At the outset, let me point out that the title has nothing to do with wild my digressions about LSD and Bicycle Day, which have been just a result of how impressed I was with the amount of stuff Wikipedia has about it. It is more to do with a claim that I want to make about something else.
Much like this quote from Apocalypse Now: "I like the smell of napalm in the morning... smells like victory;" and a score of similes used by the British in their comedies... I'd like to make one such statement. The music I like most, feels like it's 8 AM on a cool and sunny January day in a hill station in the Nilgiris, and you've just had a bath in cold water, and are watching and feeling the warmth of the sun and comfy wind.
This might sound completely idiotic, but it is an existent and recorded feeling for me :-) Now, I'm really sounding like I'm on LSD am I? Take it only as a reference to something called synesthesia/synaethesia. This is a phenomenon where sensation is "in the wrong sense" - something like being able to "see" music, or associating words with color etc. There are some beautiful ideas pointing to probable causes of this being neurological. They can be found here. There is something else that I'd like to pick up on, from the same source, but I'll write about it later.
Coming back to synaesthesia, I do have one brilliant example of a related idea, in this music video of the song 'Star Guitar' by the Chemical Brothers (check here for a high-res version). Watch the video (preferably in high-res) once, watch it again, and then read the Wiki article. If you're watching it the for the first ever time, and are able to get the idea of the music video, in all probability, you have a thing for the arts, or you just have good skill of observation. You ought to watch some of the other music videos by the same director, Michael Gondry.
Now for one of the other nice neuro/psychological problems/phenomena discussed in the book - about autistic savants. It is an interesting anomaly, when one may have very little skills in basic arithmetic and yet be able to find 8-digit primes with astounding ease; or have very little writing skills adnyet be able to draw in finer detail than HD. It's like an image of a serial killer made with collaged images of his victims (and damn, I don't have that link!). I wonder how many of these people write the trivia sections in Wikipedia articles - because some of the things in those sections are incredibly difficult to spot (and some being not easily verifiable, this being one of the reasons Wikipedia discourages trivia sections). So, being unbearably painful and bad at writing as I am, I'm writing the trivia section for my favorite episode of Dexter's Laboratory.
Dexter's password to the lab: Star Wars
The list of things to do correlates very nicely to what Dexter does:
1. Study for French test - which he does with the Subconscious Discographic Hypnotator
2. Break DNA Code - for which he just looks at a glowing jar.
3. Podiatric sterilization - trimming toenails :-)
4. Rodent aerobic trials - hamster!!!
5. Aquatic nutrification - feeding the fish
6. Solve energy crisis - which doesn't completely show up on the display initially, and then never...
In the game of Tic-Tac-Toe he plays after finishing items 2-5, crosses began the game, and won with the diagonal (0,2)-(2,0) (if your indexing starts from 0)
When the list is shown again, the items are different:
3. Fix Hubble, 4. Split quark, 5. Name the galaxy
The discs he finds: Atomic Fun, Sound of Math (which uses a strange base D, for the numbers), Steven Hawks Sings (obvious reference), and finally... Learn French (Francais disc).
The French disc starts with the speakers Jean-Pierre and Sophie/Sofie, talking about breakfast items, the first being cheese omelet - the immortal omelette du fromage. The record gets stuck on the word, and there is a good job done on the sound too. If you listen carefully, you can hear the head going back to the original position at the end of each omelette du fromage.
The next morning, Dee Dee calls him "Poophead" prompting him to shout at her, only to realize that he can only say "Omelette du fromage"! And then she goes into mocking him with "That's all you can say!" Interestingly enough, you only see cereal on the table, but then she kicks out pancakes from there.
Despite this misfortune in the morning, our man does get the question he cannot get wrong :-)
Advanced math class - tempts me to link to this post. "A train traveling at 460 W from England, by the circumference of the city of Wisconsin, terminated in air-speed to ground-weight ratio. What city in France will the trains collide?" The same goes for what is scribbled on the board...
Later, as girls fall for French, the bully kids (one with a cap reading "Phat") too get intimidated by it.
In the gameshow in which Dexter becomes the 'greatest winner of all time', he wins $ 700,000. Soon he is singing the magic word, and it becomes a bestseller. Yellow T-shirts with it written on them...
Then comes the Nike spoof with 'Just Dü it" (I wonder whether that is supposed to be a heavy metal umlaut.
The Times hails omelette du fromage as Miracle Cure, and our man as a genius (which of course he is). At the United Nations, the flags visible are India/Hungary (wrongly represented in either case), Monaco/Indonesia, Sweden, Panama, South Korea, Pakistan. Shown shaking hands are (stereotypical) Russian and American, Egyptian and Ethiopian(?), Indian(?) and Scottish, Arab and Mexican.
Soon, he is the Times Man of the Year (the s obviously added so as to prevent copyright infringement).
He arrives home in a limo with French flags, dressed like a Frenchman, complete with cap, shoes, and bread! To add to the celebrity status, there is kissing the baby (only to drop it right after).
He goes to his lab, only to use omelette du fromage as his password. Access is denied, thrice. The computer advises complete computer memory core meltdown and engages it. Dexter in recognition, smacks himself in the face (and Smack! is visible). The computer tells him that all active experiments will be terminated and demolecularized, and the lab self-destructs in ten seconds, with the computer's countdown slightly slower than 10 seconds. Dee Dee drills the last nail in the coffin with "That's all you can say!" Oh what a brilliant episode...
Phase of B.Tech called Final semester lunacy, thank you so much for being!
Much like this quote from Apocalypse Now: "I like the smell of napalm in the morning... smells like victory;" and a score of similes used by the British in their comedies... I'd like to make one such statement. The music I like most, feels like it's 8 AM on a cool and sunny January day in a hill station in the Nilgiris, and you've just had a bath in cold water, and are watching and feeling the warmth of the sun and comfy wind.
This might sound completely idiotic, but it is an existent and recorded feeling for me :-) Now, I'm really sounding like I'm on LSD am I? Take it only as a reference to something called synesthesia/synaethesia. This is a phenomenon where sensation is "in the wrong sense" - something like being able to "see" music, or associating words with color etc. There are some beautiful ideas pointing to probable causes of this being neurological. They can be found here. There is something else that I'd like to pick up on, from the same source, but I'll write about it later.
Coming back to synaesthesia, I do have one brilliant example of a related idea, in this music video of the song 'Star Guitar' by the Chemical Brothers (check here for a high-res version). Watch the video (preferably in high-res) once, watch it again, and then read the Wiki article. If you're watching it the for the first ever time, and are able to get the idea of the music video, in all probability, you have a thing for the arts, or you just have good skill of observation. You ought to watch some of the other music videos by the same director, Michael Gondry.
Now for one of the other nice neuro/psychological problems/phenomena discussed in the book - about autistic savants. It is an interesting anomaly, when one may have very little skills in basic arithmetic and yet be able to find 8-digit primes with astounding ease; or have very little writing skills adnyet be able to draw in finer detail than HD. It's like an image of a serial killer made with collaged images of his victims (and damn, I don't have that link!). I wonder how many of these people write the trivia sections in Wikipedia articles - because some of the things in those sections are incredibly difficult to spot (and some being not easily verifiable, this being one of the reasons Wikipedia discourages trivia sections). So, being unbearably painful and bad at writing as I am, I'm writing the trivia section for my favorite episode of Dexter's Laboratory.
Dexter's password to the lab: Star Wars
The list of things to do correlates very nicely to what Dexter does:
1. Study for French test - which he does with the Subconscious Discographic Hypnotator
2. Break DNA Code - for which he just looks at a glowing jar.
3. Podiatric sterilization - trimming toenails :-)
4. Rodent aerobic trials - hamster!!!
5. Aquatic nutrification - feeding the fish
6. Solve energy crisis - which doesn't completely show up on the display initially, and then never...
In the game of Tic-Tac-Toe he plays after finishing items 2-5, crosses began the game, and won with the diagonal (0,2)-(2,0) (if your indexing starts from 0)
When the list is shown again, the items are different:
3. Fix Hubble, 4. Split quark, 5. Name the galaxy
The discs he finds: Atomic Fun, Sound of Math (which uses a strange base D, for the numbers), Steven Hawks Sings (obvious reference), and finally... Learn French (Francais disc).
The French disc starts with the speakers Jean-Pierre and Sophie/Sofie, talking about breakfast items, the first being cheese omelet - the immortal omelette du fromage. The record gets stuck on the word, and there is a good job done on the sound too. If you listen carefully, you can hear the head going back to the original position at the end of each omelette du fromage.
The next morning, Dee Dee calls him "Poophead" prompting him to shout at her, only to realize that he can only say "Omelette du fromage"! And then she goes into mocking him with "That's all you can say!" Interestingly enough, you only see cereal on the table, but then she kicks out pancakes from there.
Despite this misfortune in the morning, our man does get the question he cannot get wrong :-)
Advanced math class - tempts me to link to this post. "A train traveling at 460 W from England, by the circumference of the city of Wisconsin, terminated in air-speed to ground-weight ratio. What city in France will the trains collide?" The same goes for what is scribbled on the board...
Later, as girls fall for French, the bully kids (one with a cap reading "Phat") too get intimidated by it.
In the gameshow in which Dexter becomes the 'greatest winner of all time', he wins $ 700,000. Soon he is singing the magic word, and it becomes a bestseller. Yellow T-shirts with it written on them...
Then comes the Nike spoof with 'Just Dü it" (I wonder whether that is supposed to be a heavy metal umlaut.
The Times hails omelette du fromage as Miracle Cure, and our man as a genius (which of course he is). At the United Nations, the flags visible are India/Hungary (wrongly represented in either case), Monaco/Indonesia, Sweden, Panama, South Korea, Pakistan. Shown shaking hands are (stereotypical) Russian and American, Egyptian and Ethiopian(?), Indian(?) and Scottish, Arab and Mexican.
Soon, he is the Times Man of the Year (the s obviously added so as to prevent copyright infringement).
He arrives home in a limo with French flags, dressed like a Frenchman, complete with cap, shoes, and bread! To add to the celebrity status, there is kissing the baby (only to drop it right after).
He goes to his lab, only to use omelette du fromage as his password. Access is denied, thrice. The computer advises complete computer memory core meltdown and engages it. Dexter in recognition, smacks himself in the face (and Smack! is visible). The computer tells him that all active experiments will be terminated and demolecularized, and the lab self-destructs in ten seconds, with the computer's countdown slightly slower than 10 seconds. Dee Dee drills the last nail in the coffin with "That's all you can say!" Oh what a brilliant episode...
Phase of B.Tech called Final semester lunacy, thank you so much for being!
