Extra Dimensional Advertising

In my mind, I'm obliged to write about the stark contrasts between video learning and the traditional education model. But as you don't know that I've been experimenting on my learning behaviour I can cut to the chase and come back to some really interesting revelations on learning modalities that I'm in the middle of.

OK so now you do know but let's stay on topic because I wrote this before my Quantum post and as I watched Inception two nights ago it's horrifying to me if people think I'm lifting ideas from movies, so now my policy is to get these posts out in a linear narrative fashion and as quickly possible.

Allow me to be a bit circumspect as it should, if I pull it off, cover my rear with the straights in the house, connect with the enlightened and curious, and also be generous for those in between. I will now adumbrate the connections between Aldous Huxley and Breakfast Cereal advertising.

Many people recognise that Special K is on the one hand banal and on the other deeply subversive. I'm going to exploit that subversive route by explaining that the dimensions  normally talked about in Special K are about an imaginary product with imaginary benefits that do more than watch your waistline. 

Imagine for example nobody informs you in your sleep that suddenly your right arm is two metres long and your left was the usual specifications. Imagine again, like me you're sprawled out on your bed, face down and both arms are touching the linen. You got that? Good, OK then the imaginary question is that if one were blind, there's no way of knowing through tactile sensory ability that the arm lengths are suddenly different. That is if you couldn't see your arms or were just waking up and alerted to their spatial pressure needed to push ourselves up you wouldn't know the difference. If the bed had mystically extended easily, then the feeling of having asymmetric arm lengths, wouldn't reveal itself. There would be no procrustean dissonance right? Ignore that link. I'm just pimping for Nicholas Talebs new book.

The point I'm trying to make is that tactile sensory experience doesn't involve or weigh largely on change of arm lengths.

That's the Special K breakfast experience messing with your head isn't it? That's one of the ways that Special K fools around with 4 dimensions while pretending to tackle the dimension it's advertising to do. Your girth for instance.

I've been thinking about how to explain this for a long time. But there's no way of making extra dimension references without being meaningless. That's because without the felt presence of immediate experience it's just abstract vocabulary.

So recently I've been trying to understand quantum physics' extra dimensions. The three dimensions are known to us quite well. The fourth is sometimes called time but not in the example below. As an aside I'd caution that time is the least understood. beginning, middle and end make a lot of sense to us but there's tonnes of evidence to suggest that it's the exception not the rule.

According to Quantum physics there are 11 dimensions. It's tough getting past the fifth dimension because the idea of meeting ourselves in folded dimensions is a bit heavy if not impossible. Unless Special K has done a scary on you at some point.

So while I was trawling through various explanations of extra dimensional space time (and neuro short circuiting too) I chanced across the most cheesy 70's style, but brilliant explanation of a way to observe that asymetric arm action outside of Special K space and time. 


I know it's Carl Sagan, don't be science snobby. I too was sniffy about indulging him at first, but this is bonkers clever at explaining extra dimensional understanding. He explains the Tesseract which is a four dimensional analog of a cube. I'll try to be creative here. It's like a 3D cube with it's insides sucked inside out to make sense in 4D.

The Tesseract is a shape impossible to illuminate fully in 3D. At best we could only glimpse it like those who believe in ghosts might envision spirits are lo fidelity spectrums in 3D. Here's Carl explaning it better than anyone.

Carl brilliantly uses the shadow of a perspex abstract of a Tesseract to explain how it would look in real life.

We clear?

Is this a good time to mention crop circles? I thought not. But let's face it. If the Tea Party can get away with racism, if the United States of America can get away with torture, if flying is still as cool as being a pimp then I'm damn sure I can go down this short cul de sac.

I don't really worry too much about individual definitions of crop circles. I'm inclined towards a Jungian analysis of what is the effect rather than the cause. So like y'all do on the quiet I've been tracking crop circles for the last two years. Mainly because the frequency is increasing year by year. The intensity of crop circles is only matched by the complete absence of farmer rage for people destroying their incomes.

2010 is no exception.

I've deliberately chosen this video for two reasons. I think it includes contributions from The Circle Makers who also go on to talk about some of the strange experiences they have had while recreating crop circles in England. It's because scepticism is almost preprogrammed into the crop circle phenomena that I've no interest in sharing my thoughts that are coalescing on this topic which if you've got this far, even if it's just one and half people (extra dimensional gag) then I'm doing well. The second reason for the video is the cutaway shot of a crop stalk with a bubble on it. Scientists have measured and recorded this in most crop circles. It's caused by heat swelling up the water on the joints of crop stalks. You should know this little discussed observation as it opens up possibilities a bit.

This isn't the time to go into crop circle trends but I'm disappointed so many planners aren't even curious about contemporary conundrums. Her Majesty's British government no less, legislated against dancing in fields through the 2004 anti rave legislation act, and yet to this day has no official line on trampling crops for geometric semioticians to get off on. I claim that to ignore this is to to be leading an unexamined life. Absence of theory is absence of creativity at the very least.

I should wrap up on this last one of the Tesseract because that's really the point of the post. A shape not possible in real life is now appearing in crop fields of England. What ever happened to a simple 'nonsense woz 'ere'? It's all very interesting.

1968 Awesomeness

One of the remarkable things about that fluffy bunch of overpaid and creatively cauterized group of advertising sheep is they're obession with bleating "awesomeness" (a value neutral contribution) at any opportunity. Could it be they've neglected to see how the world is changing before our eyes?

I was staggered some years back to read that planners (or that increasingly bloated class of notionally-superficial-intellect planning-charlatans) admit they didn't see the relevance of the internet when it emerged in the early 90's, for our business. This is beyond words for a category with the privilege of being able to think things through and when to my mind any sentient being could see it was the most cataclysmic disruption and challenge to the mainstream broadcast media business ever. As time progresses I put it to you that a normalization of human interaction is taking place such that if there is tipping point against monologue messaging, it will be irreversible. We've utterly blown any trust or credibility we may have had a chance to retain or even earn back.

Furthermore knowing the advertising group-think dynamics quite intimately, I confidently predict they will do an ideological about turn because their relationship with the truth is largely defined by a pampered and paunchy lifestyle expensed at the celebration of vacuous and immorally wasteful consumption, and as Arthur Schopenhauer elaborated:

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident

I put it to you that the privileged and influential (information) classes will clamber over the bleeding bodies of the violently opposed, to claim that truth as if it were their own all along. That's how awesome advertising people are, by and large.

Maybe you think I'm overstating the case? Well I always like to invoke the observation that out of all the ethnographic studies, hanging out with cool peeps, endless focus groups and datanormous quantitative research that advertising does, it's the last to highlight when and where the revolutions or real change are emerging. An example?

Here in Bangkok a hundred were mown down by army snipers earlier this year and yet not one research company could point out that there existed a modicum of dissatisfaction with the existing regime? What an own goal. We spend endless amounts trying to connect with customers on a meaningful level yet why is that we neither ask the right questions or listen to the right answers?

The reason for this is that it's not in a remedial planners short-term best interest to point out that large cultural shifts are taking place. No, advertising is largely a sycophantic extension of the wealth creation machine for the wealthy. And for those who have studied their Marx the ability for the latest, fastest and most powerful version of Capitalism to emerge out of Singapore and take root in China is Authoritarian Capitalism. An unexpected strain that is not only more effective than the neo-liberal version championed in the West but and most sobering for anyone thinking things through right now, is largely disconnected from democratic representation. Below is just another sign of the times. A police officer who cowered in his car for three hours as the mobs outside clamoured for his blood. This isn't something I expect to see in the United States any time soon as the bread and circus distractions are way too awesome to connect the corn syrup classes with their own highly diminished and globally parasitic existence.

I put it to you that the crime isn't about joining in with the awesomeness group chant, in the hope it paints a picture of you as a warm and cuddly. But if there's no edge to anything else you've got to say, you're just another bloated corpse on the advertising gravy train. Part of the problem and blocking the solution. Time will tell. It always does.

DMT - The Spirit Molecule

DMT is as natural as (and similar in a molecular sense to) Seratonin and Melatonin. It is found organically in our neuro-chemistry as well as other mammals and plants around the world. The blood brain barrier is quite picky about what it lets through so the assumption is that there's a purpose for this molecule though quite what that purpose is , nobody seems to know for sure. 

After the Americans shut down all psychedelic research in the late 60's, possibly because of the connection to war protests, it became career suicide to even express an interest in the subject worldwide, but some time in the mid 90's Dr. Rick Strassman began clinical trials to observe the effects of DMT from a standard psycho-pharmacological model to about 60 people over about five years.

A documentary was made about it this year and released only last month. I managed to see it a couple of nights ago and I think it's worth having an opinion on. The interviewees are all intelligent and mature people who try to explain the experiences they had which they  most often categorise as trans-dimensional and thus largely ineffable. 

The interviews are on Youtube but if the chance avails itself you can find out more about screenings at the Spirit Molecule website.