The Six Thousand

Myspace intermission: Occasionally, we take a break from the main "6000 list" to encounter people at Myspace. Who do you find more intriguing? Casandra writes, "Ethnically, I am half-German. Spiritually, I am half-Asian. Emotionally, I am half-Pashtun. Intellectually, I will blow your mind. My Chinese name is Chung Li. I fence competitively. I am an award winning artist and speaker. My free time is spent writing short stories in Vietnamese." Or Micsto, whose interests include "music, film, art, photography, dance (flamenco, middle eastern folkloric, bellydancing: traditional and tribal), drummer (mainly Middle Eastern), world politics, history, cooking, books, writing, traveling to obscure locations, people watching and causing chaos."

German-born artist, Martina Hoffmann, spent her childhood in Germany and in Cameroon, West Africa, where she was raised bilingually in French and German, while surrounded by African, French and German culture. In her latest mind-blowing artworks, Hoffmann uses her inner visions as a guide for her paintings. She sees herself as a "translator" for these visions.

Read more: http://www.martinahoffmann.com/visions_fantasy/visions_fantasy.html

Maggie Balistreri is author of The Evasion English Dictionary. Cultural criticism takes form in this book as Maggie make us all aware of the little linguistic games we play in order to "duck the truth," the words we use not to reveal our meaning but to mask it. Maggie Balistreri is also a performance artist and gifted, witty poet.

Read more: http://www.cafemo.com/eedict/index.html

Rick Strassman, MD, began the first new human research with psychedelic drugs in the United States in over 20 years. These studies investigated the effects of N,N-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a short-acting and powerful psychedelic. He administered approximately 400 doses of DMT to 60 human volunteers. He was drawn to DMT because of its presence in all of our bodies. Perhaps excessive DMT production from the pineal gland is involved in naturally occurring "psychedelic" states such as those in near-death, mystical, and "alien abduction" experiences.

Read more: http://www.rickstrassman.com/

Ninah Pixie is a performer/artist/musician with a fascinating and popular Blog called Ollapodrida. She sings, plays piano, flute, and harmonium. She works a full-time day job for the National Center for Science Education (http://ncseweb.org/), which seems to tolerate her "bizarro-artsy-freaky lifestyle" and allows her the freedom to also pursue her role in the UBUIBI arts collective and Big City Orchestrae. She has experienced LSD and other aids to mystical enlightenment. She is currently producing an unusual music CD.

Read more: http://www.ollapodrida.net/blog/

According to cosmologist Max Tegmark, parallel universes are a direct implication of cosmological observations. He suggests that right now there a copy of you reading this Blog. The life of this person has been identical to yours in every respect. But perhaps he or she now decides to close this window without finishing it, while you read on. The idea of such an alter ego seems strange and implausible, but it is supported by astronomical observations. The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 10^28 meters from here.

Read more: http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/index.html

Jennifer Michael Hecht earned her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Columbia University. She is a Professor of History and book author. In her book The End of the Soul, she discusses the Society of Mutual Autopsy, which had the aim of proving that souls do not exist. The idea was that, after death, they would dissect each other.... In her book The Next Ancient World, she writes delightfully tricky poems that wildly bend the sense of our language.

Read more: http://jennifermichaelhecht.com/_wsn/page3.html

Asya Schween is an artist and mathematician who makes self-portraits that encourage us to shiver. She writes, "I'm Asya Schween, age 24. Immersed in incarnadine-hued twilight of my mind. Alone. I read no poetry but mathematical manuscripts and the Holy Bible. I'm a good girl. I will perish."

Read more: http://www.myownself.com/new/saveme.html

Freeman Dyson's books and writings span the range from the subatomic to the far reaches of space, time, and mind. English-born American physicist, mathematician, and futurist, he is famous for his work in quantum mechanics and his serious theorizing in futurism and science fiction concepts, including the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He is the winner of the Templeton Prize for his thoughts on science and religion. He writes: "I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension."

Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson

"I've always wanted to meet an alien. I've always wanted to know if there were aliens on this planet right now, that pose as people. I also want to meet David Icke." Other interests: Conspiracies, metaphysics, quantum physics lucid dreaming, OBEs...

Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bee_original

Give Tatiana Cooley 15 minutes to memorize 100 faces and names and she'll remember 70 of them in a snap. Give the reigning and only USA National Memory Champion strings of 4,000 numbers, "70093518 555899 ..." or 500 words: "liquid, dairy, digit, district, garden, hair ..." and she'll repeat them better than most. Same with a 54-line poem or a deck of cards.

Read more: http://www.s-t.com/daily/02-99/02-24-99/b04li047.htm

"Simply, the body has created an information and technological environment which it can no longer cope with. This sort of Aristotelian impulse to continuously accumulate more and more information has created the situation where human cortical capacity just can't absorb and creatively process all this information. This is one of the human and technological pressures that make for the computer. It was necessary to create technology to take over what the body can no longer do."

Read more: http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/

MARIA SPIROPULU, a physicist, is currently at CERN. She has been working at the Tevatron with UCSB and was an Enrico Fermi Fellow at the EFI/University of Chicago. She is interested in collider signatures of supersymmetry and extra dimensions.

Read more: http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/pc/maria.html

Xeni Jardin (say: /SHEH-nee zhar-DAN/) is a tech culture journalist and co-editor of the collaborative weblog BoingBoing, the award-winning "Directory of Wonderful Things." She is a Contributing Writer for WIRED Magazine, and "Xeni Tech" contributor for National Public Radio's daily program "Day to Day."

Read more: http://xeni.net/

Described by Time Magazine as "a cross between Carl Sagan and Madonna", astrophysicist, author and recording artist Dr. Fiorella Terenzi received her doctorate in physics from the University of Milan, has studied opera and composition at Conservatory G. Verdi, Corsi Serali, and taught mathematics and physics at Liceo Scientifico, Milan

Read more: http://www.fiorella.com/

We are witnessing intersecting revolutions in a plethora of fields: biotechnology, nanotechnology, molecular electronics, computation, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, virtual reality, human brain reverse engineering, brain augmentation, robotics, and many others.

Read more: http://www.kurzweilai.net/

One of Teja's goals is to unite science, mathematics, and art. Her works have been featured at international exhibitions. My colleagues consider her Eastern Europe's "MC Escher" and Slovenia's "gift" to the world.

Read more:
http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/pc/tejak.html

Lisa Randall studies particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University , where she is Professor of Theoretical Physics. Her research concerns the fundamental nature of particles and forces and how matter's basic elements relate to the physical properties of the world that we see. Prof. Randall has worked on a wide variety of ideas for what might lie beyond established particle physics and cosmological theories, including grand unified theories, supersymmetry, cosmological inflation, baryogenesis, string theory and, most recently, extra dimensions of space. She has made seminal contributions in all these areas and as of last autumn, was the most cited theoretical physicist of the past five years.

Read more: http://www.physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/randall.html

Natasha Vita-More is a cultural strategist. She has given talks on the culture of the future, the future of the human body, and how technology will affect the design of the future. Natasha has appeared on more than a dozen televised programs, featured in magazines such as Wired, Marie Claire, Anna, The New York Times, and LA Weekly.

Read more:
http://www.natasha.cc/

I welcome your suggestions for more people to add to "The Six Thousand."