just lying to myself.  I know exactly why, I know exactly how to change it, and neither answer is comforting. How do we break the cultural hypnosis?  How do we expect to get people to wake up and change their own lives?  I’m bringing this up here because I believe that Ben Mack has a great deal to teach about mass media, about persuasion and the creation of consensus reality, and most of all about realistic solutions to these problems.

Interested? 

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Awhile back, Nick Pell from Key 64 asked me to write an article for him, on the topic of “Ten Ways YOU Can Fight Fascist America.” After I got that done—and you can read it here—Nick generously offered to return the favor.  So I’ve asked him to write something for all of Brainsturbator’s younger readers.  I asked him to lay out a plan: “How to Destroy Your High School in Seven Days.”

I didn’t know if I’d get a magick ritual or a treatise on home explosives, but Nick surprised me and came with a truly interesting angle.  His recipe is something anyone can apply—in fact, our sick culture will do most of the work for you. He’s also got the personal experience to prove that it works.  I’m very happy to offer this, and since Nick has a lot to teach, I will now get out of the way.  Enjoy.

--thirtyseven

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I was going to do a “We Salute You” tribute, but I realized an interview would be better.  Besides, I’m honestly unsure about how to approach even an introduction to Godforbid.  Do I say he’s one of my favorite rappers?  After all, the dude has moved on from mere hip hop—he’s currently working with That Handsome Devil, making some of the most creative shit I’ve heard since Zappa was wearing tight pants and frowning at the audience. 

Shit...there I go, making music critic comparisons. Here’s the bottom line: this interview is some of the best stuff Brainsturbator has done in 2007.  That Handsome Devil is an amazing band, and I feel confident saying that checking out their music will radically improve your day.  Godforbid is a singular human being, and you’re about to find out why directly from him.

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We talk about the third dimension a lot, but most humans don’t live in it.  Abbot’s Flatland was not so much a metaphor as an operational description of the sensory world most people inhabit: a continuous, unbroken plane that, despite surface variations and wrinkles, remains a flat stage for our two dimensional lives.  This is inevitable, since humans cannot hover or fly without technology assistance, and few of us can jump higher than three feet off the ground. 

And let’s be serious, here—what is a dimension? Have anyone ever even proved they existed?  Sure, you can draw a Cartesian XYZ grid on paper, but you can also draw a unicorn vomiting angels. I’ve been digging through the concept of time for a month, and it’s a concept nobody can really define, despite the fact we all experience it.  I’ve come to realize there’s very little humans can say for sure about space, either.  The more we learn, the less we know.  Everything you were taught in school is currently falling apart—so let’s take a look at a theory that will likely be replacing all this Big Bang horseshit: the Universe is fractal and infinite at every level of scale.

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In the last installment, a meditation on the concept of the “Chronon” and the total failure of human beings to understand and define time, I threw a ton of brainfood together and overstuffed the turkey.  Despite that, I still left out a lot of material, and I’m going to cover most if it in this “sequel,” epecially the work Jacques Vallee.  Vallee is one of my favorite authors because he precisely conveys meaningful content.  When I do that, it’s generally by accident.  You can decide if this article is worth reading in five sentences:

Time and space may be convenient notions for plotting the progress of a locomotive, but they are completely useless for locating information. What modern computer scientists have now recognized is that ordering by time and space is the worst possible way to store data. In a large computer-based information system, no attempt is made to place related records in sequential physical locations. If there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is, we may be traversing events by association. If we live in the associative universe of the software scientist rather than the sequential universe of the space-time physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational events.

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This is a series I’m working on with Garett Heaney, editor of Wishtank magazine and a friend of mine.  We’re having a cycling discussion about organization, motivation and focus.  I hope it’s useful, and please feel free to contribute advice of your own.  I would appreciate the added value, and so would anyone who reads this.

--thirtyseven

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Did you know that you have a 70% higher chance of having a heart attack between the hours of 7 and 9 am?  That’s averaged out over the full year, but if you look from a larger level of scale you’ll find that winter months are also especially high risk.  The more I dig into Chronobiology, the tenor of my investigation has changed from simple wonderment (after all, this stuff is pretty damn cool) to more sinister speculations.  Among them is the suspicion that “Daylight Savings Time” causes epidemic levels of depression, as well as a sharp increase in accidents, both on the job and on the road.

Even thought the “facts” bear my theory out more or less completely, I just mention it in passing.  We still have a lot of ground to cover, laying out the basic mechanisms and principles behind Chronobiology.  The closer I look, the more important this material seems—whether that’s a trick of perspective or a valid point is strictly up to you.

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