[00:00.000 --> 00:04.840]  There's a crypto basics workshop going on that's just up the hallway to the right there, near the bathroom area.
[00:05.440 --> 00:08.640]  Also down on the sixth floor, there's a bunch of workshops.
[00:09.180 --> 00:12.540]  And these are hands-on workshops with small groups, interactive.
[00:12.820 --> 00:13.700]  So these are fun.
[00:13.840 --> 00:16.800]  There's a listing of them on the website that's not in the printed program.
[00:16.940 --> 00:19.380]  It's on the website and we have some signage for the workshops as well.
[00:19.600 --> 00:23.760]  And of course, there's a lot of other workshops going on in the second floor, vendors and all kinds of things.
[00:23.940 --> 00:29.460]  I remind you again, please make sure your cell phone is put on mute so we don't disturb too many of our neighbours.
[00:29.460 --> 00:31.440]  And otherwise have a great time.
[00:31.680 --> 00:42.680]  Up next is apophenia, which is a word that I didn't hear very much of until maybe the previous event, when Will did a talk on sort of a related thing.
[00:42.780 --> 00:48.500]  So I think we're all concerned about this because we're all going to be dead someday, we think.
[00:48.680 --> 00:49.300]  There's a theory.
[00:49.780 --> 00:50.780]  There's other theories.
[00:51.340 --> 00:54.360]  But let's hear about what happens after the fact.
[00:54.520 --> 00:54.980]  Thank you.
[00:56.800 --> 00:57.980]  Can you guys hear me okay?
[00:57.980 --> 01:00.140]  I have a tendency to bounce around when I talk.
[01:00.440 --> 01:01.780]  Does that work for everybody?
[01:02.040 --> 01:02.300]  Okay.
[01:03.360 --> 01:05.680]  I'll try to pick up the voice a little bit.
[01:06.220 --> 01:06.980]  I did a...
[01:07.500 --> 01:08.680]  My name's Will, by the way.
[01:08.820 --> 01:09.440]  Will Lindsey.
[01:09.900 --> 01:15.980]  I'll tell you a little bit about this ghost machine business and why I'm involved with it.
[01:15.980 --> 01:19.020]  This is related to a talk that happened at HOPE Number Nine.
[01:20.400 --> 01:21.020]  HOPE Number Nine, the talk was called Building Radios to Talk to the Dead.
[01:25.160 --> 01:26.940]  And about a year before HOPE Number Nine, I got involved in this.
[01:29.380 --> 01:32.560]  This is still fairly new to me, three or four years now.
[01:34.120 --> 01:48.580]  That talk was specifically about analog radio and I found a whole culture of people online, a large international group of people who were changing, bending, breaking, hacking radios in order to communicate with the dead.
[01:49.380 --> 01:51.200]  I'd never heard anything like that in my life.
[01:51.300 --> 01:52.400]  I thought it was pretty interesting.
[01:54.400 --> 02:01.720]  Shortly thereafter, I realized that this thing they were doing, it's called EVP, Electronic Voice Phenomena.
[02:01.980 --> 02:12.060]  And the idea is that somehow spirits or ghosts are controlling the electrons or the electromagnetic energy around us and making voices come out.
[02:12.060 --> 02:16.840]  So you can actually talk to the deceased or at least listen to the deceased.
[02:17.380 --> 02:25.460]  I found out during that time, I thought this is amazing, but it turned out it's just a small sliver of a larger idea.
[02:26.440 --> 02:41.400]  That idea, or EVP, I'm sorry, Electronic Voice Phenomena, is actually a subsection of something that many, many more people practice throughout the world called instrumental transcommunication.
[02:41.800 --> 02:46.760]  I'm going to refer to that as ITC throughout the talk, instrumental transcommunication.
[02:46.960 --> 02:52.380]  It is what it sounds like and it's a pretty vague term to cover a lot of ideas.
[02:52.400 --> 03:07.220]  The basic idea is some sort of electronic device or analog or digital device that's being used to facilitate this conversation past the grave.
[03:08.200 --> 03:12.420]  There's something that's when... this is really a two-way conversation.
[03:12.580 --> 03:15.360]  This is people that want to have a conversation.
[03:15.360 --> 03:17.540]  This isn't a broadcast from beyond.
[03:18.140 --> 03:19.400]  It's a two-way thing.
[03:20.020 --> 03:35.140]  Something that is commonly believed, to the best of my understanding, is that folks who have passed occupy roughly the same space we're in, but maybe in a different plane, so they can already hear us.
[03:35.220 --> 03:38.160]  I don't know how, but they already hear and understand us, right?
[03:38.240 --> 03:40.500]  And this is commonly believed throughout.
[03:40.760 --> 03:46.700]  However, we aren't smart enough or we don't have the technology yet to understand communication in the opposite direction.
[03:46.960 --> 04:00.960]  So a lot of these devices that I'm going to show you today are going to seem like they're one-way communication, but the idea is usually the people using them are talking to the air, talking to space in hopes that there's a continuous conversation happening.
[04:03.940 --> 04:06.890]  Let me talk about me for a second and how I got involved in this.
[04:06.890 --> 04:09.200]  I'm a teacher by trade.
[04:09.480 --> 04:10.920]  I'm an artist.
[04:11.280 --> 04:14.440]  I do something called research art.
[04:14.670 --> 04:25.360]  So I base my art practice performance gallery work off of research of real things I've found in history or real social groups, things like that.
[04:25.860 --> 04:34.380]  All of my work, for as long as I've been doing this in all different fields, is about our relationship with technology.
[04:34.560 --> 04:40.260]  Specifically, I'm interested in how does technology change us as a society?
[04:40.410 --> 04:41.860]  How does it change our culture?
[04:42.100 --> 04:44.080]  How do we change the technology?
[04:44.470 --> 04:48.080]  I'm especially interested in groups that subvert technology, right?
[04:48.290 --> 04:58.730]  So a technology comes along and somebody designs it and it has an intended purpose, and then you have a bunch of people, probably half the people in this room, who want to change it and do something completely different with it.
[04:59.120 --> 05:00.620]  That's really fascinating to me.
[05:01.300 --> 05:06.670]  I've done work on the past with 8-bit music, kind of like the concerts that are going to happen tonight and tomorrow night.
[05:06.860 --> 05:09.350]  People who are hacking video games to make music.
[05:09.850 --> 05:11.440]  Unintended purpose, that's fabulous.
[05:13.850 --> 05:14.790]  Oh, what else?
[05:15.080 --> 05:20.140]  Hackers, obviously, bending radios and computers and things like that to talk to the dead.
[05:20.940 --> 05:25.790]  I then, what I like to do is I educate myself about these systems.
[05:26.000 --> 05:27.780]  I do it fairly agnostically.
[05:28.520 --> 05:31.980]  I don't necessarily agree or disagree with what's going on.
[05:32.120 --> 05:33.240]  I just kind of take it all in.
[05:33.420 --> 05:41.900]  I then like to take these tools and open them up, create some open-source packages so that other artists, experimenters, hackers can then use these tools, right?
[05:42.060 --> 05:45.180]  And then I also use them for my own exhibition and performances.
[05:45.720 --> 05:48.280]  I'll show you a little bit of that if we have time at the end.
[05:50.890 --> 05:53.600]  First, let me talk about this word, apophenia.
[05:53.840 --> 05:58.520]  So the name of this talk, and this is also what I've named the body of work that I'm working on right now.
[05:59.160 --> 06:04.020]  Some people in signal and crypto may know this word already.
[06:05.370 --> 06:16.040]  Apophenia is the idea that people have the ability to take complete randomness and organize it and get meaning from it.
[06:16.280 --> 06:19.780]  So we extract meaning from completely random data sets.
[06:19.840 --> 06:21.060]  It's kind of an amazing thing.
[06:21.220 --> 06:24.120]  It's just something I think our brain has to do to cope, right?
[06:24.840 --> 06:28.620]  And for an example of that, everybody's probably seen this picture before.
[06:28.740 --> 06:30.460]  This is the face on Mars.
[06:30.540 --> 06:34.920]  And we all know consciously there's probably not a giant head glued to the side of Mars.
[06:35.520 --> 06:38.780]  But when we see those specific shapes, we want to make meaning of it.
[06:38.780 --> 06:40.140]  And so we believe it's a face.
[06:40.480 --> 06:44.600]  Faces are probably one of the most dominant things that come through in this apophenia.
[06:45.020 --> 06:50.480]  It's one of the things we are most likely to recognize or one of the ways that we most want to make sense of what's around us.
[06:52.400 --> 06:52.800]  Clouds.
[06:52.820 --> 06:54.160]  I don't know how that looks on the projector.
[06:54.630 --> 07:01.520]  It could be either a bunny or a duck or a cloud, depending on your position, I guess.
[07:03.010 --> 07:04.700]  I'm barely sure what this is.
[07:04.700 --> 07:09.060]  This is actually folks that work on ITC came up with this.
[07:09.200 --> 07:15.180]  This is smoke reflected through a lantern onto water in a metal dish.
[07:16.220 --> 07:17.860]  Or a horse, I guess.
[07:18.020 --> 07:18.980]  Or a dog.
[07:20.250 --> 07:22.120]  Or a strange picture.
[07:22.360 --> 07:22.820]  I don't know.
[07:24.400 --> 07:24.920]  Apophenia.
[07:25.100 --> 07:27.460]  So let me talk about the history of this a little bit.
[07:27.640 --> 07:32.160]  In my last talk, I talked specifically about the history of the radio side of things.
[07:32.160 --> 07:38.800]  And I want to talk more about the networking tools that we've used and how they got used for ghost communications.
[07:39.160 --> 07:43.500]  And a little bit about computers and then what's happening in contemporary time right now.
[07:43.760 --> 07:46.960]  I'm going to jump back to... let's see in my notes here.
[07:47.380 --> 07:47.820]  1921.
[07:49.220 --> 07:54.160]  I'm just going to pull a couple examples out of history and just kind of tell you the stories of what happened with these.
[07:54.660 --> 07:56.580]  This gentleman named F.R.
[07:56.820 --> 07:59.220]  Melton, he was a radio operator in World War I.
[07:59.380 --> 08:00.240]  He lived in Birmingham...
[08:00.240 --> 08:01.440]  I'm sorry, Nottingham, England.
[08:02.740 --> 08:06.600]  He published this design in a magazine called Light Magazine.
[08:06.740 --> 08:08.340]  I've not seen the whole issue.
[08:08.460 --> 08:10.260]  I've just seen scans of this design.
[08:10.860 --> 08:14.240]  He referred to this as a psychic telephone.
[08:14.240 --> 08:19.420]  And what Melton realized with his radio and radio operators...
[08:19.960 --> 08:23.240]  I know there's some amateurs in the crowd out here probably already recognize this.
[08:24.660 --> 08:36.420]  When you're not transmitting or receiving, you want to detach that giant antenna that's going out of your house or the building you're working in in case there's lightning or static or something like that.
[08:36.540 --> 08:37.440]  Get it off the radio.
[08:37.580 --> 08:42.980]  And he realized that when he detached his antenna, he could still receive signals.
[08:42.980 --> 08:46.960]  Now, there's a lot of different theories on how that could possibly happen.
[08:47.260 --> 08:50.520]  In New York City, I think it's overload from the AM stations, right?
[08:50.720 --> 08:53.520]  But out in the middle of nowhere, it may be something completely different.
[08:54.200 --> 09:01.100]  Melton, based on where he was and what he knew about radio, theorized that the broadcast must be coming from in the room he was in, right?
[09:01.300 --> 09:09.940]  And the only explanation that he could decide from that point is that perhaps somebody occupying another plane in the same space or the dead from beyond the grave, right?
[09:09.940 --> 09:19.740]  So, he started taking that radio and tweaking it and tweaking the design of it to figure out what worked best to get this two-way communication going.
[09:20.320 --> 09:23.680]  And this is the design that he finally ended up with and published.
[09:24.540 --> 09:25.900]  Kind of an interesting one.
[09:25.980 --> 09:29.980]  Again, the output communication is yelling in the room, right?
[09:30.120 --> 09:32.220]  So, there doesn't necessarily need to be a transmission.
[09:32.480 --> 09:34.640]  This is mostly about receiving in this device.
[09:35.120 --> 09:37.440]  D is the headphones, right?
[09:37.940 --> 09:39.900]  F is the jack to plug in the headphones.
[09:40.040 --> 09:41.280]  And E is a power source.
[09:41.420 --> 09:43.520]  I guess they used some dry cell batteries back then.
[09:44.280 --> 09:46.300]  A, he lists as a transmitter.
[09:46.520 --> 09:59.440]  And I believe this is an analog receiver, kind of like a microphone or something you would see on an old Victrola that could vibrate with physical vibrations, not necessarily a radio transmitter.
[10:00.000 --> 10:00.980]  B is a balloon.
[10:01.740 --> 10:03.580]  I thought that was kind of an interesting part of the design.
[10:04.080 --> 10:06.700]  And then there's a little spring holding the whole works together.
[10:06.900 --> 10:10.520]  So, it's something to do with the balloon expanding and contracting.
[10:10.720 --> 10:16.080]  And he believed that the spirits could manipulate that and then cause some kind of voices or sound to come through.
[10:16.620 --> 10:22.760]  I don't really know what happened to his research or why he quit or why we don't all have one of these in our house right now.
[10:23.710 --> 10:26.780]  Hard to say with some of these that I'll be talking about.
[10:28.480 --> 10:29.380]  This guy.
[10:29.380 --> 10:29.960]  Let's see.
[10:30.020 --> 10:33.000]  I'm going to jump forward in history a little bit to 1940.
[10:33.000 --> 10:34.820]  This picture was taken much later.
[10:35.100 --> 10:36.460]  This is Gilbert Wright.
[10:36.500 --> 10:38.000]  He was a researcher for GE.
[10:38.800 --> 10:41.460]  Maybe somebody in the room might recognize his name.
[10:41.580 --> 10:45.600]  Apparently, in 1943, he invented or patented Silly Putty.
[10:46.340 --> 10:47.800]  Also working for GE.
[10:47.860 --> 10:48.520]  Silicon Putty.
[10:48.660 --> 10:49.400]  Silicon Putty.
[10:50.440 --> 10:52.580]  So, this is the guy responsible for that.
[10:54.460 --> 11:00.300]  I'm getting this second hand through information in a very reliable source, a magazine called Fate Magazine.
[11:00.820 --> 11:04.820]  This is an article that he was involved with in 1963.
[11:04.980 --> 11:08.340]  This was published, but it's about things that he did in the 40s.
[11:09.780 --> 11:14.280]  Apparently, he attended a seance not too uncommon in that World War II era.
[11:14.980 --> 11:20.520]  Seances at the time, instead of having devices or radios or things to talk to the dead, would have a person who would channel that energy.
[11:20.800 --> 11:24.820]  Very questionable, which is why I think a lot of people started chasing these devices.
[11:25.120 --> 11:27.100]  We put our trust in technology, right?
[11:27.320 --> 11:28.520]  People you can't trust.
[11:28.540 --> 11:33.500]  But a computer or a radio or a piece of hardware, that's something we can trust in life.
[11:33.660 --> 11:36.260]  I don't know about that, but they believed it.
[11:36.260 --> 11:41.160]  Anyway, he was at a seance in...
[11:41.160 --> 11:44.980]  I believe this was 1940 when this happened.
[11:45.760 --> 11:47.460]  A little...
[11:47.460 --> 11:55.460]  And the person running the seance was communicating the thoughts of who they believed to be Thomas Edison.
[11:55.840 --> 11:55.940]  Right?
[11:56.320 --> 11:59.180]  And it took me quite a while to track down this story.
[12:00.320 --> 12:06.060]  Edison's ghost said there were some designs missing from his notes.
[12:06.380 --> 12:16.800]  And this particular design that you see on the screen, I'll explain it in a second, was lost in a letter that went to some folks working with him.
[12:17.040 --> 12:25.820]  The actual letter was never recovered, but somebody who said they saw the letter then traced this diagram from the letter and redrew it later.
[12:25.820 --> 12:29.600]  So this is about four hands whispered down the lane.
[12:30.060 --> 12:32.160]  Or I guess the game of telephone, they say.
[12:32.360 --> 12:33.660]  The meaning may have changed.
[12:34.960 --> 12:39.080]  My understanding of this M down at the bottom is some sort of microphone.
[12:39.400 --> 12:43.680]  And then on top of this box that the microphone is in is a metal cylinder.
[12:43.820 --> 12:46.460]  The metal cylinder is filled with a chemical.
[12:46.780 --> 12:52.440]  I don't know much about chemistry, but he lists here as potassium permanganate.
[12:52.580 --> 12:53.260]  Beats me.
[12:54.060 --> 12:55.200]  A is an antenna.
[12:55.400 --> 12:58.020]  I'm not sure the relationship between the antenna and the microphone.
[12:58.680 --> 13:05.320]  And when Gilbert Wright and his associate, Harry Gardner, got this diagram finally, I don't think they understood it either.
[13:05.720 --> 13:12.580]  In fact, he decided to take this design, ignore Thomas Edison, and create his own or their own design.
[13:13.180 --> 13:18.880]  I don't have a picture of their design, but I do have this very vivid description I'll read, which is kind of interesting.
[13:19.320 --> 13:20.460]  Gardner goes on to explain.
[13:20.660 --> 13:25.600]  He had built a sound box, 14 inches by seven, by seven inches high.
[13:26.300 --> 13:28.560]  It's lined with a soundproof material.
[13:29.320 --> 13:35.220]  It has a small hole in one side, and it contained a microphone, which connected to a loudspeaker.
[13:35.220 --> 13:46.960]  And that loudspeaker could either be in the room or it could, in fact, be in another room, so some kind of third-party could kind of monitor what was going on without the medium necessarily understanding the entirety of it.
[13:47.340 --> 13:50.400]  A medium did have to be present for this, and here's why.
[13:50.400 --> 13:53.820]  He says the idea is that... here's the theory.
[13:54.120 --> 14:12.340]  The sound box could be placed close to a medium, and ectoplasm projected from the solar plexus of the medium would go through the little hole in the box and create a diaphragm, and then the spirits could move that diaphragm, and that would create the voice the microphone would then pick up.
[14:14.440 --> 14:16.180]  Several people watched this happen.
[14:16.540 --> 14:18.260]  Apparently, voices came out of it.
[14:18.260 --> 14:21.120]  If you watched my talk in HOPE Number Nine, it turns out some of these people were ventriloquists.
[14:24.400 --> 14:28.600]  I'm not saying that's what happened in this case, but it's questionable, right?
[14:29.100 --> 14:35.120]  And apparently, Wright decided to retire before he finished any research on it, so that kind of went nowhere.
[14:37.740 --> 14:38.740]  Oh, a seance.
[14:38.960 --> 14:40.200]  I don't know why I didn't show that picture.
[14:41.300 --> 14:42.820]  This is Coronet Magazine.
[14:42.820 --> 14:45.240]  This is a magazine from 1955.
[14:46.480 --> 14:50.640]  There's a whole series of ideas dealing with telephone.
[14:51.740 --> 14:54.700]  And probably everybody's heard a story about ghosts and telephones.
[14:54.800 --> 14:55.560]  I'll tell one of them.
[14:55.620 --> 14:57.360]  I think it's a fairly interesting one.
[14:58.010 --> 15:01.620]  This particular story was published by Alfred Hitchcock.
[15:01.780 --> 15:03.840]  Of course, a reliable source, right?
[15:04.400 --> 15:06.240]  Alfred Hitchcock writing this story.
[15:06.240 --> 15:10.920]  But I had actually seen a second version of the story that Hitchcock based this writing on.
[15:11.360 --> 15:20.560]  And so there is some comparison that maybe somewhere back in history where this story began, some people actually told this story as a real thing that happened or real events.
[15:21.420 --> 15:28.400]  This story is about, excuse me, Arne Gandy, a young man in the 1930s.
[15:28.640 --> 15:31.260]  And he goes off to work for a shipping company.
[15:31.340 --> 15:34.280]  The shipping company has him on a boat that goes all over the world.
[15:35.400 --> 15:40.120]  And in 1933, they port in San Francisco.
[15:40.620 --> 15:43.880]  He goes running off the boat to have fun in San Francisco.
[15:43.880 --> 15:45.420]  And the boat leaves without him, right?
[15:45.760 --> 15:47.880]  He writes a letter to his family.
[15:48.000 --> 15:51.580]  The family receives the letter in January 5th, 1934.
[15:51.620 --> 15:55.780]  They received this letter from their son saying, hey, I've been stranded in San Francisco.
[15:55.980 --> 15:57.500]  I don't have my possessions.
[15:57.500 --> 15:59.600]  I have a little bit of money that I was carrying.
[15:59.840 --> 16:01.640]  I don't have any of my personal effects.
[16:01.780 --> 16:03.360]  I'm not really sure what I'm going to do.
[16:04.720 --> 16:05.880]  And they get this letter.
[16:08.360 --> 16:17.000]  3 a.m., January 10th, on an unlisted phone number to the parent's house, the mother receives a call from a stranger, an unrecognized voice.
[16:17.660 --> 16:20.480]  And so the story goes, the ghost said, the ghost.
[16:20.680 --> 16:21.660]  There, I gave it away already.
[16:21.660 --> 16:27.900]  The voice says, will you forgive your son if you promise that he can come home?
[16:28.560 --> 16:31.240]  And he's in a hospital in San Francisco.
[16:31.240 --> 16:33.420]  And there were several other voices that come into the call.
[16:33.560 --> 16:35.420]  And we'll send him home, right?
[16:36.100 --> 16:40.500]  Another voice then interrupts and kind of fades in.
[16:40.620 --> 16:44.780]  And she says, the voice says, here I lie, propped up on pillows.
[16:45.120 --> 16:46.200]  I can't move.
[16:46.480 --> 16:48.380]  And then the line goes dead, right?
[16:50.060 --> 16:56.340]  It turns out that sometime later, the police found his body in San Francisco.
[16:56.340 --> 16:58.880]  And he had drowned in the water there.
[16:59.260 --> 17:05.290]  And an autopsy determined that he had actually died 48 hours before the phone call was made.
[17:05.730 --> 17:05.800]  Right?
[17:06.250 --> 17:09.540]  So again, there's a lot of stories like this out there.
[17:11.430 --> 17:13.950]  And some are more questionable than others.
[17:14.080 --> 17:19.970]  I think this is probably one of the odder and maybe more historically embellished stories which makes it kind of interesting.
[17:20.360 --> 17:25.140]  So many of these stories have happened just specifically about telephone, right?
[17:25.270 --> 17:31.320]  And the analog computer network that was telephone all the way up through the 1980s and 90s.
[17:31.900 --> 17:34.710]  That different researchers have approached this in different ways.
[17:34.860 --> 17:37.530]  They've approached this particular story and tried to analyze it.
[17:37.710 --> 17:40.640]  They've also taken instances where this is happening to other people.
[17:40.640 --> 17:48.470]  And tried to create some kind of scientific box around it to prove or disprove what is going on here.
[17:48.970 --> 17:57.820]  In this particular case, they thought, most people thought because it was an unlisted number, it was pretty unlikely that it would be a prank, right?
[17:58.250 --> 18:02.970]  Though I think anybody who would know that the son was away maybe would know the phone number.
[18:02.970 --> 18:04.510]  So that's questionable.
[18:06.040 --> 18:11.900]  Some people, there was some belief with some of these calls that somebody could make the call from in the house, right?
[18:12.040 --> 18:17.530]  But anybody who remembers analog lines, if you pick it up, you can't really make the phone ring on the other end.
[18:17.710 --> 18:19.380]  Some of you guys probably could, right?
[18:19.510 --> 18:22.690]  But maybe her husband or somebody messing with her couldn't.
[18:23.530 --> 18:25.420]  And you would hear the dial tone, right?
[18:25.510 --> 18:26.860]  And there was no dial tone in this call.
[18:26.970 --> 18:27.580]  It was just voice.
[18:28.380 --> 18:35.190]  Another theory that gets tossed around pretty often is that maybe the person who received the call is psychic.
[18:35.690 --> 18:40.360]  And they are actually channeling their own energies through the phone as an object, right?
[18:40.950 --> 18:43.040]  I don't know if that can be proved or disproved.
[18:43.270 --> 18:50.030]  The main thing that people say goes against that idea is that a lot of these calls are completely random or unprovoked, right?
[18:50.080 --> 18:57.660]  She had no reason to believe at that particular instance that something had happened to her son, other than receiving this letter days and days beforehand.
[19:00.780 --> 19:02.190]  Move forward a little bit.
[19:02.600 --> 19:06.300]  I'm going to talk about a guy named Julius Weinberger in the 1960s.
[19:06.340 --> 19:07.790]  I could not find a picture of him.
[19:08.290 --> 19:10.060]  He was an engineer for RCA.
[19:10.790 --> 19:17.510]  I'm picking on some of the more intelligent people in these stories to talk about what they did for obvious reasons.
[19:17.730 --> 19:20.950]  I couldn't find his picture, so I found one of the patents that his name is on.
[19:21.080 --> 19:23.100]  So this is an RCA patent for some kind of speaker.
[19:23.100 --> 19:31.140]  Most of his patents were listening devices, speakers, speaker arrays, recorders, things like that, which is kind of interesting.
[19:33.030 --> 19:46.400]  Julius Weinberger was at the same time in his shop at home in the evenings working on this Edison idea, some way to communicate with the dead, some way to make a two-way conversation happen.
[19:46.400 --> 19:57.400]  And he realized while he would work late at night in a shop that sometimes the back of his neck would tingle and you get that kind of sketchy feeling, and everyone's probably felt that now and again.
[19:57.900 --> 20:03.490]  He didn't believe that he was causing that nervous response, that his body didn't give him the chill.
[20:03.640 --> 20:07.290]  He believed that ghosts were actually touching him or causing that to happen.
[20:07.290 --> 20:21.790]  And he believed it so much that he thought if these ghosts could somehow affect my nervous system or my hair follicles even, that maybe this, instead of electricity or electromagnetic energy, should be the line of communication, right?
[20:21.860 --> 20:26.320]  So we're going to communicate with the dead through hair follicles, right?
[20:28.030 --> 20:29.040]  Interesting idea.
[20:29.040 --> 20:31.820]  And, you know, I think he's an educated guy.
[20:32.040 --> 20:35.300]  So, you know, we've got to put a little bit of trust in what he's thinking at the time.
[20:36.470 --> 20:38.820]  He was good enough to not do his research on people.
[20:40.080 --> 20:43.140]  Instead, he did his research on the Venus flytrap.
[20:44.000 --> 20:48.230]  Anybody who knows these plants knows that they have tiny little hairs inside them.
[20:48.340 --> 20:49.120]  It's a set of jaws.
[20:49.380 --> 20:52.530]  And if an insect or something flies in, it'll clamp shut, right?
[20:52.730 --> 20:57.320]  And so he had the idea that maybe the hairs on the Venus flytrap were similar.
[20:57.320 --> 21:15.230]  And he spent a lot of time measuring feedback, putting sensors on the jaws of the Venus flytrap, and getting recordings, and then intentionally setting them off with, you know, a little toothpick or something like that, and then seeing what the reading is.
[21:15.420 --> 21:26.060]  And then he later kind of figured out that there was this little tiny 20 millivolt charge coming off of these plants right before they were about to close.
[21:26.060 --> 21:32.030]  And that maybe that was the instance when the hairs were being activated.
[21:32.490 --> 21:35.840]  And so he set up something that looks similar to this.
[21:35.990 --> 21:37.470]  And I'll talk about this picture in a second.
[21:38.670 --> 21:50.100]  An electrode on the top and bottom jaw of the Venus flytrap put the Venus flytrap in a glass enclosure, so nothing could interfere with it or insects or dust couldn't get in there.
[21:50.100 --> 21:53.240]  And then just measured the pulses coming off of it.
[21:53.340 --> 21:55.190]  And he got tiny little pulses over and over.
[21:55.690 --> 22:03.110]  And he believed after a time of watching or listening to these pulses that they seemed to be patterned.
[22:03.900 --> 22:05.020]  They had a pattern to them.
[22:05.380 --> 22:09.580]  A pattern enough that he believed that maybe there was an intelligent force controlling them.
[22:09.580 --> 22:21.450]  And he cites one moment where he was so aggravated with not being able to translate this to Morse code or something that he knew, that he just said, for five minutes, don't make any pulses, and it didn't.
[22:21.800 --> 22:23.900]  Fortunately, nobody was in the room when that happened.
[22:24.600 --> 22:31.560]  He did get some other people to come see this, and many people did say that these pulses seemed intelligent.
[22:32.690 --> 22:38.710]  Specifically, the Institute for Parapsychology of the Foundation for Research.
[22:38.710 --> 22:40.760]  That sounds like a very important organization.
[22:41.300 --> 22:47.400]  I understand that that was a small arm of Duke University, and Duke went, No, we're disassociating ourselves.
[22:47.860 --> 22:56.900]  The Institute for Parapsychology sent somebody, and that person said, Yeah, it seems like there's intelligent patterns coming from these plants.
[22:58.780 --> 23:03.360]  But he's very old, and he should probably retire and stop working on this.
[23:03.450 --> 23:06.020]  So he did, and nothing more happened to it.
[23:07.690 --> 23:09.380]  This picture I thought was interesting.
[23:09.540 --> 23:10.740]  Some of you may have seen it before.
[23:11.340 --> 23:18.540]  Apparently, Make Magazine published a hack that you could get Venus flytraps to open and close by shoving voltage at them.
[23:18.980 --> 23:24.690]  And I noticed when I was reading the article that they used the exact same points that were in his research.
[23:24.690 --> 23:31.190]  So I don't know if there was some cross-education there, or the research came out with the same answers as to where those electrodes would go.
[23:33.140 --> 23:36.920]  I'm going to jump to 1980, 80 through 92.
[23:37.160 --> 23:42.480]  There's kind of a long space here of when this happened.
[23:43.140 --> 23:44.210]  This is a group.
[23:44.660 --> 23:45.950]  I'm not good with French.
[23:46.160 --> 23:47.720]  I'm going to butcher some German later, too.
[23:48.600 --> 23:52.740]  Circles d'Etudes sur la Transcommunication Luxembourg.
[23:53.480 --> 23:56.520]  I'm going to refer to that as CETL, CETL.
[23:56.860 --> 23:58.280]  I'll just call it CETL for now.
[23:59.420 --> 24:03.280]  The translation I understand to mean the Transcommunication Studies Circle.
[24:03.620 --> 24:06.520]  So it sounds a little more important or big than they really were.
[24:06.980 --> 24:10.420]  But, you know, they had a letterhead and a nice little logo, so it must have been the real deal.
[24:10.420 --> 24:13.400]  They were founded by these two people.
[24:13.880 --> 24:15.960]  This is Maggie and Jules Harsh Fischbach.
[24:16.420 --> 24:18.760]  This is a later picture from the 80s.
[24:18.820 --> 24:21.920]  They were a little bit younger, but I had a hard time finding pictures of them back then.
[24:23.720 --> 24:25.950]  They used a lot of these different practices.
[24:26.080 --> 24:32.500]  They used a lot of the EVP, the electronic voice phenomenon practices that I talked about in the other talk.
[24:33.040 --> 24:38.280]  And they created some new methods and ideas to communicate with the dead.
[24:38.280 --> 24:40.800]  And they did this in ongoing lab.
[24:42.500 --> 24:46.160]  What they decided over time was that they needed something called a bridge.
[24:46.300 --> 24:49.460]  This bridge was a bridge between here and beyond.
[24:49.710 --> 24:55.360]  And as long as that bridge existed, different devices could probably use that bridge for communication.
[24:55.690 --> 25:03.820]  And they used many different devices all the way up to, you know, the radios, the phones, and up through a Commodore 64, which I'll talk about in a little bit.
[25:04.340 --> 25:08.950]  There was some precedence to using computers for this, which is kind of interesting.
[25:09.280 --> 25:10.420]  There's the Commodore 64.
[25:10.640 --> 25:14.190]  There's a bunch of those downstairs in the mezzanine, which is kind of cool.
[25:16.690 --> 25:18.820]  This gentleman, I couldn't find a very good picture of him.
[25:18.880 --> 25:19.740]  Manfred Bowden.
[25:19.980 --> 25:21.740]  This was taken in Radio Luxembourg.
[25:21.860 --> 25:22.720]  He's the guy on the right.
[25:24.980 --> 25:26.720]  Bowden was interested in computers.
[25:26.720 --> 25:28.800]  He was an avid CB-er in the 80s.
[25:29.920 --> 25:31.600]  He had a Commodore 64.
[25:32.540 --> 25:34.860]  And he was typing in...
[25:34.860 --> 25:38.080]  You get the magazine and you'd have to type in the whole program by hand off the magazine.
[25:38.320 --> 25:40.620]  And he was typing in a biorhythms program.
[25:40.950 --> 25:46.240]  And while he was typing it, he believed the code changed in front of his eyes.
[25:46.380 --> 25:48.160]  And in fact, it happened a few times.
[25:48.400 --> 25:51.860]  And he had somebody to come over and say, did you see that?
[25:51.860 --> 25:52.480]  I saw it.
[25:52.540 --> 25:53.160]  Did you see it?
[25:53.340 --> 25:56.380]  And several people said, yes, this really happened.
[25:56.760 --> 25:58.600]  I managed to get this output print.
[25:58.780 --> 26:00.860]  And this is the German I'm going to try to butcher.
[26:02.400 --> 26:04.780]  The underlying sections here...
[26:05.920 --> 26:06.620]  Let's see.
[26:07.400 --> 26:09.580]  Ich bin da, I believe, is I am here.
[26:13.520 --> 26:14.360]  Do stirps...
[26:15.080 --> 26:16.560]  Anybody with German help me with that?
[26:19.190 --> 26:20.560]  Are you dead or you will die?
[26:20.560 --> 26:21.360]  Is it future tense?
[26:23.220 --> 26:24.280]  You will die.
[26:24.520 --> 26:24.600]  Okay.
[26:24.760 --> 26:25.360]  Future tense.
[26:25.600 --> 26:26.560]  You will die, Manfred.
[26:28.450 --> 26:28.840]  1982.
[26:29.100 --> 26:30.480]  An unfathers accident, right?
[26:30.710 --> 26:36.920]  So somebody was sending him a message through the computer by changing the program while he was typing to say, you will die.
[26:37.060 --> 26:39.020]  And this happened several times throughout the program.
[26:39.140 --> 26:40.120]  You will die in an accident.
[26:40.950 --> 26:41.340]  Interesting.
[26:41.450 --> 26:43.690]  He died of a heart attack in 1990.
[26:44.840 --> 26:45.780]  But there it is.
[26:45.950 --> 26:48.840]  You know, so a little bit of evidence of ghosts using computers.
[26:49.740 --> 26:52.320]  I'll jump back to...
[26:52.320 --> 26:55.000]  So he was not associated with Settle.
[26:55.140 --> 26:56.620]  He was elsewhere in Luxembourg.
[26:58.720 --> 27:10.140]  Settle got so good at this and they developed this bridge and kept the bridge that ghosts started using their Commodore 64 as a sort of Dropbox.
[27:10.780 --> 27:12.320]  And they would just put emails.
[27:12.660 --> 27:13.080]  Not emails.
[27:13.260 --> 27:13.450]  I'm sorry.
[27:13.500 --> 27:15.760]  They would put text files and images.
[27:16.060 --> 27:20.000]  And they would wake up in the morning, turn on the computer and, oh, look, we received a message from the dead.
[27:21.040 --> 27:23.060]  And I have some examples of that here.
[27:23.450 --> 27:24.140]  This is...
[27:24.140 --> 27:25.040]  Now these...
[27:25.040 --> 27:27.340]  The resolution on these images is a little wacky.
[27:28.340 --> 27:35.220]  Settle was producing a journal back in the 80s and 90s, which I understand to be almost like a fanzine that was Xeroxed.
[27:35.260 --> 27:40.710]  So this has been printed, Xeroxed, and then scanned back onto the Internet where I found it.
[27:41.380 --> 27:45.080]  Some of these I shot out of a book that I have, but they all pretty much look like this.
[27:45.710 --> 27:48.000]  This is an image from the dead, right?
[27:48.080 --> 27:48.860]  They're sending a photograph.
[27:49.710 --> 27:52.300]  This is, to the right, Hal Roach.
[27:53.560 --> 27:55.120]  Somebody might recognize that name.
[27:55.120 --> 27:57.520]  He's the guy who created Little Rascals or Our Gang.
[27:58.780 --> 28:02.800]  Looks pretty young in this picture, but apparently when you're dead, you can look as young as you want.
[28:03.040 --> 28:05.060]  So everybody likes to look young when they're dead.
[28:05.400 --> 28:07.020]  This was received in 1992.
[28:07.500 --> 28:09.300]  On the left, there's two women there.
[28:09.640 --> 28:12.240]  One is Janet Meek and the other one is Nancy Carroll.
[28:12.900 --> 28:25.040]  And if you heard my talk at HOPE Nine, Meek is a very big name in kind of the hucksterism side of EVP and using the radios.
[28:26.080 --> 28:31.450]  So that name's fairly easy to recognize with people who are part of this community.
[28:32.220 --> 28:33.300]  I say huckster.
[28:33.360 --> 28:36.120]  I guess I shouldn't say it so loudly, but that was my reading on it.
[28:38.860 --> 28:40.420]  He had a text file.
[28:40.950 --> 28:50.000]  Hal Roach left a text file with this one that explains that the women on the left look disembodied because they're coming through a dispassing point to the fourth plane of existence.
[28:50.000 --> 28:53.900]  Apparently, there's multiple planes of existence when you die, and this is the fourth one.
[28:54.560 --> 28:57.520]  Here's an image of a man named Yang Foods.
[28:57.960 --> 29:06.190]  He also left some text files with his image that maybe helped them decipher some ways to deal with language between the living and dead.
[29:06.950 --> 29:10.880]  Multiple languages and then maybe their own languages on the other side.
[29:11.080 --> 29:13.500]  So some confusion there and how to work with that.
[29:14.690 --> 29:22.040]  Some really interesting theories came out when Settle just started to knock out all these pictures that were left on their Commodore.
[29:23.040 --> 29:26.240]  And some things changed from what people believed about EVP.
[29:26.500 --> 29:29.640]  One is, as I mentioned, they believed there had to be a bridge.
[29:29.640 --> 29:35.210]  So there had to be some pipeline of communication that was available that could be used back and forth.
[29:36.060 --> 29:41.880]  In order for that pipeline to exist, there had to be something on our side called a contact field.
[29:42.140 --> 29:47.580]  I've had a lot of problems finding a good explanation of a contact field.
[29:47.720 --> 29:52.190]  But what I understand generally is that everyone participating has to have good vibes.
[29:52.480 --> 29:53.600]  You have to feel good about it.
[29:53.660 --> 29:54.520]  They have to believe it.
[29:54.660 --> 29:59.480]  They have to not be sarcastic or agnostic about this.
[29:59.480 --> 30:02.560]  And they have to just feel good that they're talking to the dead.
[30:02.800 --> 30:05.280]  And if that field's not there, it's not going to work, right?
[30:05.360 --> 30:06.380]  This is a general belief.
[30:07.420 --> 30:09.860]  Interesting, I kind of wish that worked with Windows.
[30:10.060 --> 30:12.140]  I've been fighting with my little Windows laptop up here.
[30:12.450 --> 30:14.950]  And maybe if I just felt good about it, it would work better.
[30:16.450 --> 30:17.210]  That'd be nice.
[30:20.380 --> 30:23.620]  They also believe that you needed something.
[30:23.950 --> 30:26.860]  And again, many people in the room will recognize this for different reasons.
[30:27.710 --> 30:28.740]  Stochastic resonance.
[30:29.100 --> 30:30.980]  So this is used in signal theory.
[30:31.220 --> 30:33.240]  Some of the crypto people probably use this a little bit.
[30:33.400 --> 30:49.020]  The idea is if you have a really weak signal, real small signal, and you can't perceive it very well, if you add white noise to it, that signal should modulate with the useful frequencies and in effect amplify itself.
[30:49.280 --> 30:57.450]  At which point you have a slightly amplified signal, and you can then filter the white noise back out and get a piece of that information that you couldn't get.
[30:57.560 --> 31:02.210]  You can get that weak signal in a stronger form, or at least a processed form.
[31:02.600 --> 31:09.320]  So you'll see a lot from this period forward about this white noise being part of the process.
[31:09.320 --> 31:13.020]  There has to be some noise in there in order for us to understand better.
[31:15.740 --> 31:18.480]  This is my favorite part of the theories that came out of Settle.
[31:19.960 --> 31:29.710]  The folks at Settle believed that not just any ghost could do this, that in fact it was dead scientists, and they were working really hard to communicate with us.
[31:30.320 --> 31:32.880]  So hard, in fact, that they set up a lab.
[31:33.120 --> 31:36.020]  And this is one of a couple images I have of the lab.
[31:36.140 --> 31:38.460]  It's called the Timestream Space Lab.
[31:38.460 --> 31:40.450]  So this is a space lab.
[31:40.710 --> 31:44.240]  It is on the astral plane of Marduk.
[31:44.540 --> 31:48.320]  I don't know the names for them, but it's on one of the planes there.
[31:49.580 --> 31:55.540]  The lab is run by this lady, I'll say lady, Suijan Salter.
[31:56.000 --> 32:03.320]  Suijan Salter explained in some text files that she is not a dead person from Earth, but she's actually from a planet called Varid.
[32:04.300 --> 32:08.520]  Varid is a parallel planet to Earth, according to these text files.
[32:09.620 --> 32:19.920]  Kind of interesting, to her side is a picture of, I guess on her computer, of a transmission that they are about to send to Earth.
[32:21.100 --> 32:27.710]  And I also found this, which is a transmission that somebody in Germany said they received around that time period.
[32:28.380 --> 32:31.300]  So I think that was the idea there.
[32:31.420 --> 32:34.720]  I don't know if the people who received it were related to Settle or not.
[32:35.220 --> 32:38.820]  Apparently on the planet Varid, they wear fringe.
[32:39.690 --> 32:40.400]  Kind of like that.
[32:41.200 --> 32:42.620]  Here's another picture of the lab.
[32:42.800 --> 32:50.020]  This is Suijan Salter and somebody who looks like they're dressed like the KKK in the lab outfit.
[32:50.240 --> 32:52.840]  I don't know exactly why they have to dress like that to do it.
[32:54.980 --> 32:59.500]  So here's some little pieces of history I've spit out, got us up into the 1990s.
[32:59.640 --> 33:02.140]  Of course, there's some contemporary manifestations of that.
[33:02.280 --> 33:05.710]  Some of you may have seen them, but I'm just going to go through a few of them that I've found.
[33:07.140 --> 33:08.560]  Software, right?
[33:08.950 --> 33:14.100]  There's people who are interested in this who are programmers, and so they created software.
[33:14.320 --> 33:17.450]  This is a particular piece of software called EVP Maker.
[33:18.160 --> 33:32.420]  EVP Maker takes... you can pipe any audio into it on your computer, and it will digitally dice the audio into tenth of a second fragments, and then it will pile it back together in no particular order.
[33:33.480 --> 33:48.660]  And then the idea is that you're supposed to play this while you're trying to communicate with those who've passed, and the ghosts can somehow manipulate the samples, and with maybe some white noise or a little stochastic resonance, you can actually get some communication out of that.
[33:49.020 --> 33:54.240]  I have an audio sample I'll play real quick of what this guy sounds like, so I'm going to hop out of my slideshow here.
[33:56.170 --> 34:01.160]  This is a sample file that the person who wrote it published.
[34:01.460 --> 34:10.580]  This is using three different voices run through this processing software, and is during a communication if you hear a little bit of a real person in there.
[34:32.120 --> 34:35.240]  I don't hear much in there, but maybe somebody heard something in there.
[34:37.900 --> 34:44.160]  I understand, talking to people who do this, that this is a trained skill to be able to hear the voices.
[34:44.160 --> 34:52.120]  So, a lot of times when you hear these samples, they'll be looped over and over and over, and if you concentrate really hard and listen to a lot of them, you'll actually start hearing voices.
[34:53.380 --> 34:54.520]  Funny how that works.
[34:59.590 --> 35:00.470]  EVP maker.
[35:00.750 --> 35:03.170]  I mentioned something kind of off the cuff.
[35:03.210 --> 35:05.590]  I said they're put together in no particular order.
[35:05.730 --> 35:06.550]  They're random, right?
[35:07.010 --> 35:11.690]  All the crypto people in here shaking their head, saying, not random from a computer.
[35:11.690 --> 35:20.770]  And the folks who did this recognized that, that, you know, our version of random from a computer isn't really random, but there's a seed in there and it's close to random.
[35:21.450 --> 35:23.770]  But people got a little upset about that.
[35:23.870 --> 35:33.030]  And so the folks who used this started publishing circuits online to create external true random generators, right?
[35:33.890 --> 35:38.890]  And the idea with these, and again, I suspect crypto people also want to do the same thing.
[35:39.030 --> 35:47.150]  But the idea here was having this external device was also another place that maybe spirits could manipulate the randomness of it.
[35:49.770 --> 35:53.210]  This is a website called ITC Bridge.
[35:53.990 --> 35:56.010]  You can go to this online right now.
[35:56.210 --> 35:59.390]  They have a continuous stream, which I'll explain in a second.
[35:59.390 --> 36:01.670]  Unfortunately, that stream has been down for about a year.
[36:01.990 --> 36:04.010]  I hope it comes back up soon.
[36:04.190 --> 36:05.630]  This is a very interesting project.
[36:07.970 --> 36:19.110]  ITC Bridge remotely networked a sensor over Ustream and took audio, converted the audio to images via a spectrogram.
[36:19.330 --> 36:26.170]  So this is a software program that takes audio and maps different frequencies in the audio over time.
[36:26.170 --> 36:43.590]  So you end up with this kind of waterfall display, either left, right or up and down, with dots, pixels, images that represent different variables in the frequency or different loudnesses to parts of the frequency in the hopes to see images coming from the sound.
[36:45.310 --> 36:46.710]  It's not running right now.
[36:46.930 --> 36:49.450]  I'll read the explanation of the last setup they have.
[36:49.450 --> 36:52.030]  And I believe he's going to do the same thing again.
[36:53.770 --> 36:55.610]  The gentleman who set up this website.
[36:55.770 --> 36:56.010]  I'm sorry.
[36:56.090 --> 36:56.950]  His name is Keith Clark.
[36:58.530 --> 37:01.870]  He has a shortwave radio in a shed.
[37:01.970 --> 37:02.890]  Oh, I have a picture of the shed.
[37:03.790 --> 37:05.530]  Shortwave radio in a shed.
[37:06.930 --> 37:11.450]  Instead of being connected to an antenna, the antenna is connected to ground, to earth.
[37:12.510 --> 37:16.170]  There's a condenser microphone approximately one inch away from the radio speaker.
[37:16.490 --> 37:21.070]  There's an XLR cable that runs from the microphone 100 feet into the house.
[37:22.090 --> 37:23.910]  That runs into an audio mixer.
[37:24.350 --> 37:30.050]  The audio mixer is just leveling everything out and then outputs to a computer sound card.
[37:30.310 --> 37:37.750]  The computer is filtering some of that sound and maybe getting some of the white noise out of it.
[37:37.750 --> 37:40.210]  I'm not exactly sure what that filtering was intended for.
[37:40.830 --> 37:43.770]  And then it outputs to another computer, which is sending it up to use stream.
[37:44.910 --> 37:51.490]  The idea being that community members at ITC Bridge can work together, all work on the same stream.
[37:51.490 --> 37:54.530]  So there's multiple people looking at the same evidence, right?
[37:54.690 --> 37:58.770]  So there's some comparison of notes to this.
[37:59.150 --> 38:08.090]  And they're invited to record parts of the stream, pull stills off of it, publish images that they find on the stream, and maybe some of that audio.
[38:11.230 --> 38:17.390]  Interestingly, he made it very clear when he set this up that he did not expect there to be any EVP.
[38:17.590 --> 38:19.470]  He did not expect anybody to hear voices.
[38:19.850 --> 38:29.250]  This was for people who have passed or maybe Time Stream Space Lab to send pictures, right?
[38:29.370 --> 38:30.750]  Specifically for that purpose.
[38:36.550 --> 38:40.610]  This gets on the edge of pop culture for me.
[38:40.970 --> 38:42.790]  This is called X Paranormal.
[38:42.990 --> 38:46.370]  This piece of software is produced by ExtremeCensus.com.
[38:46.470 --> 38:47.290]  They have a couple of these.
[38:49.050 --> 38:51.150]  This, you load it up on your PC.
[38:51.390 --> 38:52.290]  It's a Windows-based.
[38:52.810 --> 38:58.690]  It will find your network card and your Wi-Fi, whichever one you have.
[38:58.690 --> 39:02.590]  If you don't have anything plugged into your network, it will use the open jack.
[39:03.010 --> 39:10.750]  And it will try to read any anomalies in the signal where there shouldn't be a signal, which is kind of interesting.
[39:11.430 --> 39:14.870]  I didn't have a terrible amount of success with this one.
[39:15.730 --> 39:20.670]  They published in their adverts, they say it uses live calculations.
[39:21.470 --> 39:23.530]  They say it uses real-time scanning.
[39:23.730 --> 39:25.630]  I guess that's scanning the Wi-Fi port.
[39:26.890 --> 39:28.810]  It tracks something called RSFQ. 
[39:28.930 --> 39:35.050]  I had to do a little bit of a research, and you can see that flat line on the top in my version of it that says RSFQ.
[39:35.970 --> 39:38.990]  RSFQ stands for Rapid Singular Flux Quantum.
[39:38.990 --> 39:41.550]  And I understand this in my layman terms.
[39:41.990 --> 39:50.790]  To be on the silicon level in computers, there can be minute fluctuations that are not intended by design.
[39:50.950 --> 39:53.770]  And so this is supposed to be tracking those tiny, tiny fluctuations.
[39:54.210 --> 39:57.650]  I read a little bit about Flux Quantum to see if this was feasible.
[39:57.870 --> 40:02.490]  And apparently it didn't work on my laptop because I don't have a cryogenic cooling package.
[40:03.390 --> 40:06.710]  You have to cool the silicon in order to read these fluctuations.
[40:07.550 --> 40:10.510]  So not a lot of luck with this one on my part.
[40:11.090 --> 40:12.550]  This is another one they produce.
[40:12.910 --> 40:15.710]  The software interface looks like it's not this blurry.
[40:16.270 --> 40:18.210]  It looks like a handheld recorder.
[40:18.530 --> 40:24.710]  The idea is that it can take multiple line inputs or microphone inputs, depending on what you want to plug in.
[40:25.030 --> 40:28.390]  While you're trying to communicate, you can record from various sources.
[40:28.390 --> 40:30.690]  It mixes them together with white noise.
[40:30.830 --> 40:32.090]  Again, the stochastic resonance.
[40:32.670 --> 40:37.730]  And then filters that out and produces some kind of voice output from that.
[40:39.930 --> 40:41.590]  I won't give that one too much time.
[40:44.150 --> 40:45.110]  This is...
[40:45.790 --> 40:46.550]  Let's see.
[40:46.730 --> 40:48.690]  Oh, of course there's an app for that, right?
[40:48.730 --> 40:49.770]  We all have smartphones.
[40:50.150 --> 40:55.810]  So there's a bunch of these smartphone apps for ITC.
[40:55.810 --> 40:58.210]  This one is called Ghost Detector App.
[40:59.470 --> 41:02.370]  The author of this one, I have no idea how this one works.
[41:02.510 --> 41:03.950]  I really couldn't get much out of this one.
[41:05.670 --> 41:07.030]  This is a ghost radar.
[41:07.410 --> 41:13.030]  It apparently uses your GPS and Wi-Fi to detect ghosts up to a nine-mile radius.
[41:13.350 --> 41:14.870]  I don't know where nine miles comes from.
[41:16.110 --> 41:17.210]  There's a microphone.
[41:17.210 --> 41:20.390]  And if you actually see a blip on the radar, you can talk.
[41:21.270 --> 41:29.390]  And it will use voice synthesis to possibly turn the received signals into some kind of voice.
[41:29.570 --> 41:31.410]  I don't know exactly how this one works.
[41:31.410 --> 41:32.790]  I do know how the next one works.
[41:32.910 --> 41:33.730]  And it may be related.
[41:34.750 --> 41:37.110]  This is called EMF meter.
[41:37.210 --> 41:38.190]  This is kind of interesting.
[41:38.490 --> 41:42.350]  Most of our smartphones these days have GPS on them.
[41:43.590 --> 41:52.810]  And part of that GPS package or the chip that's on there usually has a magnetometer, a sensor designed to be the compass, right?
[41:52.930 --> 41:54.250]  So we can find magnetic north.
[41:54.470 --> 42:02.610]  Not only can we figure out where we're going from the GPS, but we can figure out where magnetic north is and determine which direction we're facing in any given moment.
[42:03.390 --> 42:17.470]  This app and a lot of these apps apparently untether the magnetic sensor from the GPS sensor and use it as an EMF detector, EMF electromagnetic frequencies.
[42:17.830 --> 42:31.390]  The interesting thing about this one is I don't know if it was originally designed for ghost hunters, but you can detect your laptop spinning or a fan or motors or computers or television.
[42:31.390 --> 42:36.530]  So anything that puts out stray electromagnetic energy can be detected by this.
[42:36.730 --> 42:37.830]  And it does seem to work.
[42:38.730 --> 42:40.370]  Here's another version of it.
[42:40.770 --> 42:42.670]  This is called ghost catcher camera.
[42:42.810 --> 42:44.370]  It does exactly the same thing.
[42:44.490 --> 42:50.270]  And when it sees a spike of a certain amount, it will then turn on the microphone and start flickering your camera.
[42:50.610 --> 42:58.750]  And you're invited to kind of run around with your phone in front of you while you're ghost hunting so that maybe you can look at them later and catch a picture of it.
[43:01.630 --> 43:02.950]  That's what's out there right now.
[43:03.050 --> 43:03.810]  There's an app for that.
[43:07.090 --> 43:09.350]  I take this all a little different direction.
[43:10.290 --> 43:14.390]  Right now I'm in the process of pulling these tools together in my own work.
[43:14.530 --> 43:18.130]  I've done a couple exhibitions now using these tools.
[43:18.610 --> 43:20.670]  I wanted to show you a failure first.
[43:20.990 --> 43:24.610]  Folks probably recognize that little black box as a Raspberry Pi.
[43:25.230 --> 43:27.210]  I've been working a lot with the Raspberry Pi.
[43:27.410 --> 43:30.450]  It's very malleable and cheap and nearly disposable.
[43:30.750 --> 43:35.550]  This particular one has a Wi-Fi adapter on it.
[43:36.050 --> 43:40.810]  I use a tool on this, which again, a few people in the room may recognize.
[43:40.970 --> 43:42.070]  It's called AirMonNG.
[43:43.630 --> 43:47.450]  I think most people use this to grab signals off of Wi-Fi.
[43:47.450 --> 43:51.970]  And though we're not supposed to, maybe look for passwords that are floating around on the Wi-Fi.
[43:52.570 --> 43:54.910]  I do something a little different with it.
[43:55.050 --> 43:59.770]  I take the signal off of AirMon that I get in local Wi-Fi systems.
[44:00.210 --> 44:02.670]  And I pipe it through to a program called SoX.
[44:03.550 --> 44:06.070]  This is referred to as a Swiss Army knife of audio.
[44:06.710 --> 44:08.350]  SoX is a fabulous program.
[44:08.350 --> 44:13.750]  You can take anything and pipe it into SoX and get audio out the other end.
[44:14.130 --> 44:18.930]  And then I run the audio into a spectrogram software to see if I can catch some of these images.
[44:19.590 --> 44:26.730]  Anybody who's heard a Wi-Fi signal knows that it's very sharp and sporadic.
[44:27.290 --> 44:32.710]  And what I ended up with from this particular project is mostly just peaks of white and then nothing.
[44:32.930 --> 44:35.370]  And then a peak of white and then a little bit of signal.
[44:35.370 --> 44:36.290]  And that's about it.
[44:37.310 --> 44:38.770]  I want to keep working with it.
[44:38.850 --> 44:40.050]  I think it's an interesting idea.
[44:40.830 --> 44:44.630]  Maybe I should spend some time in New York City where there's a little more Wi-Fi than where I am.
[44:45.110 --> 44:47.170]  Maybe some white noise needs to be added.
[44:47.450 --> 44:49.110]  That always seems to always be the answer.
[44:52.140 --> 44:53.100]  This is...
[44:53.100 --> 44:57.420]  This recently exhibited and is going off to Ireland pretty soon.
[44:58.180 --> 45:02.700]  I refer to this as my ghost VOX machine.
[45:02.700 --> 45:08.760]  I built it inside the case of an old radio police scanner from the 60s, I believe.
[45:09.560 --> 45:11.860]  Again, a Raspberry Pi inside of here.
[45:12.260 --> 45:13.800]  A little different idea here.
[45:14.080 --> 45:21.500]  This has a small, untuned antenna on no particular frequency with no loop to tune it.
[45:23.480 --> 45:24.040]  Amplified.
[45:24.040 --> 45:26.780]  It's a fairly broadband signal I'm capturing.
[45:27.040 --> 45:30.680]  I'm using that signal as basically a random generator.
[45:30.940 --> 45:40.140]  I'm then taking the random bits that I get out of that and I'm mapping it out to a phoneme database.
[45:41.000 --> 45:46.500]  Phonemes, for folks that are not familiar, are the tiniest part of speech in our language.
[45:46.820 --> 45:51.180]  So, not just syllables or letters of the alphabet, but the individual sounds.
[45:51.480 --> 45:54.880]  So, ah, t, k, ugh, like that, right?
[45:55.040 --> 45:55.400]  Phonemes.
[45:55.720 --> 45:57.120]  I'll play a little piece from this.
[45:57.520 --> 45:59.720]  Kind of interesting output that I got out of this one.
[46:07.870 --> 46:08.910]  It's very chatty.
[46:31.830 --> 46:34.250]  Sometimes over an hour I think I hear my name.
[46:35.430 --> 46:36.670]  I have a one syllable name.
[46:46.790 --> 46:48.770]  I'm gonna release that setup pretty soon.
[46:48.830 --> 46:50.050]  I'm pretty excited about it.
[46:50.130 --> 46:51.570]  Get some interesting sounds out of this.
[46:52.790 --> 46:55.230]  The other one I have, and I'll move along pretty quickly here.
[46:55.370 --> 46:57.510]  I see we only have probably ten minutes or so left.
[47:01.370 --> 47:05.710]  Similar untuned antenna going into a propeller microcontroller.
[47:06.170 --> 47:09.070]  This is another microcontroller that doesn't run an operating system.
[47:09.390 --> 47:18.670]  And I have this one taking the random set and using it to basically generate an A-Life algorithm to produce an image.
[47:18.690 --> 47:23.430]  And I'm building a series of fairly large LED screens to project this on.
[47:23.630 --> 47:25.370]  This is three foot by four foot.
[47:25.910 --> 47:28.250]  You can hear the other guy talking away in the background.
[47:28.510 --> 47:29.510]  This is in the same gallery.
[47:37.120 --> 47:38.820]  50-50 on this one.
[47:39.280 --> 47:43.720]  I haven't seen too many good screaming faces or anything like that.
[47:44.240 --> 47:46.300]  Sometimes it looks like landscape to me.
[47:57.460 --> 47:59.540]  I got one more here I'll show you guys.
[47:59.660 --> 48:02.360]  And in fact, a plain old bottle cap.
[48:02.620 --> 48:04.500]  Now this has been my most successful one.
[48:04.900 --> 48:07.080]  And in fact, I'm rather pleased with it.
[48:07.260 --> 48:11.780]  And I've asked to give a workshop on how to build this.
[48:12.020 --> 48:12.280]  Thank you.
[48:13.520 --> 48:17.460]  And that workshop is going to be running at 4 o'clock today down in the mezzanine.
[48:17.580 --> 48:18.600]  I'll tell you a little more about it.
[48:18.600 --> 48:23.600]  But this is an electromagnetic vibration microphone.
[48:24.320 --> 48:24.940]  So both.
[48:25.180 --> 48:29.340]  So it can be a contact mic to detect vibrations on hard surfaces.
[48:29.660 --> 48:37.140]  Or there's also a coil in there that bypasses the audio pickup from a microphone and just captures electromagnetic signals.
[48:37.360 --> 48:40.300]  Maybe what comes off of our TVs, laptops, things like that.
[48:40.300 --> 48:43.880]  And then I run it into the microphone on a PC.
[48:44.060 --> 48:45.280]  Sometimes the PC I'm monitoring.
[48:45.720 --> 48:48.920]  And this will work on either Linux, Mac, Windows.
[48:49.140 --> 48:50.720]  I found software to do it on all of them.
[48:51.020 --> 48:54.160]  And generate images based off that audio.
[48:55.700 --> 48:57.220]  These are...they're very blurry.
[48:57.600 --> 48:59.520]  And they're very small images.
[48:59.820 --> 49:02.700]  And sometimes I think it helps if you stand very far away and squint.
[49:03.720 --> 49:05.700]  This is maybe a room full of people.
[49:07.710 --> 49:09.220]  Or a Chiptune concert.
[49:09.400 --> 49:09.920]  I'm not sure.
[49:13.000 --> 49:14.080]  I'll let you guys guess.
[49:14.200 --> 49:17.060]  If you really squint at this one, I think there's something in there.
[49:18.160 --> 49:20.160]  I've been fairly pleased with this output, though.
[49:20.420 --> 49:22.700]  I don't do a lot of post-processing to it.
[49:22.700 --> 49:25.720]  So I'll grab the images and then I'll just enlarge them.
[49:25.780 --> 49:27.960]  So they're bigger than a postage stamp.
[49:28.280 --> 49:29.440]  Thus a little bit blurry.
[49:29.780 --> 49:31.520]  But again, I think the noise helps a little bit.
[49:34.000 --> 49:36.280]  I've been told that looks like my head with devil horns.
[49:39.560 --> 49:40.260]  I don't know.
[49:42.920 --> 49:43.800]  And my workshop.
[49:44.750 --> 49:46.800]  The workshop's at 4 o'clock.
[49:48.000 --> 49:56.480]  You can build one of these little bottle cap microphones and it'll help you set up on whatever you're working with to do the waterfall software and capture your own images.
[49:56.580 --> 49:57.180]  Do what you want.
[49:57.300 --> 49:57.720]  Email me.
[49:57.780 --> 49:58.580]  Tell me all about it.
[49:58.960 --> 50:00.040]  I have little kits.
[50:00.260 --> 50:02.680]  They're about six bucks is the cost of them.
[50:03.060 --> 50:04.620]  You have to bring your own bottle cap.
[50:04.780 --> 50:06.900]  So you may want to stop and get some club mate on the way.
[50:08.280 --> 50:10.380]  It's just a case to hold the whole thing in.
[50:12.830 --> 50:14.840]  The workshop's listed for three hours.
[50:14.940 --> 50:16.320]  I'm going to hang out for three hours.
[50:16.420 --> 50:19.700]  I suspect if you've never soldered before, this will take you about a half hour.
[50:20.160 --> 50:22.600]  If you've soldered before, you can probably do it in 10 minutes.
[50:23.460 --> 50:26.440]  And I've published the whole thing on the wiki, on the HOPE Wiki.
[50:26.760 --> 50:34.160]  So if you don't have any interest in this or there's so many awesome talks going on, you can just grab the parts list and the instructions later and try it yourself.
[50:34.720 --> 50:36.160]  If you do, please email me.
[50:36.220 --> 50:37.420]  Let me know if you catch anything.
[50:37.960 --> 50:41.520]  Or use it in an exhibit or performance or something like that.
[50:41.620 --> 50:42.480]  I'd love to hear about it.
[50:43.300 --> 50:44.400]  Is it worth questions?
[50:44.640 --> 50:45.240]  Do we have enough time?
[50:45.520 --> 50:46.000]  I don't know.
[50:46.560 --> 50:48.280]  I can't see out there at all.
[50:48.540 --> 50:49.020]  So...
[50:49.940 --> 50:50.780]  Yeah, maybe.
[50:50.920 --> 50:51.660]  If there are questions.
[50:51.880 --> 50:52.000]  Yeah.
[50:52.960 --> 51:05.500]  So it seems from the historical aspect that the methods of detecting the ghosts progress with technology that is available.
[51:05.500 --> 51:06.020]  Yeah.
[51:06.200 --> 51:06.440]  Right.
[51:07.700 --> 51:13.040]  Did you look into compression artifacts of MP3s or something like that?
[51:13.220 --> 51:13.320]  Yeah.
[51:13.320 --> 51:15.420]  Did you really strongly compress it?
[51:15.560 --> 51:17.140]  Maybe you can hear some ghosts there.
[51:17.360 --> 51:17.640]  Yeah.
[51:17.820 --> 51:23.640]  I've actually done process work before I got involved with this project on that exact thing.
[51:23.760 --> 51:27.700]  And it's come to my mind, nobody in this community has gone that direction yet.
[51:27.900 --> 51:29.100]  I'm very interested in it.
[51:29.200 --> 51:29.580]  And you're right.
[51:29.700 --> 51:33.560]  There's a lot of beautiful noise in those when you really compress something.
[51:33.760 --> 51:34.620]  Yeah, it's amazing.
[51:34.620 --> 51:35.560]  Anything else?
[51:35.680 --> 51:37.680]  I don't know it's not a crystal ball effect.
[51:37.900 --> 51:41.380]  And you're just not concentrating on something that's emerging from you.
[51:42.340 --> 51:43.660]  I'm sorry, the crystal ball?
[51:44.200 --> 51:44.460]  Yeah.
[51:44.920 --> 51:45.700]  It's just a...
[51:45.700 --> 51:51.440]  In other words, it was just a device to focus the attention and then the unconscious comes.
[51:51.520 --> 51:51.820]  Yeah.
[51:52.060 --> 51:53.840]  I think the subtle people believe that.
[51:54.080 --> 51:55.000]  I kind of believe it.
[51:55.080 --> 52:00.180]  I think if this is something you really believe works, you could probably do it with a pen.
[52:00.180 --> 52:00.560]  Right.
[52:00.560 --> 52:01.700]  I think you're absolutely right.
[52:02.240 --> 52:03.860]  The technologies and material...
[52:04.380 --> 52:12.740]  I am interested in the fact that a lot of times people who engage with this technology do so because they don't know how it works, which is kind of fascinating, right?
[52:12.740 --> 52:15.340]  So there's already some mysticism.
[52:15.560 --> 52:17.180]  I don't know how to program this.
[52:17.320 --> 52:18.940]  It just does its thing, right?
[52:19.140 --> 52:20.520]  So maybe it does other things, too.
[52:21.600 --> 52:22.780]  That's interesting to me.
[52:22.940 --> 52:24.080]  But yeah, I think you're right.
[52:24.080 --> 52:27.120]  I think it could be any technology or object, right?
[52:29.620 --> 52:30.060]  Good.
[52:30.220 --> 52:30.340]  Thanks.
[52:30.440 --> 52:32.680]  I see one way in the back and then I guess I'll let you go.
[52:35.240 --> 52:35.680]  Yeah.
[52:39.640 --> 52:40.080]  Yeah.
[52:40.420 --> 52:51.440]  I actually just did a straight up lookup table and I arranged the signal coming in to the number of elements in my data table and let it decide.
[52:52.880 --> 52:54.140]  That's all there is to it.
[52:54.140 --> 53:04.520]  I'm using... there's a library on Linux that I'm using for that called Festival, I believe, that's designed for the blind, speech for the blind, right?
[53:05.160 --> 53:09.860]  If anybody has other questions, I'll be at that down in the mezzanine B area.
[53:10.020 --> 53:11.440]  That's not the one near the escalator.
[53:11.640 --> 53:13.540]  I'm going to hang out down there for three hours.
[53:13.540 --> 53:18.860]  So if you don't want to build the kit and you just want to ask questions, I'm happy to talk with anybody about this, too.
[53:19.700 --> 53:20.440]  Thank you.
[53:20.940 --> 53:21.840]  I'll catch you later.