Can Surrealism Learn From Ted Turner?
Andrea Chen
transform society and free the imagination of the poor socially
brainwashed people who are repressing Dale/Brandon it needs to develop
ways in which art forms direct cognition.
This article shows how avant garde ideas (in this case the end of
nationalism as envisioned by Karl Marx (approved by official surrealists
everywhere!)) can be pursued through the development of art (or is it
the other way around?)
The Yellow and Black Dog Riding a Scorpion at Midnight wrote:
>
> Ted Turner (a man who donated $1,000,000 to the UNITED NATIONS!!!) has on his
> World Championship Wrestling program a stable called the New World Order.
> This New World Order have been 'heels' (bad guys for the
> non-wrestling-initiated) for the past couple years. Their frontman has been
> none other than wrestling's most recognised mainstream crossover star,
> "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan.
>
> Recent developments in the wrestling storylines have turned Hogan's greatest
> enemy, Ric Flair, and his 4 Horsemen group (which represent 'tradition',
> something of course both the fictional and real NWO groups are against) into
> 'heels'...as things are setting up for Hogan to go back to his 'babyface'
> (good guy) ways of the 80s...turning the NWO into something that is loved by
> the fans....
>
> As we can see, UN sympathizer and one world government proponent Ted Turner
> and his wife Hanoi Jane have no doubt planned this for years. With pro
> wrestling at record popularity, surpassing even the Hulkamania 80s, Turner
> could not have picked a better time to pollute millions of children's minds
> with One World Government rhetoric through something as seemingly innocuous
> and harmless as pro wrestling...
>
> Rest assured, Turner's media will find no depths too low to stoop to in order
> to foist the vision of One World Government and the New World Order upon our
> world.
elag
The object of the T-maze is to force the rat into choosing between two
alternatives, going to the right or the left. Various
stimuli are presented to cue the rat to the correct path. If the rat
choose the correct path then it can be said that the rat is
capable of sensing the stimuli. If the trained rat fails to chooose the
correct path more 70% of the time after a number of trials
it can be said with reasonable certainty that the rat is incapable of
differentiating between the two stimuli. I describe training in
more detail in the experiment section of this page. Lack of performance
is of course more difficult to evaluate than positive
results and the experiment must be carefully scutinized to ensure that
there is no alternative exlaination.
The cheapest marterials for the maze are probably cardboard and chicken
wire, but acrylic would be more
durable and would be washable. Whether you choose this or wood or some
other material doesn't matter too
much as long as you keep in mind the following considerations. There are
few things as annoying to a rat as a
dead end. Therefore blocking the exit from the passage is an effectve
deterent to using the wrong corridor.
Punishing the rat in other ways is not recommended as this often causes
the rat to fear the maze which may
result in the rat refusing to run at all and staying still to avoid
punishment. However finding an exit is as
rewarding as a dead end is frustrating to the rat, . Any additional food
offered will naturally increase the reinforcing effect. This
means that both exits should be hidden from view until the rat has made
the decision to go one way or another. It is also
useful to be able to see the rat but there must be some cover over the
maze or the rat will simply climb out.. I also have a
transparent wall as this allows for displaying visual stimuli and even
giving your rat an eyesight exam. (See suggested
experiments) and finally it is important to build the maze for a full
grown rat. When I acquired my first four rats they weighed
70-80 grams each and were maze-trainable. By the end of 3 months they
each weighed around 400 grams and could no
longer fit into apparatus I had designed for a 150 gram rat. I recommend
corridors that are 15 cm (6 inches) wide and 15 cm
(6 inches) high. A length of 70 cm(Two feet) would be sufficient for the
passage with the two decision arms, that would be 35
cm (one foot) in each direction. Also if you keep the maze lined with
paper or cardboard which is periodically removed this
should make scent marking almost impossible; the rats are guarenteed to
piddle a little.
So you've built the maze what do you do with it now? Here are a few suggestions:
First train your rat to run the maze. I recomend preparing passage
lining out of black and white construction paper,
plan a random sequence of correct sides, an choose either the
black or the white as the color to follow. (Rats appear to
be naturally attracted to the black). Now line the passages, block
the appropriate passage and add the rat. Make sure
your keep a record of each trail. With in less than twenty runs
the rat will consistently choose the correct passage. Now
that (s)he knows what to do in the maze (s)he is trained and ready
for new challenges.
How well do rats see color? Mix eight portions of grey paint, the
first mix 1:9 black/white, the second 2:8, the third 3:7
and so on to 9:1. Paint a scale of these paints on one half of a
sheet of white paper. On the other half paint a color such
as green, orange, or blue; carefully label your work. Photograph
the works with black and white. Use these results to
choose the grey that matches the grey intesity of the color to be
tested. (Yellow would be mached with a very light grey,
while blue would be matched with a very dark grey.) Take a fresh
sheet of paper and paint one side with the gray and
the other with the color. Line the whole maze with a medium gray
floor and the the far wall display your painting. Before
you do this, you may wish to train them with black and white on
the wall to see if they even notice the wall. A variation of
this would be to see at what point can they no longer
differentiate between two shades of grey.
Eye exam. Take two pieces of paper 15 X 70 cm (6 X 24 in). On one
piece paint four circles on the left side and four
point up triangles on the right side and do the opposite (the
triangles should still be point up) to the other paper.
(Figures should be 10-13 cm (4-5 in) high) Train the rats with the
paper right by the transparent wall. Once the rats are
trained move the paper back an inch, then two inches. At what
point are the rats no longer able to choose the correct
passage.
Try large letters. Do some rats have a problems with some letters,
e.g. d and b, like dislexic humans? You might need
to do some research on dislexia in humans.
Find two different clothes with the same color, e.g. black satin
and black rayon. Take several samples, wrap each
around a piece of cardboard 5 inches wide to line the passages.
When you feel that rat has been trained try out two
new liners. Does the rat still take the correct path. Try 3-5 new
linings in a row. Confuse your rats ( I hope you don't keep
one by his/her lonesome self) Train one rat for one cloth and the
other for the other cloth.
Take several piece of cardboard lining, on some make parallel rows
of glue lines with white glue on others make dots
all over. A more advanced execise would be drops of glue in two
patterns. How about different densities of glue drops.
The Labyrinth
The general objective in the labyrinth type maze is test the
navigational abilities and strategies of a rat. This is done by
designing a number of interlinking passageways which usually has one
entrance and one exit. My first major labyrinth type
maze was constructed in August 1995. (See The Mother of All Mazes on the
A-mazing page.) Despite it's large size my rats
needed no help to figure it out and did it far sooner than I expected.
So when considering size I have found "the bigger, the
better" is a good guide. Each labyrinth using the apparatus described
here will be based on a unit square, If you will only be
using this in the horizontal position you might be able have a 8cm (3
in) unit but this would cause the animal to squeeze
through the entire maze. Opening it up to 10 cm (4 in) improves the
situation quite a bit but is still cramped in the verticle
position. My current maze uses 11cm and my next maze will likely use 13
cm for its square unit. A generous 15 cm (6 in)
would take up too much space in my opinion. I do however recommend a
heigth of 15 cm for each passage. Finally I built my
current maze as a 8 x 12 rectangle but this allows for only one
rotation. Making the maze itself a square allow for two more
rotations to help defeat the using of scent to find their way through.
Due to size considrations (I recommend a minimum floor size of 150 X 150
cm (5 X 5 feet)) a supporting frame will need to be
built and the floor itself will probably be constructed from at least
two pieces of material. Acrylic is expensive and little tricky to
work with, but durable and easy to clean. Wood is cheaper but more
dificult to clean well, but this can be compensated for by
using a liner of butcher paper. Prepare the floor first, Then draw the
square grid on the floor and drill a hole at each
intersection The hole will be used for screwing down the post.
The post is made by taking a 2 X 2 and making a
slot in each of it 4 sides. The slot should be about
1 cm deep (1/2 in) and .5 cm wide (1/4 inch) I'd
recommend using a table saw for this part. Then cut
the 2 X 2 into 15 cm (6 in) lengths. Finally
drill a pilot hole into the bottom of each post and then
screw it to the floor of the maze. In the sides
of my current maze I have a hole for every unit square
and two for the corner units. If this is how you
wish to build yours then plan for slots on the side to
block the holes. If your entrance and exit is
through the side then your may use reinforced acrylic
for you lid. My next lid however will be
reinforced wire so that a maze can start and end in the
middle of the maze as well as at the edges. (I
suspect that my rats have figured out that the exit,
where ever it might be, is at the edge so they
almost exclusivly explore edges.) Lastly I recommend
constructing a tunnel (use chicken wire or
aluminum dryer tubing) from the maze to the cage of the
rats. Make the maze part of the way out of the
cage and most rats will be eager to find the fastest
way through.
Some suggestions for this maze:
1. With dead ends.
If the rat ran several mazes in which every right hand turn was
correct and all the others wrong would the rat eventually
run all such mazes correctly?
How long would it take to adjust to a left hand maze?
Would it also learn an alternating pattern?
Design two equally difficult mazes. Train the the rats in one maze
once a day. How many time through before the rat
has learned the maze. Now repeat the experiment but only run the
rat once every four days. How many more runs
does it take before the rat has learned the maze.
Design two mazes of normal difficulty. Run the rat on one maze one
day and the next day the other maze. Is the rat still
able to learn both mazes?
2. With no dead ends.
Will the rat find the shortest way out?
How does the rat determine which passage to choose?
Train each rat you have to run a different route. After 7-10 days
of training stop rewarding them in their routes, instead
reward them only for comming out of the maze. Do they continue in
the route that they were trained on? Do they always
adapt to the route used by the lead rat? If your have done all
these experiments and really can't think of anything new
to do then your rat has probably learned more than you.
Other Possibilities
Make some tube out of chicken wire or but some kind of flexible tubing
like rain gutter tubing. Interconnect the tubes by
attaching them to nodes of some sort. This makes a very interesting 3-D
maze but it might be a bit more difficult to analyse, to
say nothing of being expensive and space intensive. But hey! Use your
imagination. Try designing and building an obstacle
course. Good luck.
Brandon J. Freels
>Obviously if surrealism and it's modern offshoots are going to
>transform society and free the imagination of the poor socially
>brainwashed people who are repressing Dale/Brandon it needs to develop
>ways in which art forms direct cognition.
Who said anything about art. Surrealism is not an art movement.
mike...
Andrea Chen wrote:
> Obviously if surrealism and it's modern offshoots are going to
> transform society and free the imagination of the poor socially
> brainwashed people who are repressing Dale/Brandon it needs to develop
> ways in which art forms direct cognition.
>
> This article shows how avant garde ideas (in this case the end of
> nationalism as envisioned by Karl Marx (approved by official surrealists
> everywhere!)) can be pursued through the development of art (or is it
> the other way around?)
[ . . . ]
where? it looked like an article about wrestling to me.
it was a nice article...
mike
elag
e: No. It was about rats. It was about rats in mazes. You need to
read between the lines a bit.
Alan Hope
elag <el...@concentric.net> wrote in article
<3716F279...@concentric.net>...
> The T-maze
Sorry. What was the middle bit again?
AH
Andrea Chen
>
> Brandon J. Freels <fre...@teleport.com> wrote in message
> news:JdER2.45483$A6.22...@news1.teleport.com...
> > Andrea Chen wrote
> > >Obviously if surrealism and it's modern offshoots are going to
> > >transform society and free the imagination of the poor socially
> > >brainwashed people who are repressing Dale/Brandon it needs to develop
> > >ways in which art forms direct cognition.
>
> from the aggregate of surrealists' explorations.
>
Which again demonstrates an abilty to understand parody or twisting and
stretching concepts (especially smug ones) to extremes. Look Barrett if
you were to truly explore the "unconscious" you would need humor and the
ability to deal with ambiguity. Otherwise you'd go crazy, not in the
romantic way you imagine.
> we might wonder what "Andrea" means by "art forms", but the more substantive
> point is that the struggle is _always_against_ anything which attempts to
> "direct" cognition (whether it be "internal" or "external", "form" or
> "formless").
>
The paradox here is almost beyond belief. You are deciding what forms
are proper and improper, eg. you are attempting to "direct cognition"
but seriously (not tongue in cheek.)
> [of course, the attempt to "direct cognition" has always been "Andrea's"
> only discernible project.
To you. To a half way perceptive reader one of my easily discernible
"projects" (always projects, everything is goddamn project like summer
camp!) is to mock people like you and to make others aware of the
rhetorical games you play.
> this is also the primary project to be found
> among the microbes spread by all the recent larval infestations. this is
> what makes their comments on "surrealism" at most an irrelevant annoyance.]
>
But that is their "project," to find pompous idiots and annoy them.
And they're not "irrelevant" to dale/brandon who have devoted over a 100
posts to the subject.
> > Who said anything about art. Surrealism is not an art movement.
>
> neither larvae or fly will ever understand this.
>
Again analogy. You don't understand. Think were maggots grow. In
rotten smelly gangrene. That's you fool! You set yourself up!
Brandon J. Freels
[I'm crossposting this to alt.obituaries, alt.cow.tipping, and
alt.mysteries. Maybe they can help us figure this mess out.]
Dale Houstman
> the poor socially brainwashed people who are repressing Dale/Brandon
That's Braille/Dendron, Urea. Try to get it right.
>it needs to develop ways in which art forms direct cognition.
Interesting piece of Neo-Naziism; artists will free others of
brainwashing by becoming brainwashers themselves? This
shows your misunderstanding of (a) surrealism (b) art and
(c) freedom. But then again, you always are about control.
> This article shows how avant garde ideas (in this case the end of
> nationalism as envisioned by Karl Marx (approved by official surrealists
> everywhere!)) can be pursued through the development of art (or is it
> the other way around?)
So Andrea supports the continuation of nationalism? Or is it just
wrong to "want" anything, because it gets in the way of Andrea's
tendency towards control and stasis? Where are the "official
surrealists"? I want to kiss and tell...
Dreidl/Brandy