Sunday Seminar Series: Misunderstanding

Easy to misunderstand. Image via Wikipedia

Dear Readers,


In your own time stream, exploration is a thing of physical locales and geographic or astronomic travels.  At the University, we are instead explorers of temporal distances.  This sort of work is more stationary, but hazards its own perils.

Join me for this week's Sunday Seminar, adapted from my lectures for our introductory Anachronism class, CHRN/AUG 100.

I think the main hazard that we face as Anachronists is misunderstanding.  With our new ability to manifest whenever we would like, the danger is doubled.

Let me tell you the classical problem of misunderstanding.  It is best related through the anecdote of Clinton IV, a space  colony I have studied.

The colonists of Clinton IV learned early on that they were not alone on their world.  They found this very excitig at first, but as attempts to contact the local humanoid lifeforms failed or ended in disaster, they became discouraged.  It took a century for the xenobiologists to realize their mistake:  just because a creature looks and acts intelligent, does not always mean it is.

There are many classical misunderstandings we can make. One of them is to use our own cultural framework to read a source.  Thankfully, Dr. Bacon's mindset simulator is helping somewhat with that.  But you must be ever vigilant.

There are other sorts of misunderstandings we can make as well.  These aren't based on cultural frame problems, but instead on simple bad "facts".  Sometimes we just have the wrong assumptions, and we assume that a source says a society was at war when in fact they were playing a sports game.  Hint, hint, football fans.

These two classes of misunderstanding lead to bad conclusions and pollute the literature when they appear in our sedentary activities.

But, if you make these mistakes on assignment to a time stream, they can be deadly.  So watch out.

There's one last class of misunderstanding that is unique to being on assignment, though: that's where you don't consider your own effect through your presence.  When you visit, you're in a unique offshoot of the time stream that is affected by your presence.  It's almost the same, but not completely.  If you're going to collect evidence, make sure you didn't accidentally create that data.

And with that, I leave you to your sports games.  Hopefully the referees have had a good class on misunderstanding.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

Sunday Seminar Series: Resonance

Image via Wikipedia

Dear Readers,

  When Sundays roll around for you, I like to post a seminar based on my class, CHRN/AUG 100, which is the University's Introduction to Anachronism.  Here's this week's edition.

  Last week we talked about mindset and how we use the emotional and cultural context of a mind to understand the sources that wrote it.  That's kind of the small scale of the situation, though, because in the long run we're not just studying individuals but trends in society over time and to some degree we're even creating predictive models.

  To do this, we need to think about the motivations of various people and groups of people around time.  I like to think of it as sort of examining a cultural fossil record.  In paleontology, when you find successive organisms with specifc body plans that are shared, you gradually develop "taxa," or groups of different species that form up a branch of the Tree of Life.  Those groups, like "dinosaurs" or "birds" have certain shared characteristics.  There is what I would call a certain resonance between their physical forms which arise in common over time.

  Similarly, there are shared mindsets that arise in the data from augury, both when you move forward in time and when you look across concurrent time streams.  People resonate their beliefs.  A good example from your time stream to consider would be the sudden surge of support for Barack Obama prior to his election.  This happened because many people out there had a mindset that agreed with Obama and when he began to broadcast his views, these ideas resonated with an untapped aspect of the American, and even the global, mindset.  The collective consciouness vibrated to the beat of his drum.

  Another example comes from World War II, when around the world there was a flocking on people with like mindsets to two prevailing systems of government: the Free Society and the Fascist Society.  Hitler and Mussolini did not help each other to power; they formed their own groups of mindsets, from people who resonated with their viewpoints.  Then, when they had come to power, they met each other and felt that same resonance in themselves.  A dark alliance, the Axis, took root.  Resonance can sometimes be a bad thing.

  But it is through resonance that ideas and trends in ideas begin.  Movements and revolutions are born on the backs of mindsets that resonate with one another.  It starts small, but then can snowball into significant trends.  Much of my time is spent trying to determine what the critical mass is for an idea to resonate across all of a geographic location or time stream, and to echo into the future.  Even more of my time is spent looking for situations where different time streams resonate so strongly with each other that despite their temporal separation, they share a possible future!  By the power of the mind alone, sentient beings can bend probabilities to create something nearly impossible.

  That is resonance.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

Sunday Seminar Series: Mindset

Dear Readers,

Image by wallyg via Flickr

  Each time your Sunday rolls around, I post a short piece coverted from one of my lectures for CHRN/AUG 100.  It's my introductory course for students just starting out in Anachronism.

  I want to discuss mindset, because it is such an important part of the translation discipline involved in Anachronism.  I started to work on analysis of a primary source on Friday, and I'll post the conclusion on Monday.  Here I want to discuss how our understanding of mindset affects the conclusions that we make.

Image via Wikipedia

  The most basic way to explain this principle is to take some arbitrary event, like spotting an eagle as it makes a kill, and then thinking about how different mindsets would respond to that event.

  Someone from your time stream would see an eagle and be likely to think about a bunch of disconnected things: feelings about the United States or other countries that use eagles as their symbols, the freedom of flight, the violence of the kill, the helpless little animal, maybe even dredged-up images of food webs from ecology texts that you read in college.  The bottom line for you would be, though, that you are watching an eagle kill an animal as eagles are wont to do.  Maybe it would evoke the power of nature.  Maybe you would not bat an eye.

  Let's step out of your shoes for a moment, shall we?  In Ancient Greece, bird omens would evoke a god associated with the bird, or a god to whom the viewer of the bird had recently devoted.  To see it kill something could mean anger from the god, or a wish for victory in battle.  The nature of the bird's appearance as an omen would be the Ancient Greek's main response to the sight.  To determine the meaning, it would take a priest and a good understanding of the context.

  Likewise, context is important for us.  In this case, however, it's temporal context.  We have to think about what is normal for the society that our source comes from in order to establish the mindset of the author.  We have to think about profession, education, economics, culture, religion, all of it.  And we have to think about our own mindset, which is biased by every experience we have ever had.  There is a big difference between the writings of a monk whose only safe beverage is beer and the writing of an academic who lives immortally in a University outside of time.

  And, as you'll see on Monday, I bring these considerations to the forefront in my translation of primary sources.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

Sunday Seminar Series: Corporeality

Dear Readers,
  This week is a special edition of my Sunday Seminar Series relating to my recent adventure in corporeality.  If you recall, an attack by the Puppeteers left the University with a new technology that could allow direct transmission of matter to a time-normal location.  We were all pretty impressed by that.

  Therefore, I hatched a plan to make a time-normal appearance in Brooklyn, New York.  It is rather unusual, to be able to say I was with you all last night.  I am so rarely contemporaneous with my readers!  It is very exciting.

  The venue that I chose is called the Lost Horizon Night Market, and this secretly located traveling bazaar contains all manner of wonders in a uniquely mobile format.  It is a place where the most unusual city-dwellers find expression, and I am happy to have been there.

  I have to comment on the experience of traveling in the fashion that I used last night.  I'm sure it will be no strange story for the likes of my new acquaintance Dr. Wendell Howe, but for me the use of a physical appearance is a strange feat indeed.

  I brought everything that I thought I might need: camera, University dress, a device to link me with Twitter throughout, a pill to acclimate me to the normal flow of time, and an open mind.  Oh, and olives.  I cannot do without olives from the University's groves.  There is nothing like them, in this world or any other.

  I managed to take the pill before the nausea set in.  This is key.  When your body is not used to the normal flow of time, it can be very jarring for it to revert to time normality.  The olives helped, also.  I was pleased to discover that they maintained their flavor through the transmission.  Actually, I was generally pleased that the very act of stepping through the machine did not kill me.  Today, I tell you, my students: This is possible!  We embark on a new journey for Anachronists.

   The wonders I saw last night will feature in a new work of mine, but I believe I shall save that for a reputable journal rather than this collection of my work notes that I call a blog.  The market's organizers pride themselves on their secrecy, and I do not want to be the one to break it.  What I really want to impress on you is that this new technology is going to change our field.  We can now visit the possible time streams, albeit at a huge expense of resources.  As the first pioneer of this technology, I am excited to report that it works, is safe, and can bring back the most exciting data I have ever seen.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

Sunday Seminar Series: Competition

Image via Wikipedia

Dear Readers,

  This is my weekend Sunday Seminar Series, where I recap a lecture from my introductory undegraduate level class CHRN/AUG 100, the Introduction to Anachronism.

  For this week's installment, I want to talk to you about what else is out there oin the academic world as far as Anachronism.  Time-normal universities, of course, are excepted because they do not have departments of Anachronism.  However, once in awhile I see a publication from the Yale University Press on my desk.  I am unsure if this is because of a printers' error, or because something secret is going on at Yale involving Augury.  I am excited to find out.  It might even turn it into a paper.  If anyone has insight, let me know.

  There are, however, some real contenders in the field.  That's right, other universities, much like the University of Constantinople.  We communicate via advanced Augury technology that gives us nearly 100% communication fidelity, and collaborations are common.  Provost Notaras still suspects that another institution carried out the attack on our school that occurred recently, but I am of the opinion that this is a newer and more dangerous threat.

  The first institution of note is the Institute for Post-Singularity Humanism, which publishes a nice little internal review of their Anachronism Department every once in awhile.  I have, of course, read everything that they have and will publish, and I would say they are one of the strongest contributors to the field.  Their department's Chairman prefers not to use a name, and so I will respect that decision.  He is identified by title only, as "The Integrator of Past and Future."  It's a bit of an odd place.

  Second on the list comes Mid-Atlantean University.  While the University of Atlantis has some good early publications, the later work that it plans to publish does not measure up to its southern cousin, which maintains a constant standard of research across its entire history.  If you are looking for expertise on different trends in agriculture or space travel across Anachronistic literature, I recommend you start with the proceedings of their department, chaired by Pericles.  Resurrected here and currently one of my graduate students, he will be transferred there in about one month and begin his very successful career.

  Third and final (for now), is the National Academy of Laputa, which pushes the limits of Augury and Anachronism through their unique ability to raise the spirits of the dead temporarily.  It does not quite approach the University of Constantinople's ability to create recorporated individuals, but then they have higher memory fidelity than we do, so it's a bit of a wash as to who is better in this regard.  At any rate, they are an excellent institution, if slightly slow at responding to letters.  Dr. John Stuart Mill chairs their Department of Anachronism, and it should be no surprise that their president is Jonathan Swift.

  That will be all for now, and I leave you to your regularly scheduled chronology.  Enjoy.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

Sunday Seminar Series: What's the Point?

Part of our Identity; Image via Wikipedia

Dear Readers,

  This is another installment in my Sunday Seminar Series, wherein I distill lectures from my introductory class, CHRN/AUG 100, for general consumption by distance students.

  You've had a bit of a break from this over the past few weeks, but I'm sure my best students have kept up with their reading and have minds eager to be pried open and molded.  I've always found that concept strangely aggressive, but I'll run with it.

   Today I want to talk to you about the whole point of the University of Constantinople.  It may seem all well and good to you that we advocate a sort of hybrid pragmatic-postmodern view to analysis of augury data, and that we collate and collect information and cultural anthropology across a variety of different time streams.  It seems well and good enough to me, at least.  Still, it's not all that we're here for.  This seminar will explain in a cursory overview what the next few will explore in more detail.

   First, the facts: We are a university outside of normal time, created by a freak accident.  We can obtain a variety of information from other time streams, and daily (well, at least, something like daily) our capabilities improve.  We can, to some degree, return matter to normal time, though this is a tremendously expensive procedure.  We can as well create copies of any individual who ever lived anywhere, though that is also quite expensive and it requires something of a special art so that you do not get the wrong sort of person.

Sunday Seminar Series: Truth and Belief, Part II

Comet, or Dragon? Image via Wikipedi

Dear Readers,

  After the problems that occured with my "Great Expectations" Friday Seminar, I discovered that the response improved when I posted my seminars to time-normal Sundays rather than Fridays, and I've changed the schedule accordingly.

  If you are just joining us, my Sunday Seminars are a series of posts adapted from material for my first-year undergraduate Anachronism students, CHRN/AUG 100.  Last week we talked about different kinds of information, and I defined some terms for you.  It would be useful to go back to that, but I intend to move on from there, so foreknowledge should not be entirely necessary.

   The important point that I want you to take home from these two seminars is that there are different sorts of conclusions you can make about "reality."

   Let me give you an example.  There is a medieval source, from your history, in which a bishop describes his experience of seeing a dragon.  Historians (as you know them) and Anachronists both are interested in this account for a variety of reasons.  However, even time-normal historians consider this source in two ways.

  The first is literally.  The source gives us an account of what a dragon was to a medieval person.  For this bishop, whatever he saw really was a dragon.  And thus we come to interpretations of truth.  Pragmatist philosophy suggests that if an interpretive worldview is useful to someone, then it is true for that person.  What is true, thus, is not necessarily the same for everyone.  Because of truth-bias from his or her original worldview, the Anachronist has to realign his or her mind to that of the source author.  That is, if the Anachronist seeks a literalist, source subjective impression of the information available.  Furthermore, it gets very interesting when you consider that there are time streams where the objective reality would agree with the subjective reality of a dragon.  Keep an open mind!

   Of course, what if we don't take the source literally?  What if we want to figure out what "really happened"?  Was the dragon a comet?  Ball lightning?  It can be a lot more difficult, because to some degree we just have to trust in our sources.  We can't see these time streams via Augury.  So we often have to look for clues in the sources words that tell us what the different possibilities.  The take home message should be that you can never know what "really" happened or will happen in a time stream.  You just know what could happen.  And that's what Anachronism is all about.

   There is another way, however.  There are the people at the University, who still have their memories from a time normal life, but the perspective of interaction with those who have different perspectives.  When in doubt, consult a colleague.  Often, there is someone here who can tell you what their subjective experience in a given related time stream was, and that can help inform you as to the possibilities for your time stream of study.

  In the end, all we can really say is what our sources believed the truth to be, not the "real" facts.

  And yet, this does not matter.  There are so many possibilities out there, and the mere inspiration from a source provides us with something meaningful.  If a source can imagine it, there is likely a time stream where it will occur.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople