Hear, hear Mr. Apple and Mr. Microsoft: the U and I on the Dvorak keyboard layout should be switched, it's a big mistake!

Since around two years I am typing with the Dvorak-Dealey keyboard layout instead of the standard QWERTY layout. I am glad I switched. The only reason not to switch is not wanting to invest the effort to learn it; as most systems today support Dvorak (windows mobile 6 doesn't). When using a computer in an internet cafe or at a friends place I download and start my personal key re-mapper, a autohotkey script, so I can type in my adapted layout.

Typing itself is not that much faster as you formulate paragraphs slower then you can type, but it is way more comfortable. For me that is important in stress situations - which I try to avoid - which can aggrevate a returning muscle pain in my wrists as I suffered RSI a while ago.

It is possible to calculate and evolve a slightly more optimal layout with a keyboard layout evolver like kiwi, but for me it wouldn't be worth the effort to find it and re-learn it. I found one glaring issue with the Dvorak layout: the placement of the U and the I, they should be switched as [Michael Capewell] (http://www.geocities.com/smozoma/projects/keyboard/layout_capewell-dvorak.htm) noted. The reason is that the frequency of the letter U in the English and Dutch language is much less compared to the letter I frequency, also the frequency of the Dvorak two letter combinations (digrams) you can make with the letters on the left-hand with the U are also less then with the I.

This means you have to move your left index finger more and strain your left hand extra. When typing for example chapter 1 of Dreaming Void the letter i occurs 429 times compared to the 211 u's. The number of U digrams in the text typed with the left hand is 150 and 232 with the left hand. The number of I digrams typed with the left hand is 98 and with the right hand 688. It's obvious the I is best placed under the left index finger instead.

Now the distance traveled with your fingers is 218 meters when typing in Qwerty, 118 meters in Dvorak and 111 in Dvorak with the U and I interchanged. So it's around 7% more efficient in that way.

By counting the involved letter and bigram frequency one can measure the efficiency of swapping the keys. One can weigh the higher I frequency compared to the U frequency with the OU frequency compared to the OI frequency and come up with this approximation to measure the reduction of finger movement when switching the U and the I. Technically one should compare all the possible U/I digrams, but this would be complex and one would also have to factor in the cost of digram finger movement which differs for each non vowel-vowel left-hand digram. Fortunately most of the vowel-vowel digrams are in the top digram list for the left dvarok hand and comprise around 75% of the total left-hand letter digrams. So one could leave them out to get an estimate of the left-hand extra movement.

The measure is: (freq u + u-vowel left hand digrams) / (i + i-vowel digrams left hand)

improvement

title	measure	improvement
simple english bible	(44997+30877)/(57920+26312)	0.90
alice in wonderland	(2042+1334)/(2587+1181)	0.90
some science text	(99+56)/(111+74)	0.84
dutch text	(56+37)/(62+56)	0.79

In my native language Dutch the OU digram doesn't occur as frequently making the benefit of switching the U and I even greater. I haven't tested french but I suspect the OU digram frequency is similar to that of english.

Here is the count of left-hand letter digrams for the dvorak layout in the simple english bible:

vowel digrams

frequency	digram
1649	ou
741	ai
222	io
219	qu
215	up
212	ki
206	ie
169	ue
134	pi
126	oi
109	ei
102	ju
98	ik
90	ui
83	pu
81	au
52	yi
45	ia
23	xi
23	ua
23	ip
12	iu
10	ix
3	uo
1	ku
1	eu

And these are the left-hand vowel vowel digrams:

vowel-vowel digrams

freq	digram
1649	ou
741	ai
222	io
206	ie
169	ue
126	oi
109	ei
90	ui
81	au
45	ia
23	ua
12	iu
3	uo
1	eu

Questions:

1. Why the name "Jaro Kyran Siefken"?
2. When, where and how was Jaro Kyran born?
3. Oddities surrounding the birth?
4. What is the significance of the date?
5. How does it feel being a parent?
6. Who is Jaro as a person?

Answers:

1. Why the name "Jaro Kyran Siefken"?

Short answer

Jaro refers to the "Spring" (season) and so also means "Strength" (of the new life). The coming of "Jaro" was celebrated in major festivals, personified as the Slavic god Jarovit and Jarillo. Jaro is named after these gods.

Kyran refers to the Irish saint Ciarán of Clonmacnoise, which is also spelled as Kieran or Kyran, in Irish/Gaelic this means "dark (haired) one".

Siefken - while choosing the mother's name Weijers is allowed by law and we discussed the possibility - we preferred to stick with the default choice of the father's family name as family names lose their meaning with such a policy. "Siefken" is a Saterlandic name (East-Frisian).

Long answer:

Having only one name I (Francis) was a bit jealous of people having two names (like Claudy Nathalie); they could switch names and have an alter ego! Three names would be to much, and only one name, while convenient - was not enough. Why one if you can have two for the same price?

We wanted a name to be nice sounding and easy to pronounce and spell, in addition we wanted to have a name that refers to something in our recent or past history, mythology or religion that has a special meaning to us. The problem is: these two motivations don't go well together, this makes a choice difficult. Added issue was that we had to think of two pairs, one in case it was a boy and one in case it was a girl.
For example, at first we both found Jonathan a good candidate name. It sounds good and we associate it with Richard Bach's novella "Jonathan Livingstone Seagul", a novella about life and growing up. Unfortunately the name would be to long in practice, so people would call him Jona very soon which sounded a bit to old-testamentical to me. Although there are many meaningful stories in the Bible, the story of the prophet Jona and the Whale wasn't meaningful enough to us and the original reference to Jonathan would be lost.
Another candidate was Joris, it was easy, nice sounding and it refered to the intruiging mythical story of St. George and the Dragon. But about the actual historical saint George (St. Joris), little was known about the actual historical person other than that he was a Roman soldier in Anatolia who was martyred, gutted... So while he is an important revered figure within Christianity, and the folk tales surrounding St. George are fascinating for sure - we didn't have a real connection with him.

So the search continued, a few other names were selected and discussed until we came across Jaro.

Jaro sure was easy to pronounce and spell. Uncommon it is in our country, but it is an existing boys name in slavic/bohemic culture.
It refers to the spring season of the year; and so it also means "strength" (of the new life). Suprising is that the word "year/jaar" has it's original roots in the slavic "jaro", which marked the beginning of the year and the start of a new life - like the celebration of Easter. In slavic mythology there is an important figure Jarilo

or Jarovit who symbolized the springtime Jaro and whose coming marked the start of new life. In his footsteps everything flowers to life. Described as a strong young man coming on a horse or walking he is the personification of Jaro/Spring new life and our Jaro is named after him. Coincidentally Jaro was Christitianized into St. Joris/George, a warrior martyr also depicted on a horse - so St. Joris sneaked in after all!
Jaro is also the name of a Zoroastrian saint, an ancient Persian religion. In Coptic Jaro refers to the river Nile, associated with the flow of life. In Romani, the gypsy language Jaro means "Egg".

His second name Kyran was also a candidate for a first or second name. Jaro Kyran's father Francis (after St. Francis) has a connection with monastic life; the christian monasteries preserving knowledge throughout the ages. St. Kyran (also spelled as Kieran) was an Irish abbot of one of the first big North-European monasteries in the 6th century AD. For me St. Kyran personifies the ancient western tradition of the monasteries. In the week before the birth the award winning movie

"Into great silence" was aired - an impressive movie about monastic life. Further monastic inspirations are the monastery of Taize, the orthodox monastaries in Moldavia and Northern Romania, and the monastary of... monasteries we participated in for a week in 1997. The monks and monasteries in the SF novels "Das Glaspernspiel" (Hermann Hesse) and "A Canticle for Leibowitz", the monks Thomas Merton and Dom Bede Griffiths also provided inspiration in choosing a saint monk.
Coincidentally the feast day of St. Kyran is his death date of the 9th of September at 32 years old, the same as the birthdate of Francis and age.
An excellent overview of his life is found here. Ireland, the country of Clannad, Sinead O'Conner and Maarten Toonder.

Like Jaro, Kyran is also a Persian name meaning Lord, in Sanskrit Kiran means "ray of light".
So all in all the combination of the two names can be seen as that of the heart (Jarilo's life force, Jaro) and that of the mind and spirit (St. Kyran life as a monk and abbot), with the Heart as the calling card.
The pagan god of spring Jaro and the christian saint Kyran.

2. When, where and how was Jaro Kyran born?

23 october 13:22 2007
Wilhelmina Kinder Ziekenhuis

Utrecht, The netherlands
The birth was very complicated, and input from multiple experts was needed. Without mentioning the details, there was to little strength left in Claudy's muscles to push the baby out, so it was stuck half way. The pain was unbearable, all options were tried in the past hour, it couldn't last any longer - a choice had to be made. Cesarian would be complicated and dangerous at this stage.
With all our strength Claudy and I, and the 5 or 6 other experts in the room pushed... and there it was...
Quickly he was taken to the medium care... fortunately al was alright.

3. What is the significance of the date?

Although the claims of Astrology have never been verified in academic level research to date (yet), it remains a fun way to talk and speculate about character and personality if you don't take it to seriously.
(As an oracle it might work basis of synchronicity, but testing this idea requires a radical different research methodology based on insights from phenemenology, qualitative research and statistics/data mining).

According to the horoscope it is a strong willed character, more later.
Planetary positions

planet	sign	degree		motion
Sun	Libra	29°40'22	in house 10	direct
Moon	Pisces	21°26'09	in house 2	direct
Mercury	Scorpio	0°51'03	in house 10	retrograde
Venus	Virgo	13°18'17	in house 8	direct
Mars	Cancer	9°07'26	in house 7	direct
Jupiter	Sagittarius	17°58'43	in house 12	direct
Saturn	Virgo	5°44'53	in house 8	direct
Uranus	Pisces	15°11'21	in house 2	retrograde
Neptune	Aquarius	19°16'04	in house 2	retrograde
Pluto	Sagittarius	26°50'59	in house 1	direct
True Node	Pisces	5°44'54	in house 2	retrograde

4. Oddities surrounding the birth?

* Alarm mysteriously goes off at the height of labor, 2 nurses come rushing in to the surprise of everybody. Nobody pressed the alarm.

• Nurse Jora nurses Jaro
  
  

5. How does it feel being a parent?

Nothing changes, you are still the same person with the same life... but in the life you had you embark on a journey while staying in the same place. You have to be in transit and staying in the same place at the same time. This takes the necessary psychological and social adjustment.

That and the extreme reduction of "free time", it's almost gone - and replaced by the rhythm of the child.

6. Who is Jaro as a person?

He seems to be an active, impatient but content fellow.

After a difficult and nerve wrecking delivery Jaro Kyran Siefken has entered into our lives. Fortunately the healing process for everyone involved has begun. More info, movies and pictures will follow.

I came across Seaside (a Smalltalk web framework), it has script.aculo.us integration and you can develop Seaside web apps from within your browser. Compared to Ruby on Rails it's more elegant and faster to code with. As is said: "Rails is better then everything except Seaside". Inspired by Seaside, the Borges and Wee Ruby frameworks were developed.
Seaside runs on Smalltalk, developed at Xerox Parc in 1974 and while superior lost the object oriented war to C++ in the nineties. Smalltalk is an interpreted language and all development tools run within a GUI VM image, so like Ruby it is slower than byte compiled languages. To speed up the performance Sun developed Strongtalk in the nineties - perhaps porting Seaside to Strongtalk will help Seaside scale. But even on standard smalltalk Seaside seems quite capable of performing if you look at one of it's most succesful Web 2.0 projects: DabbleDB.

Another noteworthy Smalltalk project is OpenCroquet, a metaverse framework, competative with SecondLife and Sun's Darkstar. As Smalltalk is fully object oriented the language is very suited for interacting 3D objects. The only thing is: Sun and SecondLife are actively marketing their product and both are open source as well - will Smalltalk again lose the battle?

Today i read that Enya's favorite novel is "rebecca"; the newest book on my to read list. i should write the list down so i will not forget to actually read those books; reading only internet articles is not everything.

It seems particulate matter, PM10, can be deadlier then radiation, this air pollution is a hazard in most developed cities. Scientists conducting a study at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Great Britain have calculated and compared the mortality rates between populations living near Chernobyl's radioactive zone and those living in London.

Researchers found that approximately 16,000 people were killed by radiation after the Chernobyl explosion, with survivors having a 1 percent higher risk of premature death. In comparison, residents of London experience a 2.8 percent increased risk of early death from heart and lung disease related to exposure to air pollution. The UK.s Royal Commissions on Environmental Pollution estimates that 24,000 deaths a year in Britain are caused by air pollution.

The study was published in the BMC Public Health journal.

What language might humankind and the artificial intelligences be speaking in the future? a chinese/english hybrid, or a simplified english? it might be lojban++; a practical and userfriendly variant on lojban. A parser can be found here. Also see AGIRI for more on the reasons for this artificial language: the creation of a powerful and ethically positive artifial general intelligence. Instead of learning ancient greek or latin people should learn Lojban++.

Programming for kids: Scratch, Tweak, BotsInc, RUR-PLE, Guido van Robot, HacketyHack and a less conventional programming approach Inform7.
One can read this entertaining story of a 6 year old programming in python.

I have seen the future and it is hungry:

http://www.nymag.com/news/features/23169

Somebody made high resolution scans of the Voynich Manuscript available!

Some podcasts c realm, psychedelic salon, psychonautica

Saturdaymorning i had a skype conversation with a woman from beijing, she works as a english-chinese translator. in the evening there was a heartbraking documentary on tv about a children village near beijing where children of criminals were looked after as their parents were in prison or executed. as china currently offers no support for them their fate depends on charity. saturdaynight i wound up at an afterparty in nature, we walked at 4am to the secret location for half an hour, some lost faith and turned back, but at the end there was a longhaired dj in a purple jacket pumping some organic beats into the morning sky; lots of falling stars too!

Today the linksys gateway got a much needed openwrt upgrade, it's x-wrt configuration interface is powerful; easy openvpn and portforwarding configuration, extensive logging and graphing facilities.

There is a popular tv series called “Heroes” where people with paranormal and unusual powers fight to save the world. At first I didn’t like the show much, the characters were flat, the storyline simple and odd - and just a shallow copy of the theme in another series “The 4400”.
Then after watching around 10 episodes it dawned to me...
This wasn’t supposed to be a normal story, it is a comic book approach to television! The story was supposed to be in a certain way, wih heroes, villains, action and the usual comic strip kicks. When I changed my expectiations it became much more enjoyable. However I still found the voiceovers to be a bit hollow and pretentious. But one nugget is a keeper; in a way we are all heroes, playing our different parts. One part is the Peter Petrelli part, a hero that has the power to absorb and mimic the powers of other evolved humans - like flying, seeing into the future, becoming invisible etc. He unconsciously copies the abilities from the other special men. In a way we are our own Peter Petrelli. We are social animals, hardwired to learn and copy behaviours from others with help from the recent discovered mirror neurons. We literally suck up the social abilities of others when we are open to them, this goes for the negative as well as the positive. So be careful and conscious of which behaviours slip into your personality. After all your personality changes subtly over time, if it doesn’t have the flexibility to adapt and open up to others it becomes rigid and predictable. As Hiro says; you become a villain!

I am a big fan of the work Ken Wilber (I devoured it all). Not so much anymore. Read the history here; insults and a flame war. In either case: thank you Ken for liberating me from my attachment to you!

Still I would recommend his books to everyone for a philosophical look at spirituality. Grace and Grit is still one of the best books I've read. But what the bleep is going on with Ken abusing at least some of his critics or endorsing someone like Andrew Cohen?

The resulting fallout Frank listed was very relevant, so in a way some good came from it. For example this quote from generationsit.org:

"My contention, however, is that one NEEDS to be a full-blown nihilist before a sincere, DESPARATE commitment to spiritual practice is even made possible. Integral theory is the mind's last life raft staving off the full drowning into the ocean of spirit."
--Generation Sit: Integral Theory: The Ego's Last Stand?

My significant other has been saying for years that Wilber is to much theory, while you need some in the uncharted waters of spirit, one definately can get trapped in it.

My blog now runs with the elegantly simple blogmax elisp package. Emacs will be my new operating system for the next few months as my ultimate goal is to do away with my screen entirely and switch to an advanced audio desktop: emacspeak. I also took a brief look at acme, the editor of the impressive next-gen OS plan9. Although the seamless integation with the OS is appealing it's dependence of the mouse is problematic for me as I am aiming for a wearable computing environment. I have noticed that operating a mouse interferes with moving around; a mouse operation or even gesture requires more attention then keying command sequences. In passing I stumbled upon the dynamic window manager, really nice. Who needs the KDE or Gnome environment bloat; less is more. The same goes for blosxom, a minimalistic perl blogging package.

ps. 2008-01-09: I now use blosxom as blogging package, there is also the excellent nanoblogger.

"...The basic tempo (Psytrance) is significantly faster than most mainstream trance music, and this has been attributed to the fact that constant sixteenth notes at a tempo of 145 bpm gives a rhythm almost identical to that of the naturally occurring alpha waves in the brain...."

Psytrance and the Spirituality of Electronics

Bought myself a Sirius mindmachine for use with the lightstone and meditation, it has an audiostrobe decoder so i can use it with bwgen files and audiostrobe cds. One nice feature is that it can flash on the rhythm of external music which it picks up by microphone or line-in if you prefer. I tried it this weekend on a psytrance beach party (most excellent party by the way), works nicely but the decibels where to high for the mike when you where close to the speakers (sub 50m).

Zooming into the infinite loop of life:
zoomquilt 2

It has been decided. Three hobbits will travel far and wide to the land of Turkey to celebrate the rare eclipse together with creatures from every part of the world at the 7 day psytrance festival Soulclipse.
We are a few miles away from the exact center of the Nexus: 3 minutes, 33 seconds. I have acquired the rare Peleng fisheye lens from Belarus to shoot the solar gathering in all it's 360 degrees glory. Perhaps if the solar energy permits I can even make a 3D panoramic movie so I can enjoy the memories later on inside my VR goggles.

Wow, the small fortune for the Z800, my new HMD was certainly worth it. Some first impressions: Battlefield2 runs like a charm in stereoscopic 3D on my rivatuned nvidia 6800LE, antialiasing set to 4x and you don't see the 800x600 pixelization. 800x600 is enough because my brain interpolates both slightly different display's, in essence creating a higher virtual resolution running on my wetware. Moving my head around is seamless, all movement is translated by the built-in headtracker. It's a bit difficult to aim with the head though, another problem is that the movement of my feet on the DDR pad (left, right, up, down, forward, backward, jump) gets out of sync with the movement of my head (which controls the direction of my virtual body in the game). The game just feels almost as if you are inside of a real-life laserquest game, going back for more after each round.

Then there are people filming in stereo in other parts of the world and I can watch those stereoscopic videos as if I was really there. I see true depth, the only thing missing is the interactivity, the smell and the wind! At least the wind can be simulated as I can also use the visor on my laptop outside adding an extra real life dimension. I wonder if one could make a stereoscopic QTVR, that would be very nice. I've searched but couldn't find people who did something like that.

Can't wait for that 3D RPG Oblivion to arrive, that's for sure.

The absolute killer application for me is Milkdrop and Monkey for Winamp; they are rendered in pure 3D. I am literally flying into another dimension. I haven't tryed it with psytrance (just regular Oakenfold) yet, but that should be a blast.

Some friends want me to go with them see the full eclipse at Soulclipse Turkey next month - but I've no money left!

I was surprised to hear this little bit on the NerdTV podcast #8:

Bob: Now, didn't you do brain wave studies on astronauts as well?
Avram: Well, yeah. Not brain wave studies - well, they brought us in once because some of the astronauts were reporting astral projection - out of the body experiences. So, we were the astronots with N-O-T. And we did a little consulting for NASA.
Bob: Your idea was to get the astronauts back in their bodies.
Avram: To keep them in their bodies.
Bob: Now why is it that when we were watching Walter Cronkite and the space program in the '60s we didn't know that those astronauts were getting out of their bodies?
Avram: Well, because Walter kept it a secret. We were actually on the Walter Cronkite show.

I wonder what they did to solve this body problem. Former astronaut Edgar Mitchell talks a little bit on OBE's here.

I took a long break from blogging - it happens. I used to have those barren periods when I kept a diary in my early teens. I got busy with a lot of things and both of my computers died in the same week so I had no real way to blog. The good news is that the phoenix has again risen from the flames. What have I been up to?
Soulclipse was an extremely nice experience, 8000 psytrancers surrounded by nature - and the eclipse itself - absolutely wonderful, for a moment it felt like the end of the world, then the golden burning ring in the sky like a doorway to the cosmos and then the release into the new day and everybody went wild.
Ok, what else? During easter I spend the night in church, also very nice. Since that time I only sleep a maximum of 5 hours a day as I adopted the technique of polyphasic sleeping. At the moment I am going for 2-3 hours daily. Interesting way to get to know yourself, your health and your sleeppatterns. Lot's of free time now.
Google provided me with some excellent services like google calendar, google spreadsheet and google notebook to keep myself organised. I also opened a Flickr account to keep my pictures.
Claudy and I finished the first Tango Argentino course, a very interesting way of getting to know yourself.
Upgraded my podcasting gear, I now have a portable recording station (<200 mg); a cowon i5 mp3 player with ogg support and stereo microphone support (128 Kbps mp3).
I also needed to upgrade my pda's, going old school this time with the Jornada 710 with a touch type keyboard running linux and a psion revo (also with a keyboard) as a backup machine. I've decided that I prefer to have a keyboard interface instead of a pen interface only (well psion and jornada have both).
I am convering to the DVORAK keyboard layout, there are even more perfect layouts possible but DVORAK is already a good improvement.
Started reading the new sci-fi series by Peter Hamilton, good stuff!
My next 20 minute nap is coming up, gotta go!

I was listening to a Terence McKenna talk about how gestures and movements can also be carriers of language.
That lit up a memory about a tv show where a woman did studies with dolphins and concluded that dolphins communicate with complex 3D body movements, bubble patterns and sonar.
Terence's next remark cought my attention: baby's want to communicate before their motgric speech apparatus is ready &or that and thus it is possible to communicade with them in sign language befobe they can actually speak.
I just had to look that up and sure enough, learning &qukt:baby sign" seems to be quite popular these days. Soma baby's begin signing at 4 months age; simple gords of course like milk, cat, dog, eat or mama. When I asked my cognitive psychology teacher about it she mentioned that her daugher tried it with her daugher. It seems to prevent baby frustration when it can't communicate. Whether it would be beneficial for the kid later in life is an interesting question; there is a theory that later in life they tend to resolve conflicts through communication rather then throwing a tantrum and having a richer appreciation for language. I found a funny google video of a baby's first sign.
Maybe the cognitive enhancements here are similar to those that affect people who are raised bilingual or who play computer games regularly.

Yesterday I was listening to a podcast and they mentioned DDR, short for Digital Dance Revolution. Being into dance and gaming myself my interest peaked. I looked it up on both wikipedia and google video and within 5 minutes I knew I had to have one of those dance pads. Now look at this video, isn't this great?! Or what do you think of this one? One of the more successful interactive body computer games, a bode of things to come when interfaces become more immersive. They are working on a multi player DDR for use in fitness halls as DDR is said to be a great weight loss help.
So, naturally, I went out to that cool gaming store next day, they'd heard of it but didn't have it. I asked the guy if he knew more about these kinds of body centric gaming (instead of just using keyboard and mouse). He mentioned that his colleagues wrote about the topic, but that she was just leaving. He referred me to FutureMax and a dutch DDR group. There is a popular open source variant of the original DDR games called StepMania.
Well, I am 5 years behind the DDR craze.. but who cares!

I've put some small video's online on video.google.com.
Also have been listening to various podcasts. I am particularly impressed by the enthousiasm of Father Roderick Vonhögen
He stands with one foot in the world of the new media and with one foot firmly within the Church, forming a human bridge. The concept of a bridge is an important one in this fractured world of worldviews and reigning individualism. There is little passion, there is little light.
There was a time when I thought about the idea of becoming a priest, or to be active within the church or. I decided to pursue a different path: that of humanist counselor.
It's nice to see how it might have turned out for me as Roderick Vonhogen is only a few years older. Yesterday I watched the episode of the Twilight Zone (The Road less traveled): in it was a man who encountered himself from a parallel reality, someone who made a different choice. In a sense we are all manifestations of potentialities, sometimes we consciously choose the direction but most of the time we are just lost souls swimming in a fish bowl. "Why I am me and not someone else?", I wondered as a kid.

"Each one of us is brought here for a reason" -John

Thhe secret of Lost is slowly dawning onto me during the course of the series. The show ranks up there with the best I've ever seen, better than X-Files, 24 or Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who, The Tripods or Macross, Star Trek TNG or The Twilight Zone NG. I think that's because it approximates what Campbell and Jung call the Hero journey, the individuation process. Not only as the individual, the Hero, but also as an individual within a collective, a holon within an holarchy or heterachy. Networks of meaning, perhaps the building blocks of consciousness? For example Jack and Sawyer as mirrors of Kate's past, or is this meaning only in my mind and not in the mind of the producers? The mirror of the front and tail section of the plane. Ende's Spiegel im Spiegel, staring into eternity. Are our lives meaningless or meaningful? Who decides?

I think the apparatus on the Island functions as a amplifier for the psyche, a synchronicity amplifier. An amplifier of meaning, life becomes more intense as the psyche in all it's aspects infuses reality. Who built the device and why remains a question... just as this idea only remains an idea. Lost only accelerates the sense of wonder and the intensity of life. In that sense Lost itself is the amplifier and we are the ones pushing the play button each time.