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I want sense organs that can process and transmit in radio frequencies. Also a dedicated brain region for doing proper math, like we have for graphics/language/projectile throwing.

I know that feeling - my old work laptop required admin access to install Adobe PDF reader.

Tangent - but Adobe Acrobat Reader is one of the few pieces of software that IT departments are justified in keeping off of computers. Modern operating systems are secure enough that they're difficult to attack directly, so exploits work against software. That software used to be your web browser, but even those are now secure enough if you keep them up to date (and FF, Chrome, and IE10+ keep themselves up to date, so you have to work to mess that up.)

Now the targets of choice are: 1. Java, 2. Acrobat Reader, and 3. Flash, in that order. All three have the ability to execute arbitrary code against your computer, are widely installed, frequently unpatched, and made by Adobe. Nobody blocks .pdfs on their network, and normal people think of .pdfs as safe, read-only documents, not executables.

There are lots of FOSS .pdf readers out there. They tend not to support all the crazy features of PDF like formulas and executable code, which is a good thing because those give you little benefit for the security hole they are in Acrobat. Chrome also has a perfectly competent pdf reader built in.

After one year, Alexis transferred from University X to Yellowstone University for financial reasons. Yellowstone University is less expensive than University X, and close enough to the city we all lived in that she could commute from her parent's home. She still made the two drive up to visit us at University X a few times during my senior year, even though she had to scrape for gas money. When she came, we'd stay up late playing board games and she'd tell us stories about her new-old life.

She told us that her YU advisor didn't think she was smart enough for her Engineering/German double major, and tried to get her to switch to Business. She said that when she made mistakes in class other engineering students would make dumb blonde jokes. She never mentioned making any friends at YU, and she didn't have many friends in City Y, where she had lived her whole life.

The only thing I knew about her parents was that they were conservative Christians. Specifically, they did not approve of anime, so when they called Alexis during UX Anime Club she had to run out of the room so they wouldn't hear what was going on. I had suggested simply not answering the phone, but to not pick up when her parents called was unthinkable.

• Warning: parental abuse follows.

I mention her parents because the most important story she told us that year was about when her parents called the cops on her. My understanding of what happened is that some time in the late evening, Alexis was in her room getting ready to go out, I think maybe to see her boyfriend Clarence. Her mom did not want her to leave, and stood bodily in the doorway to trap Alexis in her bedroom. Alexis tried to push past her mother, who I am told is quite overweight and would have filled most of the doorway. Her mother considered this an attack and struck Alexis, knocking her over, and then tried to pin her 20-year old daughter to the floor while continuing to beat her. At some point during the fight, Alexis bites her mother on the arm. That must have been enough for them to disengage, because the next thing her mother did was call the police. They come, her mother shows the police the fresh bite mark on her arm, says "Look what she did to me!" indicating her daughter of a fraction of her weight, and they take Alexis away in a police car.

• End abuse scene.

She spent the night in jail. She used the word "arrest", but she was never read any Miranda rights. The most generous reading of the police officer's actions was that he needed to separate both sides of the domestic violence for the safety of everyone involved, and the non-homeowner was the sensible choice to remove from the scene. I think in that case, though, the officer would have documented her injuries. Instead, he used the ride back as an opportunity to tell her about how she needed to respect and obey her parents, and to be thankful they gave her a place to live. I don't think she was ever charged with anything, but she did get a restraining order barring her from going near her parent's house for some duration.

"Every single relative on my dad's side of the family has been to jail. I was going to be the first -- now I'm not."

Sounds more like personality compartmentalization than DID. It probably seems really exotic to you, but I've heard it all a hundred times if I've heard it once. Trauma and PTSD can certainly feed into it, and so can youth, and personality disorders. Ultimately, though, it's just another anecdote by a layperson observer.

It certainly might be. Wikipedia is failing me on personality compartmentalization as anything distinct from the general term for compartmentalizing beliefs.  I was using the term DID because that's what she uses to describe herself. I don't think there are any other conditions that feature persistent compartmentalized buckets of memory though? There's dissociative amnesia, which hits autobiographical memory, but I think that's different.

This is a true story. Because of its personal nature, all names have been changed. Told with permission of the heroine.
Keywords: Abnormal Psychology, Abuse, Retail, and Decent Human Beings

I met Alexis (short for "Alexandra") in college, my junior year, her freshman year. She showed up to an Anime Club meeting one day, invited by Bob (her future boyfriend) and ended up staying late afterwards to play Cosmic Encounters with us. Our geek circle drafted her after that - not many people were willing to put up with my roommate's girlfriend's game of choice, which was two decrepit copies of Cosmic Encounter, different editions, each owned by one of her parents before they dated each other, and played with barely-remembered house rules.

Alexis is short and thin, with glasses and pretty blonde hair. She can un-dislocate her shoulder by slamming into a wall, a trick she learned because her shoulder joints are weak and will dislocate if her arms are raised too high above her head. It didn't stop her from being active in Tae Kwon Do and play-sparring with us, so we got to see it a lot. She was peppy and energetic, acted like a stereotypical "genki girl". She hugged friends as a way of greeting, and laughed when Bob and I awkwardly flopped, too INTP to return the hug properly. When anyone did anything for her, no matter how small, she gushed gratitude. She smiled a lot. Usually when someone says this about a person, they mean that he was happy. I mean that she emoted. She smiled a lot, and when something especially good happened she would squee and say "Happy Face!" out loud, in case anyone didn't see how much she was smiling.

I stopped using the word "rape" casually because of Alexis. I played video games a lot, both with friends and online, and I had picked up some gamer slang. "Pwn" was getting stale, and gamers were reaching for new words to embellish games. If you were winning across the board, you were "dominating" your opponent. If an opponent was capitalizing on your play errors, you were being "spanked". A game that was shamefully and utterly one-sided was described as "rape", as in "Z nine-pooled and 'toss fucked up his opening placement, so when the 'lings hit his mineral line from the opposite side they basically anally raped all his workers with ten-foot barbed poles."

Alexis enjoyed playing video games with us, but lurid descriptions like that caused her to stop having fun. She asked me to stop, so I did, first around her and then at all. It was surprisingly easy to cut a word from my vocabulary. I've seen some heated arguments on gaming forums about political correctness and censorship and 'feminazis', and while I'm as against Nazis censoring people as the next guy, none of those arguments really matter when loose speech is preventing a friend and fellow gamer from enjoying the games we love.

At this point I should mention that rape is going to be important to this story, and I need to include a few details for all the events to make sense. If reading about the kind of child abuse and sexual assault that causes PTSD might upset you, exercise your judgment. This chapter of Alexis's life has a -- well, not exactly a happy ending, but at least an optimistic ending. If you yourself are struggling with PTSD, her story might be useful to you. I'll give you another warning before the sections that contain potential triggers.

To be continued as I write it down.

Ohhh there is a lot of contention over this. One bone is whether, if people are aware of their other personalities, it can even properly be classified "Dissociative" identity disorder at all, or if it then falls under the umbrella of delusion and is more properly classified as a schizotypal disorder.

I don't know enough about the scientific debate to comment on clinical classification.

In her case, the alters have very distinct personalities, habits, and speaking styles, enough that someone who knows them can tell which is out from even a text conversation. #1 is the public face, dresses conservatively but appreciates gothic fashions, studies lots of foreign languages, is non-confrontational to a fault, has some kind of psycho-somatic colorblindness and can't do most visual memory tasks. #2 is a self-indulgent girly-girl who considers herself eight years younger and speaks in a squeaky falsetto, likes sex, ballet, pretty things, getting her way, sex, Japanese (but hates German, Chinese, and Korean), winning, and putting the other alters into embarrassing situations. #3 is male with an affected gravelly voice, prefers German to the other languages and science and engineering over linguistics and art/fashion, and tries to maintain a dispassionate perspective on the System. #4 I know very little about, except that she speaks nothing but Japanese - only she doesn't actually know much Japanese, so mostly she's either silent or repeats "Doushite?" ("Why?") over and over. I've only met #4 once; apparently she usually manifests under duress and comes out panicked and swinging, but is the gentlest of the four if she can calm down.

There's definitely segregation of memories - #1 does not know about things that happen to #2 or #3 and has extremely fragmented memories of childhood. #2 doesn't know about things that happen while other alters are in full control, but seems to be able to "leave" at will and force another alter to surface. #3 claims to know pretty much everything, although he is almost never "out" and in control; apparently he runs as a background process, silently observing and managing the other alters.

There are specific topics that specific alters will respond to. #2 can be confused and bewildered by speaking German to her loudly and quickly, which brings out #1 who knows that she's annoyed at your terrible pronunciation but not what's going on. The engineer in #3 is annoyed by inefficient sprinkler systems that spray water onto sidewalks, driveways or roads; #1 will make comments like "Wow, your neighbor's sprinklers are reaaaallly pissing #3 off right now."

Transitions between alters can be more an less abrupt -- sometimes, the new alter has no idea what's going on (seems to happen the most with #1 -- she seems to have the least access to memory of all the alters) and needs you to explain to her why she's in a comic shop wearing a skirt. Other times the transition occurs while she's doing task, and new alter knows enough about what's going on to continue the task without it being obvious when the switch took place.

Her story is looking to be massive, a lot longer than anything else I've written on PD, so I'll post it in its own thread.

Yes. There's greater and lesser degrees of control, though. Sometimes one or more of the other alters have some awareness of what's going on - anything from complete blackout, to a vague recollection of emotional state, to full/partial awareness, to partial control. In the inbetween states where two or more alters are partially out, they can both subvocalize (both exert partial control over a shared stream-of-consciousness?) and can both be aware of and remember thoughts. Alters can and do threaten each other, even without using friends or smartphones to relay messages.

You're going to want a big on that, and you're right to do so. I got permission from my friend to tell her story in more detail; I'll start writing that up. It's pretty crazy and even has some surprise twists.

You were ritually tested, and turned out not to be one of 144,000 elect or however many there are. Offer to do the ritual for them, so they can find out.

Show them Ratatosk's posts on why he left the JWs.

News in head...
Apparently the lady running the show is named Katharine...
Katharine has decided we are going to integrate.

I'm apparently not being allowed to be alarmed about it, so other people in my head are feeling alarmed for me.

In short, I expect to be batshit for a while, and not in a really cool Hirley0 way...In a very messy, moodswingy sort of way, and thus off the board.
Y'all be cool, ok?

*salutes, heads off to support forums.*

It's your life, but maybe you should talk to someone about that?

Yeah, another victim of MPP.  The strange sort of MPP that never seems to hit the medical journals.  The ones where the personalities talk about shit with each other.

I've seen it in person. A friend's doctor is circulating some of friend's autobiographical writing among her colleagues try to get other doctors to stop telling clients that their dissociative identity disorder is just whining. I had lean on him really hard to get him to tell his doctor (who he was already seeing for PTSD & depression) about the other personalities. He was able to tell her about the awful incident(s) relating to his PTSD, but DID was too much. He eventually had to call me into the room to tell his doctor for him, because he couldn't work up to telling her himself.

It's by the single most stigmatized mental disorder. Some people treat you like shit if they find out you're schizophrenic, but at least they admit schizophrenia exists. And some of those skeptics are practicing doctors, so they give elaborate diagnoses like bipolar + poor memory + ADHD + schizophrenia + compulsive lying + whatever instead of admitting that there really is one diagnosis that explains both the full set of symptoms and why the cocktail of 8 different neuroactive drugs isn't helping.

The personalities that consider themselves alternate are afraid treatment will entail a literal existential crisis for them, so they steer the person away from psychologists. When they do make it to a doctor, and the doctor tells them they're full of shit and prescribes them brain-melting bipolar drugs, they tend not to go back. It's vastly underreported.

DID is real and serious business, and science has some catching up to do in the area. Psychologists have a long history of misunderstanding mental disorders for quite a long time before starting to figure them out. Just about every mental disorder has had to struggle for recognition. It is not supported by past results to claim that because many psychologists are skeptical of it it doesn't exist.

[know]

Here's where it breaks down...

A significant proportion of people who would define themselves as religious do not sheepishly follow their church. Protestantism was largely founded on the idea that a personal relationship with God can be infinitely more fulfilling. The reason there are so many sects within religions boils down to disagreement, which you wouldn't have if people blindly submitted to authority. Some people might. Most people don't; they self-edit, they pick and choose which bits they want to believe in, and which they don't. That's why you'll never beat a fundamentalist with bible quotes. They are fundamentally committed to the pieces they like. The pieces they don't, they are happy to ignore.

Loudmouths with extremist views get a lot of attention, because loudmouths with extremist views get a lot of attention in any group. Faith is a personal thing, and even within the same church, let alone the same religion, you'll find people who have varying beliefs.

Religion doesn't make sense to you... and that's fine. I get that you've had bad experiences with it. But projecting the bad experiences you've had and assuming that it is the same for everyone else is patronizing. I would expect that most of the people on this board who have faith, have examined that faith and thought extensively about it. I doubt anyone likely to read your posts here will have uncritically absorbed religious beliefs. I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who have, but again, that's not something which is a necessity with the entirety of all religious experience.

Spirituality can be damaging, but it can also be profoundly helpful. Particularly when dealing with death and loss, but also as a gateway into all sorts of deeper ethical dilemmas. Quite aside from that, holy books can often be moving and beautiful. Just saying 'go with your gut' is fine, but there's a lot of times my gut doesn't know what to think, and then I tend to fall back on the philosophy and theology I've read to come up with an answer. I don't even consider myself to be religious or spiritual, but I've found uses in my day to day life for the ideas I've picked up from them along the way.

The Chao Te Ching is a great example of what religion can provide in modern life, IMO. Complicated ideas illustrated in brief through metaphor.

Like Roger keeps saying, there is no way to know whether there's a God or not until we find out the hard way. Continuing to use these tooth fairy/sky daddy strawmen is just... wrongheaded. It can not make sense to you and make sense to other people and both attitudes are equally valid. The difference between calling someone a 'faithfool' and calling someone a 'teabagger' is that the teabagger's positions can be taken apart through rational argument and discourse. You won't know if you're right or the religious individual is until you are dead. You might have strong beliefs on the subject, but hey, so do they. That's the nature of belief.

Thanks for completely conflating faith and spirituality, after I'd gone to great pains to draw the distinction I'm making between the two terms for the purposes of this discussion. Fair enough, disagree on my usage of the ambiguous as hell terms. You choose option b - ignore that and tell me why I'm wrong.

Note: this a discussion about whether or not it is good form to take the piss out of people who believe in invisible sky gnomes. There is no right and wrong.

Even the most ignorant and hateful Southern Baptists I've had the misfortune of interacting with didn't believe in "invisible sky gnomes." Mostly they believed in themselves, they believed they were Right, and that anyone who didn't agree with them 100% was worthless trash. They're problem wasn't that they (allegedly) believed in a higher power, but that they were dicks.

The NSA doesn't particularly care about drug crimes except for use as blackmail to get drug networks to share what they know about the links between that drug network and terrorism / foreign intelligence. Not saying that the NSA hadn't tracked down the Silk Road guy beforehand, but if they did there's some senior NSA officials very pissed at the FBI for arresting one of their best placed informants and turning off the servers they were using to track terrorists with drug habits.

Actually, the NSA mandate specifically states they are to combat the flow of drugs into America.  As a DoD agency, they often perform in conjunction with military anti-drug programs like Plan Colombia and Plan Medina (though on whose side is open to interpretation, given "ex"-NSA assistance to certain cartel leaders).

And as we now know, the NSA was specifically cited as the agency which passed on intelligence to the DEA's Special Operations Division, which then underwent "parallel construction" to conceal the source of said information.

That's what I get for pretending I know things I don't. Appreciate the correction.

V3X's post about dimensions has prompted me to share what I believe is an epiphany I had.  I was thinking about dimensions and how to answer the question "Where is this?" you must add another dimension.  i.e. Where is this point? It is on a line.  Where is this line? it is in a plane.  Where is this plane? etc.  This train of thought has led me to believe that there are infinitely many dimensions.  In many ways, I think of God as the "infinitieth" dimension.

The hidden assumption in that line of thought is that questions imply answers. "Where is X?" implying that there is a Y for X to be in. You might as well ask "What color are God's shoes?" and derive from question that not only the existence of a god but also that a god wears shoes that have a color. Or you could ask "What is not the answer to this question?" to prove that paradoxical entities are real, and paradoxical entities imply that all statements are true and all statements are false at the same time. If there is a statement that is true but not false, or false but not true, that implies that there is at least one question which does not have an answer.

As far as dimensions specifically, you can certainly construct arbitrarily many dimensions, but it's hard to argue that any of those dimensions "exist" in any real sense. The so-called "Real Numbers", for example, are constructed mathematically as groupings of countably infinite dimensional vectors of rational numbers. (Rational numbers are 2-dimensional vectors of integers: <numerator, denominator>). You can make a case that 2, pi, square root of 7, whatever are all real entities in our universe, or at least describe relationships between real entities. But then you have Real Numbers that are noncomputable, which is to say that no algorithm defined with a finite number of symbols could calculate them. I don't mean numbers like pi and square root of 2 - those are irrational and have have infinitely many non-repeating decimal points, but you can write simple algorithms that produce ever-closer approximations of them and then declare that finding the limit of those approximations is equivalent to calculating the number. There are countably-infinite such finite-symbol algorithms, and power-set of countably-infinite Real Numbers, so the definition of Real Numbers allows for numbers that can't come from any algorithm. Such a "noncomputable" number would have to contain infinitely many bits of information, so any real relationship that it described would have infinite physical potential energy. It's hard to make the case that noncomputable numbers are really existing thing in the same way that 1, 2, pi, sqrt(7) are.

you are correct and I concede that my questions presume answers.  I think my assumption is that the universe is "somewhere" - but I'll have to think about it for awhile.

What happens if that "somewhere" is "the universe"?

Q1: "Where is GA?"
A1: "At GA's apartment."
Q2: "Where is GA's apartment?"
A2: "At GA's apartment."
Q3: goto Q2

(edit - not ignoring the parts I haven't quoted, they just have their own responses and I'll get to them separately if I get around to it.)

a) my friend told me he had an idea that there are many more dimensions in reality than the ones that we perceive.  He thought maybe that certain processes in our brains happen in these dimensions that we don't perceive.  He felt that would be a good explanation for why we humans can't seem to develop A.I. - we are only modelling the processes that we can perceive when, perhaps, there are many other processes going on that we just can't measure or perceive.

Does he mean processes that we can't perceive because we haven't figured out how, or processes that are fundamentally impossible to perceive? If it's the first one, let's wait 200 years. It took quite a long time for humans to figure out all the processes involved in powered flight, and the early attempts attempting to mimic bird wings with no understanding of the processes that made bird wings work were hilariously bad and doomed to failure, but we've definitely figured it out now.

Saying something is fundamentally impossible to perceive is equivalent to saying that it fundamentally can't exist. Let X be such an unobservable thing. Let U+X be a universe like ours universe except with one extra X, and U-X be a universe like ours except missing all instances of X. Any differences between U+X and U-X are perceivable effects of X. If there are no perceivable effects of X, than U+X is no different from U-X, and so the U+X is actually the same universes as U-X, which makes X a pretty meaningless thing if +X and -X are the same.

V3X's post about dimensions has prompted me to share what I believe is an epiphany I had.  I was thinking about dimensions and how to answer the question "Where is this?" you must add another dimension.  i.e. Where is this point? It is on a line.  Where is this line? it is in a plane.  Where is this plane? etc.  This train of thought has led me to believe that there are infinitely many dimensions.  In many ways, I think of God as the "infinitieth" dimension.

The hidden assumption in that line of thought is that questions imply answers. "Where is X?" implying that there is a Y for X to be in. You might as well ask "What color are God's shoes?" and derive from question that not only the existence of a god but also that a god wears shoes that have a color. Or you could ask "What is not the answer to this question?" to prove that paradoxical entities are real, and paradoxical entities imply that all statements are true and all statements are false at the same time. If there is a statement that is true but not false, or false but not true, that implies that there is at least one question which does not have an answer.

As far as dimensions specifically, you can certainly construct arbitrarily many dimensions, but it's hard to argue that any of those dimensions "exist" in any real sense. The so-called "Real Numbers", for example, are constructed mathematically as groupings of countably infinite dimensional vectors of rational numbers. (Rational numbers are 2-dimensional vectors of integers: <numerator, denominator>). You can make a case that 2, pi, square root of 7, whatever are all real entities in our universe, or at least describe relationships between real entities. But then you have Real Numbers that are noncomputable, which is to say that no algorithm defined with a finite number of symbols could calculate them. I don't mean numbers like pi and square root of 2 - those are irrational and have have infinitely many non-repeating decimal points, but you can write simple algorithms that produce ever-closer approximations of them and then declare that finding the limit of those approximations is equivalent to calculating the number. There are countably-infinite such finite-symbol algorithms, and power-set of countably-infinite Real Numbers, so the definition of Real Numbers allows for numbers that can't come from any algorithm. Such a "noncomputable" number would have to contain infinitely many bits of information, so any real relationship that it described would have infinite physical potential energy. It's hard to make the case that noncomputable numbers are really existing thing in the same way that 1, 2, pi, sqrt(7) are.

[he posted his Gmail address, the contents of which were later subpoenaed by federal investigators.]

I doubt that the Silk Road arrest was NSA breaking Tor, if only because the national security value of nobody else knowing you can break Tor is higher than the Silk Road guy. The NSA doesn't particularly care about drug crimes except for use as blackmail to get drug networks to share what they know about the links between that drug network and terrorism / foreign intelligence. Not saying that the NSA hadn't tracked down the Silk Road guy beforehand, but if they did there's some senior NSA officials very pissed at the FBI for arresting one of their best placed informants and turning off the servers they were using to track terrorists with drug habits.

I also doubt the breakthrough came through Tor itself - usually the way these things work is that the guy slips up and forgets to encrypt absolutely everything, and they catch that and use it to sidestep the hard encryption stuff.

Here's a snippet of Brian Kreb's post on the arrest:

the information contained on the server seized by investigators indicates that Ulbricht/Dread Pirate Roberts routinely failed to heed his own advice to fellow Silk Road users: Prominent on the Silk Road site were links to tutorials DPR penned which laid out the technologies and techniques that users should adopt if they want to keep off the radar of federal investigators.

"This shows me that the head of the Silk Road wasn't using [encryption] for all his communications, because [the government] wouldn't have all of this information otherwise, unless of course he stored his encryption key on the server that was seized," Weaver said. "Either [the government] got his encryption key off of this server or another server that they were able to access, or he wasn't using encryption at all."

The complaint also suggests that in June 2013, Ulbricht accessed a server used to control the Silk Road site from an Internet cafe that was 500 feet from the hotel he was staying at in San Francisco.


"In other words, he wasn't even using Tor to administer the Silk Road," Weaver said. "Given that, it's amazing that he was able to keep this site running for three years."

Other rookie mistakes also contributed to DPR's identification as Ross William Ulbricht. In 2011, a person using the nickname "Altoid" posted a comment to the Bitcoin Talk forum trying to get users there to visit the Silk Road. Later in the year, Altoid posted again on the Bitcoin Talk forum, this time seeking an "IT pro" in the Bitcoin community to help with Silk Road administration. In that comment, he posted his Gmail address, the contents of which were later subpoenaed by federal investigators.

Finally, DPR tripped himself up when he ordered some fake IDs from an international Silk Road vendor and had them sent to his residence. The fraudulent IDs were intercepted at the border by customs agents working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which paid a visit to the address to which the documents were to be delivered. The agents noted that while Ulbricht refused to answer any questions about the alleged purchase, one of the identity documents was a California driver's license bearing Ulbricht's photo and true date of birth, but with a different name.

The Silk Road case is very interesting. Let me see if I can find the document explaining how they caught the guy. If I remember correctly, he needed an ID document to rent some servers, so he ordered fake ones and someone opened the package in a random(?) search. The IDs had his picture.

If I were the FBI wanting to discover the identities of a lot of people involved in Silk Road, I'd start by buying some fake IDs and tracking the shipment backward to the source. Then I'd intercept all outbound packages, note the fake IDs, send them to the buyer, and alert other agencies to pay special attention to people claiming to have the same name/DOB as people in the fake IDs.

If tracking that was too hard, I'd set up shop on Silk Road selling IDs, and establish myself as the preferred seller in terms of cost (since I'm not trying to make money) and undetectable forgeries (since I can just ask the appropriate agency to print me an actual ID.)