O'Reilly, acidheads and the unix

PMc

PMc

Folks,

I might assume everybody here knows O'Reilly as a publishing house, offering probably the most extensive collection of books about unix tools and components.

Now, on an entirely different errand I just ran into the trails of somebody named Timothy O'Reilly: That page is concerned with Frank Herbert, and the logo on the page appeared surprizingly similar.
Indeed, that Tim O'Really is the actual founder of the O'Reilly bookshelf etc.! And I consider Frank Herbert the second-most impressive writer in the new spiritual mindset of the late 60's - after Ursula leGuin.

So there were indeed links and connections between the unix scene and the acidheads, right at the beginning!

I always found it quite difficult to maintain my mental two-foldedness: to be interested in engineering+electronics AND in esotericism/philosophy/magick. In my youth the engineers tended to be really conservative people, and the hippies were on the very other end of the scale. Furthermore, with the rise of eco-consciousness the blame was put on the engineers; they were considered the ones responsible for all the destructive and polluting technology. And I was wondering what was wrong with me, apparently belonging to both...

BTW, my original errand was concerned with "The Santaroga Barrier" (which is very much a book about LSD): I needed some description to argue against an opinion that we would need more and more regulation and repression in order to keep society intact. I'd say: no, we just need to stop the lying.
 
Hmm. I'm not sure about the grateful dead connection... but check out the history of Jack Parsons https://www.wired.co.uk/article/jpl-jack-parsons.

Then again... Owsley was famously an advanced, technically minded sound engineer who created the wall of sound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_of_Sound_(Grateful_Dead)

Going back in time a bit... Isaac Newton spent rather longer working on the study of alchemy, searching for the philosphers stone, than he did on physics and mathamatics:-
www.discovermagazine.com

Isaac Newton, World's Most Famous Alchemist

For centuries some of the world’s greatest geniuses struggled in secret to turn base metals into gold. In a sense they succeeded: In their restless quest, they unlocked some of nature’s greatest secrets.
www.discovermagazine.com www.discovermagazine.com

I never read much frank herbert. I liked Fritz Leiber though. And EE Doc Smith. And Walter M Miller... and Rudy Rucker.
 
PMc said:
I always found it quite difficult to maintain my mental two-foldedness: to be interested in engineering+electronics AND in esotericism/philosophy/magick.
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I didn't find it difficult so much as both the engineers and the esotericists found each other difficult if not impossible to accomodate.

PMc said:
In my youth the engineers tended to be really conservative people, and the hippies were on the very other end of the scale.
Click to expand...

'twas ever thus and still true, though perhaps to a lesser degree where they meet in the middle: climate science, music and ecology for instance.

blackbird9 said:
Going back in time a bit... Isaac Newton spent rather longer working on the study of alchemy, searching for the philosphers stone, than he did on physics and mathamatics:-
Click to expand...

So say stoned philosophers but I'm not so sure; reading the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (no, not in Latin) gives a pretty fair idea of where Newton was coming from and heading to. It helped having read Kepler first, after a major in highschool physics.

I quit Mech. Eng. I at UNSW in '68 before final exams, having done a short course in Fortran given by Prof. John Blatt based on his then new book spending half my time in the punch card room with half a dozen very serious Malaysians, to a job as a trainee programmer in NCR-315 assembler.

Three years later I was fired from my cozy S/370 systems programming job at Unilever for attending an antiwar demo, best thing that ever happened for me. Moved to the rural communal life and didn't see a computer - apart from my SR-52 programmable calculator - until '77 when I built one from a Signetics 2650 CPU kit.

Enough nostalgia for a week ...
 
Hahaha, I don't know about stoned philosphers, but apparantly there is some genuine historical record of Newton doing things with alchemy, have a read of this:-

www.nationalgeographic.com

Isaac Newton’s Lost Alchemy Recipe Rediscovered

The legendary physicist tried for years to turn lead into gold—and may have used a newly recovered manuscript in his quest.
www.nationalgeographic.com www.nationalgeographic.com

"Newton’s 1855 biographer questioned “how a mind of such power” could take seriously “the obvious production of a fool and a knave.”

A perhaps less well known but much more significant achievement of Newton was his work as master of the royal mint. His work in this area was instrumental in developing the city of london as a financial centre, and the development of the mercantile economy.
 
blackbird9 said:
Hahaha, I don't know about stoned philosphers, but apparantly there is some genuine historical record of Newton doing things with alchemy, have a read of this:-
Click to expand...

Unfortunately that's behind a subscriber-wall, and I have too many subscriptions already.

I don't doubt it for an instant though: Newton perennially was all over everything, I'm just not convinced it was uppermost in his mind (but what would I know?:)

blackbird9 said:
"Newton’s 1855 biographer questioned “how a mind of such power” could take seriously “the obvious production of a fool and a knave.”
Click to expand...

Thanks for that link. I haven't the spare cycles to read it all, but some searches dug out interesting facts and opinions on his personal life, relations with contemporary peers etc.

$google "Robyn Arianrhod" and check out 'Seduced by Logic' about three women of science including Émilie du Châtelet, Voltaire's lover, first translator of Newton's Principia to French, and 'Einstein's Heroes', one of whom was Newton.

Many have attacked Newton's assignment of seven distinct colours to the light spectrum, charging that his notion of analogy between light and music - inspired by Kepler's work on planetary harmonics - is fanciful, even reckless; of course more by engineers than philosophers.

So I may be similarly accused with my realisation of planetary orbital frequencies rendered in the human audible spectrum, for now here, which I expect may be of interest to next to noone <&^}=

blackbird9 said:
A perhaps less well known but much more significant achievement of Newton was his work as master of the royal mint. His work in this area was instrumental in developing the city of london as a financial centre, and the development of the mercantile economy.
Click to expand...

He doesn't seem to have been "short of a bob", unlike Kepler and others who had to hustle for funding, so it's unsurprising he wound up with his hand on the tiller, so to speak.

But he doesn't seem to have caused malice to others, so I can forgive almost anything that let that mind play loose on the world. Kepler seems a more disagreeable git, but to him I'm ever grateful likewise.

cheers, Ian
 
blackbird9 said:
Hmm. I'm not sure about the grateful dead connection... but check out the history of Jack Parsons https://www.wired.co.uk/article/jpl-jack-parsons.
Click to expand...
Oh my gods, how did You find out about that one??
GratefulDead somehow never made it into my playlists, but that Jack Parsons is another big issue I'm contemplating. He's the earlier half. What I tried to talk about here is the later half.
One might say, Parsons represents the left hand side of the probability wave that collapsed into the Summer of Love.

And Wired should just shut up, they apparently don't really understand the matter. Last time I checked, wikipedia/en had an excellently written article about him, lengthy, but if you read that, you might get a feeling about how the life of a magician might be like - a magician of the kind that does actually influence the path of a civilisation. Yes. he created NASA. And yes, it is no surprize that the suit-wearing buerocrats do want to keep the merits to themselves. That is often the case, the actual hard-working genius doesn't get the rewards, as they are eagerly swallowed by the meritocracy.

But here is more to it. The Summer of Love, the Moon-Landing, the creation of the Internet. These align very close together in space and time, and I don't think that is by accident. I think this was an emergence, a turning point for the entire western civilisation. There is, there always has been a magickal undercurrent that actually shapes the things to happen. And I think Parsons was a main part of this undercurrent. Likely without ever knowing himself - very much in the way as Neo in Matrix (part 1) acts specifically because he still disregards what he is.
 
PMc said:
GratefulDead somehow never made it into my playlists
Click to expand...
Probably over half of older Americans first experienced psychedelics in the parking lot of a Dead Show.
The live performance was groovy. They are a touring bad. All about the experience.
I seen about 6 shows that I remember. Traveling roadshow.
Many people toured with them going town to town. Alot in VW Vans.
Much acid sold but unfortunately you had fakes. Was a very open air market. Cops raided much but so prevalent.
No overdosing drugs just shrooms and blotter..
People would make Peanut and Butter and Jelly sandwiches and sell from a wagon. Tie Die shirts for cheap.
Very freewheeling culture. Selling beer from coolers. Wearing Ostrich bird outfit. No Problem.
By the Eighties they were selling out everywhere. Big venues. They still came back to the little places though.
Sometimes cites banned them informally so they would call themselves different names. Like "The Warlocks".
Hampton Virginia venue was called the mothership. Good shows there and in DC and Philadelphia.
Some people traveled all the way from the West Coast with them. They had a seriously strong underground.
They also bucked major ticket scalpers in the day like TicketMaster.
They sold direct by lottery. Early sales direct to fans along with merchandising.
Much like Zappa's organization Barking Pumpkin. Very much a family affair. The were niche so skip the middleman.
Oh Yea and if you were a 'taper' you could record their music direct from soundboard. FOR FREE.
Caveat: Special section in audience and must be silent entire show. Tapers section.
Mics allowed in addition to soundboard connections.
Free High End Recording Allowed. Video too added in later years.
Too bad they were not that good.
It was all about the experience.

Bruce Horsby joined for 1991 JGB tour.
Mel was kicking too. They had several fill ins including Vince from The Squeeze.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLbAWKxr2Ss
 
blackbird9 said:
Going back in time a bit... Isaac Newton spent rather longer working on the study of alchemy, searching for the philosphers stone, than he did on physics and mathamatics:-
www.discovermagazine.com

Isaac Newton, World's Most Famous Alchemist

For centuries some of the world’s greatest geniuses struggled in secret to turn base metals into gold. In a sense they succeeded: In their restless quest, they unlocked some of nature’s greatest secrets.
www.discovermagazine.com www.discovermagazine.com
Click to expand...

Well then, let's roll it from the deep:
The classic ancient (i.e. Greek) had no separation between natural science and the arts. It was a strive for knowledge, about what the mind can grasp. And magic/paganism was commonplace anyway, so no issue.
Then, in the first centuries C.E., the christian church was instanciated as the main ruling power, with the actual rulers depending on so-called "divine right". Science now required the placet of the church, and unapproved science might lead to the responsible people being burned alive. This resulted in the dark ages medieval: things that were already known went forgotten.

Significant change came with the so-called "age of enlightenment". An end was put to the totalitarian power of the church (and the aristocracy as well), and it also meant to put the libaries of the monasteries to fire. Indeed, a kind of enlightenment.

This is considered the beginning of the modern times, with all our high valued values, like rational thinking, democracy, objectivity and science. It basically meant to cut the mind out of the equation and state that there would exist an "objective reality" independent of the mind.
Obviousely no mind can perceive such a reality, so it is all just another believe system. But that is not commonly realized as of today. Instead, new witch-hunts became necessary, the heretics now called "pseudo-science" or "quackery", This is where the current problem actually begins: that we have to separate between a commonly accepted 'objective' reality on one hand, and on the other hand another 'subjective' reality that perceivably happens but needs to be considered imagination.

Conclusion: we have not liberated ourselves from the shackles of superstition, we have just instanciated science as the new church.

Then, getting into the 20.century, an infamous guy named Aleister Crowley tried to fix the thing from the root cause. He wrote:
we assert a secret source of energy which explains the phenomenon of Genius. We do not believe in any supernatural explanations, but insist that this source may be reached by the following out of definite rules, the degree of success depending upon the capacity of the seeker, and not upon the favour of any Divine Being. We assert that the critical phenomenon which determines success is an occurrence in the brain characterized essentially by the uniting of subject and object.

Well, that didn't work out broadly, for a couple of reasons. But, there was also, on the natural sciences side, Heisenberg, Gödel, etc. showing that the 'objective' things are not all so clear and easy, and on the mind's side psychologists Freund and Jung showing that the phenomena of the mind can be explained to some extent. And so, at least some things began to move into a brighter light.
~~~~~

I'm currently reading beforementioned book, Tim O'Reilly's 'enthusiast-critic' on Frank Herbert. And it is kickass. It is not about acidheads. It is not about the possibility of the technical and mental extrapolations described. It is about where they come from and what they might mean, about the sources from psychology, philosophy and contemporary science that Frank Herbert brought together in order to extrapolate what might work out how. It shows the immense depth of knowledge and perception that was applied.

And that is something I find in a couple of fiction literature of that time. They did figure out the things, and chart possible ways from there into the unknown, concerning what circumstances might be viable or not viable for the human being.

But now, when I look around today, it seems all of this was never known, or forgotten. We almost had it all... and then, what has happened?

Today, development points to a planetscope monoculture of intellect. We have no specialized bookstores anymore; even the witches buy their books from amazon. We have no yard-sales anymore where you could meet the neighbours; this is now on ebay. We have the same shops in all cities around the world: mcdonalds, marks+spencer, pizzahut, ... We have big corps knowing what is good for us, better than we do, and we have governments that align with these. We are no longer allowed to live without being 'online', and we have security measures everywhere to protect us from the dangers of life.
Does this look sane or healthy to anybody?
~~~~~


Phishfry: thanks for sharing! :)
 
PMc said:
I might assume everybody here knows O'Reilly as a publishing house, offering probably the most extensive collection of books about unix tools and components.
Click to expand...
No Starch Press is a major one. Packt offers niche books including at least one specific to FreeBSD. Sam's Publishing had a good book on FreeBSD, but it's no longer in print and outdated. Informit which Sam's Publishing is under has good computer science books. Sam's had good books, but it seems they're not common anymore.

Not sure which publisher has the largest collection, but Packt has more of the most recent on opensource software.

O'Reilly probably has the most rounded out for a longer period of time collection of books on Unix-like and opensource software. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/bsd-hacks/0596006799/ (BSD Hacks) is one. O'Reilly has a catalog of books about BSD and FreeBSD by different publishers, but I'm unsure of the relationship between those different publishers.

Pearson has BSD Unix Toolbox, which is available through O'Reilly's site.
 
PMc said:
So there were indeed links and connections between the unix scene and the acidheads, right at the beginning!
Click to expand...
Nice, I'm in the right place.
PMc said:
I always found it quite difficult to maintain my mental two-foldedness: to be interested in engineering+electronics AND in esotericism/philosophy/magick.
Click to expand...
I can relate, but with egineering+economics AND ......
PMc said:
"The Santaroga Barrier"
Click to expand...
Nice, gonna start read it this wknd.

blackbird9 said:
but check out the history of Jack Parsons https://www.wired.co.uk/article/jpl-jack-parsons.
Click to expand...
There is a very good tv-show bout it called: Strange Angel.

Jack Parsons was a Thelemite, a religion created by Aleister Crowley. The main moto of Thelema it is: "Love is the Law, Love under Will. - AL.I.57".
 
smithi said:
Unfortunately that's behind a subscriber-wall, and I have too many subscriptions already.

I don't doubt it for an instant though: Newton perennially was all over everything, I'm just not convinced it was uppermost in his mind (but what would I know?:)



Thanks for that link. I haven't the spare cycles to read it all, but some searches dug out interesting facts and opinions on his personal life, relations with contemporary peers etc.

$google "Robyn Arianrhod" and check out 'Seduced by Logic' about three women of science including Émilie du Châtelet, Voltaire's lover, first translator of Newton's Principia to French, and 'Einstein's Heroes', one of whom was Newton.

Many have attacked Newton's assignment of seven distinct colours to the light spectrum, charging that his notion of analogy between light and music - inspired by Kepler's work on planetary harmonics - is fanciful, even reckless; of course more by engineers than philosophers.

So I may be similarly accused with my realisation of planetary orbital frequencies rendered in the human audible spectrum, for now here, which I expect may be of interest to next to noone <&^}=



He doesn't seem to have been "short of a bob", unlike Kepler and others who had to hustle for funding, so it's unsurprising he wound up with his hand on the tiller, so to speak.

But he doesn't seem to have caused malice to others, so I can forgive almost anything that let that mind play loose on the world. Kepler seems a more disagreeable git, but to him I'm ever grateful likewise.

cheers, Ian
Click to expand...
Interesting, I wasn't aware of Robyn Arianrhod, I looked up "seduced by logic" and will have a read, it looks interesting.
 
Of course another well-known group that combined the mystical and scientific, going back further in time, was the school of pythagoras: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoreanism

As well as maths and logic, the pythagorean school developed the science of medicine, for example see https://historymedjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/volume4/number3/Pages from Histori_medical_Vol3-2017_english_Balalykin.pdf

Perhaps the ancients didn't see the large divides between the different areas of human thought and experience that we tend to apply nowadays.
 
PMc said:
Conclusion: we have not liberated ourselves from the shackles of superstition, we have just instanciated science as the new church.
Click to expand...

Pretty fair summary, I reckon, given that a great deal of ancient wisdom including folklore aka 'magic' is now labelled superstition by the high priesthood of especially corporate science.

Classic example is pharmaceuticals, where double-blind randomised trials are the only acceptable means of determining efficacy of trestments, especially drugs.

Of course nobody but wealthy multinational corporations can afford to conduct such trials, therefore nobody else's research is afforded validity, maintaining a system of vastly expensive treatments that governments are forced, by weight of this mythology, to subsidise.

As with churches in earlier periods, a Nice Little Earner for a few at the expense of the many.
 
smithi said:
Classic example is pharmaceuticals, where double-blind randomised trials are the only acceptable means of determining efficacy of trestments, especially drugs.
Click to expand...
It's not the only acceptable means. It's the best means. You can test in other ways but their conclusions don't have the same 'weight' as conclusions from a double-blind study.
 
SirDice said:
It's not the only acceptable means. It's the best means. You can test in other ways but their conclusions don't have the same 'weight' as conclusions from a double-blind study.
Click to expand...

I could only repeat my following point: the weight is determined by those who can afford to conduct such trials, excluding those who cannot, virtually everybody else.

Certainly there are types of trials where this is the best means, but beyond the merely empirical and into the realms of the anecdotal, it falls over.

One crude but true example:

Does THC successfully treat epilepsy in children? In many cases, yes it does, as even DBR trials have proven.

Does THC successfully treat depression in adults? In many cases, yes it does - as no DBR trials could ever prove, despite a millennia or so of anecdotes.

It's the claim that a method affordable by only one branch of research is the One True Method, end of argument, that most likens it to a religion, where people take up positions of support or opposition, as they tend to do.

Fortunately, this is off-topic ...
 
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