UP | GOOD STUFF | NEW STUFF | HELP! FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS 1998 W. Beaty ATTENTION ALL GROWNUPS. Your "inner child" has long been waiting for a chance to usurp control of your body and force it to perform certain actions. The time is now at hand. Read and follow the instructions below. Do this now. Shake your hand really hard, for a fairly long time, until your fingertips feel like they're turning into rubber. Stop for a moment, then do it again. It takes less time the second time for "rubberization" to commence, eh? Look in the mirror, use both hands to pull your lips wide, then snap your teeth open and closed as shown in the photos below. This makes you "AWARE OF YOUR SKULL" Why, your face is just a layer of meat! What if you woke up one morning and it was gone! (Once the full-blown skull awareness wears off, find another mirror and restore it to full strength.) [photos eventually!] Keep a pocketful of dimes and quarters with you at all times, and constantly leave them in knee-level weird places where only a child would ever look. Inside the hollow shafts of toilet-paper holders. Balanced along the ridges of decorative molding. Inside pencil sharpeners at the local elementary school. In the coin slots of gumball-dispensers (give 'em a half-turn.) Imagine the eventual entertainment that will result. Say "ooeeooeeooeee", but relax your face and shake your head hard and fast back and forth so that your cheeks flap. Sounds like Elmer Fudd when he's trying to shake off the dizzyness that comes from being hit on the head. Try this next time you get hit on the head by a falling anvil, see if it helps. Before you eat that apple, sniff it well. Smelling can be better than eating. Smell the table. Smell the floor. Smell the computer screen. Why should dogs have all the fun? Rub your palms together hard, so you make those little black rolls of dead skin. Those are called "Blatties." They're named after an early computer hacker at MIT. Sit in a sunbeam in a dimly-lit room. Light a stick of incense, hold it vertically, then move it upwards and stop suddenly, with a jerk. A perfect smoke-ring will be launched from the burning tip. Move the incense upwards, then suddenly jerk downwards, then repeat. You can launch fast smoke-rings through the center of slow ones, create side-by side rows, etc. In a draft-free room they persist for ages, and soon the air will be full of huge grey thin circles. Teach yourself to talk understandably while your mouth is wide open. If you ever accidentally cut your lips off or misplace your lower jaw, this will come in quite handy. "Tleese take ne tll a hos-thitle innnediatly!" I remembered another childhood trick. When riding in the car, and approaching some railroad tracks (or other large hump), hold your arms upwards! The sudden drop in g-forces makes your stomach feel VERY weird, and holding your arms over your head seems to amplify the effect. Like lifting your arms while going downhill on the roller-coaster at the amusement park Create REALLY BIG "static" sparks: on a winter's day, scuff your feet on the rug so that your body becomes electrified. Now stand near a victim. Wiggle your shoes while pressing on the rug, so that you build up some charged footprints. Now suddenly LEAP INTO THE AIR and touch your victim with your finger at the same time, while you're still in flight. The spark will be much stronger than normal. (It's called "capacitve voltage multiplication." and VandeGraaff generators employ this effect.) While waiting in the dark outside a movie theater or pub, violently shake your head back and forth while observing nearby neon signs. (this only works with clear-tube orange signs.) See those frilly filgerees in the bands of light? All neon signs have them, but normally they wiggle back and forth so fast that humans can't see them. Physicists call them "positive column striations," while neon signmakers call them "jellybeans". Tell bystanders what you are doing, and soon you'll have a crowd of people shaking their heads in the dark like fools. Teach yourself to read upside-down. Comes in handy: you can read the books of people sitting across the table from you. Teach yourself to write backwards in cursive. Da Vinci did this, it was years before people realized that his notebooks weren't written in unbreakable cypher. Yawn. (no, REALLY yawn), then immediately force your tongue backwards against the roof of your mouth. The saliva glands under your tongue will squirt like a squirtgun! You can only squirt once or twice before another yawn is required. Practice this in front of a mirror until you can slightly part your lips and silently hit a target with deadly accuracy. Hey! Is it raining in here? Face a light source. Tightly close you lips. Fill your cheeks with air partially, breathe normally through your nose, then fiercely tense your cheeks and lips to compress the air inside. (It helps if you push fingers on your lips to keep air from spurting out.) Now relax your cheeks, part your lips, and spit the air out very slowly. (Don't breathe out, instead spit the air out with cheeks and tongue.) Smoke! Fog comes out of your mouth. This works great in the dark with a flashlight. While reading, eat something. Notice that the flavor vanishes as soon as you get involved with the story you're reading? Now concentrate on your mouth, and the flavor explodes into reality. By concentrating on the text or on your mouth, you can make the flavor flash on and off. WEIRD! After getting out of the car, quickly touch one of your passengers. Snap! Why waste a good "zap" on the car door? (If you don't enjoy sparks, then use the car keys to touch your passenger. The shock still occurs, but YOU won't feel it!) Look to the left, close your eyes, then touch the rightmost edge of your right eyeball with a fingertip. (Push gently on your eyelid, don't touch the eye itself!) Wiggle your finger up and down. See anything off to the left? That is the "image" of your fingertip, but the retina of your eye is feeling it, not seeing it. Move your finger up, and the black/silver splotch moves down. Use two fingertips, and you see two splotches. This is the realm where touching meets seeing. Tune your TV to a blank station and adjust it for good "snow". Stare into the snow. Imagine the number "3", and it will appear as a 3-shaped flickering. But then it will start to slowly rotate. Mentally erase the 3, then imagine a horizontal line. It appears, but it won't stay still, it wants to drift and rotate. Make it shrink and vanish. Keep staring, and soon the snow will smoothly ripple, as if you were looking through the distorting water of complicated waves in a swimming pool. Think of more stuff to create. Who says that watching TV for hours isn't worthwhile?! NEW ADDITIONS (Add your own!) _________________________________________________________________ Caught in a FACEWARP! Find a piece of mirror material about 30cm across (or take a small mirror out of its frame.) If your mirror has sharp glass edges, grind them off with emery paper or put scotch tape on the edges. Next, stand in front of a larger mirror so you can see your reflection. Place your smaller mirror against your face so that its edge runs vertically down the middle and is slightly crushing your nose. Tilt your mirror sideways until you see your reflection in the bigger mirror. Your face will be perfectly symmetrical because your small mirror is reflecting the other half: you'll have a face that's composed of two left halves or two right halves. Now for the messy part (messy because you'll laugh so hard that you'll wet yourself!) Look to the side and YOUR EYES MOVE IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS! Gah! Tilt your head one way and your cranium expands hugely, tilt it the other way and you become a pinhead with a gigantic neck. Move the edge of the mirror so your nose has one nostril and you develop a single large eye. Hide one hand behind the non-reflective side of the mirror and extend one finger under the mirror's edge against your face. A worm appears (a worm with fingernails.) Wiggle your finger. Open your mouth and and grasp your finger between your teeth, and the fatnecked-pinhead has bitten the worm! Swallow it (and perhaps use your hidden hand to push your neck flesh sideways, to form a lump that moves down your throat. By this point I will have become "overly amused" and in danger of damaging myself. hilarity. bill b Seattle, WA USA - Tuesday, May 04, 1999 at 12:04:05 (PDT) _________________________________________________________________ try standing with one hand on a vdg and bringing your knuckes near to a busen with the gas running. with luck the resulting spark will light the busen. this demos that the spark is really hot. alex rice cmabridge, united kingdom - Tuesday, May 04, 1999 at 10:22:13 (PDT) _________________________________________________________________ Here's a strange and subtle 3D effect created by viewing the world through a pair of tiny aperatures: http://members.aol.com/kendunkley/visual.htm What the heck causes it? Maybe it removes some of the spherical or chromatic aberration from your eyes? billb Seattle, WA USA - Monday, May 03, 1999 at 18:03:46 (PDT) _________________________________________________________________ Not recommended for epileptics... One day when attempting to revise (honest ma) I noticed something a little weird... Staring at a plain white desk in a fairly dark room I switched the desk light on and off rapidly and after a while I noticed all sorts of weird things happening... Strange colors, planes and tunnels that seemingly move toward you... It's best if you don't blink and don't move your head.. Boredom is the mother of invention. Charlie Edinburgh, denial Scotland - Monday, May 03, 1999 at 11:28:11 (PDT) _________________________________________________________________ Find a dark room with a mirror in it. Turn on the lights and stare at your reflection for several seconds. While still staring at yourself, turn out the light. As the ambient light in the room fades away, you should see a brief after image of yourself. This After image when I percieve it looks like myself as a ghost! I.E. you will only see absolute light (your skin) and absolute dark (your eye sockets, nostrils, lips, etc. It only lasts for a split second, so you need to look carefully, but you can do this repeatedly. Now make the most evil face you can and try this IF YOU DARE!!! Whoa! Your "EVIL twin" is scary looking, 'eh? Not someone I'd want to meet in a dark alley, and now your alone with them in the dark!! Turn the lights back on - QUICK!!!! ;o> Patrick Burns Atlanta, GA USA - Wednesday, April 28, 1999 at 07:33:15 (PDT) _________________________________________________________________ Take a thin strand of rubber band and hold it vertically in front of your face while looking at a television set. Now give the rubber band a "twang" with the nearest unoccupied finger. You should see a wave pattern very much like you would expect to see in an o-scope monitor. ( I discovered this phenominon for my self about 30 years ago. I dont know if I'm the only one who knows about it, but I rather doubt it.) mark warlick macon , ga USA - Monday, April 19, 1999 at 23:31:31 (PDT) _________________________________________________________________ Modify your perceptions with physics rather than psychopharmacology: put an infrared filter in some welding goggles, then wear them on a bright, sunny day. (Choose a filter that is in the near-IR, so a bit of light is visible still.) The world will become EXTREMELY BIZARRE. Wait a couple of minutes until your eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. Then the bright pink clouds drift in the dark sky. The world is dusk, yet the sun shines. Car tail-lights blaze brightly. The houses and roads are dark. But the grass! The trees! They are frosty blazing red, like snow which has been sprayed with cherry Kool-aid powder. Everyone's clothes are altered. Blue-jeans are almost white, and the artwork of T-shirts is almost invisible, and everyone's hair is grey. I've heard that some types of clothing are transparent to the infrared, so stagger on down to the beach and verify if this is so. "Mister, why are you wearing those goggles?" Bill Beaty USA - Monday, February 22, 1999 at 02:16:46 (PST) _________________________________________________________________ Here's one that looks very interesting: Inducing Visual Telepathic Hallucinations. Now children, don't damage your mind too much! Bill Beaty Seattle, WA USA - Monday, January 18, 1999 at 13:33:40 (PST) _________________________________________________________________ Start swinging a pendulum with your hand. Now keep your hand as still as possible and think to another kind of oscillation (for example circular instead of linear) and after a few seconds the oscillation will be transmitted to the pendulum. Simone - Sunday, January 03, 1999 at 12:16:08 (PST) _________________________________________________________________ This works best in a dark room. Start rubbing your eyes like you do when you have just awaken. Go on rubbing them and soon you will be seeing lots of triangles one connected to the other, forming some kind of wavy moving structure. Now rub your eyes with the lower part of your palms instead of your fingers and the triangles will disappear and will be replaced by some bright moving dots, typically orange, yellow or purple. Continue rubbing your eyes this way and you will see a bright yellow ring with the central hole that slowly shrinks. Simone - Sunday, January 03, 1999 at 12:12:02 (PST) _________________________________________________________________ Here's some neat eye tricks. 1) If you happen to be in front of a chain-link fence, or staring at some very repetitious tiling, you can relax your eyes, as if you were looking at the horizon, and if you can get the pattern to converge again, the fence (or tiling) will appear much farther away than it is. Alternatively, you can cross your eyes, as if to look at something closer, but it is harder to get your eyes to converge. 2) Do this one only when *not* driving... if you're moving by a high tension wire tower, close one eye, and see if you can trick your brain into making the far leg of the tower be the close one. If you do it right, the tower will appear to rotate with you, as you drive. This is like looking at a drawing of a cube, and seeing two different perspectives; the difference is the mentally assigned 3-D position of 2D clues. 3) Rub your eyes for about a minute. I usually see fields of geometric patterns before my eyes begin to hurt. I used to this as a kid a lot. I also used to stare at the sun until it became a glowing orange disc. :-] That's all I can think of for now. Terren Terren Suydam USA - Wednesday, May 20, 1998 at 14:50:47 (PST) _________________________________________________________________ Here are a few from UK kid lore: (1) Spooky sausage. Put the tips of your index fingers together and look at them without converging your eyes (as for a Magic Eye picture). A phantom chipolata appears between them. Freaks littlies out first time. (2) Hole in your hand. Roll up a sheet of paper lengthwise to makle a tube, or use the inner from a roll of kitchen paper. Rest it between thumb and forefinger of your left hand and look through it with your right eye. With appropriate adjustment of convergence, a gaping hole appears in your hand. (3) Skull dynamics. This isn't really kid's stuff, unless you count under-employed electronics designers as kids (which you probably should). Set up an oscilloscope with no input so it's tracing out a horizontal line with a sweep time of about 50ms. While looking at it, punch yourself on the jaw (not too hard, this is a family show). The scope will trace out the response of your head to the punch - sharp onset with decaying oscillations. Although our brains seem to be set up to compensate for normal motions of our heads, extracting a stable world picture from the wildly gyrating images on our retinas, they can't cope with this one. You can get related effects by eating crunchy stuff while watching the 'scope, and also with TV. With the latter, the effect gets more marked the further you are from the screen. Try eating an apple on the other side of the street from a store with a window display of TVs. Can anyone out there explain this? Roger Bridgman; UK - Thursday, May 21, 1998 at 09:23:34 (GMT) _________________________________________________________________ Try watching TV while brushing your teeth with an electric (electronic ??) toothbrush. This will make the screen look quite weird. Works also with LED-displays used in clocks. Simon Kainz Graz, Austria - Tuesday, December 01, 1998 at 04:06:05 (PST) _________________________________________________________________ Yeah, it's good to be able to SMELL, but what about us ANOSMICS!!?? Where do we fit in ?? I Cannot smell a thing for 99.9999% of the time..and then I can smell for a few seconds. So I go on smellind BINGES smelling anything in reach(?) until it goes away again. Usually happens in the shower where the pickings are very slim! A haiku... Anosmia sucks! Olfactorially challenged nose Misses summers perfumes C Terry Allan 1997 Terry Allan Carisbrook, Vic Australia - Friday, September 11, 1998 at 19:47:47 (PDT) _________________________________________________________________ Thats "handle of a hammer" (below). Anything thinner than your wrist should work fine. Speaking of smoke rings.... A decent smoke ring generator is fairly easy to make. Cut a circular hole in a can of Pringles. Put some buring paper in the can and blow it out (fill the can with smoke). Put the plastic lid back on the can. Tapping on the plastic lid launches smoke rings out the hole. The harder you hit the lid, the faster the rings with travel. Mark Storer Kalamazoo, MI USA - Monday, August 10, 1998 at 11:43:28 (PDT) _________________________________________________________________ Squeeze something. Hard. For about 30-60 seconds. Just making a fist works, but something like the handle of a seems to work best. Open your hand very slowly, gently even. There is some resistence, not much. Your hand will slowly "creak" open. Does anyone know what causes this? Mark Storer Kalamazoo, MI USA - Wednesday, August 05, 1998 at 08:11:44 (PDT) _________________________________________________________________ I have noticed an optical illusion while working with a milling machine rotary table in my machine shop. If the table is stared at advanced somewhat rapidly by hand in either direction for a period of time,(a full 360 revolution works well),when it is stopped it will give the illusion that the table is advancing in the opposite direction for a few seconds.I would think this might be similar to the effect you see when as a kid you spun around to make yourself dizzy? Sebastian H. Largo, Fl USA - Monday, July 20, 1998 at 18:08:45 (PDT) _________________________________________________________________ Have you ever experienced how it feels when your car's brakes fail and you are driving at high speed on a crowded road? Try this. Drive down a vacant stretch of road. Imagine a child suddenly crossing the road in front of you to pick up his ball. You want to stop your car now and instead of pressing the brake pedal, press your leg on the floor board. Dont panic! K Ravinder Chennai, T.N. India - Friday, July 10, 1998 at 04:28:42 (PDT) _________________________________________________________________ Place palm of hand on computer monitor, with out touching the ground with your feet, turn the monitor on and off continuously, then without touching the ground, reach out and zap someone! Touch their bare skin with your finger and they will be zapped. Ben Condie MACKAY, qld AUSTRALIA - Tuesday, June 02, 1998 at 22:35:02 (PDT) _________________________________________________________________ While yawning, notice that rumbling sound right near the end of the yawn. You can control it consciously, and make a "boom" sound which only you can hear. Walk down the street while accompanying yourself on the Invisible Bass Drum. Launch thought-balls at irritating drivers and hear them explode. Burst out giggling while walking along at work, and nobody knows why! Bill B. Seattle, WA USA - Tuesday, June 02, 1998 at 13:17:23 (PDT) _________________________________________________________________ Stare at the computer screen while eating carrots or celery or an apple. You'll see strange black horizontal bands appear on the screen. Vibrating eyeballs! Hum a deep note (or blow rasberries hard, or play a low note on your sax) and you'll see moving stripes of distortion crawl across the screen. Move back away from the screen to make this work even better. _________________________________________________________________ Stand in a doorway, arms at your side, palms towards your body. Press the backs of your hands (with your arms) agains the door frame, as if trying to push the frame outward. Press -=hard=- for,about 1 minute. Step out of doorway and relax arms completely. Arms will mysteriously float up to a horizontal position. Creepy! MARK FERGERSON - Tuesday, June 02, 1998 _________________________________________________________________ Now Add one of your own. _________________________________________________________________ http://www.scienceclub.org/cgi-pvt/instr/instr.html Maintained by Bill Beaty. Mail me at: billbeskimo.com. If you are using Lynx, type "c" to email.