I think the essential thing to understand is that people have different abilities and needs. No category is quite adequate. I have trouble with speech, but unlike your son, apparently, I have almost no "mind's eye" at all, and a terrible memory for anything that I can't logically relate to other facts or feel in a musical way. I don't think that necessarily means that he's more or less genuinely Asperger's than I am. One of my three children has trouble with speech also, and is overly affectionate with strangers by most people's standards. He is very different from me in a lot of equally significant ways. Some people have characterized my social skills as Asperger's like, but I think the main difference is I have less of a veneer of pretense over everything. I actually don't think I'm lacking in social skills or social perceptiveness at all, relatively speaking. I think that slick, salesman types have just been more successful at getting their particular strengths and characteristics defined as the norm. (Though the 'sociopath' category is a win for my team I suppose.) One of my other children has freakishly good language and social skills: he was able to BS comfortably with adults as if he were a peer when he was 2. I don't think this is a syndrome either though, just something he's really good at, and strengths almost always come with other weaknesses and tradeoffs. He's smart, but his 'Asperger's-like brother is smarter in some ways, and that intelligence has a deep connection to his speech difficulty, in my opinion. He finds it harder to put things into words in part because he's able to think in ways that don't map neatly into a string of grammatical concepts. People are complicated machines, and in everyone a lot of small pieces are broken or don't work well, and other interrelated pieces that may be genius. It just may or may not be recognized depending on how externally obvious those pieces are.

You've added an additional step that is possible with your mom or your friend but quite a bit more difficult with the subconscious part of your mind. They communicate with the test maker without you being aware of what was said. Take that communication between them and the test maker away, and the test fails for your mom or friend. Yet even without that you still must have some way of determining that your conversations with them are not just noise.

With this kind of test, conversations with your mom or your best friend, which I hope are not "mere noise", would almost certainly fail to demonstrate meaningful content.

People who waffle new-agey platitudes may or may not understand much of anything, and I wouldn't defer to their judgment in any case.

But if you want to know what you're talking about when calling bullshit, you need an adequate understanding of the ostensibly "unmeasurable subjective experiences" in question. How unmeasurable and subjective are they really? Are they in agreement with the remarkably successful model commonly thought of as "laws of physics", or do they contradict it, or do they fall outside of that scope? You're guessing that your knowledge is adequate to make a reasonably informed judgment that the new-agey claims are all bullshit. My assertion, based on my experience with a subject I've devoted much of my life to studying, is that your knowledge is not adequate.

You're right that the new-agey claims are mostly bullshit. But there's stuff that's true and that can be understood to matter mixed in with the bullshit. If you don't want to hassle with trying to separate the two, and just want to ignore all of it, that's a reasonable stance in my view. Not everyone has time for this stuff. But then if you make strong assertions about other people's beliefs and experiences, very often you'll just be wrong.

Many scientific subjects require a lot of effort to understand to more than a superficial degree also. The physics of physics journalism, for instance, or even undergraduate physics, is typically a sketchy caricature of real physics. Most of what seems "counter-intuitive" to people about 20th century physics seems that way because its described in a way that's actually wrong. Understanding dreaming doesn't require the same type of kind of logical rigor as physics, and the abstractions are different, but takes a lot of work to sort out what's real from what's not.

When I first had astral projection experiences in the mid 90's, I messed around with it, figured out what I was doing with my senses, and dismissed it as meaningless. It took me ten years to discover that there was more going on than the more superficial aspects of the experience, even though I was mostly right about the part that I thought I understood. And if I'd put less effort into it, or my luck had been a bit different, I never would have figured that out. I'm not claiming intellectual superiority, I'm just sharing what I can see from where I am now, that if you put a fair degree of effort into understanding dreaming, you find that there's a lot there that's not what it seemed at the outset. I'm not even expecting you to take my word for it: I don't think that putting that kind of faith in other people's claims is a good idea. But I think if you relax your judgment a little bit, leaving the door open a little wider to the possibility that people like myself are not just blowing smoke, then you'll be 'forcing assumptions' a bit less yourself.

I can do that if you tell me what sort of information you would regard as evidence, provided of course that you haven't decided the outcome already.

I don't claim though that there is signal in the noise of your dreams, or that dream recall is worthwhile for you personally. Some people dream vividly for much of their time asleep, and its an important part of their problem solving process. Other people do more of the same kind of thinking while awake, or they don't do much of it at all. Personally I don't have much of a "mind's eye" while awake: my visual imagination is dominated by processing sensory information, and my intuition is remarkably restricted by my conscious thought process. I dream vividly every night though, and get insights that don't come as easily while awake.

If you're skeptical primarily on the grounds that my experience is different than yours, and on the belief that your experience is a more reliable measure of my activities than my experience is, then I'm not going to convince you.

Similarly, I probably won't be able to convince you if you are one of those people who insist that peer reviewed studies are the only valid evidence, as if everything under the sun has already been studied to conclusion. Or as if it was impossible to use objective evidence to inform one's understanding before there were panels of credentialed experts for everything.

But if you're as free-thinking as your sig seems to imply, then I think it shouldn't be a problem.

It is difficult to demonstrate empirically because there are many uncontrolled variables. And the methodologies that have been developed for other applications such as clinical trials aren't ideally suited here. By way of analogy, progress in physics in the 19th and 20th centuries required development of statistical tools to deal with measurement uncertainty. Here there's uncertainty also, but its of a different type, where the parameters of the study itself are difficult to control. It is possible to get real, objective information, but difficult to do it in a way that will attract funding, will be easy for other researchers to reproduce, and will be understood by people who are quick to misapply assumptions gained in other fields.

There are a wide variety of motives for lucid dreaming, but its often possible to become aware of things about yourself and the way your mind works that are difficult or impossible to discover in a normal waking state. You can have more conscious access to processes that are typically subconscious for instance. I agree that this is not of interest or benefit for everyone, but it is for some people.

Much of what a person can experience while lucid dreaming is difficult to interpret and understand, and people tend to describe things to themselves in a way that may not be very accurate or objective. For example, many people believe they interact with some kind of exotic 'astral matter', but I've had those same experiences and I'm not convinced that idea is valid. One reads a lot of bullshit on these topics, both from enthusiasts and skeptics. Its a very poorly understood subject area, maybe comparable to the study of electromagnetics in the middle ages. Sorting out the reality from the bullshit will take a lot of time and effort.

I think you're a smart guy Hatta, one of the best /. contributors. But I think you're a bit out of your element here, like someone who has merely used a computer forming strong opinions about kernel development. It would take many hours of discussion with someone who studies dreaming as a serious hobby before you even understand what the major issues are and how words are being used. I'm not suggesting that you didn't ask good questions, just that you're not going to get good answers to them unless you have a fair amount of time and interest to explore those questions and consider the responses with a critical but open mind.

Responding as if you're serious....This supposes that the soul is made out of some kind of exotic matter that exists where your body is and nowhere else. I think it is not localized like that, but exists everywhere, and influences and is influenced by your body as determined by the characteristics of your body. I also seems likely to me that mortality and immortality are ideas that only make sense when applied to bodies, not to souls. It would be immortal if it possessed a state that exists independent of bodies. It would be mortal if it possessed a state dependent on a particular body or population of bodies.

I carried on a mock EFP on a flight to L.A. The TSA didn't even open the bag. I was kind of appalled, because there was a lot of sharp steel in it even though there was no explosive. But then on my return trip they took my tiny little drill bits, because drill bits are forbidden.

Another time I tried to carry on a big knife by accident, but they found it. I would guess most of the confiscated guns are like that. Sam Kinison even had a routine about this.

I think its all bullshit, especially the millimeter wave stuff, its just a big money making scheme for L3 and their corrupt government patrons. If someone wanted to kill a bunch of people at an airport, the best place would be the queue at the security check. If I had my way we would fly unmolested and accept the risk. Locking the cockpit doors solves most of the problem, and most of the rest of it solved by having a population with some sense of honor, willing to fight back instead of just cowering and waiting to die. My wishful thinking isn't going to change the culture though.

Thanks that's interesting.

Though however large the effect is, I think it has to reduce the sea level by significantly less than the amount that's it raised by the added water.

I completely agree. As I saw it, the arguments about the Iraq and Afghan wars that were in the press during the Bush administration could be mostly understood as a part of the turf war between the pentagon and the state department.

Though drones don't cost that much, there are other billion dollar aircraft.

After Obama won in 2008, his administration's spending plans had large increasing drone spending before he even took office.

The revolving door is another big part of how the system work: retiring colonels have lucrative employment deals lined up with the contractors before they award the contracts. And of course private stock offerings are another mechanism for congressmen. I've been out of the industry for a few years now, and it still makes my blood boil.

You're joking? Or assuming that the compression of Greenland is mainly water being squeezed out and not rock being compressed?

I think you're overestimating the manipulative conspiracy side of it. People aren't apathetic because they're being expertly played by the elite. They're apathetic because underneath the veneer of sociability they're actually selfish assholes who would themselves abuse power if they had it.

Furthermore, the minority who would do something to change this is actually a lot smaller than it might appear. Most of the people who bitch about eroding freedoms are posturing to themselves and to others, mad about the system because they don't feel its working enough to their own advantage, which they've convinced themselves is what they deserve. Give them more power and they almost always sell out. Put them in a situation where doing the right thing requires an actual personal sacrifice, which it usually does, and they won't make it.

I worked in the surveillance industry for several years. I fought it the best I could when I was in it, without much effect, then got a chance to get out and took it. The price I paid is I haven't been able to find work within a thousand miles of where my family lives, so for the past 5 years my kids have been growing up without me. They need a dad and they'll never get that back. As of a few months ago we're closer now, 450 miles, so at least I can visit a lot of weekends. And I realize that my story is a lot less difficult than what many other people have to deal with in their lives. But it still pisses me off that the armchair idealists don't stand up for their ideals a little better. If they did things would be a lot easier for the few who do.

I think he should be punished. But what burns me up is all the corrupt colonels and signals intelligence contractor execs that I've known who are still stealing and getting people killed with impunity, while Manning gets 35 years for trying in a flawed way to do the right thing. The system is rewarding the wrong people. When someone like Sandy Berger gets a $50K fine and a short suspension of his clearance for stealing documents for the purpose of destroying evidence, Manning should not get 35 years for what he did. A few years is enough.

Also, the US has way to many "serious diplomatic negotiations" that require duplicity rather than openness. Its wrong, and it all blows back eventually.

From my standpoint the degree of dishonesty hasn't increased, events have just made it a bit more obvious to many of us than it has been at other times in the past.

People in the US were crowing about freedom back when blacks were still getting lynched for seeking basic civil rights. I could go on with numerous other examples, from every period. The pretexts for abuse are more obviously lies at some times than at others, but always they are largely pretexts.

I'm not saying that the US is worse than other countries, and its a lot better than a great many. But there has been a persistent fascist streak from the beginning.