Reported on http://novysan.com/magic and confirmed here: http://www.media.mit.edu/about/academics/class-schedule
'When Aleister Crowley defined magic as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will,” he might as easily have been describing technology. In fact, “magic” is still the word we use to encompass the wonders of a new technology before it becomes ubiquitous. '
Course Description
"With a focus on the creation of functional prototypes and practicing real magical crafts, this class combines theatrical illusion, game design, sleight of hand, machine learning, camouflage, and neuroscience to explore how ideas from ancient magic and modern stage illusion can inform cutting edge technology. Students will learn techniques to improve the presentation, display, and interface of their projects as well as gaining a deeper understanding of the cultural traditions that shape user expectations of technology. Topics will include: Stage Illusion as Information Display, The Neuroscience of Misdirection, Magical Warfare: Camouflage and Deception, Magic Items and the Internet of Things, Computational Demonology, Ritual Magick as User Experience Design. Guest lecturers and representatives of Member companies will contribute to select project critiques. Requires regular reading, discussion, practicing magic tricks, design exercises, a midterm project and final project."
Uncle Al would have been so proud.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by c0lo on Friday February 06 2015, @01:38PM
A few years later (ok, maybe a bit more than a few) a magazine is just a broken iPad [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06 2015, @03:29PM
It's not on the level of Potter until it's bendable and cheap enough to be disposable ;)
(Score: 5, Funny) by Geezer on Friday February 06 2015, @01:39PM
A common engineering term has long been used to explain things to the mathematically-challenged: PFM (Pure Fucking Magic).
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday February 06 2015, @11:24PM
That's inaccurate, though. Pure Fucking Magic is known as tantra.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06 2015, @01:59PM
technopagan [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06 2015, @02:13PM
In the past, objects were charged with magical energy. Today, we charge our smartphones with electrical energy. What's the fundamental difference? Both are forces that the majority of people does not really understand, and which give additional powers to those who manage to control them.
Imagine a middle-ages person entering the modern world. It would look all magic to that person. Well, actually, you don't really have to imagine that yourself, because it has already been done for you [wikipedia.org] except that the world back then was still decidedly less "magic" than the world today.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06 2015, @02:23PM
In the past, objects were charged with magical energy. Today, we charge our smartphones with electrical energy. What's the fundamental difference? Both are forces that the majority of people does not really understand, and which give additional powers to those who manage to control them.
Only one actually exists, though.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06 2015, @02:28PM
One of them works, one of them doesn't.
Anybody can understand electronics with a little book learning. Computing, biotechnology, 3d printing etc are dropping cost and allowing the commoner to control means of production or conduct science. Learning magic, faith healing, herbology, illusionism, mysticism, etc. is just learning to be a fraud. It doesn't give you power over nature that technology can. In the absence of other people (marks, victims, cult followers, adherents, subordinates), magic is useless.
(Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Friday February 06 2015, @02:49PM
I'm sorry, but herbology is not a fraud. If you think it is, go drink some hemlock juice: if herbology is a fraud, then nothing wrong will happen to you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06 2015, @02:56PM
I'm talking about the alternative medicine variety.
Don't bother giving me examples of folk knowledge. If it's not scientifically proven, then it needs to be tested for effectiveness or discarded.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Friday February 06 2015, @03:09PM
You mean the same type of tests like the ones behind the "sugar-good-fat-bad" [soylentnews.org]?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06 2015, @03:15PM
omg the human body is complicated.
omg science got it wrong.
Scientific understand is supposed to change over time. It has a process in place to do that, called the scientific method. Alternative medicine doesn't have that. At best it operates at the "eat this, it doesn't kill you and you might get better" level of observation. Not a substitute for control groups and double blind studies
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday February 06 2015, @03:32PM
And what's wrong with that? I mean, look, I'm not expecting miracle healing from plants, but I won't dismiss the observation that "coffee causes diuresis" even if it wasn't subject of a double blind study. As I also know (and using it whenever I need) that peppermint leaves infusion (mint tea) will stop most cases of diarrhea, except the cases of dysentery - so what's wrong with that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06 2015, @03:49PM
It's outdated and defunct. It needs to be put back in the ground.
The spread of alternative medicine and associated unscientific beliefs has led to:
a boom in loosely regulated and misleading herbal supplements [washingtonpost.com], worth billions to snake oil salesmen [wikipedia.org]
vaccine denialism [wikipedia.org] becoming a primary election issue [npr.org], weakening herd immunity, and spreading preventable illnesses [npr.org]
the death of a tech billionaire/cult leader [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday February 06 2015, @03:59PM
Yeeah, it's like heaps of fraudsters parting fools of their money caused mint tea to suddenly lose its effect, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday February 06 2015, @06:45PM
Yeah, you guys are all correct in my book. There's two different sides to herbs, the B.S. and the solid proven science.
I've got an entire cabinet in my kitchen full of nothing but herbal teas. I've got herbs for everything -- energy, sleep aids, stuff to focus, stuff to relax, stuff for acid reflux or upset stomach, stuff for general health...but I'm not getting this information off of Master Chang's Ancient Wisdom Website. I check WebMD, I check the Mayo Clinic, and I check Wikipedia. Often these do provide similar information though -- Wikipedia will say 'it has a lot of caffeine'; the traditional herbalist text might say 'it energizes your spirit'. That's pretty much the same fact in different words. I don't look at herbs in terms of chi and aura and all that garbage; I look at them in terms of compounds that expand or constrict blood vessels, or what vitamins and minerals they contain, or antihistamines or whatever.
Remember that this "ancient wisdom" crap was gathered through a very similar process to modern science. They didn't have the accuracy we do because they don't have the equipment we do. And they made plenty of mistakes. But ultimately they were creating a hypothesis, conducting an experiment, and recording the results. So it's not really surprising that they had many of the same observations we find today. And it's likely we would be making far more scientifically rigorous statements about these plants if it was possible to patent them...you can't really say it's wrong if it hasn't been studied; you can only say it's inconclusive.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Friday February 06 2015, @06:14PM
I won't dismiss the observation that "coffee causes diuresis" even if it wasn't subject of a double blind study.
That's an interesting example to choose, as that research has been done, and largely disproves the theory. Here's a quote from Medicinenet: [medicinenet.com]
Back in 1928, caffeine was shown to have no significant impact on urinary output. Subsequent studies have shown that caffeine-containing beverages did not impact urinary output any differently than other beverages. Based on this, the Institute of Medicine recommends that "unless additional evidence becomes available indicating cumulative total water deficits in individuals with habitual intakes of significant amounts of caffeine, caffeinated beverages appear to contribute to the daily total water intake similar to that contributed by noncaffeinated beverages."
tl;dr version: drinking an equal amount of water increases urination by the same amount as the coffee. That's not diuresis, that's just maintaining water balance.
There's nothing wrong with taking advantage of the true effects the herbs can have. In the immortal words of Josh Billings, however, "It ain't ignorance causes so much trouble; it's folks knowing so much that ain't so."
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday February 06 2015, @07:10PM
Interesting...I hadn't heard this and it doesn't match my own experience so I looked around a bit more...
The Mayo Clinic says you're right that it's not dehydrating -- but they say you're wrong about it not being a diuretic. I presume that would mean it does increases the immediate urge to urinate, but not the overall volume produced:
http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/expert-answers/caffeinated-drinks/faq-20057965 [mayoclinic.org]
It also seems that most people will very quickly develop a tolerance, and that the effect only occurs at doses slightly higher than one (small) cup of coffee. I'm a bit confused where they get 250-300mg as 2-3 cups of coffee here though -- I've always heard 8oz black coffee was 200mg, so that would be 1-1.5 cups...or a medium from your favorite coffeehouse. Either way though, at most it takes one "large coffee" to reach these effects:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19774754 [nih.gov]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday February 06 2015, @10:52PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday February 06 2015, @10:55PM
FWIW, coffee has a lot more in it than caffeine. It is also a diuretic, but it additionally contains a lot of water, so I wouldn't want to speculate on what the net effect was. Are you going to claim that beer isn't a diuretic because you don't quickly excrete as much liquid as you drink? I *would* speculate that chewing coffee beans would result in net loss of water..along with many other effects, some rather undesirable.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Mr. Slippery on Friday February 06 2015, @04:33PM
And while we wait around for someone to have the motivation and resources to adequately test a given herbal remedy or other treatment that has been around long enough that we can at least recognize it as mostly safe while we still wonder about its effectiveness...what shall we do?
If you're going to insist on high quality placebo controlled studies before using a medical treatment, very few meet the bill. At the "gold standard", surgery is right out, all placebo ("sham surgery") controlled studies have found the procedure under study to be ineffective. I am not saying surgery is ineffective, I am commenting on the process of gathering and processing evidence, that if you judged it by the same standards that many so-called "skeptics" demand of CAM treatments it would fail.
Many drugs, once you eliminate cherry-picking by their makers, have little evidence of effectiveness.
Most medicine as it is actually practiced, is folklore in white coats.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06 2015, @03:07PM
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday February 06 2015, @03:14PM
And exactly how this proves herbal medicine is a fraud?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06 2015, @03:23PM
Wrong question.
Herbal/alternative/traditional/tribal/chinese/fake medicine doesn't try to explain how it works.
You managed to find some magic bark [wikipedia.org] that makes your headache go away. But you don't know about the side effects or long term effects.
Mixing your magic ingredients together can also cause bad magic:
Good luck figuring that out before modern medicine.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday February 06 2015, @03:47PM
Mate, look, I don't preach "forget modern medicine" - I only say that herbalism is not a fraud.
Regarding side effects and long term exposure, don't delude yourself in thinking modern medicine is immune [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Friday February 06 2015, @04:59PM
That's not true. Modern herbalists are actually expected to have some knowledge of chemistry, and they know perfectly well why the bark works.
The biggest problem with chinese medicine is precisely that it does try to explain why it works, and the theory is incompatible with modern western A&P. Acupuncture still works shockingly well, however, and this is why you now see folks coming up with different theories to underlay the same clinical practice - dry needling.
And when you think about shamanistic/animistic medicine you should understand that in many cases with western medicine the effect of the 'real' medicine is actually less than the placebos contribution. The placebo affect can be incredibly powerful, and the most important skill for getting the most out of it is drama - not medicine. Shamans are typically better actors than doctors are. If a shaman also has a few 'real' tricks, like knowing which herbs produce useful drugs, and the symptoms for a few common ailments along with simple treatments for them, the patients might well derive significant benefit from the treatments.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday February 06 2015, @04:24PM
1. Faith healing can work, thanks to the placebo effect. Sure, it's nowhere near as good as modern medicine, but if you're out of other options why not give it a whirl? If you're dying of ebola, you really have nothing to lose by trying it out.
2. Herbology definitely can work, because some of the herbs in question have chemicals with desired and consistent effects. For a simple and well-known example, camomile will almost definitely make you drowsy which will help insomniacs, while black tea will do the opposite which helps narcleptics.
3. Mysticism has been shown in several studies to have definite effects on brain development. For example, they've done studies on Buddhist monks and determined that their brains are significantly different, especially while they're meditating, compared with the average person (whether or not they attempt to meditate).
I get that you want to take the purely scientific viewpoint here, but the fact is that the purely scientific viewpoint has more evidence for the ideas you're dismissing out of hand than most pro-science folks would care to admit.
There's also a significant difference between the practitioners of all this stuff that believe it actually works, and the frauds and quacks who fake it (e.g. Peter Popoff). One of the biggest differences is that the frauds are usually looking for significant amounts of money in exchange and claim all kinds of secret wisdom that they can't tell you about, while the real guys often are willing to work at cost or close to it and are happy to explain what they know to anyone who asks.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06 2015, @05:11PM
Herbology is not a fraud. It's one of the areas where pharmaceutical companies go to look for new stuff to patent. It's not the main area because it's tricky- not all of it works, or not all of it works if you don't know the details (which, when, where, how to prepare etc):
http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/health-and-human-body/human-body/medicines-in-nature/ [nationalgeographic.com]
Gomes told me how, a year earlier, he had visited a healer in rural West Bengal whose plant successfully countered cobra and viper poison. The healer's recipe had come from his grandfather to his father to him.
Gomes took the healer's plant to his laboratory to test on rats. He prepared a dosage of snake venom that he could predict would kill 50 percent of the animals. He administered it by injection, and 50 percent of the rats died. Next, he gave the same dosage to another group of rats, then fed them an extract of the roots. None of the rats died.
Gomes returned for more of the plants, but the healer had grown suspicious and refused to provide any more.
So Gomes had a botanist examine what remained of the first batch of plants. Together they went to rural West Bengal, collected the same plant, and again tried the experiment. The new plants did nothing to neutralize the venom. Just as Rasoanaivo had found in his work with anticancer medicines, the chemical composition of plants is complicated. Even with all their modern technology scientists do not know which plants to pick or when to pick them or whether traditional healers might have added other herbal or nonherbal ingredients to the cure.
Gomes's story was another illustration of why pharmaceutical companies spend an insignificant amount of their research money on natural products and why they focus most of their resources on genetic research and synthetic drug design: Understand the pathological process that causes disease, and design a molecule that fixes it.
Regarding faith healing, the placebo effect is real. It doesn't work for everything, but it can be effective and useful in some cases. It can even work when people know it, so perhaps we can skip the lying and fraud bit: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/placebos-work-even-when-you-know-10-12-23/ [scientificamerican.com]
I'm wondering whether some of those placebos are really inert though. Given the amount of people addicted to sugar and the effect is has, it seems to me a sugar pill isn't inert enough to use as a placebo. But many studies seem to use sugar pills.
See also: http://archive.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all [wired.com]
Not surprisingly, the health of those in the third group improved most. In fact, just by participating in the trial, volunteers in this high-interaction group got as much relief as did people taking the two leading prescription drugs for IBS. And the benefits of their bogus treatment persisted for weeks afterward, contrary to the belief—widespread in the pharmaceutical industry—that the placebo response is short-lived.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06 2015, @09:45PM
Do you know, . . . the secret of steel?
(Score: 1) by NickFortune on Friday February 06 2015, @04:41PM
Well for one thing, smartphones would seem to be far easier to mass produce. They're also based on principles that are far easier to demonstrate under laboratory conditions. And it's hard to say for sure without some equivalent magical device to test), but I suspect they're a lot easier to use for someone unskilled in the underlying theory.
It's tempting to speculate that smartphones might be also more reliable ... but given the problems I have sending a text from work, that may be a bit of a stretch.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06 2015, @02:47PM
Stage illusion: holography user interface and more.
The neuroscience of misdirection is an endless source of fun [wikipedia.org] and profit [wikipedia.org]. The human mind is very susceptible to trickery.
The Internet of Things and wearable technology would sub in for your enchanted items.
Camouflage is cutting edge science. See metamaterials [wikipedia.org]. The "invisibility cloak" gets more advanced every year.
Computational demonology... AI? How about a hybrot?
Ritual magick/user experience design: sounds like GUI design or the premium product experience [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Friday February 06 2015, @03:58PM
Yes. They will find EXACTLY the candidates that the CIA is hoping to attract, track and recruit, to help manage perception through deceit and propaganda - with methods appropriate developed for the second-quarter of this century
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06 2015, @04:11PM
Is it not just *NIX? My bad, a spelling error ...
(Score: 1) by Uncle_Al on Friday February 06 2015, @05:11PM
Will they be evoking the evil aura of Steve Jobs as well or will they settle for the lesser of two evils?
Is this what technological education is evolving into in the 21st century?
When will they change their name to the Massachusetts Institute of Post-Technology?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06 2015, @07:05PM
The convention, forever after, was known as the first conclave of the technomage.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technomage [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday February 06 2015, @07:12PM
Not that I'm a fan of Thelema or anything, but I don't think Aleister Crowley would consider "magick" the same thing as "magic" in this context. The difference between a guy putting on a show with rabbits and interlocking rings vs. somebody trying to control the universe through occult knowledge.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by Randolph Carter on Saturday February 07 2015, @02:31AM
>I don't think Aleister Crowley would consider "magick" the same thing as "magic" in this context.
I've studied quite a lot of his work and I think he would.
The fellow putting on the show is willing his audience to be entertained and thus change them audience from their current state.
So it seems to fit nicely with...
“the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will,”
...tho admittedly its a smaller scale of change than Uncle Al *himself* was ultimately aiming for with all that Thelema nonsense. I mean he didnt mention Great Cthulhu even once!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06 2015, @07:56PM
So is this being run by the Black Chamber, or is MIT due for a visit from them?