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Lama Ole in deep meditation during a study on the relationship between mind and body at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia.
Four computers tracked Lama Ole's physiology as he meditated, measuring numerous factors simultaneously: overall body temperature through real-time infrared video, ECG (cardiac function), blood pressure, EEG (brainwaves), galvanic skin response, and metabolism through oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production.
The World War
1939-1946
William Robert Curson
***********************************
CURSON, WILLIAM ROBERT
Rank:………………………….....Serjeant
Service No:…………………...5767235
Date of Death:……………….27/05/1940
Age:…………………………........33
Regiment:……………………...Royal Norfolk Regiment, 2nd Bn.
Grave Reference:…………..2. G. 5.
Cemetery:
LE PARADIS WAR CEMETERY, LESTREM
Additional Information:
Son of Robert and Beatrice Curson; husband of Barbara Phyllis Curson, of Stibbard, Norfolk.
CWGC: www.cwgc.org/find-war-dead/casualty/2279587/CURSON,%20WIL...
The Army Roll of Honour 1939-1945 records that Serjeant 5767235 William R Curson, Royal Norfolk Regiment who died on the 27th May 1940 in the French and Belgium Campaign 1939/40 was born Norfolk and resident Norwich.
No obvious Soldiers Will or Civil Probate for this man.
Birth and other family records
The birth of a William Robert Curson was recorded in the Walsingham District of Norfolk in the October to December quarter, (Q4), of 1906.
William, as the 4 year old Willie Curson, born Great Ryburgh, Norfolk, was recorded on the 1911 Census at a dwelling at Great Ryburgh. This was the household of his parents, Robert, (aged 29 and a Carpenter in a Malting from Great Ryburgh) and Beatrice, (aged 27 and from Great Ryburgh). The couple have been married 6 years and have had 4 children, 3 of whom were then still alive. As well as Willie, their other children living with them are:-
Victor……….aged 3………born Great Ryburgh
Mary-Ena….aged 2 months.born Great Ryburgh.
The most likely marriage of his parents is that of a Robert Curson to a Beatrice Barnes which took place in the Walsingham District of Norfolk in the July to September, (Q3), of 1904.
The marriage took place at St Andrew, Great Ryburgh on the 27th August 1904.
freereg2.freereg.org.uk/search_records/5510e3cfe93790332e...
Post August 1911 it became compulsory when registering a birth in England and Wales to also record the mothers maiden name. A check of the General Registrars Office Index for births for England and Wales shows 7 instances between 1911 and 2006 of the combination of surname of Curson, mothers maiden name Barnes, and all bar one were in the Walsingham District and of an age where they could have been children of Robert and Beatrice.
Arthur E………….October to December 1915
Jack T…………….October to December 1916
Malcolm S………..October to December 1918
Robert S………….January to March 1920
Joan M……………January to March 1930
Percival S…………July to September 1936
Marriage and (probable) children
The marriage of a William R Curson to a Barbara P Nobes was recorded in the Walsingham District in the July to September quarter, (Q3), of 1932.
Checking the General Registrars Office Index of Births for the combination of children registered with the surname Curson, mothers maiden name Nobes produces just two matches, both in the Norwich District. They are:-
Phyllis M…………January to March 1937
Philip C……………April to June 1939
On the day
From “Dunkirk:Fight to the Last Man” by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore
When the Royal Norfolks arrived at Locon, the officers believed that they were going to have a rest during what was expected to be a period in reserve. However, while Major Lisle Ryder, their thirty-seven year old acting commanding officer, was reconnoitring, his car and the following vehicle were fired at on both sides of the canal. It was no surprise, therefore, when, in the course of the meeting convened at their temporary Locon headquarters during the night of 24-5 May, Ryder told the company commanders that they must abandon any thought of having a good sleep: instead they must prepare for action.
4 Brigade was to be the central unit within 2 Division’s sector on the canal line, with 6 Brigade on its right, and 5 Brigade on its left. The Royal Norfolks ended up in the centre of 4 Brigade’s position. The battalion’s companies were to move up to the canal line immediately, in the dark, flushing out any Germans they found in their path, and were to establish foxhole positions on the northern and eastern canal banks between Avelette and the Bois de Paqueaut. It would have been a difficult assignment for a full-strength well rested battalion, but it was immeasurably harder for an understrength unit whose men were suffering from varying degrees of sleep deprivation. At this point, the battalion consisted of just 450 officers and other ranks.
….
Ryder’s original plan required the battalion’s headquarters to be moved at the same time as the companies to a village enticingly named Le Paradis (Paradise). However, while moving in the dark, without lights, signposts or large-scale maps, Hastings, who had been given the task of selecting the site for the new HQ, lost his way, and ended up with the headquarters personnel near Le Cornet Malo. It was only during the next night, 25-6 May, that the fateful decision was made to move the headquarters again to Le Paradis. Little did the officers who made the decision realize that life there was going to be anything but paradise.
Although several attacks were put in on the Royal Norfolks’ section of the canal line on 25 May, and small bridgeheads were established on the north-east bank, officers at the battalion headquarters believed that the companies, after suffering their first casualties, were still holding their own. That was thought to be the case notwithstanding the fact that during the previous night two of the front-line companies, which had also got lost in the dark, ended up mistakenly digging in alongside a tributary of the canal rather than on the canal line itself. Like the battalion’s headquarters personnel, the “lost” companies reached their correct positions on the night of 25-6 May, and it was only the next morning that Ryder ordered that steps should be taken to form a true picture of his front line. One of these involved sending Hastings forwards to the crossroads at Le Cornet Malo to find out what had happened to A Company, on the Royal Norfolks’ right.
“At the cross roads I was surprised to see [2nd Lieutenant] Slater, who was now commanding A Company [after Captain Yallop’s death on 25 May], and a group of six or seven men standing helplessly around him,” wrote Hastings. “Slater told me his position up by the canal had been overrun by tanks, and the company had been ‘minced up’. All that remained, he said, were the few men standing about outside, and some others who were wounded, that he had got inside a building on the…corner of the cross roads. I went…and looked at the wounded. As I came out, another car was arriving, and Col. Money, commanding the Royal Scots, got out. He was anxious to hear Slater’s story, which Slater retold, again using the expression ‘minced up’.
‘Minced up!’ shouted Col.Money. ‘How dare you say you have been minced up!’ and he went on to describe the casualties his battalion had suffered, before concluding: ‘Do I say I’ve been minced up? I’m far from being minced up’…..Col. Money continued stormily in this strain for some time, and if anything could have stirred new life into these tired men, I think his ‘conversation’ might have done so. But at the end of it all, Slater and his men seemed more helpless than ever, and I formed the opinion that they couldn’t make any further effort….Having formed this opinion…I acted on my own initiative, and told Slater to bring his seven men in to Battalion Headquarters.
Before I left, [Lieutenant] Edgeworth, commanding B Company [the company now holding the front on A Company’s left], came running up….His Company too was much reduced in numbers…He had only 19 men. He had a position along the line of a hedge 200 or 300 yards in front of the cross roads. There were no tanks about at the moment, but he thought there were Germans in a village just beyond his position.”
Hastings drove back to Le Paradis to tell Ryder what he had done, only to discover that
“he did not agree to Slater’s recall, and was angry that I had done it. ‘Go back,’ he said. ‘Put the two companies together, and command them yourself.’ The cross roads, he told me, were to be held at all costs – to the last man, and the last round. He concluded his orders by saying: ‘Keep them back with your own pistol if necessary.’ I saluted and left, feeling rather dispirited and incompetent….On the way I tried to form a plan, but I couldn’t gather my thoughts, and realized with a shock that I wasn’t going to be very much use.”
Hasting’s account goes on to describe the state to which he, and no doubt some of the other officers, including Slater, had been driven thanks to their lack of sleep.
……..
Because so few men from the front-line companies survived, it has been impossible to describe all the nail-biting incidents that doubtless took place as these men stood their ground against the much stronger enemy troops and armour. However, the account written by Captain Hallett, whom Hastings had left in charge of the men he had been directing, at least gives some idea of what they must all have to endure.
Unlike Hastings, Hallett appears to have been relatively fresh, which enabled him to take a much more proactive approach to his command. Shortly after Hastings had departed during the morning of 269 May, Hallett led a patrol forward to the southern side of Le Cornet Malo and fired at Germans he saw approaching from the direction of the canal. “It was a pity we had no mortars, or we could have bombed them beautifully”, he reported enthusiastically.
Nevertheless Hallet’s group’s rifle and Bren-gun fire must have stopped the Germans in their tracks. As his account records, when he ordered his men to advance again, they did so without opposition, and captured a wounded German soldier, who was in a ditch, plus some others who also surrendered without a fight. “After all the frightful things the troops had threatened, it was amusing to see how well they treated the [wounded] prisoner,” Hallett noted. “They gave him cigarettes and chocolate, and ….[when] I started to question him……..he was quite ready to talk. He said that there was about a division against us across the canal, as I’d expected, instead of the odd hundred or so that I’d been told.”
The Germans attacked again as it became dark, driving back Hallett’s forward posts. Then, according to Hallett, “they started digging hard just beyond the village where we could hear them all night, [and] just before midnight I heard unmistakable sounds of tanks”. This prompted Hallett to take the initiative once again, and after sending out a small patrol, whose report enabled him to work out exactly where the Germans were digging, he gave orders for the mortars that had become available to be fired at them. “From the shouts and shrieks, there must have been some direct hits,” Hallett observed.
But, as Hallett’s account confirms, that was the last time he was able to impose his will on the battle:
“As it began to get light, [at] about 5 a.m. [on 27 May], the tanks arrived, huge fellows, and about a dozen. I phoned Battalion HQ….Then they cut the line. This was the last message I go to the Battalion. The forward section came in, leaving their guns, and worse, their AT [anti-tank] rifles. And for a bit there was…..chaos…..Eventually we had a brainwave, and ran out below the tanks’ angle of fire, and put Mills grenades in the tracks. It did not do the tanks much harm, but [it] frightened the drivers, and they ditched them. We got the LMG [light machine-gun] back in position, and the AT rifles mounted.
Luckily the German infantry were a long way behind their tanks, so when they came, we were ready for them. And come they did, in masses. I never believed I’d see troops advancing shoulder to shoulder across the open, but these men did, and suffered accordingly. The Brens fired till they were red-hot, and also the riflemen. But we [also] suffered heavily, and in the end, I was left in a big farm with an attic, with an AT Rifle, and a rifle for myself, and one rifleman to help.”
After some further exchanges of fire, even Hallett’s last remaining helper was killed, and he himself was captured while trying to escape.
Back at Duriez Farm, the state of the front-line battalions was monitored from messages received in the ‘signal office’ in the cellar under the farmhouse kitchen. A similar pattern of signals emanated from each company. First, messages came through to say they were holding. Then a more desperate voice, which could barely be heard above the firing in the background, informed the commanding officer that they were involved in hand-to-hand fighting. Sometimes the signalman at the other end of the wire had a personal chat with his mate in the battalion signal office. When B Company was about to be overrun, their signalman Alf Blake confided to Bob Brown, the nineteen-year-old telegraphist: “I’m afraid we’re for it. Don’t forget me. We’ve had some good times together. I don’t know whether I’ll ever be seeing you again.”
It was the last message from B Company, and the last time Bob Brown ever heard Alf Blake speak. He must have been killed shortly afterwards, among the many who did not survive long enough to surrender. There was no time for Brown to be sentimental: as soon as the line went dead, he shouted up the stairs to the officers in the kitchen, “The line to B Company’s been cut.”
As the German attacks strengthened, everyone who could be spared was ordered to take their place around the farm’s perimeter, and that included Bob Brown. Once all contact with the front-line companies had been lost, he could do more as a signalman. He was glad to come out of the suffocatingly hot cellar.
……
Before the lines to the companies were cut, it was discovered that the Germans were attacking in two main lines: between the Royal Norfolks’ left and 5 Brigade, and in the area held by Hallett and his men. After overrunning the front-line companies, the German troops were free to concentrate on Battalion Headquarters, which they did with a vengeance approaching Duriez Farm from the north, the east and the west in spite of the fire put down by the men in the courtyard. “We engaged the enemy furiously,” Long reported.
“[Then] suddenly the enemy on the right stopped advancing, and…ran back towards the wood. We had one moment of exultation. We felt the counter-attack had been successful somewhere, and the German line was falling back. But our exultation in one moment turned to consternation.
A sudden flurry of noise and rattle of shots was heard in front of the Battalion HQ [i.e. to the south]. A section of German motorcyclists had rushed up the road to Bn HQ. They were dealt with effectively, and fell back on the RAP [Regimental Aid Post] buildings [a short distance to the east, across the road from the farmhouse], leaving 2 dead in the road. From the RAP they filled the air with shots, and it seemed impossible to get at them….It was a very awkward moment which was saved by RSM [Regimental Sergeant-Major] Cockaday. He seized a Bren, and rushed forward into the open. Taking up a position, he opened fire with a gun. In the course of this, he was wounded”
Thanks to Cockaday, who was backed up by Ryder and Long, the Germans were eventually driven away from the south side of the farm, and an escape route, in theory at least, was kept open. Long attempted to secure it by ordering some of the men to hold a couple of neighbouring houses as outposts. However, the difficulties Long experienced in going to and from these houses must have convinced him that salvation might well be impossible. According to Long, the “piece of open country [between the battalion and the houses]….was whipped with fire. The route [I took] was the only one possible, and I’m damned if I liked it. This was the only time I felt frightened. However we got there, and lost no men.”
Holding these outposts became even more problematic when the brigade’s artillery. Probably reacting to a telephone call from Long telling the brigadier where the Germans were attacking, began to shell them. It was a frightening moment. After holding off the enemy so courageously, it seemed as if they were about to be annihilated by British guns. The barrage was only stopped when Long dashed back through another hail of bullets to telephone through an urgent request to the brigade to put an end to their unwelcome ‘support’.
No sooner had the guns been silenced then another problem emerged. “The men seemed to lose heart without anyone to command them,” Long wrote later. “So once more, I dodged back again, and got the men in position and cheered up.” However, the situation in the outposts was only stabilized after he had placed an NCO in each of the two houses he had ordered his men to hld. Long was then free to return to the farm.
Hastings has described what he witnessed there:-
“At one moment I am watching the movements of the enemy through glasses through a hole in the roof. Another moment I am firing a rifle. Now I am firing a Bren gun which stops…A party of Germans try to get past at short range. Everyone that can get a rifle gets some shooting. Richardson has a German Tommy gun taken from the dead motorcyclist in the road…Now the outlook is good. Now again it is bad…Now I am putting the Battalion papers and war diary in a sack and weighting it with stones, and tying it up ready to sink it in the farm pond. Now I am looking down from an upper window on the dead German motorcyclist who still lies in the road with his arm outstretched. A stream of blood has run from his head to the gutter. As I look, I see a soldier steal out at the peril of his life, and remove the wrist watch from the dead man’s hand. He slips back as quickly and quietly as he slipped out…
Charles Long is a great success with the men. He is telling awful lies, but he talks as if he himself believes what he says….The men love him…He set a fine example by his disregard of personal danger, and certainly did more than any other officer to keep morale at a high level. He has a breezy manner, was always cheerful, and full of unbounded optimism…All this he managed to convey to the troops….
Something that looks like a tank approaches. Where is the anti-tank rifle? It is lying out in the road. I go to get it. A private soldier comes after me. “Let me get it Sir” he says. I don’t let him, but I am touched at his offering. It has a hole in the side of the barrel, but it can still be fired. The tank stops behind a hillock. Its top can just be seen….It’s an armoured troop carrier….
The CO is ringing up Brigade. He says: “I shall not ring you up again. We are doing very well.”….I think he [Ryder] is about to crack. He says to me: “When I think of the magnificent battalion I took over only a few days ago”….He is unable to go on. I wonder why he does not abandon our position. I think we could still get some men away safely. We both know now there is no hope of holding on much longer. However, he says [that] others are depending on us. I think he knows more than I do. I glance at the Battalion papers in the sack. He nods his head, and I pitch the sack into the farm pond. It doesn’t sink. I throw a bicycle on top of it. Now it sinks.
Now I am going round counting up rounds of ammunition. I see Richardson. He is quiet and very grim. He is watching the development of the enemy’s attack from the side of the troop carrier. I am getting ammunition collected from the rifles and pouches of the wounded. Bren gun magazines must be broken up and the rounds distributed. We are very short of ammunition, but everyone has a few rounds.”
(End of preview extract)
From “Dunkirk:Fight to the Last Man” by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore
books.google.co.uk/books?id=V7r-F7FxtrYC&pg=PR183&...
On May 27th, their ammunition expended, and completely cut off from their Battalion and Brigade Headquarters, 97 officers and men of the 2/Royal Norfolks surrendered to No. 4 Company of the 1st Battalion of the 2nd S.S. Totenkopf (Deathshead) Regiment. They were disarmed, marched into a field, mowed down by machine-guns, finished off by revolver shots and bayonet thrusts and left for dead. By a miracle two of them escaped death, and were hidden and succoured for a short time by the people of Le Paradis. Later they became prisoners of war, and ultimately returned home to set in motion the wheels of justice which, on January 28th 1949, brought to the gallows the German officer who gave the command for this massacre.
A day or two after the atrocity the local people, under orders from the Germans, buried the dead where they lay. In 1942, however, the bodies were exhumed and moved into the part of Le Paradis churchyard which is now the war cemetery. Other casualties were brought from scattered graves in the area.
www.cwgc.org/find-a-cemetery/cemetery/2027400/LE%20PARADI...
On the night of 26-27 May 1940, the German force which included the 1st Battalion, 2nd SS 'Totenkopf' Regiment, moved up the south bank of the La Bassee Canal. It attacked across the canal in a northerly direction with Bailleul as its objective. In the area immediately north of the canal they were held by the Norfolk Battalion in much depleted strength because of the previous fighting and the physical exhaustion of the men. The Battalion and the Royal Scots were holding the villages of Riez du Vinage, Le Cornet Malo and Le Paradis. The Battalion Headquarters was in Le Paradis.
During the night, the 2nd SS Infantry Regiment crossed the canal using the ruins of the bridge Pont Supplie. They met heavy British resistance and advanced very slowly and at high cost. They eventually occupied Riez du Vinage and spent the night in the Bois de Paqueaut.
At dawn on 27 May 1940, the German forces emerged from the wood and began attacking Le Cornet Malo. No. 3 Company was in the centre, with No. 2 on the right and No. 1 on the left in semi-reserve. The British troops defended very stubbornly. According to a German account four officers and one hundred and fifty men were killed and eighteen officers and four hundred and eighty men wounded of this and another action. Fritz Knoechlein's company suffered the greatest casualties. With the village of Le Cornet Malo burning and its fields dotted with dead, the Germans attacked Le Paradis.
The British Battalion's last contact with Brigade took place at 11.30am. They were then told that they were isolated and must fend for themselves. They had fallen back upon the Battalion Headquarters situated in a farm on the Rue du Paradis. This road formed the boundary between the Norfolks and the Royal Scots who had been fighting on the right of the Norfolks. The location of the Battalion Headquarters on the the boundary between these two forces, accounts for the curious events that followed the surrender, for although the Norfolks were attacked by one SS Battalion, most of their survivors were captured by the SS Company which up to that moment had been fighting the Royal Scots. This other SS Battalion took a number of prisoners, among them Captain C. Long, MC, who was the Battalion Adjutant. The treatment they received was good, and gave little cause for complaint. Had all the Battalion fallen into their hands the events of the Le Paradis massacre would not have happened.
When the Battalion surrendered about one hundred men were collected and paraded on a minor road off the Rue du Paradis. There they were given many evidences of the mounting temper of German troops. Their equipment was taken and they were marched into a paddock of a farm and shot.
The German Battalion Commander had gone forward after the surrender, which took place in the early hours of the afternoon. While the men were waiting on the road two machine-guns of No. 4 Machine-gun Company were brought forward and set up in the paddock. Fritz Knoechlein was No. 3 Company Commander of the Battalion and also the Deputy Battalion Commander. He was directly responsible for the crime and it was on his orders to fire that the killing of the prisoners occurred. After the shooting of the British soldiers Knoechlein had gone around the locality looking for British prisoners or wounded. He found some French civilians and threatened them. These civilians saw a wounded soldier shot with a rifle after the mass shooting.
Ah, what a night! With medieval carnival weekend in full swing down at Balingup accomodation was pretty thin on the ground, especially when things were booked last minute. Nicky had booked herself and a friend into a hotel in Greenbushes over a month previously but with some interest from me and another friend she was able to also book us a room at the same place, but in a different complex. They were going to be in the apartments, and we were staying in the hotel proper.
We went to the carnival first off before even heading to our hotel, so it was already late in the afternoon before we set eyes on the place. During the festivities I'd run into an old friend who'd asked where we were staying and when i mentioned the Exchange Hotel in Greenbushes she pursed her lips and said that the place was like the centre of a ghost town and she could always imagine the tune from 'Deliverance' playing when she went past. I also ran into my aunt who aaah'ed at its mention, saying that the apartments out the back of the hotel complex used to be a brothel.
Interesting.
So we crawl into the sleepy town, an old mining town well past its heyday and go to the hotel. The look is exactly as we've come to expect from the stories, and the bar has a few weathered old codgers muttering amongst themselves over a beer and at the intrusion of us city gals into their midst.
Before I get to the hotel story itself I'll tell all about Nicky and Kirsten's wonderful apartment visit. Pretty rundown, dumpsville you would say, but as a backpacker i've come across worse (though not by much!). Dodgy looking locks on the doors and bent flywire on the windows. Creaky beds with mattresses that tilt on precarious angles when you sit on one edge, and metal grills that decide to fall off the wall heaters halfway through the night. Cold showers in the morning, and a mini fridge that makes so much noise it keeps them up for most of the night.
Now for the hotel where Megan and I were staying. Access to the rooms is via a rickety old outside staircase with a door that leaks out into the night, full of holes and gaps at the edges of the frames, wouldn't be surprised if it fell off the hinges someday soon. The room itself doesn't seem as bad as expected, all things considered, until we start unpacking and realise that the beds haven't been made. Megan is somewhat reluctant to see if we can change rooms until I point out that we have no idea how long some sweaty old miner has been spending his lonely nights there. So the apologetic lady at the bar gives us the keys to another room. Things are looking up in the world - the beds are made and it's nicer, though just as basic, room. We're unpacking again and I head off to use the bathroom (one shared one for the corridor) before leaving for the evening. Whoops! Turns out we didn't need keys to this room, the doors been kicked in at some point and the lock is practically falling off, and there's no way that it's ever going to close properly again, let alone lock. Next room please!
Megan goes downstairs while i wait in the very empty and quiet hallways with our luggage, wondering what new surprise we'll find in our new room. Luckily, no surprises waiting this time, but Megan mentions that the lady practically shrugged off our concern and mentioned that it wasn't really anything to worry about, there was only us two girls and Old Billy up there, and "he ain't up to much these days".
!!!
So unpacked, beds scrutinised for bedbugs, we head off for dinner and some ceremonial dragon burning at the fair (bad timing, we missed all the excitement in the end).
I should mention the wonderful country/arty decor that I spied in the dining room - a large rusty double-handed saw, and a chalk drawing of a woman with her hands covering her face. Altogether comforting items to display in a near deserted hotel.
So bedtime arrives and after a brush in with a nasty looking spider on the rickety stairs we bypass that entrance and make our way in through the bar. The place is jumping with Saturday night fever. Not. Deserted except for the lady and what appears to be her two children.
Upstairs is arranged in a U-shape. Corridor 1 is lit, as is Corridor 2. But yes, you guessed it, Corridor 3 - our corridor - is plunged in the dark and we can't find any switches that get it to turn on. Knowing that we're going to have to venture out in that during the night to visit the bathroom is not a comforting thought, and the bathroom light is on a timer so we can't keep that switched on. We have the brainwave to kick open the busted door to our previous almost-abode which happens to be across the way so we can have our night-light to make us feel safe!
So we spent an uncomfortable and more or less sleepless night in a deserted hotel, full of the creaks and groans that you expect of old buildings. Noises that always seem to be in the room but not coming from the other person, or which seem to be coming from the hallway just outside the room. Noises that you expect to hear but which nevertheless make you feel nervous and a little jumpy. Particularly when you venture into the dimly lit corridor and creep down to the bathroom only to jump a mile high when Megan's mobile (which in the dead silence seems to be set to an extra loud volume) suddenly blares out the haunting theme to "The Good, The Bad & The Ugly". Did I mention that this place was like a ghost town?
In the morning, after what I swear was only 2 or 3 hours sleep on my part, I mention to Megan that I have a suspicion that "old Billy" isn't really a person, but actually a ghost, but I hadn't wanted to say anything before in case it made her jumpy. She mentions that she'd been thinking the exact same thing and hadn't wanted to say anything to me!
Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything (42). In the first novel and radio series, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer, Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42. The Ultimate Question itself is unknown. When asked to produce The Ultimate Question, Deep Thought says that it cannot; however, it can help to design an even more powerful computer, the Earth, that can. The programmers then embark on a further ten-million-year program to discover The Ultimate Question. This new computer will incorporate living beings in the "computational matrix", with the pan-dimensional creators assuming the form of mice. The process is hindered after eight million years by the unexpected arrival on Earth of the Golgafrinchans and then is ruined completely, five minutes before completion, when the Earth is destroyed by the Vogons to make way for a new Hyperspace Bypass. This is later revealed to have been a ruse: the Vogons had been hired to destroy the Earth by a consortium of psychiatrists, led by Gag Halfrunt, who feared for the loss of their careers when the meaning of life became known. Lacking a real question, the mice decide not to go through the whole thing again and settle for the out-of-thin-air suggestion "How many roads must a man walk down?" from Bob Dylan's song "Blowin' in the Wind". At the end of the radio series (and television series, as well as the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) Arthur Dent, having escaped the Earth's destruction, potentially has some of the computational matrix in his brain. He attempts to discover The Ultimate Question by extracting it from his brainwave patterns, as abusively suggested by Ford Prefect, when a Scrabble-playing caveman spells out forty two. Arthur pulls random letters from a bag, but only gets the sentence "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?" "Six by nine. Forty two." "That's it. That's all there is." "I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe" Six times nine is, of course, fifty-four. The program on the "Earth computer" should have run correctly, but the unexpected arrival of the Golgafrinchans on prehistoric Earth caused input errors into the system—computing (because of the garbage in, garbage out rule) the wrong question—the question in Arthur's subconscious being invalid all along. Quoting Fit the Seventh of the radio series, on Christmas Eve, 1978: Narrator: There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. Some readers subsequently noticed that 613 × 913 = 4213 (using base 13). Douglas Adams later joked about this observation, saying, "I may be a sorry case, but I don't write jokes in base 13." In Life, the Universe and Everything, Prak, a man who knows all that is true, confirms that 42 is indeed The Answer, and confirms that it is impossible for both The Answer and The Question to be known about in the same universe (compare the uncertainty principle) as they will cancel each other out and take the Universe with them to be replaced by something even more bizarre (as described in the first theory) and that it may have already happened (as described in the second). Though the question is never found, 42 is shown as the table number at which Arthur and his friends sit when they arrive at Milliways at the end of the radio series. Likewise, Mostly Harmless ends when Arthur stops at a street address identified by his cry of, "There, number 42!" and enters the club Beta, owned by Stavro Mueller (Stavromula Beta). Shortly after, the earth is destroyed in all existing incarnations. The number 42 Douglas Adams was asked many times why he chose the number 42. Many theories were proposed, including the fact that 42 is 101010 in binary code, the fact that light refracts off water by 42 degrees to create a rainbow, the fact that light requires 10−42 seconds to cross the diameter of a proton. Adams rejected them all. On November 3, 1993, he gave an answer on alt.fan.douglas-adams: The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do'. I typed it out. End of story. Adams described his choice as 'a completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven. In fact it's the sort of number that you could without any fear introduce to your parents'. While 42 was a number with no hidden meaning, Adams explained in more detail in an interview with Iain Johnstone of BBC Radio 4 (recorded in 1998 though never broadcast) to celebrate the first radio broadcast's 20th anniversary. Having decided it should be a number, he tried to think what an "ordinary number" should be. He ruled out non-integers, then he remembered having worked as a "prop-borrower" for John Cleese on his Video Arts training videos. Cleese needed a funny number for the punchline to a sketch involving a bank teller (himself) and a customer (Tim Brooke-Taylor). Adams believed that the number that Cleese came up with was 42 and he decided to use it. Adams also had written a sketch for The Burkiss Way called "42 Logical Positivism Avenue", broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 12 January 1977[10] – 14 months before the Hitchhiker's Guide first broadcast "42" in fit the fourth, 29 March 1978. In January 2000, in response to a panelist's "Where does the number 42 come from?" on the radio show "Book Club" Adams explained that he was "on his way to work one morning, whilst still writing the scene, and was thinking about what the actual answer should be. He eventually decided that it should be something that made no sense whatsoever- a number, and a mundane one at that. And that is how he arrived at the number 42, completely at random." Stephen Fry, a friend of Adams, claims that Adams told him "exactly why 42", and that the reason is "fascinating, extraordinary and, when you think hard about it, completely obvious." However, Fry says that he has vowed not to tell anyone the secret, and that it must go with him to the grave. John Lloyd, Adams' collaborator on The Meaning of Liff and two Hitchhiker's fits, said that Douglas has called 42 "the funniest of the two-digit numbers." The number 42 also appears frequently in the work of Lewis Carroll, and some critics have suggested that this was an influence. Other purported Carroll influences include that Adams named the episodes of the original radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "fits", the word Carroll used to name the chapters of The Hunting of the Snark. There is the persistent tale that forty-two is actually Adams' tribute to the indefatigable paperback book, and is really the average number of lines on an average page of an average paperback book. On the Internet The number 42 and the phrase, "Life, the universe, and everything" have attained cult status on the Internet. "Life, the Universe, and Everything" is a common name for the off-topic section of an Internet forum and the phrase is invoked in similar ways to mean "anything at all". Many chatbots, when asked about the meaning of life, will answer "42". Several online calculators are also programmed with the Question. If you type the answer to life the universe and everything into Google (without quotes or capitalising the small words), the Google Calculator will give you 42, as will Wolfram's Computational Knowledge Engine. Similarly, if you type the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything into DuckDuckGo, the 0-click box will read "42".[19] In the online community Second Life, there is a section on a sim called "42nd Life." It is devoted to this concept in the book series, and several attempts at recreating Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, were made. In the OpenOffice.org software, if you type into any cell of a spreadsheet =ANTWORT("Das Leben, das Universum und der ganze Rest"), which means the answer to life, the universe and everything, the result is 42.[20] ISO/IEC 14519-2001/ IEEE Std 1003.5-1999, IEEE Standard for Information Technology - POSIX(R) Ada Language Interfaces - Part 1: Binding for System Application Program Interface (API) , uses the number '42' as the required return value from a process that terminates due to an unhandled exception. The Rationale says "the choice of the value 42 is arbitrary" and cites the Adams book as the source of the value. The random seed chosen to procedurally create the whole universe including all the regions, constellations, stars, planets, moons and mineral distribution of the online massively multi-player computer game EVE Online was chosen as 42 by its lead game designer in 2002. Cultural references The Allen Telescope Array, a radio telescope used by SETI, has 42 dishes in homage to the Answer. In the TV show Lost, 42 is the last of the mysterious numbers, 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42. In an interview with Lostpedia, producer David Fury confirmed this was a reference to Hitchhiker's. The TV show The Kumars at No. 42 is so named because show creator Sanjeev Bhaskar is a Hitchhiker's fan.[24] The band Coldplay's album Viva la Vida includes a song called "42". When asked by Q magazine if the song's title was Hitchhiker's-related, Chris Martin said, "It is and it isn't." The band Level 42 chose its name in reference to the book. The episode "42" of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who was named in reference to the Answer. Writer Chris Chibnall acknowledged that "it's a playful title". Ken Jennings, defeated along with Brad Rutter in a Jeopardy match against IBM's Watson, writes that Watson's avatar which appeared on-screen for those games showed 42 "threads of thought," and that the number was chosen in reference to this meme.
Life Ink, developed by the Ars Electronica Futurelab, shows the creative flow and flying sparks when Ars Electronica Center infotrainer Mario Mrcela plays the drums.
Life Ink revolves around the question: Can mind and body generate ink? It captures brainwaves and body signals in real time to create a new form of ink: This Life Ink is used to express our creative moments in a completely new form.
Life Ink was developed by the Ars Electronica Futurelab in collaboration with Wacom. Learn more:
ars.electronica.art/futurelab/en/projects-life-ink/
Photo: Jochen Manz / Wacom Co., Ltd.
Just having fun with my trainee Thijs.
He's a great guy and very willingly to learn.
We call this a mindmelt :)
Shot taken by Steven, he's a IT consultant and works for us parttime.
Have a great wednesday my friends!
Digital Drugs or Binaural beats or Binaural Tones are auditory processing artifacts, or apparent sounds, the perception of which arises in the brain independent of physical stimuli. This effect was discovered in 1839 by Heinrich Wilhelm Dove.
Complete feature found at www.danzen.com/flickr/zenpicture.html the Zen Picture sliding show with cool space sounds!
Project B.I.G. - Image 217/365
This mornings after Baz had gone offs to workies I hads a brainwaver with how to helps Wage (and Rolf) out with gettings loads of voters in the compermatition that they is entereds into!
When we goes away for our daytrippers I always sees people standerings on the corners of busy intermasections wavering signers, the signers coulds be for local superdupermarkets, new housers, or sometimes completely randomer thingies.
I askered Letterman what he thinkered of my ideas and he tellered me it was a gooders one, so we makereds up our signers and then walkered along to a localler busy intermasection to gets those voters flyings in for Wage.
After abouts ten minuters I was wonderings why peoples kept honkering their car horns, and then I lookers at the signer that Letterman had makered, I don't thinkers he quite undermastood what I meants to write on the signers, but we is having great funners anyway so is all goods!
If you wants to voters for Wage, you can followers the linker below to takes you right to the compermatition pager:-
Voters here - www.g-technology.eu/competition/961
From the Uglydoll blog at blog.adventuresinuglyworld.com
Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything (42). In the first novel and radio series, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer, Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42. The Ultimate Question itself is unknown. When asked to produce The Ultimate Question, Deep Thought says that it cannot; however, it can help to design an even more powerful computer, the Earth, that can. The programmers then embark on a further ten-million-year program to discover The Ultimate Question. This new computer will incorporate living beings in the "computational matrix", with the pan-dimensional creators assuming the form of mice. The process is hindered after eight million years by the unexpected arrival on Earth of the Golgafrinchans and then is ruined completely, five minutes before completion, when the Earth is destroyed by the Vogons to make way for a new Hyperspace Bypass. This is later revealed to have been a ruse: the Vogons had been hired to destroy the Earth by a consortium of psychiatrists, led by Gag Halfrunt, who feared for the loss of their careers when the meaning of life became known. Lacking a real question, the mice decide not to go through the whole thing again and settle for the out-of-thin-air suggestion "How many roads must a man walk down?" from Bob Dylan's song "Blowin' in the Wind". At the end of the radio series (and television series, as well as the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) Arthur Dent, having escaped the Earth's destruction, potentially has some of the computational matrix in his brain. He attempts to discover The Ultimate Question by extracting it from his brainwave patterns, as abusively suggested by Ford Prefect, when a Scrabble-playing caveman spells out forty two. Arthur pulls random letters from a bag, but only gets the sentence "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?" "Six by nine. Forty two." "That's it. That's all there is." "I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe" Six times nine is, of course, fifty-four. The program on the "Earth computer" should have run correctly, but the unexpected arrival of the Golgafrinchans on prehistoric Earth caused input errors into the system—computing (because of the garbage in, garbage out rule) the wrong question—the question in Arthur's subconscious being invalid all along. Quoting Fit the Seventh of the radio series, on Christmas Eve, 1978: Narrator: There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. Some readers subsequently noticed that 613 × 913 = 4213 (using base 13). Douglas Adams later joked about this observation, saying, "I may be a sorry case, but I don't write jokes in base 13." In Life, the Universe and Everything, Prak, a man who knows all that is true, confirms that 42 is indeed The Answer, and confirms that it is impossible for both The Answer and The Question to be known about in the same universe (compare the uncertainty principle) as they will cancel each other out and take the Universe with them to be replaced by something even more bizarre (as described in the first theory) and that it may have already happened (as described in the second). Though the question is never found, 42 is shown as the table number at which Arthur and his friends sit when they arrive at Milliways at the end of the radio series. Likewise, Mostly Harmless ends when Arthur stops at a street address identified by his cry of, "There, number 42!" and enters the club Beta, owned by Stavro Mueller (Stavromula Beta). Shortly after, the earth is destroyed in all existing incarnations. The number 42 Douglas Adams was asked many times why he chose the number 42. Many theories were proposed, including the fact that 42 is 101010 in binary code, the fact that light refracts off water by 42 degrees to create a rainbow, the fact that light requires 10−42 seconds to cross the diameter of a proton. Adams rejected them all. On November 3, 1993, he gave an answer on alt.fan.douglas-adams: The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do'. I typed it out. End of story. Adams described his choice as 'a completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven. In fact it's the sort of number that you could without any fear introduce to your parents'. While 42 was a number with no hidden meaning, Adams explained in more detail in an interview with Iain Johnstone of BBC Radio 4 (recorded in 1998 though never broadcast) to celebrate the first radio broadcast's 20th anniversary. Having decided it should be a number, he tried to think what an "ordinary number" should be. He ruled out non-integers, then he remembered having worked as a "prop-borrower" for John Cleese on his Video Arts training videos. Cleese needed a funny number for the punchline to a sketch involving a bank teller (himself) and a customer (Tim Brooke-Taylor). Adams believed that the number that Cleese came up with was 42 and he decided to use it. Adams also had written a sketch for The Burkiss Way called "42 Logical Positivism Avenue", broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 12 January 1977[10] – 14 months before the Hitchhiker's Guide first broadcast "42" in fit the fourth, 29 March 1978. In January 2000, in response to a panelist's "Where does the number 42 come from?" on the radio show "Book Club" Adams explained that he was "on his way to work one morning, whilst still writing the scene, and was thinking about what the actual answer should be. He eventually decided that it should be something that made no sense whatsoever- a number, and a mundane one at that. And that is how he arrived at the number 42, completely at random." Stephen Fry, a friend of Adams, claims that Adams told him "exactly why 42", and that the reason is "fascinating, extraordinary and, when you think hard about it, completely obvious." However, Fry says that he has vowed not to tell anyone the secret, and that it must go with him to the grave. John Lloyd, Adams' collaborator on The Meaning of Liff and two Hitchhiker's fits, said that Douglas has called 42 "the funniest of the two-digit numbers." The number 42 also appears frequently in the work of Lewis Carroll, and some critics have suggested that this was an influence. Other purported Carroll influences include that Adams named the episodes of the original radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "fits", the word Carroll used to name the chapters of The Hunting of the Snark. There is the persistent tale that forty-two is actually Adams' tribute to the indefatigable paperback book, and is really the average number of lines on an average page of an average paperback book. On the Internet The number 42 and the phrase, "Life, the universe, and everything" have attained cult status on the Internet. "Life, the Universe, and Everything" is a common name for the off-topic section of an Internet forum and the phrase is invoked in similar ways to mean "anything at all". Many chatbots, when asked about the meaning of life, will answer "42". Several online calculators are also programmed with the Question. If you type the answer to life the universe and everything into Google (without quotes or capitalising the small words), the Google Calculator will give you 42, as will Wolfram's Computational Knowledge Engine. Similarly, if you type the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything into DuckDuckGo, the 0-click box will read "42".[19] In the online community Second Life, there is a section on a sim called "42nd Life." It is devoted to this concept in the book series, and several attempts at recreating Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, were made. In the OpenOffice.org software, if you type into any cell of a spreadsheet =ANTWORT("Das Leben, das Universum und der ganze Rest"), which means the answer to life, the universe and everything, the result is 42.[20] ISO/IEC 14519-2001/ IEEE Std 1003.5-1999, IEEE Standard for Information Technology - POSIX(R) Ada Language Interfaces - Part 1: Binding for System Application Program Interface (API) , uses the number '42' as the required return value from a process that terminates due to an unhandled exception. The Rationale says "the choice of the value 42 is arbitrary" and cites the Adams book as the source of the value. The random seed chosen to procedurally create the whole universe including all the regions, constellations, stars, planets, moons and mineral distribution of the online massively multi-player computer game EVE Online was chosen as 42 by its lead game designer in 2002. Cultural references The Allen Telescope Array, a radio telescope used by SETI, has 42 dishes in homage to the Answer. In the TV show Lost, 42 is the last of the mysterious numbers, 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42. In an interview with Lostpedia, producer David Fury confirmed this was a reference to Hitchhiker's. The TV show The Kumars at No. 42 is so named because show creator Sanjeev Bhaskar is a Hitchhiker's fan.[24] The band Coldplay's album Viva la Vida includes a song called "42". When asked by Q magazine if the song's title was Hitchhiker's-related, Chris Martin said, "It is and it isn't." The band Level 42 chose its name in reference to the book. The episode "42" of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who was named in reference to the Answer. Writer Chris Chibnall acknowledged that "it's a playful title". Ken Jennings, defeated along with Brad Rutter in a Jeopardy match against IBM's Watson, writes that Watson's avatar which appeared on-screen for those games showed 42 "threads of thought," and that the number was chosen in reference to this meme. by Jeff Ferguson
Another of Barmy Brian's Brainwaves here! 9-)
Anyone who uses a Raynox DCR-250 or similar macro lens will know how difficult it is to focus by moving camera backwards/forwards to focus? well i have found a solution to megamacro shots in the studio (but could be used outside too)
Basically its an adjustable table that moves backwards/forwards using a fine threaded bar so one full turn moves the tabletop approx .5mm it also has a revolving turntable so you can adjust your subject to suit your lighting/angle of view etc. OK looks a bit overkill but this is the MK1 version the MK2 will be much smaller and easier to make.
I have a Mini Lab Table kindly donated to the keep Rowdy happy fund by Russell (cheers) and this enables me to adjust the height aswell. I have used this recently for some critter shots (place a plant on turntable) and used a Raynox DCR-250 + DCR-150 + a Telelink 2x converter on my S100fs for near Microscopic shots and the focussing was no problem.
Easy to make, does the job and can be made out of MDF and a piece of 6mm diameter threaded Rod available from most hardware stores.
Its pretty hard to describe how this works but in theory you could make one half the size that will fit in your camera bag and use it out in the field.
There you have it, feel free to ask any questions regarding how to make it etc and i will try and help.
Remember if Barmy Brian can do it, any eejit can! 9-)
Night: nature and the city
Created in ArtScope = PC Kaleidoscope
you are the creator of magical images
Brainwave is a fascinating “what if” story. What if all animal life on earth suddenly became 5 times more intelligent? Earth emerges from a force field that had inhibited brain activity so we are now all a lot smarter. This quickening of wits affects every creature – not just humans but hogs, dogs, chimps, even rabbits. Poul Anderson explores what happens by focusing on a handful of characters including newly sentient animals after the incredible change in intelligence has occurred.
During the early 1950s, Ballantine Books was one of the leading publishers of paperback science fiction and fantasy. Beginning with “The Space Merchants” (#21) by Frederik Pohl and C.M Kornbluth, Ballantine published paperback originals by major science fiction authors including Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, John Wyndham and many others. Ian Ballantine who with his wife Betty Ballantine founded Ballantine Books in 1952, announced that he would offer trade publishers original titles in two simultaneous editions, a hardcover “regular” edition for bookstore sale, and a paper-cover, low-priced “news stand” edition for mass market sale. So, these Ballantine paperbacks were true first editions.
Wearing Vogue cashmere jacket (as worn before) and a new-ish Vogue Sandra Betzina ponte skirt. My photographers were still all ill today so I took myself on a photographic adventure at lunchtime, stopping firstly at Hyde Park (where I took photos of tourists by the fountain and then they took photos of me - isn't this an absolute brainwave? I'm going to have to remember this idea of using tourists for selfies in future!) and then ducking into the Hyde Park Barracks for this photo (camera on a bench with the timer set...) when a strange man started following me.
I made this video for my blog to show the pendant being worn and working with the MindWave Mobile headset. The crowd atmos in the background is to give the impression of wearing in a crowded social situation eg networking.
The pendant visualises EEG attention (red) and meditation (green) data and visualises it on this LED matrix in real time. Using a Mindwave Mobile, Bluetooth dongle and Shrimp microcontroller.
I've built this for use in excruciating social situations such at conferences, networking, bars, etc. I'm interested in extending our emotive state by displaying if we're paying attention to whom we're speaking to or if our thoughts / attention is drifting off to the canapes or our to-do list. It's a mischievous device, read more about it here rainycatz.wordpress.com/2013/05/27/eeg-data-visualising-p...
The pendant visualises EEG attention (red) and meditation (green) data and visualises it on this LED matrix in real time. Using a Mindwave Mobile, Bluetooth dongle and Shrimp microcontroller.
I've built this for use in excruciating social situations such at conferences, networking, bars, etc. I'm interested in extending our emotive state by displaying if we're paying attention to whom we're speaking to or if our thoughts / attention is drifting off to the canapes or our to-do list. It's a mischievous device, read more about it here rainycatz.wordpress.com/2013/05/27/eeg-data-visualising-p...
1. The Bat and the Bug
Drury- Bruce, I just want to thank you. You've got no idea how much it means that you came.
Bruce- I'm happy to help, in fact-
*Ring Ring*
Bruce- Phone. *He answers suddenly changing to a Brooklyn accent* Yeah it's Matches, who else would it be? Uh huh. A job? Ah. Where? Ah, gotcha. Haha, sounds 'bout right. Yeah. Uh huh. See ya then. *Hangs up*
Drury- ... What the fuck was that?
Bruce- That was business. I have to go.
Drury- Already? But we haven't even had cake.
Bruce- Gotham comes first. Here.
*He hands Drury a communicator, emblazoned with the letters 'J' and 'L'
Drury- What is- Oh my God. Am I joining the Justice League?
Bruce- No. But, if you call us, we will be there.
Drury- I don't know what to say... thank you
*Drury hugs him*
Bruce- Just, don't use it for when you've lost the
remote control.
Drury- Eh? You just made a joke! This day is full of surprises.
Miranda- And they're not done yet
2. Chancer, Crystal and Colonel Pimp
Crystal- Right, time ya paid up.
Chancer- Uh yeah. Let me get my wallet. It's in my... car
Crystal- Sweetie, he isn't paying.
Blimp- You better pay the lady.
Chancer- I- Colonel Blimp?!
Blimp- It's Colonel Pimp now
Chancer-... Did you become a pimp just for the pun?
Blimp- Well, the job does have other benefits
Chancer- Oh, heheh, I'm sure
Blimp- I meant smashing unloyal customers with my favourite cane.
Chancer- Ah, well. Luck powers activate!
Dave- I don't think that they work that way!
Chancer- Shut up Magnet.
*Pimp moves towards Chancer, swinging his cane menacingly*
Chancer- Oh crap
Crystal- Aim for his kneecaps
Blimp- Darling, I don't tell you how to do your job, do I?
Crystal- Yes you do!
Blimp- Oh, 'course.
Chancer- If this is the end, I'd like to thank all of you for being there for me. To Blake I give my glass eye-
Blake- Gross.
Blimp- Your luck's run out boy.
Chancer- GIVE ME A MIRACLE!
Blimp- Not going to happ-
*A piano falls and crushes Colonel Pimp*
Chancer- Well what do you know?
3. Booze, Sex and Grand Pianos
Dave- Well, isn't this fun. We haven't been to a party in ages. Mainly because we were in witness protection.
Blake- Because of Zodiac?
Dave- Like you have to ask. Of course it's because of Zodiac, bastard follows us everywhere.
Blake- Rotton luck that is. So guys, do any of you ever miss villainy?
Chuck- Yeah... but then I rob a convenience store and feel much better. Len's gone all out though, he's a bloody gun for hire these days.
Len- ... I told you that in secret.
Jules- Um, is that Colonel Blimp over there?
Chuck- Oh yeah, I heard he went mad when he huffed car fumes.
Dave- I remember that party, it's where we met.
Mags- And fell in love
Dave- Oh the memories.
Jules-... I wasn't invited.
Blake- We should probably help Chancer, right?
Dave- On it.
*He uses his powers to send a piano out the window*
4. Introductions
==The Hall of Doom- Teleport Room==
Kuttler- *on intercoms* All members of the Society are to report for mandatory questioning regarding the incident at Mercury Labs. Failure to do so will be seen as an admission of your guilt and as such you will be suitably punished. Furthermore, anyone who uses the teleports or an alternative escape route without first consulting with the high council will be seen as equally guilty and will face the same punishment.
AM- Don't worry, he'll pay. I promise you, I will make you proud. I... love you too. Bye.
Prometheus- How adorable.
AM- Ah fuck! I could've killed you!
Prometheus- You must be the new guy. You couldn't kill me. Not with this beauty, this helmet can alter my brainwaves to mimic the greatest fighters on the planet: Lady Shiva, Richard Dragon, Orphan, Batman... I'm Prometheus by the way.
AM- A pleasure. I'm the Arkham Moth
Prometheus- So, what does it take for someone to go "You know what? Arkham Moth. That's a great name?"
AM- It *is* a good name.
Prometheus- If you say so. I'm going to be joining you on the Cloudburst job.
AM- Yippee.
Prometheus- You'd make a grown man cry, you know that. Where's your sense of fun?
AM- It died long ago.
Prometheus- Ah. You're one of those edgy villains.
AM- Is it "edgy" to justly want revenge?
Prometheus- Well, there's plenty of ways to get revenge and have fun. Torture for example. Where'd you get your army anyway?
AM- It was a present for my sixteenth birthday.
Prometheus- Neat. I got a new rucksack
5. Dinner Time
==The Hall of Doom- Mess Hall==
Kuttler- -anyone who uses the teleports or an alternative escape route without first consulting with the high council will be seen as equally guilty and will face the same punishment
West- When will they stop playing those damn messages?
Vertigo- Once they have found the traitor.
Rigger- Come on guys, who'd betray us?
Orm- Who wouldn't betray us?
Rigger- Fair point.
Phosphorus- Thing is, They're just making more enemies. I heard Manta cut off Brown's hand.
Rigger- Again? Heh. Guy can't catch a break
Billings- He just needs to check the lost and found box, there's plenty of robot ones in there.
Phosphorus- Still, I think Manta's just using it as an excuse to torture people
Billings- That's exactly what it is, he threw The Thinker through a wall. The Thinker. And he's in his fucking seventies
West- Monsters. What do you think Skull? Skull?
Rigger- Ah well, more pie for me
Phosphorus- They probably put some kind of tracking technology in there
Rigger- Who cares? It tastes good
6. True Love
*A car pulls up to the front of the house*
Miranda- Finally.
Drury- -this day is just full of surprises.
Miranda- And they're not done yet.
Drury- Babe, you didn't have to get me anything
Miranda- It's not anything, it's anyone. And, are you kidding me? You got me a wedding!
Drury- Ah, but you didn't know about that!
Miranda- You stay here, I'll go get them
Blake- Fucking hell, Drury's getting a threesome!
Miranda- Shut up Blake
*She goes around the corner*
Miranda- You're late
???- Many apology. I tell you. Flight from San Francisco, very long.
Miranda- What matters is you're here, that's Drury there.
???- The one in funny hat?
Miranda- No, that's my dad. The one about to faint
Wiseau- Oh. Hai Dewey!
Miranda- Drury
Wiseau- Haha. What I say.
Drury- ... Is this real?
Simon- Go to him, Dad. Go to him.
Drury- Babe, how did you get him to come here?
Miranda- Let's just say Daddy still has some influence.
Drury- Goddammit, I love you!
*They kiss*
Wiseau- And remember, if a lot of people love each other, the world would be a better place to live.
The Brainwave Alpha team has recruited me to scan our galaxy for intelligent alien brainwaves. So far -- nothing. But I'll keep trying.
S t r o b i s t:
- Vivitar 285 HV, directly left of subject, 1/2 power, off bounce card.
- Vivitar 285 HV, directly right of subject, 1/2 power, off bounce card.
- Fired with Yongnuo rf-603 radio trigger.
Follow me on:
facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Perry-Gerenday-Photography/1192531...
night photo, manual expsure of freeway, double exposure of some happy guys in the background, cross processed, Holga 120mm
by Doug Kline
If you're interested in higher resolution versions of my images for journalistic or commercial purposes, contact me via my profile page.
by Doug Kline
If you're interested in higher resolution versions of my images for journalistic or commercial purposes, contact me via my profile page.
Gladys's Papa insists on doing the hard-work . . . sawing the middle out of a white plastic mono-bloc stool, 16-inches high.
the crazy little toilet-bowl in their C.R. is just 8-inches high, and if I crouch down to sit on it, I can't get up again !!
by Doug Kline
If you're interested in higher resolution versions of my images for journalistic or commercial purposes, contact me via my profile page.
by Doug Kline
If you're interested in higher resolution versions of my images for journalistic or commercial purposes, contact me via my profile page.
Wiccan the made up child of Scarlet Witch is on the Young Avengers. Great character, who's underused.
I'm not the first to do him and using the (often useless) Batman head is someone else's brainwave. Body from Vikings figures. That's the new Thor cape from Age of Ultron
This is also (I think) the first openly gay minifigure character I've made.
The pendant visualises EEG attention (red) and meditation (green) data and visualises it on this LED matrix in real time. Using a Mindwave Mobile, Bluetooth dongle and Shrimp microcontroller.
I've built this for use in excruciating social situations such at conferences, networking, bars, etc. I'm interested in extending our emotive state by displaying if we're paying attention to whom we're speaking to or if our thoughts / attention is drifting off to the canapes or our to-do list. It's a mischievous device, read more about it here rainycatz.wordpress.com/2013/05/27/eeg-data-visualising-p...
This weekend in my weekend projects video podcast you can learn how to make Mitch Altman's brain machine and play with your brainwaves!
After running into mechanical difficulties (it wouldn't bloody work!) at Mossend a couple of days earlier, 92032 had made it as far as the south bay at Warrington Bank Quay on transfer to Crewe IEMD for attention from the special spanners.
Picture taken on Saturday 1 March 2014, it took until the following Thursday for someone to have the brainwave of using the ice breaker loco stationed in the north bay at Warrington, 87002, to take it the last 25 miles to the mother ship. Still, it was a nice sunny afternoon to bask in the bay...
Being serious for a brief moment, it's good to see the fortunes of the class improve, since their introduction 20 years ago, many of the class have spent long periods out of use as the traffic they were built for simply never materialised. There's few left at Crewe that are not serviceable, even the long dumped ones at Coquelles on t'other side of the tunnel are coming home. With DRS and GBRf clamouring for more electric horsepower, maybe a bit more of the next 20 years for the class will be in the sun.
Hunched up on the extreme left is our good pal Jim, no doubt concocting some dead arty shot of the broken Dyson. Don't some people just drive you mad?... Only joking Jim :D
Brainwave, Activity Holiday, Family Circle Entertainment, Summertime Scene Contest, Artistic Market Square, Land Days
photos.app.goo.gl/J7wsoZB61sAAk8HEA
photos.app.goo.gl/q2nAx9M6Y8vqK5Rq7
photos.app.goo.gl/FjNSRagv949sDW4A9
photos.app.goo.gl/4ReBvxtSpfiSCYHp8
Life Ink, developed by the Ars Electronica Futurelab, shows the creative moment when artist Emiko Ogawa, Head of Prix Ars Electronica, is immersed in her drawings.
Life Ink revolves around the question: Can mind and body generate ink? It captures brainwaves and body signals in real time to create a new form of ink: This Life Ink is used to express our creative moments in a completely new form.
Life Ink was developed by the Ars Electronica Futurelab in collaboration with Wacom. Learn more:
ars.electronica.art/futurelab/en/projects-life-ink/
Photo: Jochen Manz / Wacom Co., Ltd.
In this offbeat 1982 thriller, a brain transplant recipient gets the gray matter of a murder victim. The brain switches its owner into "revenge" mode, and chills ensue. Director Lommel also did the better-known cult fave "The Boogey Man" (1979). The Korean VHS edition hit the shelves on the Ajoo Label, which tirelessly trawled the vaults and put out all kinds of obscure films.
My great-grandfather.
Yay! I've joined The Sketchbook Project 2013 :-)
After rebinding my sketchbook (with watercolour paper) and brainwaving about my theme, I recently started sketching...
I'm planning to make a family tree sketchbook... starting with my great-grandparents. I've always been interested in family-history. I have old photos, some facts and stories. And now I'm trying to combine these, travel through time and make small pieces of history come alive on my pages.
Screen shot of a Mind Mirror design I put together in BioExplorer. Contact me if you would like a copy (free) ( ianmc3 at shaw .. dot .. ca )
Here's a complete seminar by Anna Wise in 1991 demonstrating the real deal:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0PbIAqxJKo
As many have noticed, an FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) spectrograph shapes do not always match the classic MindMirror EEG display shapes published by folks such as Maxwell Cade and Anna Wise. Instead of using FFT this design uses 28 discrete bandpass filters in the hopes it will provide a display more closely matching the original MindMirror.
Look closely in the middle (and twist your head!) to see the band's center frequency. The yellow bars show a slower average for that particular filter. The range of each bargraph is 50 uV but that's easily adjustable in the design page.
Note: Monitor display needs rotation 90 deg CW to view. This can be done through free software (www.entechtaiwan.com/util/irotate.shtm) or you can physically rotate your screen...assuming it's not a CRT!
See the original Mind Mirror in action: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFFMtq5g8N4
Band Labels
In my version of Bioexplorer I don't see the frequency labels on each bargraph when I open the design. To have them display click on Instruments Menu and then 'Edit Layout'
Electrode Placement (from a MM website):
All the early Mind Mirror research was carried out using a two channel EEG, the Mind Mirror, with contacts placed over the occipital areas. Differential pick-ups between contacts placed at T5 - O1 and T6 - O2 are used, rather than the more usual common reference mode. Contacts T5, O1and T6, O2 are more or less equidistant from the powerful neck muscles and from heart voltages and thus cancel these voltages more effectively than the more normal common reference mode.
Sensitivity.
The default range of each bandpass bargraph is 50uV. On the design page you can see each channel go through an evaluator with a multiplier of 1 and it can be adjusted on each channel as needed. ie: change this to 2 to have a range of 25uV for each bargraph or 0.5 for 100uV.
I built this design using technical information provided from this MindMirror website which unfortunately has been shutdown (mindmirroreeg.biomonitors.com/). However as of Mar/07 some of it's pages were still available in google cache.
I did my best guess at the filter types and # of poles for each filter range in order to match what I could glean out of this site. I've tested by sweeping through with the BE signal generator and I think it's fairly close. Any feedback or suggestions appreciated
cheers, Ian
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Here's some interesting bits from the webpages (thanks Google cache!):
The Mind Mirror is an electroencephalograph (EEG) which was originally created in 1976. It performs frequency analysis of signals generated by the brain and displays the results on horizontal barographs. The display panel has two columns of bar graphs which represent the left and right hemispheres (LH, RH) of the brain. Zero signal is displayed by all the indications showing at the middle of the display. Each bargraph represents one filter; if a LH signal is being displayed, the indication moves away from the center of the panel to the left and similarly for the right.
The filters which analyze the brain signals are centered on frequencies chosen to give optimum analysis. These are 0.7Hz, 1.5Hz, 3Hz, 4.5Hz, 6Hz, 7.5Hz, 9Hz, 10.5Hz, 12.5Hz, 15Hz, 19Hz, 24Hz, 30Hz, and 38Hz. These frequencies were chosen by previous experience and needed to be modified only slightly after early work with the Mind Mirror. The bandwidth of each filter is adjusted so that the 3db loss points coincide with the equivalent points in the adjacent filters. This means that a brain rhythm whose frequency lies mid-way between two filters will appear at a reduced level in both. This disadvantage is balanced by the fact that a signal lying between two filters will not be lost.
The performance of analogue filters is excellent, the rejection of unwanted signals is 50db per octave. Translated, this means that the response of the 9Hz filter to a 4.5Hz signal is reduced by a factor of more than 100 times.
Maximum input sensitivity is 3 microvolts. The wideband noise is less than 1 microvolt. The sensitivity may be switched between 3, 5, 10, 30, 50 or 100 microvolts rms. The CMR response is better than 60db.
These machines and filter frequencies were the basis of the early work in "consciousness" research by C Maxwell (Max) Cade and its more recent development by Anna Wise. The analogue filters proved to be uniquely suited to this application because the optimum bandwidth of each one can be easily chosen.
Brain rhythms respond in both amplitude and frequency to changing thought patterns. Indeed if any frequency is very stable, it seems to indicate a rigid thought pattern which can manifest as a seizure. Our work suggests, for example, that the alpha frequency of a well-developed subject (someone who is very good at what they do) may average 9Hz but may be varying between 7 and 10Hz. This seemed to be true of all the subjects who excelled: what they excelled at did not seem to be important. They could be yoga teachers, television presenters or healers.
The original analogue filters in Mind Mirrors 1 and 2 were precise but difficult to construct with individual components and became too expensive to manufacture. An unusual design was adopted for the filters which allowed the center frequency and bandwidth to be set independently. I have never seen this in a filter textbook even though it is very easy to implement. Fortunately digital techniques can precisely imitate analogue filters and even to some extent improve on them so that the Mind Mirror technology has been translated into the digital domain. The cost is of the instrument is reduced and the precision of the resulting filters guaranteed.
FFT Analysis of Brainwaves
We are often asked why we do not use Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT), which are easy to implement in computer software. Due to the way it functions, this method gives a different pattern to that seen on the Mind Mirror and is not very responsive to the grouping of bands of frequencies known as the beta, alpha, theta and delta responses for a variety of reasons.
FFT works by taking a sample of the signal for a precise interval of time and then by calculation delivers an analysis of the signals present during that interval. It is excellent when the signal:
* is a constant frequency
* is repetitive
* is a much higher frequency than the sampling window interval
An example of its use is tone recognition used for telephone dialing.
The signal to be analyzed must be of a higher frequency than the sampling window time, i.e., a delta signal of 1Hz cannot be captured (a change of the signal in 1 second) by a sampling window which lasts one second without gross errors occurring. Any system with 1Hz window will be inaccurate below about 3 or 4 Hz.
Why is this? The sampling window chops into the signal, generating false answers, an effect called leakage. If the window was precisely synchronized with the signal being analyzed, there would be no problem. But we are analyzing the signal because we want to know the frequencies present. This means that at the beginning and end of the sampling interval there must be distortion. Consider a 1Hz wave and a 1 second sampling window. If the beginning of the window was aligned with a peak of the 1Hz wave, then the sample would contain a fast excursion from zero to maximum and this would imply a whole range of frequencies not present on the original. The problem can be minimized by shaping (tapering) the sampling window-switching voltage.
The leakage shows itself in every channel as a false reading. The effect is less when the frequencies are higher, e.g., 10 cycles of alpha during a 1-second window because only the first and last cycles are distorted by the sampling but the effect is still present. A reasonable guess might be that the error has been reduced to 5%. In most cases this does not matter (i.e., in telephone dialing). It can be eliminated by cutting out the low-level spurious signals, a process called application of a Hanning window. Suppose though that the wanted signal is at a low level; it too would be eliminated.
This use of the Hanning window partly explains why it is difficult to recreate an accurate beta response. A typical beta filter bandwidth is from 17 to 22Hz. The beta frequency is responding in both amplitude and frequency to the subject’s thoughts. Any beta signal lying within this range is automatically included in the response of the analogue filter and displayed even though it is varying in frequency. With FFT it would seem possible to obtain the same result by adding together the output of the windows 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22Hz. In practice, the continuously changing beta does not rest within one window for any length of time and is therefore often low
enough in amplitude to be chopped out by the Hanning window.
If the beta amplitude is large enough, FFT can generate beta readings which are approximately accurate, but the method becomes more and more inaccurate as the beta amplitude reduces. This makes it impossible to use to display Mind Mirror patterns.
The FFT can only generate outputs which are distributed linearly in frequency. If for EEG analysis the window is chosen as 1 second, the frequency "bins" are 1Hz wide from 1 to 40Hz. The relative width of each bin falls with frequency, i.e. from 1 to 2 Hz is a whole octave wide whereas from 39 to 40Hz is only a fraction of an octave. This does not matter if the signal consists of a single tone but when the source is an EEG which is varying continuously in frequency, then this unavoidable change in the relative bandwidth provides another explanation why the beta response is very different with FFT. FFT does not respond accurately to rapidly changing or transient signals. This is important when reading alpha frequencies which are rarely very steady in amplitude.
To understand this limitation we have to consider how the FFT analyzer works. Typically in EEG analysis, the sampling window is 1 second long but this does not mean that one has to wait for 1 second before a response is available. Overlapping windows are used; one choice might be 8 per second. After the first second, an eighth of a second of fresh data is added, the oldest eighth second is discarded and the latest 1 second of data is calculated. This speeds up the response after the first second so that low-frequency signals can be displayed within about 0.3 of a second of their occurrence.
Paradoxically this does not improve the transient response. If a 10Hz wave is being sampled by a 1-second window, it cannot display the full amplitude of alpha until the window is full and this takes a second to complete.
Consider what happens when the alpha is fluctuating. Assume the window is 1-second long and that bursts of five alpha waves are arriving every second. The rise time of the analogue filter would allow it to follow this easily, even though the fall time would be extended slightly by the detector time constant. But the FFT would see a half-full bin each time and so display the average - an unvarying output of half the relative amplitude. The relative time position of the sliding window wouldn’t make much difference because the window will still be only half full wherever the burst of 5 cycles is sitting within the window. The representation will look completely different on the two systems, one would be correctly following the peaks whereas the FFT would be showing an unvarying level. These bursts represent useful information in Mind
Mirror technology.
The transient response of the FFT cannot be improved by shortening the window time because it will then become comparable to the frequency and thus leakage will introduce large leakage
errors, especially into the adjacent channels. For example, an FFT with a quarter-second window could respond quickly but as the window will only contain 2.5 cycles of 10Hz alpha, one can see that considerable distortion (leakage) will be generated.
This means that FFT limitations cannot be overcome by using two or three FFT analyzers running
at the same time. To summarize:
* The Delta response is not good with tolerable response times.
* The process is not very responsive to fast-changing signals such as alpha.
* The FFT analysis itself produces spurious signals which are not present in the original. A
correction for this problem causes beta inaccuracy
* The pattern shown by an FFT analyzer is sufficiently different to make it unusable for Mind
Mirror work.
Uniqueness of the Mind Mirror Pattern.
Anna Wise has been contacted by many frustrated users of FFT systems wondering why they could not see the patterns which she described in her book The High Performance Mind. She says: "Twenty years’ work with the Mind Mirror has led me to understand the uniqueness of its pattern display and the complexity of the information I gain from it.
People need to know that they do not gain the same information from FFT systems and not realizing its limitations, could lead them to dismiss their own abilities and/or dismiss my years of research as not being replicable." "Accessing alpha allows the flow of information from the unconscious (delta), through the subconscious (theta), to the conscious (beta) mind. It is this openness or availability of awareness on all levels that constitutes the state Max Cade called an Awakened Mind. Applying and using and manifesting with this open flow of conscious awareness gives us a High Performance Mind. We have to focus on, find, and thoroughly develop the alpha bridge to allow this to happen." All the original studies of healers, swamis and anyone who excelled at their job by Max Cade and myself described in his book The Awakened Mind were performed with the Mind Mirror and will not be replicable with an FFT system.
..the pendant is now able to record EEG visualisations and play them back, for extra mayhem! More info here: rainycatz.wordpress.com/2013/05/27/eeg-data-visualising-p...
Lama Ole (seated) being fitted by PhD scholars Anupama Tyagi (left) and Stephen Lane (center) with measuring equipment for a study on the relationship between mind and body, led by Professor Marc Cohen MD (far right) at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia.
Four computers tracked Lama Ole's physiology as he meditated, measuring numerous factors simultaneously: overall body temperature through real-time infrared video, ECG (cardiac function), blood pressure, EEG (brainwaves), galvanic skin response, and metabolism through oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production.