Notes

William James's four marks of mystical experience:

1. Ineffability--'it defies expression...its quality must be directly experienced.'
   
2. 'Noetic quality'--mystical states present themselves as states of knowledge
   
3. Transience
   
4. Subjective passivity--they cannot be controlled by the experiencer

From The Varieties of Religious Experience

http://cryptome.org/diebold-fix-vote/lists.tgz Diebold Vote Fixing E-Mail (11.5MB)

Comic Of The Day: iTunes For Windows

Kiss and tell

From Wicked Thoughts, via SCSU Scholars, comes a story about a private school where senior girls were kissing the restroom mirror after putting on lipstick, leaving prints that had to be cleaned every night. Finally, the principal called the girls to the restroom.

To demonstrate how difficult it had been to clean the mirrors, she asked the maintenance man to show the girls how much effort was required.

He took out a long-handled squeegee, dipped it in the toilet, and cleaned the mirror with it. Since then, there have been no lip prints on the mirror.

There are teachers, and then there are educators.

Ghost Story

The Pool in the Graveyard

"By this corner of the graveyard the red dawn discovered to Jonas a little pool of clear water, with mosses and parsley-ferns all around it, and so clear and cool-looking that he must drink. The larger part of it was still shadowed by the wall. On knees and hands, he put his lips to it and drank. The refreshment was wonderful. He rose with a sense that he should find the lost sheep yet and bring her home. He looked down once more into the clear pool. It was wider than he had thought - indeed, he had been mistaken; it was a great tarn on the mountain-side! Then he saw that wonderful things were happening on the face of and all round the water. What appeared to be little glow-worms were lying motionless in groups on the mosses in a still-shadowed region by the side of the water. From beneath a low arch in the wall, where the water was slowly flowing away in a river, there came, against stream and wave and wind, a fishing-boat. Its great red sail was spread, and its pennant shone silvery blue in the sun. It came alongside a pier of mossy stones, and cast anchor. From it leapt twelve strong young fishermen, all with bright faces. They took up the little creatures with the glowing lights, and carried them aboard; then back again to other groups, until all were gathered in. For they were all sleeping human forms, close-wrapped in grave-clothes, but with their light still living, as might be seen by anyone who had suffered. When all were safe aboard, the men cast off and the boat disappeared under the arch."
- Greville MacDonald

Why have an emblem at all?

To some hackers, having an emblem might smack too much of groupthink. But the hacker community is, in fact, a community, knit together by trust bonds over the Internet. One thing we've learned since 1991 is that visible emblems of community are just as valuable to hackers as they are to other kind of human beings. They help us recognize each other, help us affirm common values and cooperate more closely. They're useful social engineering.

Using this emblem means something a little different from just presenting yourself as a Linux fan, or a Perl-monger, or a member of any of the hacker subtribes that have become so successful since the mid-1990s. These are relatively recent developments in a tradition that goes back decades.

The hackers, in the broadest sense, are the people who built the Internet, and Unix, and the World Wide Web; our dreams of freedom have changed the world everybody lives in. See How To Become A Hacker for an in-depth look at what that means. If you find yourself nodding in agreement as you read that document, you are one of the people who should be using this emblem.
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A How To Halloween Pumpkin

SOHO Observed Two Eruptions This Week

Active region 10486, already under close scrutiny by several instruments on SOHO and other satellites, as well as numerous ground observatories, played up a spectacular show in the morning on Tuesday 28 October 2003. An X 17.2 flare, the second largest flare observed by SOHO, was setting off a strong high energy proton event and a fast-moving Coronal Mass Ejection.

The high level of energetic particles have caused two SOHO instruments to take precautionary measures: Both CDS (Coronal Diagnostic Spectrometer) and UVCS (UltraViolet Coronagraph Spectrometer) have stopped taking science, ramped down their high voltages and turned off the high voltage supply. Other instruments are less affected, although the onslaught of particles is quite noticeable for some - they are the cause for the "snowstorm" in EIT and LASCO images. Not only does it make detection of new CMEs difficult, it is also making their on-board compression algorithm less efficient - over time, their observations lag behind the schedule because images take longer to downlink, and their buffer fills up.

A number of people have noticed that a comet was approaching the Sun shortly before the flare and CME (see the beginning of the LASCO C2 movie above, lower right corner). However, we have no reason to believe there is any connection. Such a comet would evaporate completely before getting anywhere near the surface, and its mass would be like a speck of dust compared to the almost 10 billion tons of matter involved in the CME alone. And the orbit of sungrazing comets (theoretically speaking, should they have survived the encounter) does not touch the Sun itself.

Diebold documents now on Freenet, safe from censorship?

IndyMedia Says Goodbye To stallman (The Server)

"There are men too gentle to live among wolves -- Who prey upon them with IBM eyes And sell their hearts and guts for martinis at noon. There are men too gentle for a savage world Who dream instead of snow and children and Halloween And wonder if the leaves will change their color soon... " James Kavanaugh 1970

Diebold nastygrams Politech member over internal letters

A Very Scary Solstice:

the HPLHS Solstice Carol CD and Singalong Songbook

Enjoy the horror of the holidays with twenty-five of your favorite seasonal songs infused with an insane dose of the Cthulhu Mythos.
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For a (568K) MP3 sample: Oh Cthulhu Chorus (click to hear or right click and "Save Target" for a local copy).