[geeks] [Fwd: [SubG] Fw: Massachusetts Institute of TimeCube]

[s at avoidant.org]

After our duscussion here way back when, I thought some might appreciate
this. Unfortunately I couldn't get there, but someone did, and here's
what he had to say...


---sambo



So, as some of you might know, Gene Ray (of TimeCube fame) was part of a
panel discussion at MIT yesterday, during which he discussed, well, the
TimeCube.

(Chris, i assume you attended and just refrained from trying to
enlighten us because we are all educated stupid.)

At any rate, i have obtained a set of lecture notes from this momentous
event. Please prepare your poison-filled minds to receive Gene.

-johnnnnnnnnnn

------------

egregious lecture notes, 30 Jan 2002.

The lecture is set to start at 3:00.  I show up about ten minutes early,
and the lecture hall is already filling up.  The front row has three
video cameras, one looking more professional than the other two since
he's wearing big headphones.

In the front of the lecture hall are six seats, from left to right:
- Chris Said, Johns Hopkins
- Eric Downes, MIT
- YOUR GOD
- Gene Ray
- Victor Brar, MIT
- Chris Gorman, Harvard

The "YOUR GOD" seat was covered with some sort of drapes.  The meaning
of YOUR GOD or whoever he is was supposedly revealed on the website. I
didn't ask.  No one ever sat there.

Gene Ray looks like a kind old man.  He had on a white golf shirt with a
logo of "TIMECUBE.COM" and "MIT 2002" emblazoned on it, and a white
baseball cap done up the same way.  I didn't see anyone else wearing
that.

The other panelists were all students.  Eric Downes is a scary looking
guy with a blonde mop of hair and a bushy beard.  Chris Gorman was on
the end, and acted like he had Downs syndrome, although he looked
normal.  Just about any time he opened his mouth, a chorus of "Harvard
SUCKS!" would rise up from the crowd.

By the time the seminar actually started, the lecture hall of several
hundred seats was just about full.  When the moderator starts the
lecture a huge roar of applause goes up.  As each panel member is
introduced (including the students and the empty chair) a similar huge
cheer erupts from the crowd.  Someone tosses a paper airplane, and the
crowd gives an ovation.  Ah, we are easily pleased.

Two people in the audience have posterboard signs: one says

                                GENE RAY
			            4
                                PRESIDENT
		   
		   and the other says
		   
	                         CUBISM
                                   not
                                 FASCISM

Another has assembled a "color cube" to complement the Timecube. I'll
get back to him later.

The first part of the seminar has Gene talking about the Timecube.  He
starts out by asking "How many people here have open minds?" Sure, I see
where he's going with this.  I raise my hand, as do most other people. 
Then he says "well, open minds can be filled with garbage!" We all
cheer.

He starts going on about the self being part of the village and 1/2 of
one's life is going into mating and .... well, I tried to write down
notes, and then I gave up and just tried to write down random words he
said, but I gave up on that, too:

You know the mumbly guy on King of the Hill?  Boomhauer?  Well, imagine
he was reading straight from www.timecube.com.  That's what it was like
listening to Gene Ray talk.  For fifteen incredible minutes he kept on
talking and talking about things that I've glimpsed at on the Timecube
website.  It was very impressive.  This must be what those southern
congressman who would filibuster must've been like.  It sounded like a
train of consciousness, but he kept on using different examples, only
repeating the "timecube has 4 corners" aspect.

After this, the moderator stops him, and we proceed into the next
segment: panel Q&A.  Each of the four people on the panel with Gene get
to ask him four questions.

Chris is first.  He has a problem with a grandparent/parent/self/child
nature of people.  Some people know their great-grandparents; some
people have no children, some have multiple children.  Gene says "well,
there are variations..." "So--it averages out to 4?" Chris suggests. 
"Yes" Gene confirms and immediately everyone applauds.  A repeating
cheer of "Gene! Gene! Gene! Gene!" starts up and lasts for about 20
seconds.

He asks about the places in nature where 3 occurs, and brings up the
example of 3 primary colors.  Gene, as he will do often during the
seminar, answers a different question, and explains how the color sphere
has a top pole and a bottom pole, and when you look at it from one
direction it goes clockwise and from the other direction it goes
counterclockwise and as they turn against each other there are four
corners around which they blah blah blah. You can probably get the rest
of this argument from the website.

He asks Gene to explain why God is word masturbation.  It eventually
comes up that because God is unique, there isn't a grandparent/
parent/self/son lineage.  So God does not fit in the family.  God is
male, and, so, being male with himself is "a queer perspective." He then
quotes Revelations 21:16, which talks of the city that lies foursquare
and has jasper walls.

He asks about Gene claiming to have applied Timecube to the Unified
Field Theory.  He congratulates Gene on having discovered by accident
something that scientists have been chasing for decades, but asks him to
explain -why- Timecube fulfills it.  It's simple, says Gene: the Unified
Field Theory would change all of physics, and it involves four
fundamental forces, and Timecube changes all of physics and has four
corners (of course, he took three minutes to explain this part), so
therefore they are the same thing. (Of course!)

Next person is Eric Downes, and he asks about people being made of
different numbers of parts.  Humans are a pyramid, with 2 arms and 2
legs I guess, and each of those has 4 main digits on it, for a total of
16.  Of course, (and this, I swear, is a direct quote) "you don't say 16
because that would demean the value of 4." That got another wild hoot of
approval from the lecture hall.

The rest of his quesitons (about cube-word vs. cubeless-words and a new
co-ordinate system) result in mostly incoherent answers.

Victor Brar asks the next question.  Gene says that "-1 x -1 = +1" is
stupid and evil, so Victor asks him to explain some more.  Gene goes off
of his previous explanation about the North pole and the South pole and
various races, and explains like this:

"1 x 1 = 1 makes sense, because that's like saying that a North American
times a North American equals a North American.  But saying -1 x -1 = 1
is like saying a South American times a South American equals a North
American." "Okay, Gene, . . . so, -1 x -1 should equal what?" "A South
American!" I stopped writing notes here for about five minutes I was so
busy laughing.

Oh, the reason that we can't divide a day into 100 days, but only four?
After your divide a pie plate into four pieces, you can't divide it any
further.  Any further divisions must happen in one of the four
quardants. It's so obvious.  Now don't you feel silly?

He also rambled something about the USS Liberty.  Didn't quite follow
this as well as I was able to grasp everything else.

The next student was Chris Gorman, from Harvard, whom I affectionately
referred to as "retard-boy" but I think that was just an act.  It turns
out he was questioning Gene Ray for about an hour before the lecture
began.

Chris opens out by saying "thank you everyone for coming to day 3 of Sea
Monkey Week.  I hope you all brought your Sea Monkey bags." He
eventually gets to his first question, "it's about Dungeons and
Dragons."

"A magic users hit die, as we all know, is a d4, or a pyramid. However,
the priests, that is, the druids and clerics, use a d8.  But it is the
rogues and thieves and bards who use a six-sided die, THE CUBE!" I
didn't really sense a question in here, but Gene still was able to
respond.  "I'll give a simple answer: (points at Chris) he's wrong."
Wild applause.

Chris's second question is "Can I ask you another question?" to which
Gene says "no" again eliciting wild applause.

We now enter the next phase of the session: $1000 if you can disprove
Timecube, with Gene as the judge.  You will be shocked to learn that no
one succeeded.

The best case was put forward by Tom (?) who had assembled the Color
Cube: a 4 by 4 by 4 array of cubes held together with black sticks, with
one corner being all white, the opposite being all black, and the three
dimensions repesnting different amounts of each of the primary colors
(or was it pigments?).  They attempted to co-opt the Timecube theory
into their own, but unfortunately, they were dealing with Gene Ray, who
simply co-opted theirs right back.

Another good case was put forth by someone who used the fact that the
Timecube is ineffable as a proof of its unprovability.  However, Eric
correctly pointed out that Godel's incompleteness theorem applies, and
that even if you could prove that the Timecube is unprovable, that would
not count as a disproof.

It was during this discussion that the contestant reminded Gene that "no
human can understand the Timecube" and Gene responded without missing a
beat "Yeah.  I'm not human." Gene later hedged on this remark, claiming
that a human is 4 parts, grandparent, parent, self, and son, and he
could only exist in 1 corner at a time, so he was, and I quote, "1/4 of
a human."

There was a $100 prize for the best student who could come up with a
proof of Timecube.  Five students offered various theories, some
revolvoing around the magick of the number 4, some about the universal
applicability of the golden mean (when he asked how many people in the
room had seen "Pi" about 3/4 raised their hands--unfortunately an
imprompty pi recital did not commence).  When the moderator asked Gene
which student had given the best proof, Gene said "I don't wanna get
into this" and let the audnience vote by applause.

There was a $500 prize for the best professor-offered proof. Amazingly,
no professor was in the room.  (There were a few post-docs, but they
were just yelled at for being out of the office and told to get back to
work.) Some students suggested going to fetch a professor, and Noam
Chomsky was thought of several times, but no action occurred.  Gene
talked about how academica stifles the Timecube because it would undo
all that they have done.  He predicts that if any professor from MIT
were to say that the Timecube is accurate he would be fired.  Y'know, I
think he might be right.

Then a general Q&A started with the audience.  This was the real fun.

While describing how he gets shut out of academia, Gene said "I was
thrown off all the scientific boards on the Internet." He made a
reference to Revelations 16:21 (when I think he meant 21:16 again), and
started rambling about how people use the law to shut down discussion of
Timecube, and how a university told him "We'll put you in jail if you
send us another fax."

Following up on Gene's discussion of the four races in the four corners
of the Timecube (white, black, asian, indian) a black guy asked how he
could explain black Republicans, the black Spice Girl, or Bill Clinton.

One person asked "What is 6 times 9?" Not one to be trapped into proving
which base he was in, Gene responded after a moment of thought: "It's
man-made math."

Someone asked the question a lot of us must have been wondering: "How do
you finance your research?" Gene beamed proudly and proclaimed "credit
cards!"

"Timecube is not a theory.  It's a principle."

How Timecube could have prevented the September 11 attacks?  "If they
would stay in their corners they wouldn't be able to bomb anything."

"It's against the law to kill Christians but it's not immoral."

Someone brought up the blurb on his website about the book he was
writing. When she asked "what's your book going to be about?" he look
incredulous and responded "the Timecube." More cheering.

He was unable to explain how circus clowns are explained by Timecube.

Delving further into his four corners-four races point, a student asked
how people who aren't in those four races fit in.  Gene explained that
they fit inside the Timecube (duh!).  The student said, "Well, I'm
bi-racial--" at which point Gene interrupted and said "you're _WHAT_?!"

Asked if "odd numbers are a false fabrication" Gene said "Yeah."

Does he support the decriminialization of marijuana?  He said that it
seems to make some people feel good, and he doesn't mind them using it
"as long as they're not in my cube."

Another black man asked about how he could use Timecube to get his
groove on, if he could better understand the Timecube if he shaved his
hair into a "cubic 'fro", and if Gene supports 4somes.

I forget the question that brought this on, but at one point Gene
started talking about lemon nipples.  "A lemon has two nipples.  If you
cut it in half each half has one nipple.  If you turn them, they are
facing each other." Around this point I lost the ability to write down
notes again.

He told a story of how he met a black woman in the south, and told her
that when she died she was going to come back on the opposite corner of
the cube, as a white person.  Then he told her "and when I die I'm gonna
come back as a black person and I'm gonna hate you honkies."

Cube eggs would be better than round eggs, but would be "pretty rough on
the chicken laying" it.

People started drifting away at this point, but I kept my guard,
resolving to report the situation as best I could.  However, I failed to
realize that no one can report the Timecube, and I should've had three
other people taking notes from the three other corners of the lecture
hall.