Glassholes
Frederick D Abraham
Frederick D Abraham
Theodore Hoppe
Theodore A. Hoppe
'dustproduction'
gus koehler
On Saturday, May 18, 2013 4:45:29 AM UTC-7, Frederick D Abraham wrote:
This word appears on p. 38 of the June Scientific American. Comments are invited.
Theodore Hoppe
Detweiler, Karen R.
FWIW, I think part of the appeal of the Scientific American piece is the construction of the label “Glassholes” itself.
By combining the element of the product (glass) with a common label for self-involved jerks, the label “Glassholes” evokes meaning for the technology and the kind of person who might adopt it. It is likely to have a high emotional valence, especially for technology’s early adopters who usually want to be seen as “cool” and “with it.” In this case, the closest colloquial parallel I can offer is the term “Fashion victim,” i.e., someone who slavishly follows current trends in apparel even when they are overpriced, poorly constructed, and/or not flattering and suitable for the person’s actual life.
That the label creates alliteration with the vendor name (Google Glass) also helps it become memorable.
In short, “Glassholes” has all the key elements to become a viral name for the users of the Google Glass technology and its knockoffs.
++Karen
Theodore Hoppe
Frederick D Abraham
Frederick D Abraham
Guastello, Stephen
Actually, if you go to the journal Human Factors, people have been studying their practical use, disuse, and user annoyances for a while. Ergonomics probably has a few contributions in that area too.
Sent: Friday, May 24, 2013 5:47 PM
To: chao...@googlegroups.com
Cc: Theodore Hoppe; gus koehler
Subject: Re: Glassholes
Frederick D Abraham
Guastello, Stephen
Google glasses transit images from the source to somewhere else. Why would any foo be using them while operating their own computer? GGs impede clear vision, not assist.
Frederick D Abraham
1 semicolon = half a large intestine..
1 megahurtz = 1,000,000 aches.
Frederick D Abraham
Frederick D Abraham
gus koehler
Here is a general overview of various issues with google glass trom The New York Times:
GRAY MATTER: Is Google Glass Dangerous? Technology like Google Glass and Siri may be hands-free, but it still demands your attention.
Theodore Hoppe
Linda Alford
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/03/07/technology-google-glass-social-implications.html
best, Linda
Rachel Heath
I’m curious about what glassholes has to do with the application of nonlinear dynamics in psychology and the life sciences.
Rachel
robert.gregson
and for some of the philosophical speculations we get sent to us
this never have a line of nonlinear dynamics involved or quoted.
If I want to read some I go to journals on Chaos or Fractals or
Bifurcations.
Thanks Rachel for saying it.
Robert
Theodore Hoppe
Rachel
Gus Koehler
My interest lies in the study of social and political complex systems including how their various components are organized (nodes for example) and how they communicate with each other across domains or layers (edges involving energy, information, etc.). Nonlinear data collection methods and analysis are, for the most part, computer driven either in how the data is collected, put into a data based, modeled or interpreted. New virtual and other systems that have been appearing over the last few years are changing our’ s and globe’s social, economic, political other systems quite dramatically. Google glass and other systems are related to perception and data collection. This extends to how scientist’s perceive—literally—the data on their computers and interact with it, even extending to the programing language which most of don’t understand. Finally, and this may not appeal much to many of you, for me critical philosophical analysis drawing on work by post modernists and others is an important part of what I do and am interested in. Non-linear dynamics is well represented in these theoretical discourses and has been clearly involved in political revolutions in the middle east. Some method for assigning and interpreting meaning—critical values related meaning which is directly related to what the actors think they are doing—is important. Art is a significant analytical approach for revealing the values and contradictions in such change that this not accessible using quantitative tools but critical to understanding what is going on.
Gus
Gus Koehler, Ph.D., President
1545 University Ave., Sacramento, CA 95825
916-564-8683 (Cell: 716-1740)
From: chao...@googlegroups.com [mailto:chao...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Theodore Hoppe
Sent: Friday, June 07, 2013 8:23 PM
To: robert.gregson
Cc: chao...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Glassholes
Point taken,but I believe there are non linear dynamics involved here if we see the bigger picture, and we might consider what they are.
robert.gregson
to be relevant to what Rachel was describing in Friston's work?
Asim Roy in Front Psychol 24 May 2013 doi: 10.3389
on 'An extension of the localist representation theory: grandmother
cells are also widely used in the brain'
and
Ralf-Peter Behrendt in Front Psychol 30 May 2013 doi: 10.3389
on 'Conscious experience and episodic memory: hippocampus at
the crossroads'
Work is moving so rapidly now that anything we find on consciousness is likely
to be partly obsolescent soon after it appears in print, as I discover myself.
Robert
Guastello, Stephen
It's been my experience in the past few years that a lot of the neurocog material that's been pouring out of Wherever hasn't been particularly deep, and I didn't expect a lot of the material to have a long lifespan while reading it. There always was a publish-or-perish imperative in academe, but I think "imperative" may be reaching maniacal proportions. If authors are willing to pay to publish, the incremental originality can become smaller and the process accelerates.
If a paper happens to be a lot deeper than many others, it'll show through when reading it, and it'll have a longer life-span of influence.
Several years ago I was asked to review a book by Alessandro & Zbilut in 2008. (The book wasn't quite published at the time, and the journal for which I was writing the review went defunct.) They made an interesting observation that stuck with me for years: There is an artistry and craftsmanship in science. A&Z thought that artistry had gone seriously downhill, and we had entered an era of "blue collar science" -- people cranking out small bits of work without any sense of the big picture of what they were working on. I think A&Z had the right idea.
Sent: Saturday, June 08, 2013 6:29 PM
Frederick D Abraham
this message used a reply function which failed to go to the forum because of the addressing of the item to which it replied:
1 semicolon = half a large intestine..
1 megahurtz = 1,000,000 aches.
Frederick D Abraham
One of the things I like in chapter 4 of Cascades and Fields is the recognition that many of our fancy statistics do not reveal as much about the dynamic processes as we would wish. Ueda notes a similar admission in discussing his explosive bifurcation of the driven Duffing system which is a cascade of micro-bifurcations (an example of a macro or μ-bifurcation (my papers are yet unfinished). These are a function a control parameters, which would be, in your Γ recursions, the gain a and internal sensitivity e parameters, (C&F, p. 76). I will have to study your work more carefully as I think you have developed the most explicit of modals and analysis of this process, well surpassing the traditional ‘edge of case’ (no rightfully a forgotten term; even the Sante Fe-ites have dropped it amid recognitions of the difficulty of pinning it down and because of its limited network-model horizons). I think these will all be special cases of the μ process, though I have not included the hierarchical features that you have, nor is my thinking as developed mathematically; mainly an outline of an idea.
Respectfully, fred
Fred is always kind to me when quoting what I have explored,
if cascades is the core topic that might be important, then the most detailed
source in a chapter is in the book by me called
Cascades and Fields in Perceptual Psychophysics,
published in 1995 by World Scientific. I have not done much since
on Cascades, perhaps I was overwhelmed by the intrinsic conplexity
of the algebra, but a very small touch to the topic gets within
one equation in a new paper by me now in press in NDPLS vol 17 (3), July.
Let us have more from Fred on his mu-bifurcation process.
Robert
On 10/06/2013 4:37 AM, Frederick D Abraham wrote:
I have found a great article that applies to nonlinear interactions among multitasked/parallel processes in the perceptual-action-cognitive domain that I think could be applied to research with Google-Glass-type environments. To wit:
Gregson, RAM (1996). n-dimensional nonlinear psychophysics: Intersensory interaction as a network at the edge of chaos. In E MacCormac & MI Stavenov (eds.), Fractals of brain, fractals of mind. Benjamins
It uses the famous gamma-recursions of the author and involves non only nonlinear dynamics but networks, and a cascades concept which may fall within the concept to which I apply the phrase, a mu-bifurcation process.
I think there are many problems to which these models could be used to drive research on, for example, driving an automobile (safety issues with cell phones, would/could G-Glasses amplify or mitigate safety).
fred
On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 7:29 PM, robert.gregson <ram...@bigpond.com> wrote:
--
Frederick David Abraham1396 Gregg Hill RoadWaterbury Center, VT 05677 USA802 244-8104 249-0806 (mobile)Skype: frederick.d.abraham (video compliant)Google+ Circles, Hangouts Groups
1 semicolon = half a large intestine..
1 megahurtz = 1,000,000 aches.
Roulette Wm. Smith Ph.D.
I have been sitting along the sidelines during the ongoing discussion of GOOGLE’s ‘Glassholes’. Unbeknownst to most persons on this list and beginning in the 1960s (as a Stanford University graduate student in computer sciences and artificial intelligence), I was directly and/or indirectly involved in the development of most of the technologies that now are take-for-granted. A few of these technologies include: time-sharing; the ARPAnet/internet; text-editing/wordprocessing/spellchecking; computer-assisted instruction/computer-based instruction/computer-based dialogue/online education; speech and language recognition; three approaches to artificial intelligence (e.g., emulating human intelligence, modeling presumptive intelligence, and, computational theories of intelligence); browsing; novel approaches to helping/logistic reasoning/decision-making/problem-solving; mass storage; and, human factors (e.g., user interfaces, privacy, economics, common sense et al.). Indeed, my son (a professional golfer) recently remarked that he and his friends now are amazed that our early research (for which they only had a peripheral understanding at that time) now is revolutionizing their professions (e.g., physiological enhancements of golfer performance).
Regarding ‘Glassholes’ and its implications for non-linear dynamics, chaos theory et al., one only needs to ponder their long-term implications for persons with prosopagnosia and Hermansky-Pudlak syndrome (i.e., persons with facial blindness and/or who have little or no facial recognition/memory).
Roulette Wm. Smith PhD
gus koehler
gus koehler
I think this is a very important question. The public’s memory, as we know from court testimony and from jury studies, is remarkably poor. Survey research, different interview techniques, etc., and various statistical processes can be used to try and make it “clearer” but it always comes down to he remembered and said vs. she remembered and said. Now, with Google glass this is no longer necessary.
Some basic questions that I think have to be answered before yours can be: 1) is brain perception and memory of the content of space constructed and the same as that of machine memory space? Is the difference important? The tools for recording machine space are software and optics; the first is invisible and unknown and open to manipulation in unknown ways—so what is real and what are “real” tests conducted by whom? Is infinitely distributed memories that are ageless any different than one memory at a time that dies or fades with the organism? Finally, what about “bastard” or “mashed-up” real-virtual reality created by and or recorded by Google glass?
Lanier’s book, who owns the future?, raises a number interesting questions which the Technology Review may have just discovered.
Guastello, Stephen
By the same token "citizen journalism" does not speak for, or justify, the myriad uses and appearance of google glasses that will be recording events and people with no redeeming forensic value. We wouldn't want the police following us around, recording us, just to be sure we didn't do a crime or cross the street the wrong way. Why would we ever want pseudo-police, wackjobs, flakes, and stalkers doing the same thing?
Photographs are not necessarily trustworthy depending on the angle, cropping, etc. That's before we get to photoshopping images. A book appeared about 10 years ago called "A Robot in the Garden" which was mostly about distortions of meaning coming out of filtered images going into stationary video surveillance cams. I can see how people would bootleg concerts and other admission-fee events too.
And of course the NSA is getting all the images from their Prism program, right?
Sent: Monday, July 08, 2013 4:46 PM
Theodore Hoppe
"Smith and Squire therefore designed their experiments so that they could assess the effects of the age of a memory independently of both the encoding of the test questions and richness of the recollection of the memory. At the beginning of the task, the researchers presented in random order blocks of questions about events in each time period, and they asked participants to indicate whether or not they knew the answer. About 10 minutes later, while still in the scanner, the participants were asked three questions about each news event. First, they were asked to recall the original question they had been asked about the event (to assess how well they had encoded the information). Then, they were asked the answer to that question (to assess the accuracy of recall) and, finally, how much they knew about each of the events (to assess the richness of each memory)."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-memory-trace
"Why, then, might old memories be transferred from the hippocampus to the frontal cortex? It may be because retrieving older memories requires stronger associations and increased effort—memory encoding in the frontal cortex is more complex than in the hippocampus, and involves a widely distributed network with a greater number of connections. The frontal cortex may therefore be better suited to the task of retrieving memories that were encoded in the distant past."
One suggestion is that all of us become much more attuned to the necessity, through policy, through procedures, to get more science in the courtroom, and I think one large step toward that is more requirements, with all due respect to the law schools, of science, technology, engineering, mathematics for anyone going into the law, because they become the judges. Think about how we select our judges in this country. It's very different than most other cultures. All right?
The other one that I want to suggest, the caution that all of us have to have, I constantly have to remind myself, about just how accurate are the memories that we know are true, that we believe in?
Is the day coming when we do not subpoena the witness we'll subpoena the Glasse's recording.
One final point, "Why do we fear the loss of privacy things like Google glasses represent?"
Dan Ariely's book "The Honest Truth About Dishonesty" makes the point that we all want t benefit from being dishonest, and we don't want this to interfere with our view of our selves. Google glasses threaten to disclose our dishonesty.
http://www.thersa.org/events/rsaanimate/animate/rsa-animate-the-truth-about-dishonesty
Guastello, Stephen
>Is the day coming when we do not subpoena the witness we'll subpoena the Glasse's recording.
>One final point, "Why do we fear the loss of privacy things like Google glasses represent?"
> Dan Ariely's book "The Honest Truth About Dishonesty" makes the point that we all want t benefit from >being dishonest, and we don't want this to interfere with our view of our selves. Google glasses threaten to >disclose our dishonesty.
IMO.
Stephen J. Guastello, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology, Marquette University
P. O. Box 1881, Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881 USA
Editor-in-Chief, Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences
Sent: Monday, July 08, 2013 8:05 PM
To: Guastello, Stephen
Cc: gus koehler; chao...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Glassholes
"Smith and Squire therefore designed their experiments so that they could assess the effects of the age of a memory independently of both the encoding of the test questions and richness of the recollection of the memory. At the beginning of the task, the researchers presented in random order blocks of questions about events in each time period, and they asked participants to indicate whether or not they knew the answer. About 10 minutes later, while still in the scanner, the participants were asked three questions about each news event. First, they were asked to recall the original question they had been asked about the event (to assess how well they had encoded the information). Then, they were asked the answer to that question (to assess the accuracy of recall) and, finally, how much they knew about each of the events (to assess the richness of each memory)."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-memory-trace
"Why, then, might old memories be transferred from the hippocampus to the frontal cortex? It may be because retrieving older memories requires stronger associations and increased effort—memory encoding in the frontal cortex is more complex than in the hippocampus, and involves a widely distributed network with a greater number of connections. The frontal cortex may therefore be better suited to the task of retrieving memories that were encoded in the distant past."
re: The public’s memory, as we know from court testimony and from jury studies, is remarkably poor.
http://www.ted.com/talks/scott_fraser_the_problem_with_eyewitness_testimony.html
All of our memories are reconstructions. Scott Fraser is a forensic psychologist who thinks deeply about the fallibility of human memory and encourages a more scientific approach to trial evidence.
"First of all, there's a long history of antipathy between science and the law in American jurisprudence. I could regale you with horror stories of ignorance over decades of experience as a forensic expert of just trying to get science into the courtroom. The opposing council always fight it and oppose it.
One suggestion is that all of us become much more attuned to the necessity, through policy, through procedures, to get more science in the courtroom, and I think one large step toward that is more requirements, with all due respect to the law schools, of science, technology, engineering, mathematics for anyone going into the law, because they become the judges. Think about how we select our judges in this country. It's very different than most other cultures. All right?
The other one that I want to suggest, the caution that all of us have to have, I constantly have to remind myself, about just how accurate are the memories that we know are true, that we believe in?
Is the day coming when we do not subpoena the witness we'll subpoena the Glasse's recording.
One final point, "Why do we fear the loss of privacy things like Google glasses represent?"
Dan Ariely's book "The Honest Truth About Dishonesty" makes the point that we all want t benefit from being dishonest, and we don't want this to interfere with our view of our selves. Google glasses threaten to disclose our dishonesty.
http://www.thersa.org/events/rsaanimate/animate/rsa-animate-the-truth-about-dishonesty
On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 6:29 PM, Guastello, Stephen <stephen....@marquette.edu> wrote:
By the same token "citizen journalism" does not speak for, or justify, the myriad uses and appearance of google glasses that will be recording events and people with no redeeming forensic value. We wouldn't want the police following us around, recording us, just to be sure we didn't do a crime or cross the street the wrong way. Why would we ever want pseudo-police, wackjobs, flakes, and stalkers doing the same thing?
Photographs are not necessarily trustworthy depending on the angle, cropping, etc. That's before we get to photoshopping images. A book appeared about 10 years ago called "A Robot in the Garden" which was mostly about distortions of meaning coming out of filtered images going into stationary video surveillance cams. I can see how people would bootleg concerts and other admission-fee events too.
And of course the NSA is getting all the images from their Prism program, right?
Stephen J. Guastello, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology, Marquette University
P. O. Box 1881, Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881 USA
Editor-in-Chief, Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences
Guastello, Stephen
Stephen J. Guastello, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology, Marquette University
P. O. Box 1881, Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881 USA
Editor-in-Chief, Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences
From: Guastello, Stephen
Sent: Monday, July 08, 2013 9:31 PM
To: chao...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Glassholes
Frederick D Abraham
This is proving to be a popular thread with over 35 posts! We are all treading on thin ice I think, and Gus, Ted, and Steve probably gets closest by bringing up jurisprudence. Surveillance is already extremely ubiquitous, and I don’t think G-glasses brings up anything new, except as Steve expresses, the extent to which is can be pervasive in both the public and private spaces. There are video cams in police cars (mainly to protect themselves during apprehension procedures), most public businesses, on public streets, and mounted on newer traffic light installations, and those signs displaying your driving speed in many cities and towns (which easily be modified to transmit and record). The car cams are now being sold in quantities for a fraction of the cost of the glasses (about $120-$150 for the better models). Many cars are now equipped with rear viewing video.
So the public spaces are a lost cause. It has already happened. The most important issue is the intrusion into the private sphere, now happening on a large scale basis, especially when done without warrants, as the Snowden case has emphasized, but we already knew that from cooperation from large isps with the government. All in the name of 1984. That is where the stand will have to take place.
We have something of the panopticon effect just in the use of discussion groups like ours. Because a record is made, we become more conscious of our errors and sloppiness being recorded, and try to be more careful, such as my composing this off line and cut and pasting the result. Also, knowing that big brother, not just us, is recording everything flying the internet, we are careful about how such surveillance might view what we say, and that certainly is a freedom of expression issue.
This will certainly be a major issue of our times as it unfolds in government, business, and our lives, how we balance freedom against commerce and security.
fred
Theodore A. Hoppe
Guastello, Stephen
I wonder how popular the glasses would become if some the people wearing them became targets of violent attacks.
Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2013 9:22 PM
Guastello, Stephen
Here's another angle, if anything anyone does, interesting or boring, can become a movie for later use, then everyone becomes a stage performer. A stage performance is protected by copyright, which is why bootleg taping equipment is not allowed in public performances. So if anyone is google-glassed without permission, they should be able to sue for copyright infringement.
When Shakespeare said "All the world is a stage," he had no clue how far that remark could go.
Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2013 9:34 PM
To: Theodore A. Hoppe; chao...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: Glassholes
gus koehler
On Saturday, May 18, 2013 4:45:29 AM UTC-7, Frederick D Abraham wrote:
This word appears on p. 38 of the June Scientific American. Comments are invited.
Theodore Hoppe
Theodore Hoppe
We are in the wrong business! We keep running away from the problem instead of participating in creating the problem and then dragging our bags of money to our charitable foundations.
Another gadget that is possibly about to weave its way into our lives is a stamp-sized camera that can be worn on any garment and take pictures at 30-second intervals, creating a record of a life that can be searched and shared. Developed by Memoto, a Swedish start-up, the device has an app and cloud-storage platform to ensure that no experience—no matter how mundane—will go undocumented.
Memoto created a stir last year with a campaign on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform, to raise $50,000. It raked in more than $500,000. Oskar Kalmaru, one of its founders, says the “the first wave of the buzz” about the camera rolled in ahead of the Kickstarter campaign through a “network of friends around the company”. Memoto had €500,000 ($655,000) in seed funding from Passion Capital, a British venture-capital firm, enabling it to build a prototype camera. Crowdfunding allowed it to raise money before having to fund an expensive manufacturing process. “The alternative would have been to try and raise capital from investors for equity, but it would have been hard and expensive,” explains Mr Kalmaru.
Frederick D Abraham
I would venture that this would only kick in if any commercial use were made of publicly documented events, and that likely there might be a flurry of new laws directed toward this problem.I have recently played jazz publicly, and when Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (our Green Mountain Swing band give us rehearsal space, and they were one of the sponsors of luncheon concert last week), we all signed releases for their videotaping of our concert. Least we could do for the use of their space.
I might also add, that hacking Google glasses made the news yesterday, and Google is viewing this as a positive development during its beta testing relative to learning more about the operating system and improving it.fred
--
Frederick David Abraham1396 Gregg Hill RoadWaterbury Center, VT 05677 USA802 244-8104 249-0806 (mobile)Skype: frederick.d.abraham (video compliant)Google+ Circles, Hangouts Groups
Q: What is the best way to prevent getting an infection from biting insects?
A: Don't bite any.
Q: What is the best way to prevent getting an infection from biting insects?
A: Don't bite any.
Theodore A. Hoppe
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+GoogleGlass/posts
gus koehler
Theodore A. Hoppe
"I for one can’t wait to get some Glass on my face –- there seem to be so many exciting new social rules to break! If things are already starting to go awry, imagine what it’s going to be like when we’ve all mounted a beach ball and set light to our juggling sticks.
Mind you, once I’m allowed to join the “Glass Explorer Community”, like Groucho, it’ll be a club I won’t want to be a member of anyway."
Thanasis Argiriou
Thanasis Argyriou
| “ | But Carter preferred to look at them than at his captors, which were indeed shocking and uncouth black things with smooth, oily, whale-like surfaces, unpleasant horns that curved inward toward each other, bat wings whose beating made no sound, ugly prehensile paws, and barbed tails that lashed needlessly and disquietingly. And worst of all, they never spoke or laughed, and never smiled because they had no faces at all to smile with, but only a suggestive blankness where a face ought to be. All they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts. | „ |
|
| ~ HPL , The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath |
|
thanasis...@gmail.com
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
The narrative opens by stating that as humans on Earth busied themselves with their own endeavours during the mid-1890s, aliens on Mars began plotting an invasion of Earth because their own resources are dwindling. The Narrator (who is unnamed throughout the novel) is invited to an astronomical observatory at Ottershaw where explosions are seen on the surface of the planet Mars, creating much interest in the scientific community. Months later, a so-called "meteor" lands on Horsell Common, near the Narrator's home in Woking, Surrey. He is among the first to discover that the object is an artificial cylinder that opens, disgorging Martians who are "big" and "greyish" with "oily brown skin", "the size, perhaps, of a bear", each with "two large dark-coloured eyes", and lipless "V-shaped mouths" which drip saliva and are surrounded by two "Gorgon groups of tentacles". The Narrator finds them "at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous".[8] They emerge briefly, but have difficulty in coping with the Earth's atmosphere and gravity, and so retreat rapidly into their cylinder.
A human deputation (which includes the astronomer Ogilvy) approaches the cylinder with a white flag, but the Martians incinerate them and others nearby with a heat-ray before beginning to assemble their machinery. Military forces arrive that night to surround the common, including Maxim guns. The population of Woking and the surrounding villages are reassured by the presence of the British Army. A tense day begins, with much anticipation by the Narrator of military action.
After heavy firing from the common and damage to the town from the heat-ray which suddenly erupts in the late afternoon, the Narrator takes his wife to safety in nearby Leatherhead, where his cousin lives, using a rented, two-wheeled horse cart; he then returns to Woking to return the cart when in the early morning hours, a violent thunderstorm erupts. On the road during the height of the storm, he has his first terrifying sight of a fast-moving Martian fighting-machine; in a panic, he crashes the horse cart, barely escaping detection. He discovers the Martians have assembled towering three-legged "fighting-machines" (tripods), each armed with a heat-ray and a chemical weapon: the poisonous "black smoke". These tripods have wiped out the army units positioned around the cylinder and attacked and destroyed most of Woking. Taking shelter in his house, the Narrator sees moving through his garden a fleeing artilleryman, who later tells the Narrator of his experiences and mentions that another cylinder has landed between Woking and Leatherhead, which means the Narrator is now cut off from his wife. The two try to escape via Byfleet just after dawn, but are separated at the Shepperton to Weybridge Ferry during a Martian afternoon attack on Shepperton.
One of the Martian fighting-machines is brought down in the River Thames by artillery as the Narrator and countless others try to cross the river into Middlesex, and the Martians retreat to their original crater. This gives the authorities precious hours to form a defence-line covering London. After the Martians' temporary repulse, the Narrator is able to float down the Thames in a boat toward London, stopping at Walton, where he first encounters the curate, his companion for the coming weeks.
Towards dusk, the Martians renew their offensive, breaking through the defence-line of siege guns and field artillery centred on Richmond Hill and Kingston Hill by a widespread bombardment of the black smoke; an exodus of the population of London begins. This includes the Narrator's younger brother, a medical student (also unnamed), who flees to the Essex coast, after the sudden, panicked, pre-dawn order to evacuate London is given by the authorities, on a terrifying and harrowing journey of three days, amongst thousands of similar refugees streaming from London. The brother encounters Mrs. Elphinstone and her younger sister-in-law, just in time to help them fend off three men who are trying to rob them. Since Mrs. Elphinstone's husband is missing, the three continue on together.
After a terrifying struggle to cross a streaming mass of refugees on the road at Barnet, they head eastward. Two days later, at Chelmsford, their pony is confiscated for food by the local Committee of Public Supply. They press on to Tillingham and the sea. There, they manage to buy passage to Continental Europe on a small paddle steamer, part of a vast throng of shipping gathered off the Essex coast to evacuate refugees. The torpedo ram HMS Thunder Child destroys two attacking tripods before being destroyed by the Martians, though this allows the evacuation fleet to escape, including the ship carrying the Narrator's brother and his two travelling companions. Shortly thereafter, all organised resistance has ceased, and the Martians roam the shattered landscape unhindered.
The Earth under the MartiansAt the beg