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Now I'm reminded of the real Stargate program, called the Stargate Project, where the military tried to use remote viewing and other psychic techniques to affect the enemy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project And of course, when Jon Ronson made the book The Man Who Stare at Goats about it The movie was alright.
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Jan 20, 2016 13:23
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The funny thing is stuff like remote veiwing, mind control, drugs, even magic being explored by the government isn't part of some sinister plan, but more based on someone in the goverment going "What if there is something to it? We can't be left behind", so they fund it. Some unethical projects later, and nothing comes of the money spent, other than some funny videos of soldiers and cats on LSD, oh and the horrible violation of the rights of the unwilling test subjects. But then cranks today use these as proof the government is up to no good. MK Ultra gets trotted out every time someone dismisses the government putting microchips in vaccinations or chemtrails. They act like it was some massively successful project, when it produced pretty much no workable results. Other than the experiments with LSD and other drugs, it was pretty much a failure. Even then the drug stuff was basically "this poo poo is awesome". BTW, the government funded El Ron and Jack Parsons to go out into the desert and cast spells created by Alistar Crowley called Babalon Working. Though if you read about what actually went on, it sounds more like they just had a 3 way in the desert.
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Jan 22, 2016 07:47
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The reptilians' home base is on "newly" theoretically discovered planet x. News about it is only being released now because it's actually on it's way back in right now at which point their massive fleets will invade earth and their sleeper agents are easing us in.
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Jan 22, 2016 07:56
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twistedmentat posted:Some unethical projects later, and nothing comes of the money spent, other than some funny videos of soldiers and cats on LSD, oh and the horrible violation of the rights of the unwilling test subjects. Also the Unabomber
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Jan 22, 2016 08:22
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twistedmentat posted:The funny thing is stuff like remote veiwing, mind control, drugs, even magic being explored by the government isn't part of some sinister plan, but more based on someone in the goverment going "What if there is something to it? We can't be left behind", so they fund it. technology advanced so quickly between 1870-1950 it really blew people's minds. i mean you had people who were just starting out in the army when airplanes were invented who, when they finished their careers, were ordering around jet powered aircraft and space rockets. we don't have that limitless sense of advancement and possibility so it's weird to us now trying to understand how people could ever be like "maybe there is something to this psychic phenomena, let's throw some money at it and find out." the only thing we really have that's anything similar is the internet and modern telecom which isn't that much crazier than everyone having a phone in their homes. back then everything was changing so fast, not just how you order pizza and look at dick pics anyway one of the big reasons we know there's no such thing as ESP or mind control drugs is because the US government fresh off creating nuclear weapons and sending dudes to the moon put time and effort into the idea and turned up nothing. i wonder if conspiracists just can't accept the idea that magic isn't real and prefer the idea of a coverup than a negative proof
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Jan 22, 2016 08:25
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twistedmentat posted:The funny thing is stuff like remote veiwing, mind control, drugs, even magic being explored by the government isn't part of some sinister plan, but more based on someone in the goverment going "What if there is something to it? We can't be left behind", so they fund it. To be fair though one of the entire points of MK Ultra was to develop effective mind control. One thing the conspiracy nuts are right about is that the CIA is a loving shady organization that would do, and has done, completely awful things given even the slightest chance. I get that the need a certain level of secrecy because they're literally spies but some of the stuff they've gotten up to has been unethical as all get out.
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Jan 22, 2016 13:19
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A good way to control minds is to gently caress them up with psychedelics. Then you might not even have a mind left to resist!
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Jan 22, 2016 15:23
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Popular Thug Drink posted:technology advanced so quickly between 1870-1950 it really blew people's minds. i mean you had people who were just starting out in the army when airplanes were invented who, when they finished their careers, were ordering around jet powered aircraft and space rockets. we don't have that limitless sense of advancement and possibility so it's weird to us now trying to understand how people could ever be like "maybe there is something to this psychic phenomena, let's throw some money at it and find out." the only thing we really have that's anything similar is the internet and modern telecom which isn't that much crazier than everyone having a phone in their homes. back then everything was changing so fast, not just how you order pizza and look at dick pics People born in the 70-80s in middle class families maybe had a 20-30inch TV as a kid and some might've still had black and white, like the 12" one my parents had from the 60s or 70s and that we sometimes kept my dad's Atari 400 hooked up to. The ease of getting information off the Internet today is basically The Borg from TNG and people have phones with screens and processing power several magnitudes greater than anything that existed when we were kids. Provided we don't destroy the world too quickly then by the time the 2060s roll around technology is either going to be far beyond what we can think of right now or we're going to have stagnated and relapsed back in to a Gilded Age or some other dystopian hellscape.
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Jan 22, 2016 16:15
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Evil Fluffy posted:relapsed back in to a Gilded Age or some other dystopian hellscape. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by Gilded Age, but to some extent I think our culture is showing signs of wear. I do a lot of events in the underground, and the rebelllious countercultures now revolve around buying as much stuff as possible and less on having creative skills and urges of your own. I guess it's just a small thing, but I've always wondered if hipsterism won't bite us in the rear end when people are more interested in consuming stuff than inventing it..
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Jan 22, 2016 17:37
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Tias posted:I'm not entirely sure what you mean by Gilded Age, but to some extent I think our culture is showing signs of wear. I do a lot of events in the underground, and the rebelllious countercultures now revolve around buying as much stuff as possible and less on having creative skills and urges of your own. I guess it's just a small thing, but I've always wondered if hipsterism won't bite us in the rear end when people are more interested in consuming stuff than inventing it.. Throughout history there's always been way more people just consuming stuff than inventing anything of consequence.
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Jan 22, 2016 17:49
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fishmech posted:Throughout history there's always been way more people just consuming stuff than inventing anything of consequence. Also, there are some subcultures specifically built around inventing new things and being DIY (look look at "Makers").
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Jan 22, 2016 18:34
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Evil Fluffy posted:People born in the 70-80s in middle class families maybe had a 20-30inch TV as a kid and some might've still had black and white, like the 12" one my parents had from the 60s or 70s and that we sometimes kept my dad's Atari 400 hooked up to. The ease of getting information off the Internet today is basically The Borg from TNG and people have phones with screens and processing power several magnitudes greater than anything that existed when we were kids. Provided we don't destroy the world too quickly then by the time the 2060s roll around technology is either going to be far beyond what we can think of right now or we're going to have stagnated and relapsed back in to a Gilded Age or some other dystopian hellscape. sure, but aside from advanced telecoms and flashy entertainment, what else has fundamentally changed from half a century ago? in the gap between roughly 1900-1950 you saw the development of chemistry, aeronautics, rocketry, plastics, antibiotics, etc. so on - things that profoundly altered how people relate to the world. the only thing like that between 1950-2000 is the internet, and even then people get along fine without the internet. try living without using any plastic at all, ever. this isn't to say that technology itself is stagnating or declining, far from it. but the marginal impact that say 1000 TV channels has on someone who's used to 10 is much less than the leap between 10 channels and 0. maybe in another half century we'll have personal robotic augmentation or consumer nanoclouds or something which is just so wild and futuristic that helps us get back to that sense of boundless discovery that makes people think "hey maybe there really is something to this psychic sensing thing"
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Jan 22, 2016 18:43
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Popular Thug Drink posted:sure, but aside from advanced telecoms and flashy entertainment, what else has fundamentally changed from half a century ago? ITT Popular thug drink dismisses invention of microchip as completely irrelevant.
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Jan 22, 2016 19:03
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Popular Thug Drink posted:sure, but aside from advanced telecoms and flashy entertainment, what else has fundamentally changed from half a century ago? Like...everything? The internet isn't "the only thing" but the internet in and of itself dramatically changed how the world works on a fundamental level. I mean you can even just look at cell phones. They are literally pocket computers. They're Star Trek poo poo.
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Jan 22, 2016 19:38
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Like...everything? The internet isn't "the only thing" but the internet in and of itself dramatically changed how the world works on a fundamental level. I heard some people talking about the old game Shadowrun, and it was amazing how many of the crazy, futuristic techno gadgets the characters had in the future year of 2074 were just things cell phones do.
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Jan 22, 2016 19:42
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PTD doesn't have a smartphone and is proud of it.
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Jan 22, 2016 19:51
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Sputnik was also launched in 1957 so we may include the entire space age in the 1950-200 era of lack of fundamental change. As I look out at the blizzard blowing into DC that I've been warned about for a week I wonder if satellites have ever done anything for me other than allow more television channels.
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Jan 22, 2016 20:06
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Transportation and logistics were almost as massive of a shift as the development of products themselves. The Shipping Container alone did amazing things.
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Jan 22, 2016 20:11
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Popular Thug Drink posted:sure, but aside from advanced telecoms and flashy entertainment, what else has fundamentally changed from half a century ago? Medicine, medical devices, imaging techniques, data acquistion, data storage, rapid prototyping, CAD software, CNC machining, 3d printing/sla, and that's just a non-exhaustive list of stuff I work with on a near daily basis. Half of that stuff wasn't even conceivable half a century ago.
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Jan 22, 2016 20:23
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I mean, they made a console that you could play the games on the home system AND the portable *AND* it was 16 bits!
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Jan 22, 2016 20:47
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I'd argue (just because this is a fun derail) that rail and telegraph are almost incomprehensible leaps and all modern transport and telecommunications are only progressive developments of these fundamental revolutions. There's a much bigger difference between "get the news in a month" and "get it the same day" than there is between "get it the same day" and "get it in your pocket."
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Jan 22, 2016 20:56
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The popularization of fondue completely revolutionized cheese.
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Jan 22, 2016 21:04
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I can buy a coffee maker than I can program. I can set it up the night before and tell it to brew right before I wake up so there is fresh coffee waiting for me! What a time to be alive.
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Jan 22, 2016 21:06
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SedanChair posted:I'd argue (just because this is a fun derail) that rail and telegraph are almost incomprehensible leaps and all modern transport and telecommunications are only progressive developments of these fundamental revolutions. There's a much bigger difference between "get the news in a month" and "get it the same day" than there is between "get it the same day" and "get it in your pocket." Calling it "only progressive development" of air flight from the wright brothers to literally millions of people and trillions of dollars being in the air at any given time helpfully elides the changes necessary to create the multiple orders of magnitudes difference you're dismissing as "only progressive." Just think of how few people would have been able to read lovely opinions now vs the days where it required you to post a bill up on a random wall and hope someone stopped by long enough to correct the spelling
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Jan 22, 2016 21:10
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Popular Thug Drink posted:sure, but aside from advanced telecoms and flashy entertainment, what else has fundamentally changed from half a century ago? I mean if you're going to blow off things like the development of computers as something other than building sized things where the term "bug in the system" meant an actual bug and internet then yeah, sure, nothing has changed fundamentally.  Most means of travel today are hugely different than they were half a century ago. The Interstate Highway System was created in the 1950s and forever changed ground transportation in the US. SedanChair posted:I'd argue (just because this is a fun derail) that rail and telegraph are almost incomprehensible leaps and all modern transport and telecommunications are only progressive developments of these fundamental revolutions. There's a much bigger difference between "get the news in a month" and "get it the same day" than there is between "get it the same day" and "get it in your pocket." There's a big difference between "get my local news and maybe some national news in the same day" and "get any news from anywhere on earth instantly no matter where I am also I can look up almost the total sum of human knowledge at the same time."
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Jan 22, 2016 21:10
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SedanChair posted:I'd argue (just because this is a fun derail) that rail and telegraph are almost incomprehensible leaps and all modern transport and telecommunications are only progressive developments of these fundamental revolutions. There's a much bigger difference between "get the news in a month" and "get it the same day" than there is between "get it the same day" and "get it in your pocket." It's more than just getting it in your pocket though. Not only do we get the news almost instantly (depending on how often we check and the delay for journalists to cover it), we can then instantly engage people from anywhere in the world in a discussion about it. It's the dual nature of communication that is the real revolution here. Cars revolutionized transportation in a way rail did not - easy access to anywhere in a large radius to your average consumer. It also revolutionized the shipping industry, since good can now be easily loaded and transported via truck as well. That being said, while cars have gotten much slicker and more powerful over the years, I don't think we'll get another revolution in transportation until either cheap spaceflight (cheap enough to transport goods/passengers orbitally) or automated/assisted driving become more advanced.
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Jan 22, 2016 21:11
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GutBomb posted:The popularization of fondue completely revolutionized cheese. See that's actually relevant to this thread because the popularization of fondue was due to a conspiracy by the Swiss cheese cartel. They had a monopoly and needed a way to increase their exports so they started talking about fondue like it was some common meal in Switzerland when it was really only a special treat in the dead of winter.
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Jan 22, 2016 21:41
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Begemot posted:See that's actually relevant to this thread because the popularization of fondue was due to a conspiracy by the Swiss cheese cartel. They had a monopoly and needed a way to increase their exports so they started talking about fondue like it was some common meal in Switzerland when it was really only a special treat in the dead of winter. this is actually very much like the Ploughmans sandwich / lunch in England. The whole thing was created by the cheese bureau in the 1950s and popularised by the milk marketing board.
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Jan 22, 2016 21:59
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Evil Fluffy posted:I mean if you're going to blow off things like the development of computers as something other than building sized things where the term "bug in the system" meant an actual bug and internet then yeah, sure, nothing has changed fundamentally. computers are really fun and obviously this is an unpopular opinion in a venue populated by computer addicts (seriously who still posts on forums) but if you take a step back and think about what your life would be like if you didn't have a computer again, ever, or a smartphone, or the internet, it wouldn't be quite the dark ages step backwards that not having electricity would be. or not having petrochemically derived medicine. or plastics please recongize that i'm not saying technolgy is pointless, because that's the very easy and emotionally charged reaction that people like to leap to when you say "hey maybe the internet isn't all that great". i'm making a point about rates of change, and how things havent changed as much in the last few decades as they did during the first few decades of the 20th century Dirk the Average posted:It's more than just getting it in your pocket though. Not only do we get the news almost instantly (depending on how often we check and the delay for journalists to cover it), we can then instantly engage people from anywhere in the world in a discussion about it. It's the dual nature of communication that is the real revolution here. being a pessimist i don't see how it's all that revolutionary that i can gossip in real time with uninformed people about flawed and incomplete information. it's just like meeting your neighbors on the corner and hearing their boorish opinions, but now you can get completely useless input on speculative clickbait articles about celebrity sex scandals from peruvian farmers and parisian underground DJs! what a time to be alive. people don't change that much and just because people can now be dumb at each other in real time isn't all that groundbreaking boner confessor fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Jan 22, 2016 |
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Jan 22, 2016 22:05
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Popular Thug Drink posted:computers are really fun and obviously this is an unpopular opinion in a venue populated by computer addicts (seriously who still posts on forums) but if you take a step back and think about what your life would be like if you didn't have a computer again, ever, or a smartphone, or the internet, it wouldn't be quite the dark ages step backwards that not having electricity would be. or not having petrochemically derived medicine. or plastics Considering you think the sum total of computers is posting on message boards it's easy to see why people think your stupid opinion is stupid. But hey maybe that's just cause we don't understand your hot take. farraday fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Jan 22, 2016 |
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Jan 22, 2016 22:20
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i don't see how it's so controversial to say that things changed more rapidly in the past than they did in the present. i also don't see how this constitutes an attack on the sanctity or usefulness of computers. i'm just saying that most of the things you do today is stuff that people would have done forty or sixty or seventy years ago, and wouldn't be that alien to someone from that time. but to someone from 1850 the concept of refigerated food, moving faster than 50mph, talking electronically to someone at a distance, or even buying premade clothes in a store - all things that were commonplace by 1920 - would be a huge leap in lifestyle and technology. someone who is familiar with television, telephones, and radio would pretty quickly understand a smartphone, as impressive as it may be. and just pointing this out doesn't in any way indicate that i think these things are bad, so please stop being so incredibly insecure about it boner confessor fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Jan 22, 2016 |
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Jan 22, 2016 22:27
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Popular Thug Drink posted:computers are really fun and obviously this is an unpopular opinion in a venue populated by computer addicts (seriously who still posts on forums) but if you take a step back and think about what your life would be like if you didn't have a computer again, ever, or a smartphone, or the internet, it wouldn't be quite the dark ages step backwards that not having electricity would be. or not having petrochemically derived medicine. or plastics I like how you quoted me on the instant communication thing, but missed entirely everything I talked about with respect to CAD programs and CNC machining. Those two things alone have made massive changes to the way we do engineering, which lets us make more and more complicated products. That's just the engineering side of things. Medicine has likewise changed massively, what with increased speed and efficiency of research, new medical devices in production, more powerful scanning and diagnostic devices and software, robotic surgery tools, and a whole host of other developments. Computers have affected almost every industry on the planet. I don't know what you do for a living, but if not having a computer doesn't have an impact on your job, then you might be living under a rock.
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Jan 22, 2016 22:32
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Popular Thug Drink posted:i don't see how it's so controversial to say that things changed more rapidly in the past than they did in the present. i also don't see how this constitutes an attack on the sanctity or usefulness of computers Yes we've covered that you have no idea what you're talking about and are being really pretentious about it? Just because your computer doesn't have the ability to capitalize letters doesn't mean they are useless. quote:1850 the concept of refigerated food Early refrigerators were basically electrical iceboxes, hardly a major leap. In fact it takes until the post world war period for the modern refrigerator to start really becoming widespread. quote:buying premade clothes in a store Pre-made mens clothing dates back to the civil war in the US as the advent of large scale military procurement established sizing. This isn't mind boggling for your prospective 1850s person as clothing would have been bought from someone else and not home made. The expansion of goods available for sale by middlemen is clearly not revolutionary. Please stop pretending to know what you're talking about. farraday fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Jan 22, 2016 |
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Jan 22, 2016 22:32
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SedanChair posted:I'd argue (just because this is a fun derail) that rail and telegraph are almost incomprehensible leaps and all modern transport and telecommunications are only progressive developments of these fundamental revolutions. There's a much bigger difference between "get the news in a month" and "get it the same day" than there is between "get it the same day" and "get it in your pocket." Well, even the current speed of news is changing the perception of society and entertainment. You no longer need to wait for a newspaper to get printed, as you get live updates as any issue around the world happens. This is already believed to be a big factor in determining the success or failure of major films, as news of a movie's quality spreads faster than the sun goes around to change the time of day so the West Coast gets its premier. If a movie is lovely, news can spread before places in later time zones (to say nothing of other nations) have their opening night. This technology is also what allowed "social media" to even exist as a thing, and it's been a hassle for governments and intelligence services to deal with when everyone is used to enemies that use telephones and emails.
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Jan 22, 2016 22:34
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Dirk the Average posted:I like how you quoted me on the instant communication thing, but missed entirely everything I talked about with respect to CAD programs and CNC machining. Those two things alone have made massive changes to the way we do engineering, which lets us make more and more complicated products. That's just the engineering side of things. i work in software. simply pointing out "things have changed!' does not rebut my argument that things changed more rapidly in the past. as quickly as things may have changed recently, they may have changed even more rapidly in previous decades. there can be different rates of change in different time periods, and one may be higher than the other even though both may be high. things may have changed by a factor of 2 in period A, and a factor of 1.8 in period B. this does not mean that there was no significant change in period B. i fail to see why this is so controversial boner confessor fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Jan 22, 2016 |
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Jan 22, 2016 22:36
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Popular Thug Drink posted:i don't see how it's so controversial to say that things changed more rapidly in the past than they did in the present. i also don't see how this constitutes an attack on the sanctity or usefulness of computers. i'm just saying that most of the things you do today is stuff that people would have done forty or sixty or seventy years ago, and wouldn't be that alien to someone from that time. but to someone from 1850 the concept of refigerated food, moving faster than 50mph, talking electronically to someone at a distance, or even buying premade clothes in a store - all things that were commonplace by 1920 - would be a huge leap in lifestyle and technology. someone who is familiar with television, telephones, and radio would pretty quickly understand a smartphone, as impressive as it may be "Any technology distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced" - Asimov's Corrollary to Clarke's Law. My loving BB-8 mobile phone powered toy would blow the mind of a guy from the 1970s. my smartphone would be unbelievable to someone from 1980. We can do stuff like launch an unmanned spacecraft that performs multiple complex orbits of other planets so that it will be in precisely the right place at exactly the right time to land on a loving comet millions of kilometres from Earth. We can create circuitry so complex that a human being literally can't understand it on a chip that's nanometres thick. Clarke and Asimov by the way wrote science fiction that easily foretold men flying to the stars and creating very complex machines but both of them completely failed to see the communications revolution that miniaturised and exponentially more powerful computing ability would allow.
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Jan 22, 2016 22:40
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Helen Highwater posted:"Any technology distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced" - Asimov's Corrollary to Clarke's Law. these are both dudes who wrote in the period of exploding technological advancement that i'm pointing at as being more altering to the human world. who are the big visionary sci-fi authors of today, and what grand proposals do they write about?
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Jan 22, 2016 22:41
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Popular Thug Drink posted:i work in software. simply pointing out "things have changed!' does not rebut my argument that things changed more rapidly in the past. as quickly as things may have changed recently, they may have changed even more rapidly in previous decades. there can be different rates of change in different time periods, and one may be higher than the other even though both may be high. why is this such a mind altering concept Because I can now go from a concept to a prototype in less than a day thanks to modern computing power. I can do this by myself and do not need a team of drafters and machinists to make it happen. Hell, I don't even need to work that hard to do it - most of the work is done by software. What I just described is almost unthinkable to people before 1950. It's such a massive efficiency boost to R&D and production that timelines today are a fraction of what they were in the past. This efficiency boost has affected almost every industry on the planet. We're churning out upgrades and new technology at a faster rate now than ever before. There's some real irony that you, someone who works in a field that didn't even exist within living memory are having a hard time understanding just how fast technology is changing these days.
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Jan 22, 2016 22:45
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Popular Thug Drink posted:these are both dudes who wrote in the period of exploding technological advancement that i'm pointing at as being more altering to the human world. who are the big visionary sci-fi authors of today, and what grand proposals do they write about? Clarke did most of his writing after 1950, the period you've identified as technologically unimpressive. Keep trying.
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Jan 22, 2016 22:48
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Dirk the Average posted:There's some real irony that you, someone who works in a field that didn't even exist within living memory are having a hard time understanding just how fast technology is changing these days. i do understand it, i'm just saying that it's not changing as fast as it changed a hundred years ago. you seem fixated on attacking me as a luddite when you refuse to acknowledge my basic point - as much as technology changes, now, it changed even faster or in other words more rapidly at a previous time. you and i are not arguing the same thing, which is why it's really weird to me that you're trying to tear down an argument i'm not making out of a desire to either be correct or some sincere miscomprehension on your part
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Jan 22, 2016 22:49
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