THE LAST MIMZY

[Elizabeth Helen Drake]

kevin, Mr. Twigsnapper has called you the Navigator and so from here on out thats your handle as far as I am concerned. I hope you meant what you said when you said you could operate "at speed". Buckle up sir.

I cannot thank you enough for pointing out the links that you recently gave me. It would have taken me FOREVER

And your notice of manifold 13 has messages that had particular meaning to me and the fact that you would see it where others would not, is proof of much. Generally, as we both know, thirteen is meant to be the invisible number. So thank you for seeing that.

Onward. Fare forward Voyagers.

This is from the site you just gave me:

http://www.jaworski.co.uk/m13/13_lemmawocky.html

and this is the quote that starts it.


"Thus, as all educated persons know, runs the first verse of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky. He goes so far, in Alice, as to explain what the words mean. I find his explanations slightly evasive, in that, although they give a meaning to each word seperately, they do not give a coherent structure to the stanza. Yet it clearly possesses such a structure, and consequently must have a deeper significance; but not one which can be readily explained in Alice. Now Carroll was a mathematician - and what could be more difficult to explain to a Victorian child than mathematics?

Jabberwocky, then, is mathematical in content. The natural break at the end of line two of the first stanza suggests that it be re-interpreted as a

THEOREM ."

AND YOU WERE RIGHT TO POINT THIS OUT KEVIN! THANK YOU SO MUCH!

I won't get into the body of it. Thats for others. Trickfox, you out there? Mikado? Andy? Radomir?MarkC? grinder? Victoria? Lindab? Gewis?grady? Everyone else! ( sorry if I have left your name out ...you are ALL so VERY important) You all have bee been such a fantastic help here.!.... but see now how much work there is ahead? Elizabeth

[grinder]

This is making no sense but,

http://www.jaworski.co.uk/m13/13_lemmawocky.html


'You've proved it?
Oh, well done, lad! You'll get a Ph.D. out of this!'

Is a line out of that last site and where was it and who was it here that just recently equated PHD with "Parallel Hopping Device"?

You know nothing is rational anymore. But it makes more sense than anything. grinder

[Victoria Steele]

Paul just posted the next chapter and of course I have to go do my thing and read that but I will be back on this. Certainly. The only thing that is going on in my mind right now is WHAT. And I have to see that movie, AGAIN. Victoria

[Paul S.]

OK, I've seen the movie, and liked it very much, and certainly see how it shares thematic elements with what we're talking about here -- on so many different levels that I'm not sure where to start. Need to read some of the background material, follow some of the links presented here, see what comes to mind.

In the meantime I'm taking copy of "Through The Looking Glass" with me to read on this trip.

Now, this question: did anybody happen to recognize the renown physicist (listed in the cast as "Intel rep") that appeared in a couple of the scenes at the 'Seattle Research Facility' ?

None other than Brian Greene, he of "The Elegant Universe -- and "Gravity Phone" fame from my Las Vegas presentation.

Hmmmm......

--PS

[grinder]

I tried to remember the lyrics but the theme song at the end of the movie says something like " Hello, I love you" ..... then something about a short wave radio .... and all I could think of was Dr. Brown reaching for that .... what looked like a short wave radio..... at the Bahnson Lab ..... and you have already told us Paul that it was no short wave radio. So ......

I am like you. I don't even know where to start. grinder

[Victoria Steele]

Another artistic twist to " Through the "looking glass"

Did you notice in the hallway conversation between the science teacher and the kid .... that the notebook drawings of the mandalas are reflected in the teachers glasses ... but not seen directly? Pretty ingenious filming I thought! Did anybody else see that?

And I notice that one of the meanings of Mandala is ...... "connection"

I am finding this Tibetan ... Sanskrit connection ...wierd. Victoria

[Paul S.]

I tried to remember the lyrics but the theme song at the end of the movie says something like " Hello, I love you" ..... then something about a short wave radio ....

If you stayed through the credits, then you heard the little girl who played "Emma" -- Rhiannon Leigh Wryn -- sing the 'punch line' to the song, which I think was "...are you out there..."

BTW, the song was written by Howard Shore and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame. Perhaps you notice Rainn Wilson's character, the science teacher Mr. White, wearing a "Dark Side of the Moon" T-shirt under his jacket in one scene?

--PS

[Paul S.]

Did you notice in the hallway conversation between the science teacher and the kid .... that the notebook drawings of the mandalas are reflected in the teachers glasses ... but not seen directly? Pretty ingenious filming I thought! Did anybody else see that?

Actually, I did take note of that particular moment. In that case, the director thought it was better to see the characters reaction, but it didn't hurt to see what he was reacting to reflected in his glasses. Pretty clever, I thought too.

--PS

[Paul S.]

....is the short science fiction story on which the movie is (loosely) based. The title is a line in Carrol's "Jabberwocky."

I'm going to try to find a copy of the original story while I'm traveling, in the meantime, here's a link to a synopsis of the original story:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_were_the_Borogoves

[LongboardLOVELY]

Andy and I saw The Last Mimzy. I have a few comments - AND Elizabeth, you KNOW this is going to be fun

1] I also liked that director's shot of seeing the boy's drawings through his teacher's glasses. In the words of a friend of mine, it seemed as if it was an analogy to Alice, stepping through the looking glass.

2] The fact that they used Intel in the movie to introduce the concept of Wetware (AI) is Very Interesting b/c of the top 10 Universities pioneering research in this area, 3 Universities have come up in discussion on these forums. Elizabeth, I'll give you 3... oh never mind: U.Penn, Stanford, Berkeley. Yup.

3] Victoria, you mentioned that you looked up Mandala. Here's more to it: There are many different meanings to Mandala.
moji-mandala (文字漫荼羅), in Nichiren Buddhism, is a hanging paper scroll or wooden tablet whose inscription consists of Chinese characters and medieval-Sanskrit script representing elements of the Buddha's enlightenment
The mandala of Kalachakra (Dalai Lama) symbolizes the entire universe (Outer Kalachakra) in terms of planets and time cycles.
In modern days, mandala is a term for any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the universe from the human perspective. Mandala's should actually be 3-dimensional, which takes a long time to create, so these are fairly rare.
Psychiatrists sometimes ask their patients to draw one, and therefore use it to interpret the person's personality, thought patterns, etc. Carl Jung used it first, I believe.

4] The School of Arts and Sciences in Computing at the University of Pennsylvania has a professor using Mandala in his teachings. There is a scalar model of a drawing on his webpage.
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/george/mandala.html

5] This last bit has nothing to do with the movie, but I thought it interesting to note:
When Alice Liddell (the inspiration for the character) Hargreaves' husband died, she was hardpressed to sell her copy of Alice's Adventures Under Ground (this is what it was first called before it was called Alice in Wonderland). She was 80 years old at that time. The manuscript was sold at Sotheby's auction house for £15,400. It became the possession of Eldridge R. Johnson and was displayed at Columbia University on the centennial of Carroll's birth. (and it was on this visit to America that Alice met Peter Llewelyn-Davies, one of the brothers who was the inspiration for J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan). When Eldridge Johnson died, the book was given back to Britain by a consortium of American book-lovers as a token of Britain's bravery against Hitler before America came on the scene. And now, that manuscript is in the British Library, which I guess is kind of like our Library of Congress.

Can you tell I am a book-lover?

LongboardLOVELY

[Victoria Steele]

Thats some great work LBL, I am really impressed!

Defending my honor somewhat though. I did not say that "Connection" was the ONLY meaning of Mandala. I said it was One of them! I was kind of hoping someone with a little more knowledge of the subject would step forward with more information..... and see? .... I was right!

Why does it not surprise me that University of Pa would be involved in Artificial Intelligence? Talk about wierd threads. That has been weaving in and out of this whole thing. getting closer and closer to some kind of revelation on this I think!

Great background information on Eldridge Johnsons purchase of Alice in Wonderland and the information about the manuscript being bought by a consortium of "book lovers" so that it could go back to England as a thanks to the English people for fighting against Hitler.

I sure would like to know more about this "consortium", wouldn't you? I might be really off in left field but that sure sounds like something that the Caroline Group might do. Anybody know who those men were? (I assume men but you know how much trouble that could get me into! Perhaps a group of wealthy ladies purchased the book to give to England. In that case I would suspect the Caroline Group even more!)

So Much Fun!

Victoria

[grinder]

One scene I thought sort of interesting. When the brother and sister are setting up to send Mimzy off there is much happening all around them and she turns to him and says something like " Its US Noah .... we will build it"" Or something like that. But that thread is not picked up again in THIS story. I haven't read the original story but I think thats what happens in it.

I thought about that alot today and think thats part of the deal here. The "bridge" (or at least the future developments that would make such a thing as Mimzy POSSIBLE) would be constructed by these two kids as adults. Remember both of them have already SEEN what is there.

Want to bet that they will be responsible for developments which would eventually counteract the negative environmental and heredity factors.

Heres my extension to the story. He will go on to win the science fair, The news of it will hit the papers, he will eventually become a famous engineer and inventor...... and his sister ..... will become a ...... science fiction writer .... (that way she could write about stuff that she can see without having to explain herself to anybody or to "prove the concepts"). So .... she will write about the world in the future and her brother will work hard to make it all come true.

The advantage the two of them would have is that they have already seen what the POSSIBILITY of the future could be and can work to countermand it. I wonder if that will work in the long run? and BOY. All of the sudden I got a strong dose of what Townsend Brown was doing. grinder

[Mikado14]

And I notice that one of the meanings of Mandala is ...... "connection"

I am finding this Tibetan ... Sanskrit connection ...wierd. Victoria

Victoria,

In Sanskrit the word is normally interpreted as "cirlce" and also as "disc", at least I believe I remember correctly. And as to Tibetan, not sure about Buddism, it is used in meditation and is usually unique for the person and is representative and personal.

I used to have mine on a wall.

Mikado

[grinder]

Hey guys. Here is an interesting extension of that Minzie story. I figure we can write our own Huh?

The biology teacher and his fiance hit the lottery ( he saw the numbers remember) and with the 300 some million they do what she said they wished they could do , (helping people.) One of the things that they do is fund a foundation to promote scientific and literary projects.

They of course finance the kid ( research costs as all will agree) and of course they will go back to the folks at Intell who have seen much more fantastic things than they ever even imgagined so with that "nudge" the research is started which will make the Mimzie rabbit possible in the first place. Right. Its the two kids that will be the root of it.

The "floating" kids at the end sort of lost me but Noah had already figured how to "zap" things from one place to another and thats sort of what would happen with the kids I think. One moment they would be sitting with their teacher and blink the next moment they would be somewhere else. Why couldn't that be possible? Why should we even need vehicles? My two cents worth. grinder

[Elizabeth Helen Drake]

LBL,

What interesting connections between the U of Pa and Artificial Intelligence work!

I am just sort of sitting still mentally for a few days, with Paul being away on his trip for a short time its given me a chance to decompress too. I am just telling you this so you don't think I am not interested in what you have written . I just need to put things on a " back burner" for just a bit

I enjoyed The Last Mimzy too and also The Robinsons actually. Both of them had important messages offered to the public ... and of course the REX still makes me laugh!

I know when Paul gets back we will all be plunged headfirst into this special rabbit hole that we seem to have here. A really magic place!

So forgive me everybody if I just take a couple of days and try to think not very much at all!

This thinking stuff is hard work! If the weather permits I am going to pretend I am on some tropical island!

Mr. Twigsnapper, I certainly hope that you are doing the same in actuality. And everybody else out there! I know that the weather has been strange so everybody stay warm and well.

I know that Paul said he was going to continue to monitor the forum so don't feel that no one is listening! Speaking for myself, sometimes its just important to take a break, walk away somewhere quiet and then come back later. What I plan to do. Best to all of you, Elizabeth