Quote from: pg 00075 Principia Discordia 4th ed.This being the 4th Edition, March 1970, San Francisco; a revision of the 3rd Edition of 500 copies, whomped together in Tampa 1969; which revised the 2nd Edition of 100 copies from Los Angeles 1969; which was a revision of PRINCIPIA DISCORDIA or HOW THE WEST WAS LOST published in New Orleans in 1965 in five copies, which were mostly lost.
Has anyone ever heard what happened to these earlier editions and if any copies survive? La Wik mentions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Discordia)
QuoteIn 1978, a copy of a work from Kerry Thornley titled "THE PRINCIPIA DISCORDIA or HOW THE WEST WAS LOST" was placed in the HSCA JFK collections as document 010857 [1]. A scan of this document has been identified as the first edition and uploaded to 23ae.com. The record identifier can be found by searching for Thornley and Discordian on nara.gov.
However, I can't find it on 23ae. I'm interested, because of historical significance as an artifact, and to compare the first with the latest editions and see if any parts have mutated.
Huh.
First I'm hearing of it. I just assumed those other editions were either lost, or flat out made up.
nara search turns up nothing.
Maybe contact St. Mae and see if she knows anything about the copy alleged to have been uploaded to 23ae?
Sondra London knew Kerry Thornley. Could help?
I've read a scan of the 1st Ed PD (How the West was Lost). It's how I figured out how to resurrect the Official Discordian Document Numbering System. Interested parties can PM me.
2nd/3rd editions have been nearly-if-not-entirely lost.
Rev DrJon Swabey is working on digitizing his 1st edition copy.
you can read a note about it here: http://appendix.23ae.com/
he's dragging his damn feet though!
I wondered if that was legit or if it was just a mythology that Thornley was making up to ramp up the mysticism.
According to most of the early Discordians I've talked to the early editions were basically short runs and passed out to friends. There weren't any 'published' editions (in the traditional sense of the word) until the later editions. There is a scanned version of the first ed kicking around. Chunks of it were put on Scribd by Rev. St Syn: http://www.scribd.com/doc/27611396/Principia-Discordia-1st-Edition
Having messed around a little bit with self-publication, I can't imagine there not being some early versions before the 4e we all know and love was completed.
Quote from: Cramulus on February 02, 2012, 01:12:53 PM
Rev DrJon Swabey is working on digitizing his 1st edition copy.
you can read a note about it here: http://appendix.23ae.com/
he's dragging his damn feet though!
Dude, it should only take about 20 minutes to scan the damn thing.
Never mind, I see now that it had some legibility issues so it's not just scanning, but also deciphering it. I'd still like to see straight-up scans of the original though.
I would also like to face-kick whoever stole my yellow edition.
Thanks everybody. I'm glad there's still at least one copy around.
I shot swabey a note to reminding him to get on it!
Quote from: Nigel on February 02, 2012, 04:06:07 PM
Never mind, I see now that it had some legibility issues so it's not just scanning, but also deciphering it. I'd still like to see straight-up scans of the original though.
I would also like to face-kick whoever stole my yellow edition.
Are we talking about the 1st edition? It's been scanned and transcribed for a long time already. It's just that he hit a snag with copyright or something or other because it doesn't say it's Kopyleft and therefore belongs to the Thornley estate, or something:
http://appendix.23ae.com/pd1/after.html
The scanned+transcribed PD1 was hosted there
for quite a while before he decided to pull the links.
from DrJon Swabey-----
QuoteWhen I have any further knowledge, I'll share it. I'm waiting to hear, myself, but the principal folks have, as I understand it, been snowed under of late.
There is also a low-resolution copy of the third edition floating around. It's not readable, but it does sort of prove it exists/existed.
Could attempts be made to make it reasonably legible? Cuz that would be kinda cool considering how different the first edition seems to be from the fourth.
Sample page:
http://imgur.com/e3qTs
That's the highest resolution I have. I think this is the file I have it from: www.23ae.com/files/pd3rd.zip
So either there is a really cool technique I don't know if, someone has better scans, or no, we can't read much from it.
Will check when i get home (approx hour and forty)
Quote from: Billy the Twid on February 02, 2012, 10:36:39 PM
Could attempts be made to make it reasonably legible? Cuz that would be kinda cool considering how different the first edition seems to be from the fourth.
Interesting idea. The parts using a regular font (say, from a typewriter) should technically be able to be deciphered. Computer OCR trained on very noisy very low-res (say, 6x3 pixels) character images are actually able to attain way higher accuracy than a human can, as long as the training data is of the same font and noise-profile as the target data.
(OT: You can even decipher those screenshots where sensitive data has been blurred out. Which is why you should always just paint a black square over it, to actually destroy the data (make sure no ascenders or descenders stick out, and that the length of the square is a bit longer than the word you're blotting out). This is because, if you know the font is Verdana, you can just reproduce the blur and see which blurred letters match up. To a human a blurred "a" might look like an indistinguishable cloud, but it is slightly different than a blurred "b". )
It won't be easy, but it might be possible.
http://i.imgur.com/e3qTs.jpg
... well! :lol: One thing, those spotty dotty letters look about the same quality as the OCR/noise paper I read claimed to be able to attain about 70% correct recognition rate for. Which is better than nothing.
Problem is that they worked with pre-segmented characters, so you'd need an additional algorithm to cut up the image into tiny chunks of pixels each containing one character. Fortunately a typewriter is monospaced (each letter is the same width), which would help with that.
Then, you need a trainingset with labeled data (examples of blotchy character images labeled with what letter they are). Which is
also possible, because squinting at the text, you can see it's at least partly the same content as the PD, so we could guess quite a few things.
Then, dump that data into a machine learning algorithm and see what rolls out. This is actually the easy part, as always in a ML task, preparing the training and target data is the most work.
I'm going to have to think about this for a bit. It's one thing that it's theoretically possible, it's another question if such a project is the size of a few afternoons or a PHD thesis :P
I love the idea that we may have to interpret the 1st edition PD for ourselves
I feel like a Talmudic scholar with a boner.
"BATTLE HYMN OF THE ERISTOCRACY was written by Lord Omar" starts the second to last paragraph of the first column. Page of credits?
Quote from: Cramulus on February 02, 2012, 11:07:16 PM
I love the idea that we may have to interpret the 1st edition PD for ourselves
I feel like a Talmudic scholar with a boner.
You mean the 3rd edition?
Cause the 1st is legible, it's just hidden.
Not sure why this hasn't been linked to yet: http://www.scribd.com/doc/27611396/Principia-Discordia-1st-Edition
Quote from: el sjaako on February 02, 2012, 10:45:16 PM
Sample page:
http://imgur.com/e3qTs
That's the highest resolution I have. I think this is the file I have it from: www.23ae.com/files/pd3rd.zip
So either there is a really cool technique I don't know if, someone has better scans, or no, we can't read much from it.
I see. If Trip can find a way to clean it up, that would be pretty cool.
Quote from: el sjaako on February 02, 2012, 11:52:51 PM
Not sure why this hasn't been linked to yet: http://www.scribd.com/doc/27611396/Principia-Discordia-1st-Edition
That's a really excellent collection. There's some of the 1st Ed PD in there (can't be sure as I just scanned through quickly and would have to compare side-by-side), but there's also quite a lot of "lost" single page flyers and letters (with ODD#s!!!!!!! I wonder if they're version 1 or version 2 ODD#s...).
Nice!
Quote from: Billy the Twid on February 03, 2012, 01:28:33 AM
I see. If Trip can find a way to clean it up, that would be pretty cool.
Don't hold your breath, really :)
Studying the images, however, one thing I wonder about is the colours. There's this sort of "rainbow shine" going through the text, anyone else notice this?
It sort of reminds me of the "ClearType" font rendering on LCD screens. Dunno if you ever heard of it, but as you know pixels on an LCD screen are in fact tiny red, green and blue dots next to eachother. So they figured fonts are usually one colour anyway, we could increase the horizontal resolution of the screen threefold by treating these R, G and B dots as separate pixels. So they did and lo, fonts appeared to be sharper and crisper. But if you look reaaaaally close, or take a screenshot and zoom in, you can see a sort of rainbow glitter colouring at the edges of diagonal lines and curves.
The scanned images sort of look like that, except rotated 90 degrees (so the RGB dots are vertically above eachother).
See for example this zoomed part of page 12:
(http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/1634/012xoxxxx.png)
You can see part of the text is underlined with a ruler, but the lines are all wonky rainbow coloured. That's because the line is not exactly horizontal and therefore crosses through the separate RGB components, slowly fading one into the next, creating a rainbow-like colours.
If this hypothesis is right, I should be able to separate the RGB components and triple the vertical resolution. ... Just need to figure out which of the six permutations of RGB, RBG, GRB, GBR, BRG, BGR "fits".
... nope tried it. IF this is what's causing the rainbow artifacts, the order is *probably* RGB, but there's other crap going on such as that the blue channel keeps fucking up, making stripes, probably because it's been colour corrected or something. And GIMP, while it's nice that it *can* do it, doesn't make it that easy to quickly switch back and forth between hypotheses.
Question, anyone, any idea what could be causing these rainbow artifacts? Another possibility could be chromatic lens aberration, but I dunno if you'd get that with paper text like this and afaik it looks slightly different than what we see here. Ideas?
Quote from: el sjaako on February 02, 2012, 11:52:51 PM
Not sure why this hasn't been linked to yet: http://www.scribd.com/doc/27611396/Principia-Discordia-1st-Edition
fucking SWEEET
sometimes I love working at a publishing office. I made this in about 3 minutes:
(https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-RgE0dzYg_8w/TywF7hVmwHI/AAAAAAAACjg/x1Y416mfOss/s0-d/IMAG0277.jpg)
(https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-IVglQosr35U/Tyvup5shdHI/AAAAAAAACi8/KWov62BMFuY/s0-d/IMAG0276.jpg)
my very own 1st edition PD!
Quote from: Cramulus on February 03, 2012, 02:43:17 PM
Quote from: el sjaako on February 02, 2012, 11:52:51 PM
Not sure why this hasn't been linked to yet: http://www.scribd.com/doc/27611396/Principia-Discordia-1st-Edition
fucking SWEEET
sometimes I love working at a publishing office. I made this in about 3 minutes:
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-RgE0dzYg_8w/TywF7hVmwHI/AAAAAAAACjg/x1Y416mfOss/s0-d/IMAG0277.jpg
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-IVglQosr35U/Tyvup5shdHI/AAAAAAAACi8/KWov62BMFuY/s0-d/IMAG0276.jpg
my very own 1st edition PD!
Cram.
DO WANT.
Actually, I like your plain stapled version better than any more fancy printing might give.
I have never before heard of The Eristesque Principle before, especially the first one. It is not in our current edition of the PD, at least not by name.
QuoteThe Eristesque Principle: is, essentially, that everything that claims to be ordered is in fact only superficially ordered, and imperfectly at that. In other words, even the greatest orderers of all humanity, The Scientists, find that every time they get some kind of good scheme going some damn thing or another doesn't fit and every word of the "knowledge" of science must be prefaced with the understanding that it might all be scrapped if the wrong evidence pops up tomorrow.Furthermore, every scientist today (using "scientist"narrowly) is spending the bulk of his time trying to figure out just what to do with all the bits of information that he already has that even now don't fit the scheme. Anyway, it is all well and good because the order is not really there in the first place--only primal chaos; it is we that give birth to order, imposed on chaos, so that we may utilize our environment and Lead A Good Life. That is, ordering is [essentially] a Human thing and also in fact, is essential to humans.
This idea that order is essentially Chaos and that disorder is equal to Chaos is different from the later incarnations, where order and disorder are both manifestations of Chaos.
One story for the newbies, one for the "initiates to the hidden knowledge". :evil:
Really, I think that Greg Hill developed the line of thought you quoted into a couple of different places in the "modern" Principia, expecting the reader to put it back together.
It feels like that "grew up" into the Psychometaphysics section from 4e. The stuff about ordering and scientists trying to figure out a scheme to describe it all sounds a hell of a lot like an early draft of the grids concept.
Quote from: Telarus on February 04, 2012, 05:42:25 AM
One story for the newbies, one for the "initiates to the hidden knowledge". :evil:
Really, I think that Greg Hill developed the line of thought you quoted into a couple of different places in the "modern" Principia, expecting the reader to put it back together.
Can you back that up?
It sounds quite a bit like RAW took this early principle and expanded on it in his essay "Never Whistle While You're Pissing":
http://surge.ods.org/idle_other/whistle.htm
Quote from: Bebek Sincap Ratatosk on February 05, 2012, 10:12:44 AM
It sounds quite a bit like RAW took this early principle and expanded on it in his essay "Never Whistle While You're Pissing":
http://surge.ods.org/idle_other/whistle.htm
Reminds me of Naming Nature (http://www.amazon.com/Naming-Nature-Between-Instinct-Science/dp/0393061973), and the authors difficulty with scientific classification not fitting groups of species into traditional gestalt. She laments that there is no such thing as "Fish" anymore, at least as a single taxonomic group, because we understand that such a group would not include all the descendents. So there are the Condrichthyes, the Actinopterygii, the Coelocanths, and the Dipnoi, but there is no group Pisces, no Fish group. The four groups before are separate lineages. that branch before the tetrapods.
And then there are the Burgess Shale Cambrian fauna. Things like Hallucigenia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucigenia), Opabinia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opabinia), and Anomalocaris (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalocaris) do not easily fit into modern phyla. "Neither fish nor fowl".