http://relativestate.net Wed, 02 Aug 2006 04:47:41 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The CBC reports: One of the most notorious drunk drivers in the Ottawa area has been found not criminally responsible on his latest impaired driving charges because of a mental disorder that makes him believe female celebrities are controlling his actions. The 33-year-old [Matt Brownlee] told psychiatrists that he knew the legal ... http://relativestate.net/articles/the-shania-twain-defense/ OK, here's something cool for everyone who doesn't identify with what society says they are based on their physical body. At the Technology Entertainment Design 11 conference in 2001, inventor Ray Kurzweil demonstrated a system which captured his body movements and voice and digitally altered them into the body ... http://relativestate.net/articles/virtual-live-recording-artist/ This was just too poignant a quote to pass up. Tricia Helfer, the actress who plays Battlestar Galactica's character Six, commented about her role at September 2005's Dragon*Con: "We kind of got Six into a box somehow and we've been trying to figure out how to get out of it ... http://relativestate.net/articles/bsg-actress-on-playing-six/ Science fiction author Greg Egan's stories often deal with themes of the nature of consciousness, mind transfers, artificial intelligence, and so forth. He is considered one of the best current hard science fiction writers, and he has won the Hugo Award, one of the two top awards in science ... http://relativestate.net/articles/greg-egans-the-extra/ The Hearing Voices Network is a UK-based organization devoted to raising awareness of the experience of hearing voices and supporting those who hear them. They do not support a solely medical approach to the subject; rather, there is an increased focus on the personal significance of the voices to ... http://relativestate.net/articles/the-hearing-voices-movement/ Last week, I wrote about the characters of Baltar and Six in the sci-fi TV series Battlestar Galactica. Such a relationship is not unprecedented. From Carl Jung's autobiography: When I was writing down these fantasies, I once asked myself, "What am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do ... http://relativestate.net/articles/six-spielrein-and-jungs-anima/ A couple of days ago, I watched the entire first season of Battlestar Galactica. OK. Humanity made the machines, called Cylons. The Cylons rebelled, left, and attacked again. Humanity's survivors are on the run in space. But you know this, or can find it out easily. ... http://relativestate.net/articles/bsg-baltar-and-six/ Chris Wayan, of The World Dream Bank, has an interesting viewpoint on Jung. I see more and more that just because I have been "swallowed by my anima" in Jung's terms---surrendered to my dreams, treated "unconscious" forces and dream-spirits as my friends and equals, not as things---does not make me a ... http://relativestate.net/articles/world-dream-bank/ I had a textbook about a year ago which had three coauthors (Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World, Second Edition, by Kaufman, Perlman, and Speciner). They had a novel way of indicating whose opinions were whose: they would use personal pronouns throughout, but attach numbered subscripts ... http://relativestate.net/articles/subscript-notation-for-pronouns/ Carl Jung was Freud's student and apparent successor until they parted ways intellectually. In Jung's autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (MDR), he recounts the period following his break with Freud, when he was thrown into a state of disorientation that lasted several years: I lived as if under constant inner pressure. ... http://relativestate.net/articles/jungs-plural-experiences/