Sunday Seminar Series: Resonance

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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

Special Edition: Trying out the Mindset Simulator

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Dear Readers,

  As I mentioned earlier on Twitter, one of our professors, Sir Francis Bacon, has worked with Professor George Sphrantzes to build a device I call a mindset simulator.  It's not quite finished, but they let me test it out today.  It leaves a weird ringing in the mind.

  At any rate, I wanted to put myself into the mind of a personal hero, Mr. Samuel Butler, a Victorian novelist who was a contemporary and commentator of Charles Darwin.  He wrote an essay called Darwin amongst the Machines that I heartily suggest you give a read.  I set the Mindset Simulator to put me into his mind toward when he wrote that essay.

  Anyhow, below you'll find selected parts of a transcript of what I experienced with the headset on.  Enjoy!

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

Translation Walkthrough with Plastic Farmers, Part III

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Dear Readers,

  I think we've gleaned about all we can from the primary sources.  Let's turn this into a narrative, shall we?

  Always,

   Dr. John Skylar
   Chairman
   Department of Anachronism
   University of Constantinople

The deck's constant pitch and roll made Stephen wan to grab one of the plastic bags off the litter and vomit into it on the double.  He could handle flipping a kayak with just his stomach muscles, but this damn ship and its slow waves out in the Gyre drove his anxiety and motion sickness into overdrive.

He punched the railing and cursed, "Why do I gotta be out here?"

Though he mean the question to be at the sea and the circumstances, he got an answer growled from behind him, "Because ain't another's got the chick-hands we need to use the machinery, that's why.  Not getyerass back to work.  They need this plasty soup back on the shore, maggot."

Stephen knew that voice.  Blogston, the asshole first mate.  Stephen stared at the rail in front of him, where he'd punched a moment before.  When they got back to port, he would hire the first person he could find who could make Blogston's death take more than 24 hours.

He stowed his fury, however, and just answered, "Fine."  If Blogston did not know Stephen hated him by now, then the first mate would have to be the thickest meathead in the butcher's shop.

"That's what I thought." the first mate huffed and the  walked back down the deck.  Stephen started to sigh his relief, but then he noticed a rope coil right in the first mate's path.  His eyes followed it back to the main plastic processor.  If the first mate stepped wrong he would get sucked into the machine and die in seconds.  Not that Stephen cared.  Instead, he felt his guts sink when he realized that if the first mate went into the machine, their entire catch would be ruined and his father would be furious.  Maybe even furious enough to send him out on another of these punishment missions.

Stephen dashed down the deck like a man possessed, and slipped on a water spot in the process, just as the first mate stepped closer to the rope.  They collided, and Blogston went down right next to the rope.  His nose broke the fall.

It took a couple of seconds for the large, bearlike superior officer to gather what happened.  He stood up, with a guttural roar from deep in his gut, and picked up Stephen by the sealskin collar.  No simple feat, at Stephen's size.

"You little shit!" Blogston growled through the blood that streamed down his face, "I'ma break your face too!"  A little blood flecked onto Stephen's shirt.

He meant it.  Stephen kicked out into Blogston's chest, which freed him from the hulk's slick grip.  Blogston yowled and tried to throw a punch out at Stephen, but the younger man ducked.

"I just saved ya from trippin' on the damn lead-rope, peasant sealcrap."  He placed a jab right into Blogston's cheek.  Strength wouldn't beat skill.

Blogston roared, "I wasn't gonna-"

The loudspeaker roared to life, "You wasn't gonna do shit, Blogston.  Kid's correct, this time.  Kid- get up to the wheelhouse, I'm gonna whip you for hitting my first mate.  Bein' correct don't make you in the right for hurtin' my man.  Captain's orders."

Blogston got in close to Stephen's face and hissed, "We'll finish this later."

The loudspeaker crackled again, "Like hell you will, Jeff.  I'll take care of the kid.  You get the damn plastic."

Stephen glared back at the first mate.  Perhaps they wouldn't kill each other.  Today.

Translation Walkthrough with Plastic Farmers, Part II

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Dear Readers,

   On Friday I gave you some primary sources and a little bit of analysis of those sources.  Now today I'm going to synthesize those sources into a story about the various characters.  I'm going to draw on some other sources that I know of for this time stream that would have been too complex to include, but the important thing here is that you'll see how it is I draw from clues in the sources to write something that gives a clue about what it feels like to live in one of these time streams.

  This experiment is becoming something longer than I expected, so here I'll give some further analysis and then the full narrative will post on Wednesday.

  See below.

  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