ePlaya

graidawg wrote:monkeys vs robots. with each block being assigned either monkeys or robots, with h outwards being observers or mercenarys. schwag will represent battle trophys at the man burn awards will be counted and the side with the most shwag getting to light up the man with the bodies of the fallen....

Schtev wrote:I kinda like the magic versus science idea. That could be fun.

Scientists achieved the first remote human-to-human brain interface this week, when Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal over the Internet that moved the hand of colleague Andrea Stocco—even though Stocco was sitting all the way across the University of Washington's campus.


Using one human brain to direct another person's body via the Internet was an amazing breakthrough. But other feats of mind control are already realities, particularly in the realm of human machine interfaces (HMIs).

Lonesomebri wrote:My hipster mook roommates let me know they are now thinking of attending in 2014, while I was rinsing their coffee grounds from the sink.
These are the type of people I don't want to see there, and would work to prevent attending, maybe the theme choice could help me with that duty.

A theme like- "Clean up after yourselves" or "Work for your supper." Or how about next year being acoustic? "Burning Man Unplugged". Or maybe competing facebook pages, with the theme picked by "likes", in honor of that great thumbsup playa art/ad this year. Build on this years spirit with the theme "Probable Cause." Or make the un-offical theme official, "It was Better Last Year."

Simon of the Playa wrote: Using one human brain to direct another person's body via the Internet was an amazing breakthrough.

theCryptofishist wrote:If they don't come to the burn, how will they survive without your tender care for a week? Think of the Children!

Roughly speaking, if you can mass-produce it, it's science, and if you can't, it's magic. As an example, suppose someone says she can transform lead into gold. If we can use her technique to build factories that turn lead into gold by the ton, then she's made an incredible scientific discovery. If on the other hand it's something that only she can do, and only under special conditions, then she's a magician. And I don't mean that she's a charlatan; she might actually be able to transform lead into gold. But scientific phenomena are reproducible by other investigators; they aren't dependent on a specific person.

Electricity might have seemed magical at one time in history, but it works for everyone; you don't need to have an innate talent or be descended from someone special for a light bulb to turn on which you flip a switch. It took the work of very smart people to get us to the point that we can all use electricity, but none of them were magicians, precisely because they were able to make their discovery work for everyone.

To go on at slightly greater length, the reason magic can't be mass-produced is that it usually relies on some subjective quality of the practitioner: her intense concentration, her spiritual purity, something that can't be substituted with another person or with a machine. Magic is, in a sense, evidence that the universe knows you're a person. When people say that the scientific worldview implies a cold, impersonal universe, this is what they're talking about. Magic is when the universe responds to you in a personal way.