http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kurzweil02/kurzweil02_index.html
 

THE INTELLIGENT UNIVERSE

RAY KURZWEIL: The universe has been set up in an exquisitely specific way so
that evolution could produce the people that are sitting here today and we could
use our intelligence to talk about the universe. We see a formidable power in
the ability to use our minds and the tools we've created to gather evidence, to
use our inferential abilities to develop theories, to test the theories, and to
understand the universe at increasingly precise levels. That's one role of
intelligence. The theories that we heard on cosmology look at the evidence that
exists in the world today to make inferences about what existed in the past so
that we can develop models of how we got here.
    Then, of course, we can run those models and project what might happen in the
future. Even if it's a little more difficult to test the future theories, we can
at least deduce, or induce, that certain phenomena that we see today are
evidence of times past, such as radiation from billions of years ago. We can't
really test what will happen billions or trillions of years from now quite as
directly, but this line of inquiry is legitimate, in terms of understanding the
past and the derivation of the universe. As we heard today, the question of the
origin of the universe is certainly not resolved. There are competing theories,
and at several times we've had theories that have broken down, once we acquired
more precise evidence.
    At the same time, however, we don't hear discussion about the role of
intelligence in the future. According to common wisdom, intelligence is
irrelevant to cosmological thinking. It is just a bit of froth dancing in and
out of the crevices of the universe, and has no effect on our ultimate
cosmological destiny. That's not my view. The universe has been set up
exquisitely enough to have intelligence. There are intelligent entities like
ourselves that can contemplate the universe and develop models about it, which
is interesting. Intelligence is, in fact, a powerful force and we can see that
its power is going to grow not linearly but exponentially, and will ultimately
be powerful enough to change the destiny of the universe.
    I want to propose a case that intelligence — specifically human intelligence,
but not necessarily biological human intelligence — will trump cosmology, or at
least trump the dumb forces of cosmology. The forces that we heard discussed
earlier don't have the qualities that we posit in intelligent decision-making.
In the grand celestial machinery, forces deplete themselves at a certain point
and other forces take over. Essentially you have a universe that's dominated by
what I call dumb matter, because it's controlled by fairly simple mechanical
processes.
    Human civilization possesses a different type of force with a certain scope and
a certain power. It's changing the shape and destiny of our planet. Consider,
for example, asteroids and meteors. Small ones hit us on a fairly regular basis,
but the big ones hit us every some tens of millions of years and have apparently
had a big impact on the course of biological evolution. That's not going to
happen again. If it happened next year we're not quite ready to deal with it,
but it doesn't look like it's going to happen next year. When it does happen
again our technology will be quite sufficient. We'll see it coming, and we will
deal with it. We'll use our engineering to send up a probe and blast it out of
the sky. You can score one for intelligence in terms of trumping the natural
unintelligent forces of the universe.
    Commanding our local area of the sky is, of course, very small on a cosmological
scale, but intelligence can overrule these physical forces, not by literally
repealing the natural laws, but by manipulating them in such a supremely sublime
and subtle way that it effectively overrules these laws. This is particularly
the case when you get machinery that can operate at nano and ultimately femto
and pico scales. Whereas the laws of physics still apply, they're being
manipulated now to create any outcome the intelligence of this civilization
decides on.
    Let me back up and talk about how intelligence came about. Wolfram's book has
prompted a lot of talk recently on the computational substrate of the universe
and on the universe as a computational entity. Earlier today, Seth Lloyd talked
about the universe as a computer and its capacity for computation and memory.
What Wolfram leaves out in talking about cellular automata is how you get
intelligent entities. As you run these cellular automata, they create
interesting pictures, but the interesting thing about cellular automata, which
was shown long before Wolfram pointed it out, is that you can get apparently
random behavior from deterministic processes.
    It's more than apparent that you literally can't predict an outcome unless you
can simulate the process. If the process under consideration is the whole
universe, then presumably you can't simulate it unless you step outside the
universe. But when Wolfram says that this explains the complexity we see in
nature, it's leaving out one important step. As you run the cellular automata,
you don't see the growth in complexity — at least, certainly he's never run them
long enough to see any growth in what I would call complexity. You need
evolution.
    Marvin talked about some of the early stages of evolution. It starts out very
slow, but then something with some power to sustain itself and to overcome other
forces is created and has the power to self-replicate and preserve that
structure. Evolution works by indirection. It creates a capability and then uses
that capability to create the next. It took billions of years until this chaotic
swirl of mass and energy created the information-processing, structural backbone
of DNA, and then used that DNA to create the next stage. With DNA, evolution had
an information-processing machine to record its experiments and conduct
experiments in a more orderly way. So the next stage, such as the Cambrian
explosion, went a lot faster, taking only a few tens of millions of years. The
Cambrian explosion then established body plans that became a mature technology,
meaning that we didn't need to evolve body plans any more.
    These designs worked well enough, so evolution could then concentrate on higher
cortical function, establishing another level of mechanism in the organisms that
could do information processing. At this point, animals developed brains and
nervous systems that could process information, and then that evolved and
continued to accelerate. Homo sapiens evolved in only hundreds of thousands of
years, and then the cutting edge of evolution again worked by indirection to use
this product of evolution, the first technology-creating species to survive, to
create the next stage: technology, a continuation of biological evolution by
other means.
    The first stages of technologies, like stone tools, fire, and the wheel took
tens of thousands of years, but then we had more powerful tools to create the
next stage. A thousand years ago, a paradigm shift like the printing press took
only a century or so to be adopted, and this evolution has accelerated ever
since. Fifty years ago, the first computers were designed with pencil on paper,
with screwdrivers and wire. Today we have computers to design computers.
Computer designers will design some high-level parameters, and twelve levels of
intermediate design are computed automatically. The process of designing a
computer now goes much more quickly.
    Evolutionary processes accelerate, and the returns from an evolutionary process
grow in power. I've called this theory "The Law of Accelerating Returns." The
returns, including economic returns, accelerate. Stemming from my interest in
being an inventor, I've been developing mathematical models of this because I
quickly realized that an invention has to make sense when the technology is
finished, not when it was started, since the world is generally a different
place three or four years later.
    One exponential pattern that people are familiar with is Moore's Law, which is
really just one specific paradigm of shrinking transistors on integrated
circuits. It's remarkable how long it's lasted, but it wasn't the first, but the
fifth paradigm to provide exponential growth to computing. Earlier, we had
electro-mechanical calculators, using relays and vacuum tubes. Engineers were
shrinking the vacuum tubes, making them smaller and smaller, until finally that
paradigm ran out of steam because they couldn't keep the vacuum any more.
Transistors were already in use in radios and other small, niche applications,
but when the mainstream technology of computing finally ran out of steam, it
switched to this other technology that was already waiting in the wings to
provide ongoing exponential growth. It was a paradigm shift. Later, there was a
shift to integrated circuits, and at some point, integrated circuits will run
out of steam.
    Ten or 15 years from now we'll go to the third dimension. Of course, research on
three dimensional computing is well under way, because as the end of one
paradigm becomes clear, this perception increases the pressure for the research
to create the next. We've seen tremendous acceleration of molecular computing in
the last several years. When my book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, came out
about four years ago, the idea that three-dimensional molecular computing could
be feasible was quite controversial, and a lot of computer scientists didn't
believe it was. Today, there is a universal belief that it's feasible, and that
it will arrive in plenty of time before Moore's Law runs out. We live in a
three-dimensional world, so we might as well use the third dimension. That will
be the sixth paradigm.
    Moore's Law is one paradigm among many that have provided exponential growth in
computation, but computation is not the only technology that has grown
exponentially. We see something similar in any technology, particularly in ones
that have any relationship to information. The genome project, for example, was
not a mainstream project when it was announced. People thought it was ludicrous
that you could scan the genome in 15 years, because at the rate at which you
could scan it when the project began, it could take thousands of years. But the
scanning has doubled in speed every year, and actually most of the work was done
in the last year of the project.
    Magnetic data storage is not covered under Moore's Law, since it involves
packing information on a magnetic substrate, which is a completely different set
of applied physics, but magnetic data storage has very regularly doubled every
year. In fact there's a second level of acceleration. It took us three years to
double the price-performance of computing at the beginning of the century, and
two years in the middle of the century, but we're now doubling it in less than
one year. This is another feedback loop that has to do with past technologies,
because as we improve the price performance, we put more resources into that
technology. If you plot computers, as I've done, on a logarithmic scale, where a
straight line would mean exponential growth, you see another exponential.
There's actually a double rate of exponential growth.
    Another very important phenomenon is the rate of paradigm shift. This is harder
to measure, but even though people can argue about some of the details and
assumptions in these charts you still get these same very powerful trends. The
paradigm shift rate itself is accelerating, and roughly doubling every decade.
When people claim that we won't see a particular development for a hundred
years, or that something is going to take centuries to do accomplish, they're
ignoring the inherent acceleration of technical progress.
    Bill Joy and I were at Harvard some months ago and one Nobel Prize-winning
biologist said that we won't see self-replicating nanotechnology entities for a
hundred years. That's actually a good intuition, because that's my estimation —
at today's rate of progress — of how long it will take to achieve that technical
milestone. However, since we're doubling the rate of progress every decade,
it'll only take 25 calendar years to get there— this, by the way, is a
mainstream opinion in the nanotechnology field. The last century is not a good
guide to the next, in the sense that it made only about 20 years of progress at
today's rate of progress, because we were speeding up to this point. At today's
rate of progress, we'll make the same amount of progress as what occurred in the
20th century in 14 years, and then again in 7 years. The 21st century will see,
because of the explosive power of exponential growth, something like 20,000
years of progress at today's rate of progress — a thousand times greater than
the 20th century, which was no slouch for radical change.
    I've been developing these models for a few decades, and made a lot of
predictions about intelligent machines in the 1980s which people can check out.
They weren't perfect, but were a pretty good road map. I've been refining these
models. I don't pretend that anybody can see the future perfectly, but the power
of the exponential aspect of the evolution of these technologies, or of
evolution itself, is undeniable. And that creates a very different perspective
about the future.
    Let's take computation. Communication is important and shrinkage is important.
Right now, we're shrinking technology, apparently both mechanical and
electronic, at a rate of 5.6 per linear dimension per decade. That number is
also moving slowly, in a double exponential sense, but we'll get to
nanotechnology at that rate in the 2020s. There are some early-adopter examples
of nanotechnology today, but the real mainstream, where the cutting edge of the
operating principles are in the multi-nanometer range, will be in the 2020s. If
you put these together you get some interesting observations.
  Right now we have 1026 calculations per second in human civilization in our
biological brains. We could argue about this figure, but it's basically, for all
practical purposes, fixed. I don't know how much intelligence it adds if you
include animals, but maybe you then get a little bit higher than 1026.
Non-biological computation is growing at a double exponential rate, and right
now is millions of times less than the biological computation in human beings.
Biological intelligence is fixed, because it's an old, mature paradigm, but the
new paradigm of non-biological computation and intelligence is growing
exponentially. The crossover will be in the 2020s and after that, at least from
a hardware perspective, non-biological computation will dominate at least
quantitatively.
    This brings up the question of software. Lots of people say that even though
things are growing exponentially in terms of hardware, we've made no progress in
software. But we are making progress in software, even if the doubling factor is
much slower. The real scenario that I want to address is the reverse engineering
of the human brain. Our knowledge of the human brain and the tools we have to
observe and understand it are themselves growing exponentially. Brain scanning
and mathematical models of neurons and neural structures are growing
exponentially, and there's very interesting work going on.
    There is Lloyd Watts, for example, who with his colleagues has collected models
of specific types of neurons and wiring information about how the internal
connections are wired in different regions of the brain. He has put together a
detailed model of about 15 regions that deal with auditory processing, and has
applied psychoacoustic tests of the model, comparing it to human auditory
perception. The model is at least reasonably accurate, and this technology is
now being used as a front end for speech recognition software. Still, we're at
the very early stages of understanding the human cognitive system. It's
comparable to the genome project in its early stages in that we also knew very
little about the genome in its early stages. We now have most of the data, but
we still don't have the reverse engineering to understand how it works.
    It would be a mistake to say that the brain only has a few simple ideas and that
once we can understand them we can build a very simple machine. But although
there is a lot of complexity to the brain, it's also not vast complexity. It is
described by a genome that doesn't have that much information in it. There are
about 800 million bytes in the uncompressed genome. We need to consider
redundancies in the DNA, as some sequences are repeated hundreds of thousands of
times. By applying routine data compression, you can compress this information
at a ratio of about 30 to 1, giving you about 23 million bytes — which is
smaller than Microsoft Word — to describe the initial conditions of the brain.
    But the brain has a lot more information than that. You can argue about the
exact number, but I come up with thousands of trillions of bytes of information
to characterize what's in a brain, which is millions of times greater than what
is in the genome. How can that be? Marvin talked about how the methods from
computer science are important for understanding how the brain works. We know
from computer science that we can very easily create programs of considerable
complexity from a small starting condition. You can, with a very small program,
create a genetic algorithm that simulates some simple evolutionary process and
create something of far greater complexity than itself. You can use a random
function within the program, which ultimately creates not just randomness, but
is creating some meaningful information after the initial random conditions are
evolved using a self-organizing method, resulting in information that's far
greater than the initial conditions.
    That is in large measure how the genome creates the brain. We know that it
specifies certain constraints for how a particular region is wired, but within
those constraints and methods, there's a great deal of stochastic or random
wiring, followed by some kind of process where the brain learns and
self-organizes to make sense of its environment. At this point, what began as
random becomes meaningful, and the program has multiplied the size of its
information.
    The point of all of this is that, since it's a level of complexity we can
manage, we will be able to reverse engineer the human brain. We've shown that we
can model neurons, clusters of neurons, and even whole brain regions. We are
well down that path. It's rather conservative to say that within 25 years we'll
have all of the necessary scanning information and neuron models and will be
able to put together a model of the principles of operation of how the human
brain works. Then, of course, we'll have an entity that has some human-like
qualities. We'll have to educate and train it, but of course we can speed up
that process, since we'll have access to everything that's out in the Web, which
will contain all accessible human knowledge.
    One of the nice things about computer technology is that once you master a
process it can operate much faster. So we will learn the secrets of human
intelligence, partly from reverse engineering of the human brain. This will be
one source of knowledge for creating the software of intelligence.
    We can then combine some advantages of human intelligence with advantages that
we see clearly in non-biological intelligence. We spent years training our
speech recognition system, which gives us a combination of rules. It mixes
expert-system approaches with some self-organizing techniques like neural nets,
Markov models and other self-organizing algorithms. We automate the training
process by recording thousands of hours of speech and annotating it, and it
automatically readjusts all its Markov-model levels and other parameters when it
makes mistakes. Finally, after years of this process, it does a pretty good job
of recognizing speech. Now, if you want your computer to do the same thing, you
don't have to go through those years of training like we do with every child,
you can actually load the evolved pattern of this one research computer, which
is called loading the software.
    Machines can share their knowledge. Machines can do things quickly. Machines
have a type of memory that's more accurate than our frail human memories. Nobody
at this table can remember billions of things perfectly accurately and look them
up quickly. The combination of the software of biological human intelligence
with the benefits of non-biological intelligence will be very formidable.
Ultimately, this growing non-biological intelligence will have the benefits of
human levels of intelligence in terms of its software and our exponentially
growing knowledge base.
    In the future, maybe only one part of intelligence in a trillion will be
biological, but it will be infused with human levels of intelligence, which will
be able to amplify itself because of the powers of non-biological intelligence
to share its knowledge. How does it grow? Does it grow in or does it grow out?
Growing in means using finer and finer granularities of matter and energy to do
computation, while growing out means using more of the stuff in the universe.
Presently, we see some of both. We see mostly the "in," since Moore's Law
inherently means that we're shrinking the size of transistors and integrated
circuits, making them finer and finer. To some extent we're also expanding out
in that even though the chips are more and more powerful, we make more chips
every year, and deploy more economic and material resources towards this non
biological intelligence.
    Ultimately, we'll get to nanotechnology-based computation, which is at the
molecular level, infused with the software of human intelligence and the
expanding knowledge base of human civilization. It'll continue to expand both
inwards and outwards. It goes in waves as the expansion inwards reaches certain
points of resistance. The paradigm shifts will be pretty smooth as we go from
the second to the third dimension via molecular computing. At that point it'll
be feasible to take the next step into femto-engineering — on the scale of
trillionths of a meter — and pico engineering —on the scale of thousands of
trillionths of a meter — going into the finer structures of matter and
manipulating some of the really fine forces, such as strings and quarks. That's
going to be a barrier, however, so the ongoing expansion of our intelligence is
going to be propelled outward. Nonetheless, it will go both in and out.
Ultimately, if you do the math, we will completely saturate our corner of the
universe, the earth and solar system, sometime in the 22nd century. We'll then
want ever-greater horizons, as is the nature of intelligence and evolution, and
will then expand to the rest of the universe.
    How quickly will it expand? One premise is that it will expand at the speed of
light, because that's the fastest speed at which information can travel. There
are also tantalizing experiments on quantum disentanglement that show some
effect at rates faster than the speed of light, even much faster, perhaps
theoretically instantaneously. Interestingly enough, though, this is not the
transmission of information, but the transmission of profound quantum
randomness, which doesn't accomplish our purpose of communicating intelligence.
You need to transmit information, not randomness. So far nobody has actually
shown true transmission of information at faster than the speed of light, at
least not in a way that has convinced mainstream scientific opinion.
    If, in fact, that is a fundamental barrier, and if things that are far away
really are far away, which is to say there are no shortcuts through wormholes
through the universe, then the spread of our intelligence will be slow, governed
by the speed of light. This process will be initiated within 200 years. If you
do the math, we will be at near saturation of the available matter and energy in
and around our solar system, based on current understandings of the limitations
of computation, within that time period. However, it's my conjecture that by
going through these other dimensions that Alan and Paul talked about, there may
be shortcuts. It may be very hard to do, but we're talking about supremely
intelligent technologies and beings. If there are ways to get to parts of the
universe through shortcuts such as wormholes, they'll find, deploy, and master
them, and get to other parts of the universe faster. Then perhaps we can reach
the whole universe, say 1080 protons, photons, and other particles that Seth
Lloyd estimates represents on the order of 1090 bits, without being limited by
the apparent speed of light.
    If the speed of light is not a limit, and I do have to emphasize that this
particular point is a conjecture at this time, then within 300 years, we would
saturate the whole universe with our intelligence, and the whole universe would
become supremely intelligent and be able to manipulate everything according to
its will. We're currently multiplying computational capacity by a factor of at
least 103 every decade. This is conservative as this rate of exponential growth
is itself growing exponentially. Thus it is conservative to project that within
30 decades (300 years), we would multiply current computational capacities by a
factor of 1090, and thus exceed Seth Lloyd's estimate of 1090 bits in the
Universe. We can speculate about identity — will this be multiple people or
beings, or one being, or will we all be merged? ­ but nonetheless, we'll be very
intelligent and we'll be able to decide whether we want to continue expanding.
Information is very sacred, which is why death is a tragedy. Whenever a person
dies, you lose all that information in a person. The tragedy of losing
historical artifacts is that we're losing information. We could realize that
losing information is bad, and decide not to do that any more. Intelligence will
have a profound effect on the cosmological destiny of the universe at that
point.
    I'll end with a comment about the SETI project. Regardless of this ultimate
resolution of this issue of the speed of light ­ and it is my speculation (and
that of others as well) that there are ways to circumvent it ­ if there are
ways, they'll be found, because intelligence is intelligent enough to master any
mechanism that is discovered. Regardless of that, I think the SETI project will
fail — it's actually a very important failure, because sometimes a negative
finding is just as profound as a positive finding — for the following reason:
we've looked at a lot of the sky with at least some level of power, and we don't
see anybody out there. The SETI assumption is that even though it's very
unlikely that there is another intelligent civilization like we have here on
Earth, there are billions of trillions of planets. So even if the probability is
one in a million, or one in a billion, there are still going to be millions, or
billions, of life-bearing and ultimately intelligence-bearing planets out there.
    If that's true, they're going to be distributed fairly evenly across
cosmological time, so some will be ahead of us, and some will be behind us.
Those that are ahead of us are not going to be ahead of us by only a few years.
They're going to be ahead of us by billions of years. But because of the
exponential nature of evolution, once we get a civilization that gets to our
point, or even to the point of Babbage, who was messing around with mechanical
linkages in a crude 19th century technology, it's only a matter of a few
centuries before they get to a full realization of nanotechnology, if not femto
and pico-engineering, and totally infuse their area of the cosmos with their
intelligence. It only takes a few hundred years!
    So if there are millions of civilizations that are millions or billions of years
ahead of us, there would have to be millions that have passed this threshold and
are doing what I've just said, and have really infused their area of the cosmos.
Yet we don't see them, nor do we have the slightest indication of their
existence, a challenge known as the Fermi paradox. Someone could say that this
"silence of the cosmos" is because the speed of light is a limit, therefore we
don't see them, because even though they're fantastically intelligent, they're
outside of our light sphere. Of course, if that's true, SETI won't find them,
because they're outside of our light sphere. But let's say they're inside our
light sphere, or that light isn't a limitation, for the reasons I've mentioned,
then perhaps they decided, in their great wisdom, to remain invisible to us. You
can imagine that there's one civilization out there that made that decision, but
are we to believe that this is the case for every one of the millions, or
billions, of civilizations that SETI says should be out there?
    That's unlikely, but even if it's true, SETI still won't find them, because if a
civilization like that has made that decision, it is so intelligent they'll be
able to carry that out, and remain hidden from us. Maybe they're waiting for us
to evolve to that point and then they'll reveal themselves to us. Still, if you
analyze this more carefully, it's very unlikely in fact that they're out there.
    You might ask, isn't it incredibly unlikely that this planet, which is in a very
random place in the universe and one of trillions of planets and solar systems,
is ahead of the rest of the universe in the evolution of intelligence? Of course
the whole existence of our universe, with the laws of physics so sublimely
precise to allow this type of evolution to occur is also very unlikely, but by
the anthropic principles, we're here, and by an analogous anthropic principle we
are here in the lead. After all, if this were not the case, we wouldn't be
having this conversation. So by a similar anthropic principle we're able to
appreciate this argument. I'll end on that note.

from http://www.ziggurattheatre.org/winterquest.htm

Embark on an Enchanting Holiday Journey With the Ziggurat Theatre Ensemble’s World Premiere of “WINTERQUEST” Nov. 21

Culver City, Calif. — Following its critically acclaimed, sold-out run of “Red Thread” earlier this summer, the Ziggurat Theatre Ensemble will present its first-ever, holiday offering, “WINTERQUEST,” which makes its world premiere at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 21 at the Gascon Center Theatre.
    Written and directed by Stephen Legawiec, “WINTERQUEST” is inspired by the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the paintings of Maxfield Parrish.  Three clownish craftsmen enlist the help of a lonely man to retrieve valuable cargo that has vanished on the eve of Christmas.  With the help of an enchanted sailing ship, the four travel across the Northern light to a strange, wintry land where battles are fought, dreams realized and the dead brought back to life — and joy and hope are restored to their village upon their return.
    Music, masks, singing, comedy and the spirit of the holidays make this an enchanting journey for adults and children alike.
    “WINTERQUEST” stars Mueen Ahmad, Anna Lisa Erickson, James Jaeger, Amanda Karr, Jill Lawrence, Dean Purvis, Yelena Strelkoff, Michelle Tenazas, Dana Wieluns and Jenny Woo.
    “WINTERQUEST” will play Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 5 p.m. and Sundays at 7 p.m. through Dec. 22.  No performance Thanksgiving Day, November 28.  Tickets are $20 each for Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday night performances; $15 each for the 5 p.m. Saturday shows.   Student and senior discounts are $10.  The 5 p.m. Nov. 30 performance is pay-what-you-can.  Tickets can be reserved by calling (310) 842-5737.

FROM http://www.826valencia.com/store/facade.html

Our Facade
Well, it’s finished. As you may know, Chris Ware, one of the world’s great artists, designed this mural specifically for 826 Valencia. It depicts the parallel development of humans and their efforts at and motivations for communication, spoken and written. It’s a very complex mural, and requires its most devoted viewers to study it for about an hour, from the middle of Valenica Street, by far the best vantage point.

The mural was applied by skilled artisans according to Ware’s specifications. The bottom half of the building, which has been painted black, features gold lettering that states the name of the place. Over the window is a nice burgundy awning.
 

826 Store
"Definitely one of the top five pirate stores I've been to recently."
—David Byrne

The Store at 826 Valencia is San Francisco's only independent pirate supply store. We offer a variety of goods, including lard, flags, eye patches, mops, glass eyes and the like. We also sell all McSweeney's-related items. All proceeds from the store go toward the writing center resting directly behind it.

New items for sale in the store:

· Swashbuckler hats
· Cavalier hats
· Tri-cornered hats
· Treasure chests
· 826 t-shirts
· Sixteen vintage pirate cards from the 1920s
· Four ancient Roman coins

PEOPLE
Title: Ceremony -- Buddha Meet Rock
Label: P-VINE RECORDS (JAPAN)
Format: CD
Price: $26.00
Catalog Number: PCD 1414

First reissue of this totally unknown Japanese freak-out album, originally issued in 1971. Opening in unique fashion with various street sounds collaged into a sampled excerpt of David Axelrod's "Holy Thursday" (from his 1968 masterpiece Song of Innocence), this flows into exceptional heavy psych from the group People, lead by the pure wah-wah excess of guitarist Kimio Mizutani (Love Live Life, Satoh Masahiko & Soundbreakers). Mixing Buddist chanting, chirping birds and religious ecstacy, this one beats B.O.R.B. to the doughnut hole by 2 decades plus. One of the finest P-Vine 70s rock resurrections to date.

Peruvian teenagers 'possessed' by Japanese TV cartoon

The parents of three Peruvian teenagers say their children have been possessed by a Japanese TV cartoon show.
    Christian Vilchez, who's 16, and 19-year-olds Jorge Vela and Edy Frank Castillo are fans of Dragon Ball Z and never miss an episode.
    But, according to their parents, since watching it last week they have gone mute, had convulsions and lost their memories.
    One of the teenager's fathers told Terra Noticias Populares: "It is all Dragon Ball Z's fault. My son is numb. I beg the authorities and the church to support me."
    Doctors on the town of Tarapoto have examined Edy Frank Castillo and have not yet come up with an explanation for his condition. They continue to study the cases.
    One of the cartoon's characters is Babidi, a mind altering wizard who uses his powers to "bring out the evil in people's hearts and control them".
    The show started in 1986 and has featured more than 500 episodes.
    (Story filed: 15:22 Monday 4th November 2002)

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