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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“EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG.” That’s such a cliche it became a joke before I was even born.  The good news is, I’m not here to sell you on mere paradigm change.  (Although, if you’re looking for some, check out Hump Jones.) What I’m referring to here is Euclidian mathematics—flat surfaces, straight lines, and solid objects.  I have no words to explain the rage I felt when I first got into fractal math and realized I’d been saddled with useless, outdated bullshit in high school.  I’ve been working on correcting that ever since (and as anyone can see, failing more or less completely).

I’m not going to explain why everything you know is wrong.  Too much work. Instead, I’ve compiled the single best collection of resources for fractal self-education that exists.  I say that with total confidence because I’m psychotically arrogant—but also because I’ve spent a long time building up this collection and I haven’t seen anything better.  Furthermore, anything online that comes close to this is already included here, so this list has eaten the competition, at least according to Set Theory: Brainsturbator contains them, yet they do not contain Brainsturbator.

With no further ego sickness, and not even another word of sarcasm, I proudly present to you the Brainsturbator Fractal Toolkit.

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We were brainstorming ideas for this title, but I decided that instead of making something catchy up, I should just f***ing swear. After all, what separates Brainsturbator from all those other weird science sites is 1) my cheerful willingness to be offensive and immature, 2) my total contempt for copyright laws and common sense, and 3) my voracious consumption of psychedelic drugs.  There’s no sense in pretending we’re some sort of respectable operation when I give out awards.  Hell, odds are a few of these sites would rather not be associated with me.

This is a collection of what I consider to be some of the best websites on the internets.  I spend a truly unhealthy amount of time on the internets, so I appreciate finding someone who’s put in work and built a quality resource.  This is in no particular order and not all of it will be interesting to you: I tend to have a much wider Curiosity Zone than most people I talk to.  A number of these websites are truly amazing and completely obscure, because the people who run them don’t want to deal with Search Engine Optimization, Web 2.0, keywords, or any of the other obligatory bullshit of “blog” culture.  And that’s a beautiful thing. Here’s a toast to Fucking Art—let’s begin:

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The Codex Serpahinianus has a reputation as a mysterious, impenetrable book.  Having gotten ahold of an excellent scanned copy, I have to say that reputation was unfounded.  The Codex is an early study of the fractal dimensions of apparently “flat” surfaces, such as paper, and the shapes generated by ink along that landscape.  As you will see in the first two scans, all of the intricate species, landscape and cultures within the pages of the Codex are the result of iterative changes in a chaotic environment—just like you and me.

The extraordinary “Codex Seraphinianus” is a book of 400 pages in the form of an encyclopedia—graphical letters, signs, animals and plants, anatomy and chemistry, creating a book to view and to admire. Its writing, completely invented, could never be deciphered even with the most technologically advanced machine, but it can be intuited, loaded with emotional meaning that washes over the eyes.

I give away the scan without malice—I don’t think I’m exactly hurting the market for existing copies of this book.  The Codex is ultimately an artifact, not a message—it’s a reminder that flesh-surface of actual paper has a power that electrons on a screen do not.  Everything in the Codex was written and drawn by hand—evoking illuminated manuscripts and Da Vinci’s legacy of dope notebooks.  Some of the best tea I ever had in my life was picked by monkeys in the Fujian province of China.  It’s called Monkey-Picked Tea, and it’s $37 for 3 ounces.

At least the Codex is free.  Much love to Luigi Serafini, the primate who hand-crafted this:

Sorry, due to traffic this file has been removed for a bit, digg + 150meg pdf is crippling my server.


CODEX SERAPHINIANVS (150 MB SCAN)

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This is probably long overdue.  Although Brainsturbator has attracted a lot of flattering attention from the publishing industry (as well as Scientologists) for flagrant violation of copyright law, I’m still a big fan of real damn books, the kind you can carry around with you and read in the backyard.  PDF files are great, but my laptop would give me testicular cancer if I tried using it like a book. 

The classic excuse for pirating mp3s is really true, at least in my case: when I download a book I really like, I will go out and buy it.  This was true for Kevin Kelly‘s masterpiece Out of Control, and just this past week, that was true for Ben Mack‘s outstanding marketing book, Think Two Products Ahead.  If the book is important enough to be re-read and referred back to regularly—and damn few of them are—then it’s worth investing money into getting a hard copy.

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