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Greek Gods and Printer Drivers

October 9th, 2007 (05:26 pm)

I was reading an email from my grandfather. He was replying to me, after receiving something I'd written to a relative about him that seemed favorable. One focus on the letter was about how he had read my website in the past and cited several sentences from it which were supposed to be indication or justification of why he did not communicate... he didn't even know what those sentences meant (and still didn't).

I didn't remember writing the letter being cited, nor did I recognize any of the quotes. Puzzled, I was trying to understand the letter when I heard his voice, and then realized he was behind me and had been talking.

me: "I'm sorry, I was totally zoned out reading this letter from you, so I didn't hear a thing you've said."
grandfather: "Yeah, that's ok."
me: "I wonder if they've done a study, where people are reading letters from someone, if that decreases the likelihood that they'll notice if that person starts speaking while in the room with them. As if they're in a mindset where you're already virtually 'hearing' their voice in your head, so you just integrate it with what you're already reading."
grandfather: (chuckling) "Well, I guess that's possible."

Because the letter was about opening a channel of communication, I decided to ask a question. I know little about his medical career, he was a general practitioner and not a researcher.

me: "Did you ever have a theory, or study some kind of effect like that, and get it published?"

We suddenly were taken to a lab room. There were people frozen in it, as if we'd walked into some moment of history. Paperwork regarding the study was there, as well as the chemicals and things they had been using. I could make out some of it... and it had to do with the effects of lavender oils and other materials on schizophrenia. The study had been started in 1905 and continued for many years.

(Note: Though I had no idea that such studies might have been done, they apparently have, such as A controlled trial of aromatherapy for agitation in nursing home patients with dementia.. No one related to me was involved.)

There was a dusty book that he pointed out to me on a shelf in the office. It was a light brown, and was information about the UNICODE standard—an unusual book to be in a doctor's office.

me: "Considering that we're talking, and you're dead, how did it come to be that you navigated us to this frozen room?"

He raised a hand and a map descended from the ceiling.

grandfather: "As for the location coordinates, you just touch the part of the map right here."
me: "After death, how long was it before you had access to this, um, interface? Was there a period of judgment, or, um..."
grandfather: "Funny, I don't remember exactly, but as far as I can tell it was relatively instantaneous. We could ask the Greek Gods about the details."
me: "What?!"

At that moment, a fairly ordinary-looking woman walked in the room, with dark hair and wearing dark clothes. I was under the impression that she was supposed to be one of the Greek Gods who had been summoned. She looked at me:

her: "Who are you?"
me: "No one to be concerned about. Well, unless you're concerned about some guy who's asleep waking up and taking back secrets behind how the spirit world works and making it open and comprehensible to everyone!"
her: "It's not in your power to sacrifice that. Even if you could, you wouldn't have the right to."
me: "I think information is everyone's right."
her: "Well think about things like device drivers, opening up that development to the entire world. When you buy a computer with a cheap printer, they don't just write a solid printer driver. They write one that doesn't work, and put all kinds of hooks in for bugs. Then they install all kinds of other software you don't need that uses the hooks."
me: "Security through obscurity isn't real security."

I woke up somewhere around here, before I could make some kind of broader argument back. My last line there is what I wanted to say though I probably didn't get it out that cleanly.

Comments

Posted by: Nihil ([info]mrnihil)
Posted at: October 10th, 2007 02:38 pm (UTC)
Nihil @ Computer

very interesting.

her: Well think about things like device drivers, opening up that development to the entire world. When you buy a computer with a cheap printer, they don't just write a solid printer driver. They write one that doesn't work, and puts all kinds of hooks in for bugs. Then they install all kinds of other software you don't need that uses the hooks.

i wonder if she actually knows all about this, or if she talks in some other way, and your mind just translates it into this so you can understand. as though they have a language that can be universally understood.

Posted by: Reality Handbook ([info]realityhandbook)
Posted at: October 10th, 2007 02:55 pm (UTC)
Dream Talk

There are a lot of complexities just in ordinary linguistics, such as how we pick up on the pauses between words when there are no gaps in the audio waveforms. The gaps are "in our head".

I don't think it would be impossible for someone "outside of the matrix" to plug into your audio/visual system and drive you with a simulation of audio and video. Or they could cut in after the audio part—and into the stream of words. In fact, some dreams have been so clear that they've had that character. Yet this wasn't "crystalline" in that way. So I think that supports the likelihood that it was somehow based on more abstract triggers into my mind... subtle high-bandwidth means of implanting general ideas.

The printer driver thing seems like a way of casting a concept into my terms, and the crappiness of those installs is something that I've actually lamented about in the past. Though it hasn't been on my mind lately, and I would never use it as an excuse for not publishing hardware specs or device driver kits! Thus I certainly wouldn't use it as an excuse for hiding the nature of the universe from its residents—some of whom may be undergoing great pain and persecution due to unexplained phenomena.

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