higherspace | Most visitors to this blog – and, indeed, to my academia.edu profile
– come seeking Charles Howard Hinton and his system of cubes. No
surprises there. Hinton’s biography is quite something and his work on
visualising – or, perhaps more accurately, imagining – the fourth
dimension of space was innovative, influential and almost completely out
of its time.
The purpose of this post is to update a project I began almost four years ago
and am only really now in a position to continue: the construction of a
set of Hinton’s cubes, the material demonstration models that anchored
his pedagogical enterprise.
Hinton began working with cubes early in
his career. The essay ‘On the Education of the Imagination’ (1888) may
well have been written before ‘What is the Fourth Dimension?’ was first
published in 1880. In this he describes working with a system of cubes
with his school students, and he began teaching in 1876. The system is
also based on what he termed ‘poiographs’ in a paper presented before
the Physical Society in 1878, so it seems likely to have been a
foundation stone for his project. Certainly, his proficiency with it was
advanced by 1887, when he was able to claim that he’d memorised a cubic
foot of his named cubes.
He refined the system of cubes over the course of his career. The system described in A New Era of Thought (1888),
taking up the entire second-half of that remarkable, visionary text,
described cubes with a different colour and name for each vertex, line
and face. Relying on description and line drawings it is,
unsurprisingly, fiendishly complicated. By 1904’s The Fourth Dimension
he had developed a system of ‘catalogue’ cubes and plates to enable a
more step-by-step working through of cubic training. There are also many
more and far clearer illustrations in this text, so this is the version
I’ve followed.
The first task is to paint the correct number of one inch cubes the correct colours, which are as follows:
Null
16
White
8
Yellow
8
Light yellow
4
Red
8
Pink
4
Orange
4
Ochre
2
Blue
8
Light blue
4
Green
4
Light green
2
Purple
4
Light purple
2
Brown
2
Light brown
1
I
used model paints of the kind you use to paint Airfix aeroplanes. As a
newbie to this game this process caused me more problems than you might
imagine. For example, metallic paints sound exciting in the shop –
wooh-hooh, electric pink! – but they are more liquid, don’t necessarily
look all that great on wood, and can even look largely indistinguishable
from lighter, non-metallic shades. Also, on which side do you rest a
painted cube to dry? I never discovered the answer to this gnomic poser
so my cubes are slightly messy. But hey! They’re my cubes – and they
don’t need to be perfect.
After the set of 81 coloured cubes there
are the catalogue cubes. These are coloured to distinguish vertices,
lines and faces and the fold-out colour-plate at the front of The Fourth Dimension shows how they should look.
As you can see, painting lines a fifth of
an inch proved beyond me, either freehand or using tape to mask off. In
the end I decided to print out coloured nets of the cubes onto card and
cut these out and tape them together. Again, slightly imperfect, but I
think they do the job nicely.
publicdomainreview | In April 1904, C. H. Hinton published The Fourth Dimension,
a popular maths book based on concepts he had been developing since
1880 that sought to establish an additional spatial dimension to the
three we know and love. This was not understood to be time as we’re so
used to thinking of the fourth dimension nowadays; that idea came a bit
later. Hinton was talking about an actual spatial dimension, a new
geometry, physically existing, and even possible to see and experience;
something that linked us all together and would result in a “New Era of
Thought”. (Interestingly, that very same month in a hotel room in Cairo,
Aleister Crowley talked to Egyptian Gods and proclaimed a “New Aeon”
for mankind. For those of us who amuse ourselves by charting the
subcultural backstreets of history, it seems as though a strange
synchronicity briefly connected a mystic mathematician and a
mathematical mystic — which is quite pleasing.)
The coloured cubes — known as "Tesseracts" — as depicted in the frontispiece to Hinton's The Fourth Dimension (1904) - Source.
Hinton
begins his book by briefly relating the history of higher dimensions
and non-Euclidean maths up to that point. Surprisingly, for a history of
mathematicians, it’s actually quite entertaining. Here is one tale he
tells of János Bolyai, a Hungarian mathematician who contributed
important early work on non-Euclidean geometry before joining the army:
It
is related of him that he was challenged by thirteen officers of his
garrison, a thing not unlikely to happen considering how differently he
thought from everyone else. He fought them all in succession – making it
his only condition that he should be allowed to play on his violin for
an interval between meeting each opponent. He disarmed or wounded all
his antagonists. It can be easily imagined that a temperament such as
his was not one congenial to his military superiors. He was retired in
1833.
Janos Bolyai: Appendix. Shelfmark: 545.091. Table of Figures - Source.
Mathematicians
have definitely lost their flair. The notion of duelling with violinist
mathematicians may seem absurd, but there was a growing unease about
the apparently arbitrary nature of "reality" in light of new scientific
discoveries. The discoverers appeared renegades. As the nineteenth
century progressed, the world was robbed of more and more divine power
and started looking worryingly like a ship adrift without its captain.
Science at the frontiers threatened certain strongly-held assumptions
about the universe. The puzzle of non-Euclidian geometry was even enough
of a contemporary issue to appear in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov when Ivan discusses the ineffability of God:
But
you must note this: if God exists and if He really did create the
world, then, as we all know, He created it according to the geometry of
Euclid and the human mind with the conception of only three dimensions
in space. Yet there have been and still are geometricians and
philosophers, and even some of the most distinguished, who doubt whether
the whole universe, or to speak more widely, the whole of being, was
only created in Euclid’s geometry; they even dare to dream that two
parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may
meet somewhere in infinity… I have a Euclidian earthly mind, and how
could I solve problems that are not of this world?
— Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamzov (1880), Part II, Book V, Chapter 3.
Well
Ivan, to quote Hinton, “it is indeed strange, the manner in which we
must begin to think about the higher world”. Hinton's solution was a
series of coloured cubes that, when mentally assembled in sequence,
could be used to visualise a hypercube in the fourth dimension of
hyperspace. He provides illustrations and gives instructions on how to
make these cubes and uses the word “tesseract” to describe the
four-dimensional object.
Diagram from Hinton's The Fourth Dimension (1904) - Source.
The
term “tesseract”, still used today, might be Hinton’s most obvious
legacy, but the genesis of the word is slightly cloudy. He first used it
in an 1888 book called A New Era of Thought and initially used
the spelling tessaract. In Greek, “τεσσάρα”, meaning “four”,
transliterates to “tessara” more accurately than “tessera”, and -act
likely comes from “ακτίνες” meaning "rays"; so Hinton’s use suggests the
four rays from each vertex exhibited in a hypercube and neatly encodes
the idea “four” into his four-dimensional polytope. However, in Latin,
“tessera” can also mean “cube”, which is a plausible starting point for
the new word. As is sometimes the case, there seems to be some confusion
over the Greek or Latin etymology, and we’ve ended up with a
bastardization. To confuse matters further, by 1904 Hinton was mostly
using “tesseract” — I say mostly because the copies of his books I’ve
seen aren’t entirely consistent with the spelling, in all likelihood due
to a mere oversight in the proof-reading. Regardless, the later
spelling won acceptance while the early version died with its first
appearance.
Diagram from Hinton's The Fourth Dimension (1904) - Source.
Hinton
also promises that when the visualisation is achieved, his cubes can
unlock hidden potential. “When the faculty is acquired — or rather when
it is brought into consciousness for it exists in everyone in imperfect
form — a new horizon opens. The mind acquires a development of power”.
It is clear from Hinton’s writing that he saw the fourth dimension as
both physically and psychically real, and that it could explain such
phenomena as ghosts, ESP, and synchronicities. In an indication of the
spatial and mystical significance he afforded it, Hinton suggested that
the soul was “a four-dimensional organism, which expresses its higher
physical being in the symmetry of the body, and gives the aims and
motives of human existence”. Letters submitted to mathematical journals
of the time indicate more than one person achieved a disastrous success
and found the process of visualising the fourth dimension profoundly
disturbing or dangerously addictive. It was rumoured that some
particularly ardent adherents of the cubes had even gone mad.
He
had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal,
non-Euclidian, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart
from ours.
alchetron |Charles Howard Hinton (1853, United Kingdom – 30 April 1907, Washington D.C., United States) was a British mathematician and writer of science fiction works titled Scientific Romances. He was interested in higher dimensions, particularly the fourth dimension. He is known for coining the word "tesseract" and for his work on methods of visualising the geometry of higher dimensions.
In 1880 Hinton married Mary Ellen, daughter of Mary Everest Boole and
George Boole, the founder of mathematical logic. The couple had four
children: George (1882–1943), Eric (*1884), William (1886–1909) and
Sebastian (1887–1923) inventor of the Jungle gym. In 1883 he went
through a marriage ceremony with Maud Florence, by whom he had had twin
children, under the assumed identity of John Weldon. He was subsequently
convicted of bigamy
and spent three days in prison, losing his job at Uppingham. His father
James Hinton was a radical advocate of polygamous relationships, and
according to Charles' mother James had once remarked to her: "Christ was
the saviour of Men but I am the saviour of Women and I don't envy him a
bit." In 1887 Charles moved with Mary Ellen to Japan to work in a
mission before accepting a job as headmaster of the Victoria Public
School. In 1893 he sailed to the United States on the SS Tacoma to take up a post at Princeton University as an instructor in mathematics.
Fourth dimension
In
an 1880 article entitled "What is the Fourth Dimension?", Hinton
suggested that points moving around in three dimensions might be
imagined as successive cross-sections of a static four-dimensional
arrangement of lines passing through a three-dimensional plane, an idea
that anticipated the notion of world lines. Hinton's explorations of higher space had a moral basis:
Hinton
argues that gaining an intuitive perception of higher space required
that we rid ourselves of the ideas of right and left, up and down, that
inheres in our position as observers in a three-dimensional world.
Hinton calls the process "casting out the self", equates it with the
process of sympathizing with another person, and implies the two
processes are mutually reinforcing.
Hinton created several new words to describe elements in the fourth dimension. According to OED, he first used the word tesseract in 1888 in his book A New Era of Thought. He also invented the words kata (from the Greek for "down from") and ana
(from the Greek for "up toward") to describe the additional two
opposing fourth-dimensional directions (an additional 4th axis of motion
analogous to left-right (x), up-down (y), and forwards-backwards (z)).
Hinton's Scientific romances,
including "What is the Fourth Dimension?" and "A Plane World", were
published as a series of nine pamphlets by Swan Sonnenschein & Co.
during 1884–1886. In the introduction to "A Plane World", Hinton
referred to Abbott's recent Flatland
as having similar design but different intent. Abbott used the stories
as "a setting wherein to place his satire and his lessons. But we wish
in the first place to know the physical facts." Hinton's world existed
along the perimeter of a circle rather than on an infinite flat plane.
He extended the connection to Abbott's work with An Episode on Flatland: Or How a Plain Folk Discovered the Third Dimension (1907).
Hinton influenced P. D. Ouspensky's thinking. Many of ideas Ouspensky presents in "Tertium Organum" mention Hinton's works.
Hinton's "scientific romance," the "Unlearner" is cited by John Dewey in "Art as Experience", chapter 3.
Hinton is the main character of Carlos Atanes's play Un genio olvidado (Un rato en la vida de Charles Howard Hinton). The play was premiered on Madrid in May 2015 and published in May 2017.
Hinton is mentioned several times in Alan Moore's graphic novel From Hell;
his theories regarding the fourth dimension form the basis of the
book's final chapter. His father, James Hinton, appears in chapters 4
and 10.
He is mentioned twice in Aleister Crowley's novel Moonchild. The first mention mistakenly names his father, James Hinton.
In conclusion let us remark that we have supposed two different worlds—one of sensation in the first part, one of motion in the second part. And these have been treated as distinct from one another. And especially in the first part, by this avoidance of questions of movement, an appearance of artificiality was produced, and occasionally inconsistencies, for sometimes sensations were treated as independent of actions, sometimes as connected with them. But it remains to be decided if these inconsistencies are in themselves permanent, or whether, when we remove the artificial separation, and let the world of sensation and the world of motion coalesce, the inconsistencies will not disappear, thereby showing that their origin was merely in the treatment,123not in the fact; that they came from the particular plan adopted of writing about the subject and are not inherent in the arguments themselves.
The king in the first part was supposed to have all the material problems of existence solved. There was a complete mechanism of nature. He took up the problem of the sentient life. But this problem can only artificially be separated from that of the material world. The gap between our sensations and matter can never be bridged, because they are really identical.
Let us then allow this separation to fall aside. Let us suppose the king to have all the reins of power in his own hands. Let us moreover suppose that he imparts his rays to the inhabitants so that they have each a portion of his power. And let us suppose that the inhabitants have arrived at a state of knowledge about their external world corresponding to that which we have about the world which we know.
Let us listen to a conversation between two of them.
A.The energy of the whole state of things is running down.
B.How do you prove that?
A.Whenever any motion of masses takes place a certain portion of the energy passes irrecoverably into the form of heat, and it is not possible to make so large a movement with those same masses as before, do all that is possible to obtain the energy back again from the heat into which it has passed.
B.Well, what about the heat? Energy in the form of the motions of the masses passes off into the energy of heat. But what is heat?
A.It is the motion of the finer particles of matter.
B.Well, I would put forward this proposal. We have by observation got hold of a certain principle that where any movement takes place some of the energy124goes in working on the finer particles of matter. Let us now take this principle as a universal one of motion, and apply it to the motions of the finer particles of matter themselves, which are simply movements of the same kind as the movements of the larger ones. This principle would show that these movements are only possible inasmuch as they hand over a portion of their energy to work on still finer matter.
A.Then you would have to go on to still finer matter.
B.Yes, and so on and on; but to fix our thoughts, suppose there is an ultimate fine matter which is the last worked on. Now I say that we may either suppose that this is being gradually worked on and all the energy is dissipating, or else we may put it in this way. When we regard so much energy we are apt to think that it is the cause of the next manifestation in which it shows itself. But this is really an assumption. Energy is a purely formal conception, and all that we do is to trace in the actions that go on a certain formal correspondence, which we express by saying that the energy is constant.
A.But I feel my own energy.
B.Allow me to put your feeling to one side. If we take then the conservation of energy to be merely a formal principle, may we not look for the cause of the movements in the invariable accompaniment of them, namely, in the fact that a certain portion of the energy is expended irrevocably on the finer portions of matter. If now we take this ultimate medium which suffers the expenditure of energy on it, may we not look on it as the cause, and the setter in action of all the movements that there are. By its submitting to be acted on in the way in which it does submit, it determines all the actions that go on. For what is all else than a great vibration, a swinging to and fro. When we count it as energy, we by reckoning it in a particular manner make it seem to125be indestructible, but that the energy should be indestructible would be a consequence from the supposition which we could very well make, that to produce a given series of effects the submitting to be worked on of this ultimate medium must be a minimum. If it were a minimum no movements could neutralize one another when once set going, for if they did there would be a waste of the submission of this ultimate medium.
A.But what do you suppose this ultimate medium would be?
B.That I cannot tell, but we seem to have indications. For the more fine the matter which we investigate, the more its actions seem to annihilate distance: light and electricity produce their effects with far greater rapidity than do the movements of masses. We might suppose that to this ultimate matter all parts were present in their effects, so that anything emanating from the ultimate matter would have the appearance of a system comprehending everything.
A.But you have not got any evidence of an ultimate matter.
B.No, all that we can think of is an endless series of finer and finer matter. But is that not an indication rather, not that the direction of our thoughts is false, but that there are other characteristics of this ultimate, so that when looked at under the form of matter it can only be expressed as an infinite series.
Let us omit the considerations brought forward in the preceding conversation and examine more closely the philosophy of the inhabitants of the valley in so far as it corresponds with ours.
They laid great stress on a notion ofvis viva, or what we should term energy, but said it was gradually passing away from the form of movements of large bodies to that of movements of small bodies. So that in the126course of time the whole valley would consist of nothing but an evenly extended mass of matter moving only in its small particles—and this motion of the small particles they called heat. Now they had very clearly arrived at the conviction that with every mechanical motion there was a certain transference ofvis vivato the smaller particles of matter, so that it did not appear again as mechanical motion. But they did not accept this as a principle to work by. They did not consider that the motions of the smaller particles of matter were just the same as those of the larger masses. They did not see that if a condition held universally for the movements of the visible world, it must also hold for the smaller motions which they experienced as heat. So the conclusion which they should logically have come to that there was a transference ofvis vivaon and on was not held. But the step was a very little one for them to take from regarding an invariable condition as always there to regarding it as a cause. For the causes they assigned were all purely formal relations, and only got to assume an appearance of effective causes by familiarity with them, and a throwing over them of that feeling of effectiveness which they derived from the contact which they had with the king.
They might have reasoned. This universal condition of anything happening must be the cause. Energy goes from a higher to a lower level. That which causes the difference of level is the cause, and the cause of the difference of level must be that which invariably accompanies such a transference of energy from a higher to a lower level. Now this invariable condition is the passing of a portion of the energy into the form of motions of the finer parts of matter. Hence there is an apparently endless series. But to realize the matter, suppose an ultimate medium, suppose there is a kind of matter of127infinite fineness distributed everywhere which let itself be worked on, and so determines differences and wakens the sleeping world. What are the qualities of this fine matter? We see them in the properties of the finer kind of matter which we know, such as light, electricity. The property of the finer kind of matter is in general that it tends to bring distant places together, so that a change in one part is rapidly communicated to every other part. If they followed this indication they would have supposed that the ultimate fine matter was of such a nature as to make all parts of the valley as one, so that there was no distance, and any determination of a difference of level on the part of this ultimate matter would have reference to all the conditions everywhere. It would be in immediate contact with every part, so that anything springing therefrom would present the appearance of a system having regard to the whole. Now if they had imagined such an ultimate medium doing that which to them would seem bearing rather than exerting force, suffering rather than acting, they would not have been far from a true conception of the king who directed them all. For he himself by reason of his very omnipresence could not be seen by them. There was nothing for them to distinguish him by. But they could have discovered somewhat of the means by which he acted on them, which can only be described from the appearances they present to the creatures whom the king calls into life.
But of truth they would have had another and perhaps a truer apprehension of the king in a different way. For when he acted on them so that they took one course rather than another, it was his action in themselves that they felt. If they were mere pleasure-led creatures then they were shaped outwardly, but if in their inner souls he acted and through them suffered, then they were true128personalities conscious of being true selves, the oneness of all of them lying in the king, but each spontaneous in himself and absolute will, not to be merged in any other.
Thus they had two modes of access to the king, one through their own selves where he had made them exist, one through the outer world. And in the outer world it was but a direction in which they could look. They could never behold the personality of the king, but only an infinite series of different kinds of matter, one supporting the other as it were and underlying it, but doing more also than this, for in proportion as they considered the kinds of matter that lay deeper they found that distant became near, absent, present, that time gave no longer such distinctions, but from the phenomenal side they seemed by a gradual diminution of the limitations of experience to arrive at an external presentation of that absolute which exists in the fulness of things, which they knew more immediately in themselves when they truly were.
James Hinton was an ear surgeon who was best known for The Mystery of Pain, a little book which sets forth the Panglossian thesis that "all that which we feel as painful is really giving-something that our fellows are better for, even though we cannot trace it." It gives some idea of the turn of the son Charles Hinton's mind to learn that he wrote a piece, "The Persian King," in which he attempted to use higher dimensions and infinite series to obtain a mathematically accurate model of this idea.
pureflamencobarcelona | She was born in a shack in the Somorrostro. Her father was Francisco
Amaya “El Chino”, a poor guitarist who played in taverns day and night
to earn a living. When she was only four years old she started going out
at night with her father to help him. She was just a little gypsy girl
by then. Her father played the guitar and Carmen danced and singed.
After that, they asked for money or took the coins that the audience
have thrown to the floor. At the same time, she appeared in some
theatres which lacked any prestige. José Sampere, a businessman, was the
first one in being interested on her and took her to the most known
Spanish Theatre of Barcelona. However, the problem was that she wasn’t
allowed to work legally due to her age so the officially date of birth
may not be the real one according to some researches about the artist.
Her name appeared for the first time printed in the Expo Barcelona 1929
thanks to Sebastián Gash, a sharp critic who watched her and talked
about her in the weekly newspaper Mirador: “Imagine a 14 years old gypsy
sitting in a chair on the tablao, Carmencita remained impassive,
statuary, noble with a racial elegance, inscrutable, absent, not paying
attention of what is happening around her, alone with her inspiration,
with a very hieratic actitude to allow her soul to raise until
inaccessible areas. And suddenly, a jump. And the gypsy dances.
Indescribable. Soul. Pure sole. The feeling made real. Movements of
twist in right angle, pure geometry.
In that time also Vicente Escudero watched her dancing and said that
Carmen Amaya will make a revolution in the flamenco dance because she
mixed two styles: the old female dancer and the frenetic foot tapping of
the male dancers. In 1935 she was hired by Carcellé who presented her
in the Coliseum in Madrid. That was maybe her only national recognition.
The world of cinema also noticed her. She performed a small role in La
hija de Juan Simón. Later, she worked in María de la O, along with
Pastora Imperio.
The 18th July 1936 Carmen and her family were in the Zorrilla
Theatre in Valladolid working in the company of Carcellé. In that moment
their economy was in good shape and they bought their first car. They
had to go to Lisbon to enforce a contract but the car was confiscated
and they couldn’t go there until November. After some setbacks they
embarked to America in a ship that took 15 days to cross the Atlantic.
They arrived to Buenos Aires and the triumph of Carmen Amaya and her
family went beyond expectations.
They went there just for four weeks and stayed there nine months
due to the fact that every time that Carmen performed in the theatre a
lot of people attended and the tickets were sold two months before the
show. As a proof of the popularity of the artist in the South-American
country we can find a theatre with her own name: the Theatre Amaya.
In America Carmen Amaya met a lot of famous people of her time. She
was in Hollywood a couple of times filming some movies and the cinema,
music and culture celebrities wanted to watch her dancing. The musician
Toscanini went to watch her once and said that he had never seen an
artist with that rhythm and fire before. She was constantly improvising.
Her compass was solid and she possessed a prodigious sense of the
rhythm with a rigorous tempo that was exact in all her movements. Anyone
has ever span like her, so fast and perfect. In America she met
Roosevelt, the president of the United States and in Europe she even met
the Queen of England.
She didn’t come back to Spain until 1947 and she did it as a
worldwide star. Her stay in America turned her into a professional and
famous artist. Lot of stories hard to believe were told about her as the
anecdote of the fried fish in the luxury suite of the Waldorf Astoria.
In that time her flamenco dance was the best one. She stood out not
only for her art but also for the wonderful personality that won
everyone she met. She was also very generous. It seems that during her
stay in America the dancer had a sentimental relationship with Sabicas
who declared before his death he dated Carmen for nine years and they
broke up in Mexico.
In 1952 she married the guitarist Juan Antonio Agüero, a member of
her company, a man from a distinguished family from Santander who wasn’t
gypsy. They lived an authentic love story, with an intimate wedding. In
1959 Carmen lived another exiting moment in her life when the ceremony
of the inauguration of the fountain Carmen Amaya was celebrated in the
seafront promenade in Barcelona located in the neighbourhood
Somorrostro, the same fountain and the same place she lived in as a
child years before. The last ten years of her life she was surrounded of
lots of people and almost sanctified, not only by the audience but also
by her colleagues. Her genius was instinctive, wild, far from the
academic styles. When she performed for the last time in Madrid, Carmen
Amaya was deathly sick; she had a renal failure that stopped the
elimination of toxins from her body. The doctors couldn’t find any
solution to her problem.
The sickness made worse in the filming of “Los Tarantos” in the
spring of 1963. She had to dance barefoot with an unbearable cold. She
always put on her coat when the filming stopped and they didn’t repeat
any scene. Despite these drawbacks, Carmen remained strong and began the
summer tour. However, the 8th of August while she was working in
Gandía, Carmen didn’t finish her performance. She was performing when
suddenly she said to Batista: “Andrés, let’s finish”.
That was the end of the dancer Carmen Amaya, who got inspiration
from the street, the family and the gypsy blood and revolutionized the
flamenco dance. With her way of dancing, Carmen Amaya showed that for
her the flamenco was feeling, soul and passion. Her dancer came from the
anger and the violence retained with an amazing speed and strength.
Still today she is a model of the flamenco dance.
Even if Carmen is remembered for her dance she also sang. In fact,
her father thought at first that she was better in singing than in
dancing. She had a dark and hoarse voice, typical of the gypsy sing. A
good example of her way of singing can be seen in “La reina del embrujo
gitano”. Recordings on slate records 1948-1950 collects a good sample
of her abilities as a flamenco singer, accompanied by two guitarists
from her dynasty, Paco and José Amaya, as does “En familia”.
amidwesterndoctor |I was recently sent an excellent presentation that was given by Doctor Richard Fleming.
It touches on a variety of very important topics that will be the
focus of today’s article. I have spent a great deal of time researching
these topics, and due to my own familiarity with the subject it is
clear to me Dr. Fleming is highly knowledgeable in this area and his
presentation was the result of spending an enormous amount of time in
research.
After I saw his presentation, I reached out to a few colleagues who somewhat knew Dr. Fleming
to further inquire about him. In addition to the content of his
presentation, we are of the opinion he is a credible source for the
following reasons:
•He is self-funding his work and asking for nothing in return besides help in ending the War on COVID-19. •He is both a Doctor (M.D.) and a Lawyer (J.D.). •He
is a Cardiologist and a PhD with extensive experience conducting
research for publication in scientific journals (such as the development
of a treatment protocol for heart disease) and being a reviewer for premier medical journals.
This
is a very, very unusual combination that I believe makes him uniquely
qualified to address this issue and it is incredible how much time he
has put into it. I also feel it is extremely fortunate that someone
with his background has been willing to defy his own medical community
to try to address this issue, especially given just how much he had to
have personally invested to be part of that community.
Because
this was a very long presentation, I spent a while editing to shorten
it in order to focus on the essential points. Although the edited
version below is still on the longer end, I would highly encourage you
to watch it at a speed you can follow. If you would instead like to see
the longer more complete version, it can be viewed here while his complete deposition on this subject can be viewed here.
Telegram | Maria Zakharova ✔ On the night of August 5, the administration of the Twitter platform blocked the official account of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in English for 7 days. The reason is the publication of excerpts from a briefing by Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, Chief of the RCBZ Troops of the RF Armed Forces, on US military biological activities.
Such a sharp reaction was caused by our post with a quote from the Department of Defense about the possibility that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was involved in the emergence of a new coronavirus. It is doubtful that Twitter has sufficient competence to question the conclusions of the Ministry of Defense, based on work with documents and fresh data. There is another clumsy attempt to shut us up.
By the way, this kind of sanctions are applied to us for the first time. It happened that individual tweets were blocked, but to close, even for a week, the account of the official foreign policy department of one of the leading countries in the world is beyond good and evil. With our embassies, such a trick was repeatedly turned: for the publication, for example, of facts (real, not fictional) about a provocation in Bucha, the accounts of embassies in London and Berlin were suspended.
Is this all happening against the backdrop of a Russophobic orgy on the part of Western politicians, experts and even ordinary users, as well as unprecedented activity talking about "inauthentic behavior"? This wording was used by Twitter when in recent years it "cancelled" objectionable bloggers who adhere to pro-Russian views. But direct calls for violence and reprisals against Russians are now considered authentic in the West. I don’t remember a single blocking of representatives of the Ukrainian side, generating just fierce fakes in the style of the former Ukrainian “ombudsman” Lyudmila Denisova, who told the whole world about “atrocities / rapes” allegedly committed by the Russian military.
With its stupid actions, trampling on the principle of freedom of speech, "Twitter" with a tenacity worthy of a better use, sawing the branch on which it sits. This platform has been stagnating for a long time: trust in it is practically at zero, users leave en masse. It is not surprising that Elon Musk, having familiarized himself with the true state of affairs, in horror broke off the deal to buy this social network.
So, of course, you can block us, but the truth will still find its way. It's just that American digital platforms, which have turned into instruments of censorship in the interests of the "Washington regional committee", will definitely not be used to disseminate facts.
If Hemingway were alive, I'm sure that Twitter would definitely block him for reports that the FBI is following him and does not leave him alone.
wikipedia | The Tetris effect (also known as Tetris syndrome) occurs when people devote so much time and attention to an activity that it begins to pattern their thoughts, mental images, and dreams.[1] It takes its name from the video gameTetris.[1]
People who have played Tetris for a prolonged amount of time
can find themselves thinking about ways different shapes in the real
world can fit together, such as the boxes on a supermarket shelf or the
buildings on a street.[1]
They may see colored images of pieces falling into place on an
invisible layout at the edges of their visual fields or when they close
their eyes.[1] They may see such colored, moving images when they are falling asleep, a form of hypnagogic imagery.[2]
Those experiencing the effect may feel they are unable to prevent the thoughts, images, or dreams from happening.[3]
A
more comprehensive understanding of the lingering effects of playing
video games has been investigated empirically as game transfer phenomena
(GTP).[4]
The Tetris effect can occur with other video games.[5] It has also been known to occur with non-video games, such as the illusion of curved lines after doing a jigsaw puzzle,
the checker pattern of a chess board (or imagining chess pieces in
unrelated objects or phenomena), or the involuntary mental visualisation
of Rubik's Cube algorithms common among speedcubers.
The earliest example that relates to a computer game was created by the game Spacewar! As documented in Steven Levy's book Hackers:
"Peter Samson, second only to Saunders in Spacewarring, realized this
one night when he went home to Lowell. As he stepped out of the train,
he stared upward into the crisp, clear sky. A meteor flew overhead. Where's the spaceship? Samson thought as he instantly swiveled back and grabbed the air for a control box that wasn’t there." (p. 52.)
Robert Stickgold reported on his own experiences of proprioceptive imagery from rock climbing.[3] Another example, sea legs,
are a kind of Tetris effect. A person newly on land after spending
long periods at sea may sense illusory rocking motion, having become
accustomed to the constant work of adjusting to the boat making such
movements (see "Illusions of self-motion" and "Mal de debarquement"). The poem "Boots" by Rudyard Kipling describes the effect, resulting from repetitive visual experience during a route march:
'Tain't—so—bad—by—day because o' company,
But—night—brings—long—strings—o' forty thousand million
Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin' up an' down again.
Mathematicians have reported dreaming of numbers or equations; for example Srinivasa Ramanujan, or Friedrich Engel, who remarked "last week in a dream I gave a chap my shirt-buttons to differentiate, and he ran off with them".[6]
It is believed that the reason why these form constants appear
has to do with the way the visual system is organized, and in particular
in the mapping between patterns on the retina and the columnar organization of the primary visual cortex.
Concentric circles in the retina are mapped into parallel lines in the
visual cortex. Spirals, tunnels, lattices and cobwebs map into lines in
different directions. This means that if activation spreads in straight
lines within the visual cortex, the experience is equivalent to looking
at actual form constants.[1]
Author Michael Moorcock once observed in print that the shapes he had seen during his migraine headaches resembled exactly the form of fractals. The diversity of conditions that provoke such patterns suggests that form constants reflect some fundamental property of visual perception.
Cultural significance
Form constants have a relationship to some forms of abstract art, especially the visual music tradition, as William Wees noted in his book Light Moving in Time
about research done by German psychologist Heinrich Klüver on the form
constants resulting from mescaline intoxication. The visual and
synaesthetic hallucinations this drug produced resembles, as Wees noted,
a listing of visual forms employed in visual music:
[Klüver’s] analysis of
hallucinatory phenomena appearing chiefly during the first stages of
mescaline intoxication yielded the following form constants: [emphasis
original] (a) grating, lattice, fretwork, filigree, honeycomb, or
chessboard; (b) cobweb; (c) tunnel, funnel, alley, cone or vessel; (d)
spiral. Many phenomena are, on close examination, nothing but
modifications and transformations of these basic forms. The tendency
towards "geometrization," as expressed in these form constants, is also
apparent in the following two ways: (a) the forms are frequently
repeated, combined, or elaborated into ornamental designs and mosaics of
various kinds; (b) the elements constituting these forms, such as
squares in the chessboard design, often have boundaries consisting of
geometric forms.[3]
These form-constants provide links between abstraction, visual music
and synaesthesia. The cultural significance of form constants, as Wees
notes in Light Moving in Time is part of the history of abstract film and video.
The practice of the ancient art of divination may suggest a deliberate practice of cultivating form constant imagery and using intuition and/or imagination to derive some meaning from transient visual phenomena.
Psychedelic art,
inspired at least in part by experiences with psychedelic substances,
frequently includes repetitive abstract forms and patterns such as tessellation, Moiré patterns or patterns similar to those created by paper marbling, and, in later years, fractals. The op art genre of visual art created art using bold imagery very like that of form constants.
In electroacoustic music,
Jon Weinel has explored the use of altered states of consciousness as a
basis for the design of musical compositions. His work bases the
design of sonic materials on typical features of hallucinatory states,
and organises them according to hallucinatory narratives. As part of
this work, form constants feature prominently as a basis for the design
of psychedelic sonic and visual material.[4]
avalonlibrary | It will be possible to answer these questions definitely only when it is definitely known that the fourth dimension exists and when it is known what it really is. But so far it is possible to consider only what might be in the fourth dimension, and therefore there cannot be any final answers to these questions. Vision in the fourth dimension must be effected without the help of eyes. The limits of eyesight are known, and it is known that the human eye can never attain the perfection even of the microscope or telescope. But these instruments with all the increase of the power of vision which they afford do not bring us in the least nearer to the fourth dimension. So it may be concluded that vision in the fourth dimension must be something quite different from ordinary vision. But what can it actually be? Probably it will be something analogous to the " vision " by which a bird flying over Northern Russia " sees " Egypt, whither it migrates for the winter; or to the vision of a carrier pigeon which " sees ", hundreds of miles away, its loft, from which it has been taken in a closed basket; or to the vision of an engineer making the first calculations and first rough drawings of a bridge, who " sees " the bridge and the trains passing over it; or to the vision of a man who, consulting a time-table, " sees " himself arriving at the station of departure and his train arriving at its destination.
Now, having outlined certain features of the properties which vision in the fourth dimension should possess, we must endeavour to define more exactly what we know of the phenomena of that world.
Again making use of the experience of the two-dimensional being, we must put to ourselves the following question: are all the " phenomena " of our world explicable from the point of view of physical laws?
There are so many inexplicable phenomena around us that merely by being too familiar with them we cease to notice their inexplicability, and, forgetting it, we begin to classify these phenomena, give them names, include them within different systems and, finally, even begin to deny their inexplicability. Strictly speaking, all is equally inexplicable. But we are accustomed to regard some orders of phenomena as more explicable and other orders as less explicable. We put the less explicable into a special group, and create out of them a separate world, which is regarded as parallel to the " explicable ".
This refers first of all to the so-called " psychic world ", that is to the world of ideas, images and conceptions, which we regard as parallel to the physical world. Our relation to the psychic, the difference which exists for us between the physical and the psychic, shows that psychic phenomena should be assigned to the domain of the fourth dimension.1 In the history of human thought the relation to the psychic is very similar to the relation of the plane-being to the third dimension. Psychic phenomena are inexplicable on the " physical plane ", therefore they are regarded as opposite to the physical. But their unity is vaguely felt, and attempts are constantly made to interpret psychic phenomena as a kind of physical phenomena, or physical phenomena as a kind of psychic phenomena. The division of concepts is recognised to be unsuccessful, but there are no means for their unification.
In the first place the psychic is regarded as quite separate from the body, as a function of the " soul ", unsubjected to any physical laws. The soul lives by itself, and the body by itself, and the one is incommensurable with the other. This is the theory of naive dualism or spiritualism. The first attempt at an equally naive monism regards the soul as a direct function of the body. It is then said that " thought is a motion of matter ". Such was the famous formula of Moleschott. Both views lead into blind alleys. The first, because the obvious interdependence of physiological and psychic processes cannot be disregarded; the second, because motion still remains motion and thought remains thought.
The first view is analogous to the denial by the two-dimensional being of any physical reality in phenomena which happen outside his plane. The second view is analogous to the attempt to consider as happening on a plane phenomena which happen above it or outside it. The next step is the hypothesis of a parallel plane on which all the inexplicable phenomena take place. But the theory of parallelism is a very dangerous thing. The plane-being begins to understand the third dimension when he begins to see that what he considered parallel to his plane may actually be at different distances from it. The idea of relief and perspective will then appear in his mind, and the world and things will take for him the same form as they have for us. We shall understand more correctly the relation between physical and psychic phenomena when we clearly understand that the psychic is not always parallel to the physical and may be quite independent of it. And parallels which are not always parallel are evidently subject to laws that are incomprehensible to us, to laws of the world of four dimensions.
1 The expression " psychic " phenomena is used here in its only possible sense of psychological or mental phenomena, that is, those which constitute the subject of psychology. I mention this because in spiritualistic and theosophical literature the word psychic is used for the designation of supernormal or superphysical phenomena. At the present day it is often said: we know nothing about the exact nature of the relations between physical and psychic phenomena; the only thing we can affirm and which is more or less established is that, for every psychic process, thought or sensation there is a corresponding physiological process, which manifests itself in at least a feeble vibration in nerves and brain fibre and in chemical changes in different tissues. Sensation is defined as the consciousness of a change in the organs of sense. This change is a certain motion which is transmitted into brain centres, but in what way the motion is transformed into a feeling or a thought is not known.
The question arises: is it not possible to suppose that the physical is separated from the psychic by four-dimensional space, i.e. that a physiological process, passing into the domain of the fourth dimension, produces there effects which we call feeling or thought?
On our plane, i.e. in the world of motion and vibrations accessible to our observations, we are unable to understand or to determine thought, exactly in the same way as the two-dimensional being on his plane is unable to understand or to determine the action of a lever or the motion of a pair of wheels on an axle.
At one time the ideas of E. Mach, expounded chiefly in his book Analysis of Sensations and Vitiations of the Physical to the Psychic; were in great vogue. Mach absolutely denies any difference between the physical and the psychic. In his opinion all the dualism of the usual view of the world resulted from the metaphysical conception of the " thing in itself " and from the conception (an erroneous one according to Mach) of the illusory character of our cognition of things. In Mach's opinion we can perceive nothing wrongly. Things are always exactly what they appear to be. The concept of illusion must disappear entirely. Elements of sensations are physical elements. What are called " bodies " are only complexes of elements of sensations: light sensations, sound sensations, sensations of pressure, etc. Mental images are similar complexes of sensations. There exists no difference between the physical and the psychic; both the one and the other are built up of the same elements (of sensations). The molecular structure of bodies and the atomic theory are accepted by Mach only as symbols, and he denies them all reality. In this way, according to Mach's theory, our psychic apparatus builds the physical world. A " thing " is only a complex of sensations.
But in speaking of the theories of Mach it is necessary to remember that the psychic apparatus builds only the " forms " of the world (i.e. makes the world such as we perceive it) out of something else which we shall never attain. The blue of the sky is unreal, the green of the meadows is also unreal; these " colours " belong to the reflected rays. But evidently there is something in the " sky ", i.e. in the air of our atmosphere, which makes it appear blue, just as there is something in the grass of the meadow which makes it appear green.
Without this last addition a man might easily have said, on the basis of Mach's ideas: this apple is a complex of my sensations, therefore it only seems to exist, but does not exist in reality.
This would be wrong. The apple exists. And a man can, in a most real way, become convinced of it. But it is not what it appears to be in the three-dimensional world. The psychic, as opposed to the physical or the three-dimensional, is very similar to what should exist in the fourth dimension, and we have every right to say that thought moves along the fourth dimension.
No obstacles or distances exist for it. It penetrates impenetrable objects, visualises the structure of atoms, calculates the chemical composition of stars, studies life on the bottom of the ocean, the customs and institutions of a race that disappeared tens of thousands of years ago. . . .
No walls, no physical conditions, restrain our fantasy, our imagination.
quantumphysicslady | Quantum physics also poses major challenges to realism. In 2017, Chinese physicists experimented
with two photons, that is, bits of light. The specially-created photons
were separated by 700 miles. The experiment showed that the photons
were able to instantaneously coordinate their behavior. This phenomenon
is called “quantum entanglement.”
According to Special Relativity, no
signal can travel across a distance instantaneously. How can one photon
instantaneously “know” what another photon over 700 miles away is doing?
What kind of reality are we living in?
When people learn about quantum
physics, they find out about specific oddities like quantum
entanglement. But the most fundamental oddity is its most fundamental
premise: Both matter and energy are mere vibrations in an invisible,
undetectable medium called “fields.” How does our very impressive, very
solid physical universe arise from vibrations in a kind of nothingness?
How does our reality arise from vibrations?[Image
source: David Chalmers and Kelvin McQueen, “Consciousness and the
Collapse of the Wave Function” (modified to omit a label) http://consc.net/slides/collapse.pdf]
But it gets worse. The vibrations
represent a cornucopia of possible physical realities, only one of which
becomes the solid reality that we perceive. (If this sentence is
baffling to you, you are not alone. It condenses the heart of quantum
physics, which is puzzling enough, into one sentence—which is a terrible
idea. See the footnote below.**)
Do the oddities of quantum physics mean we must abandon realism? No. Many physicists have come up with interpretations of quantum physics
that are based in realism. It’s also true that some of these
interpretations describe very odd realities. For example, the Many
Worlds Interpretation, perhaps the oddest, describes us as having
infinite copies of ourselves in infinite numbers of universes. The
desire to salvage realism may be an important reason that the Many
Worlds Interpretation is gaining popularity among physicists. But there
are other realistic interpretations of Special Relativity and quantum
physics that are less mind-blowing.
Quantum physics undermines the solidity of the physical universe. When
people learn that quantum physics is based on the proposition that
matter and energy are, at bottom, vibrations of questionable reality
which shake invisible, undetectable fields, the solidity of our universe
loses some of its impressiveness. Thoughts pop up like: Could our
physical universe have no more solidity than a dream?
To the dreamer, the houses, the
cars, and the monsters all seem completely real. So, too do to the
hallucinations of the psychotic and those of someone on LSD. Our minds
are quite capable of creating solid reality without any necessity of an
independent external world.
Quantum physics may also create
wonderings about the mysterious invisible medium for the vibrations of
matter and energy: Could the vibrations of matter and energy be
vibrations in a new kind of energy that makes up consciousness?
In other words, some begin to entertain the notion of idealism.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
