general supernatural exploration - part 1

[Mr X]

hello,

thanks for the summary. i dont mind conservative analysis, even dry or cold or ruthless. it is not just for skeptics, but for beliefers. if persons wanted to seek true knowledge and true experience of the superpara it seems like an good idea to check that the knowledge they think they are learning is real.

what was the dreaming together thing ?

2.  X's original xhosha remark very likely was, like in the case i reported, subconsious telepathic perception of G's  thought.

that depends on the timing of indaba and clicking with xhosa. checking this thread, i am not exactly sure when indaba came into play but i am thinking around the 7-8th of june. mr g reports on 11th june giving up on his encryption system. and his xhosa book was part of that.

I think we can agree it is non-shamanic, the question is if it is paranormal.

http://i.imgur.com/PEkBoao.gif

the only part of my system i use on the regular is the holding pattern. during the guessing rounds, especially xhosa, i was messing around with the earlier system that the holding pattern comes from. which is sort of an homemade shaman system. sort of. a bit of this and a bit of that, a bit of antithesis.

what would you say is happening in an succesful guessing game. if it words or numbers, do you think those things are the information being sent and recieved. while words and numbers are real things, they are not real actual physical things, more context dependant information.

when the brain thinks an word, the activity of the brain would be very real. i dont really think, if such an thing as telepathy were possible, it would be as simple as sending or recieving some symbol. as we enter each others minds to send or recieve the symbol or information - would it be so clean cut. would we just with pinpoint accuracy communicate "2", or would the state of the brain activity producing "2" in both minds be the crossing of all sorts of mental activity, then merges at the point of the correct information. what other things could bleed over into both states of mental activity as the merge happens.

???
why?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrK7oWRXQ-o

there is an book on my desk. more than an few words on the front cover. spine is red. you are welcome to informally guess one of those words. it is touching my computer. informal but you are welcome to guess any of the words on the cover. any good guesses could result in an photo of it, on my g similar desk.

aside from mr g, the only other guesser we had was my assistant, miss -. and she was assigned to guess numbers for round 2 because i planned to use her numbers as mine. but she guessed 2 of mr g numbers so it didnt work (i still have the hand written note she left on my desk when she guessed). i am mentioning this because miss - really wants to try guessing again. she has absolutley no interest in forum4 but wants more guessing assignments.

mr x

ps.
i think any more guessing rounds would require some sort of discipline such as noting things down or keeping some sort of basic journal. no need for each participant to post the entire notes, just more for keeping track of things, when what happens and so on.

[tally-ho!]

dam.
[=blood, in Hebrew)or dome?
doom?
Dam.
Damm?

this jumped forcefully into my mind - dismissed it as being just association to your reminding red spine - but it is oddly strong.
closed my eyes tried to see the book - gold on brown text? foreighn language? forein alphabeit? or red? picture? black small text in latin letters?  a frame anyway, text behind it.
i think i'm seeing different books - there is a third, inspired by the voineech manuscript or something to that effect

i don't know what the link between then is

i feel mis -'s curiousity avoking - her book, one of them?
i hold back an impulse to delete it for fear to feel very stupid if non of it connected to anything

postpone the rest.
it's 00:38 my local time.
P.S. - sent the post and got a strong image of the name of a book i once edited (the Hebrew translation) -Damnation Ally, by Rojer Zelazney.
(it's alreadt 00:43)

[tally-ho!]

woke this morning : "Jabberwockie!" and saw this pic:


heared in my thoughts just the meter, the ryme, of the Hebrew version (which i know from early age) - then few of the words emerged
לְעֵת בָּשָׁק, וּשְׁלֵי פַּחְזַר
ּּּ סָבְסוּ, מָקְדּו _ _  _ _...


נתיב התופת? ]=damnaton ally?]
a vision, quite graphic, that i'll skip, made me jump off bed and start cleaning. (or maybe it's otherwise a reaction to X's tupe with the cats food cans and ghosts).

[ju4o]

Well, when the coin experiment closed there was quite a lot of enthusiasm for another experiment.  And there had been discussion of using cards instead of coins, to give a richer set of possibilities.  So, here is how it went:

Card Experiment
We have started a New Card Experiment.

There are three cards which have letters written on them. three letters in all which were selected according to the recomendations in the coin experiment. Three playing cards were drawn at random, using the table provided by emilio the letters were selected accordingly.

The three cards are lying on a black piece of paper on a white table with no other objects on the table, from left to right.

Members should guess the identity of the three letters in their correct sequence from left to right

each member will have one guess in the first round which will last until Thursday 8 pm Pacific coast time. at that time I will either announce a winner or start a new round. in the new round members will be allowed to guess again. round two will last until saturday noon, PCT at which time I will either announce a winner or start round three which will last until monday 8pm central time. At that time the experiment will be closed.

Members should refrain from multiple guess within a round.

members who post mulitple guesses within a round will have their posts deleted.

an e-mail has been sent to corey donovan who has agreed to be the witness to the experiment. The answers have been sent to him.

Guesses (Tuesday):

Tomahawk Kid A-D-L

(Wednesday)

Abe Z-L-A
Ghost Dog R-D-P

(Thursday)

Emilio J-V-K
Garen Valoo C-X-L

Re: Card Experiment
no winner

Round two begins now.

You may try again.

We will BTW use Emilio's point system if no one nails it, which means we'll have a winner one way or another.

Bye, Bye.

Good luck!

(Friday)

Jeremy S-W-B
Ghost Dog R-L-G
Audrey B-K-M
Greg I-P-Q
Tomahawk Kid T-N-T

(Saturday)

Garen Valoo G-R-M

Re: Card Experiment
I'm going to start the third and final round a little early. I'll be offline shortly so go ahead and guess...........

We'll wrap it up Monday.

(Saturday)

Emilio L-X-E

(Sunday)

Charlila Z-B-C
Ra6as C-V-E

(Monday)

Garen Valoo S-L-I
Tomahawk Kid N-N-L
Greg F-D-K
Tosk B-Q-F
Audrey A-C-L
Power M-C-H
Abe C-A-W

Re: Card Experiment
Hello fellow Sr Experimentors,

I hereby declare and officially proclaim that the card experiment is now over. (strikes gavel.....bam,bam)

(clears throat),

I do hereby and with all powers invested in me announce the following winners...............

Grand Prize....Ghost Dog

Ist Runner -Up.......Greg Mamishian

2nd-Runner-Up.......Tomahawk Kid

The correct answers are R-D-S

Ghost Dog guessed R-D-P in the first round and R-L-G in the 2nd.

Greg guessed F-D-K in the third round

Tomahawk Kid guessed A-D-L in the first round.

There were no other correct answers.

[...]

Congradulations Ghost Dog!

Thanks to everyone for making these experiments a lot of fun.

Emilio had also proposed a way of scoring each guess so that there would be a winner even if nobody guessed all three letters correctly, so I then made an analysis of the results using his system:

In all we had 21 guesses from 12 people. [...]

Now, among the 26 cubed (17,576) ways of guessing 3 letters against a target combination, we have the following (where "x^y" means x to the power of y, and where the binomial coefficients 1,3,3,1 appear in the last column)

1 way of getting 3 matches (that is, 25^0 times 1)
75 ways of getting 2 matches (that is, 25^1 times 3)
1875 ways of getting 1 match (that is, 25^2 times 3)
15,625 ways of getting 0 matches (that is, 25^3 times 1)

(which, as a check, add up to 17,576)

giving the following probabilities (assuming random guesses against a randomly chosen target)

.000057 chance of 3 matches (1 in 17,576)
.004267 chance of 2 matches (about 1 in 234)
.106680 chance of 1 match (about 1 in 9)
.888996 chance of 0 matches

and which, using your current scoring method, leads to an expected score for each guess of around 5.67, and an expected aggregate score for the 21 guesses of around 119.

[...]

Scoring the overall experiment by adding up the individual scores as you suggest (and which presumably is the proper thing to do, since that is what the participants were advised of at the time) gives a score of 733 [...]

So we can ask: what is the probability of the card experiment yielding a score of 733 or more, using your scoring method?

where we define "experiment" as being a sequence of 21 random guesses (we have to fix the number of guesses since, the expected outcome being positive, the more guesses allowed, the greater the expected score.)

The easiest thing to do now is simulate the experiment (that is, run a large number of trials, each trial consisting of 21 random guesses, adding up the score for each trial, and seeing how many trials yield a score of 733 or more.)

Doing this indicates the probablity of the card experiment coming out as well as it did as .0347 (1 in 29).

(As a check, this simulation also confirms the expected score for each guess as 5.67)

[... But] perhaps we could re-consider the method of scoring.

For example: a psi enthusiast would complain that your scoring method does not give enough credit to Ghost Dog for getting hits in both guesses (two hits in one guess and one hit in the other).

The probability of 2 or more hits in a single guess is about 1 in 234 (see above) but the probability of 3 or more hits distributed over two guesses is a much more impressive 1 in 959.

Lifting his score from 675 to 700 does not reflect this adequately.

At the time I did not follow up on this suggestion, because I felt that the results already on the table were impressive enough.

Now I think I should have been more ruthless, because the preceding calculations seriously underestimate the weirdness of the outcome of the experiment.

Interestingly, one person (who now posts at the Hat) made a rather extraordinary intervention.  The thread, as described thus far, petered out on October 24th 2004.  Six months later, Elmar Ata added 3 consecutive posts to the thread as follows:

Out of prison.... near the edge and ....
...opportunity for the dog to become .....should I say honest ?

Opportunity again...
Corey Donovan wrote (in this thread) :

"Here's the email I received from Tungsen when this experiment began:

Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 18:01:19 -0700 (PDT)
From: "leamon hill" <[email protected]> View Contact Details
Subject: Re: fun stuff
To: "Richard Jennings" <[email protected]>

Yes, thank you...Richard........ah.Corey.

You are Officially The Keeper of the Secret Answers which are..... R D S

They have to guess the letters for the grand prize. Emilio is giving points for each correct letter guessed so it's fun.

It will definetly go on through Thursday and if need be a round two for up to 7 days.

You'll just need to verify this email thread when the time comes. no rush.

Thanks,

Leamon "

Me:

Tungstenwhite (Leamon) is a liar. There were no secret answers . THe dog did know at least two letters.

Did he guess or did he know
he did know .......and you should tell us how

where is Tungstenwhite when he can be honest....??

laughing....

or the functions of paranoia.

I don't know if Elmar had made a calculation or if he just felt it intuitively, but he was basically saying that what had apparently happened in the card experiment was simply not believable.

[Mr X]

hello,

dam.
[=blood, in Hebrew)or dome?
doom?
Dam.
Damm?

in an formal round would this be allowed, would dam be considered the guess or blood. blood is an word on the cover of the book.
maybe your mind got caught in an loop over dam, taking you to damnation ally as you got a word correct but didnt know.

j, interested reading.

the coin thing seemed more like remote viewing attempt. the card thing seemed very clinical.
i dont know all the facts about the sr experiments, so i cant judge. but with our nice small group here i feel the guessing rounds have been an bit more relaxed
or organic. odd things here, sync there, an bit more personal. i like how it worked out.

i hold back an impulse to delete it for fear to feel very stupid if non of it connected to anything

that is something we dont want in guessing rounds. fear of failure or looking silly would only hinder guesses or report i think.

the scoring system and having a winner seems a bit odd. trying to communicate in an weird way is not an competition.
is the elmar ata quotes the dreaming together remark, as in suggesting collusion. i dont understand.

it also is both interesting and strange that people have been at this since 2004. castanet is an very weird place.

mr x.

ps. mr g i am looking forward to you being around again. wether you think you are good company or not.

[ju4o]

We will get to the dreaming together remark, it is something that happened near the end of the card experiment.  The eagle eyed reader will have noticed that I put a more precise timestamp on the quote from Tungsten at the end of the card experiment, this is in order to prepare the ground.

But let us continue enjoying the orderliness which comes from doing things in the right order, and the next thing to do is to make a better analysis of the card experiment.

The tl;dr version of this post is that if we analyse the experiment properly, the unlikeliness of the outcome turns out to be something like 1 in 80, instead of the 1 in 29 which I settled for previously.

Let us analyse it from first principles, like we did for the coin experiment.

We had 21 entries from 12 people where:

* the winner Ghost Dog made two successful entries, one with 2 matches out of 3 and the other with 1 match out of 3;

* the two runners-up Greg and TKid each made one successful entry, with 1 match out of 3, as well as some unsuccessful entries.

The first point to make, I think, is that the achievements of the runners-up do not contribute materially to the unlikeliness of the final outcome, because it is well in line with expectation that there should have been a handful of successful entries at the 1-match-out-of-3 level.

A back-of-the-envelope way of seeing this is to say that, altogether, the community made 63 (that is, 21 times 3) guesses at alphabetic letters, each of which (ignoring edge-effects arising from it being known that nobody had yet won the contest) independently had a 1-in-26 chance of success.  So, out of the 63 guesses, one would expect that around 2 or 3 would have been correct;  even 4 or 5 correct guesses would have been by no means out of line.

The notable thing in this experiment was Ghost Dog's performance, so we need to find a way of putting a number on that and then asking what is the probability of 1 or more out 12 people doing that well or better by chance.

Ghost Dog made, altogether, 6 (that is, 2 times 3) guesses at alphabetic letters, of which 3 were correct and 3 incorrect.  Again ignoring edge effects (in that when he made his second set of three guesses, he knew that his first set of three guesses was not completely correct) we can calculate the probabilities as follows:

Among the 26-to-the-power-of-6 (i.e. 308,915,776) ways of guessing 6 letters against a target combination, we have the following (where "x^y" means x to the power of y, and where the binomial coefficients 1,6,15,20,15,6,1 appear in the last column)

1 way of getting 6 matches (that is, 25^0 times 1)
150 ways of getting 5 matches (that is, 25^1 times 6)
9,375 ways of getting 4 matches (that is, 25^2 times 15)
312,500 ways of getting 3 matches (that is, 25^3 times 20)
5,859,375 ways of getting 2 matches (that is, 25^4 times 15)
58,593,750 ways of getting 1 match (that is, 25^5 times 6)
244,140,625 ways of getting 0 matches (that is, 25^6 times 1)

(which, as a check, adds up to the total number of ways of choosing the 6 numbers, which is 308,915,776)

giving the following probabilities (assuming random guesses against randomly chosen targets, and expressed here for readability in terms of chances)

chance of 6 matches: 1 in 308,915,776
chance of 5 matches: 1 in 2,059,438
chance of 4 matches: 1 in 32,951
chance of 3 matches: 1 in 988
chance of 2 matches: 1 in 53
chance of 1 match: 1 in 5
chance of 0 matches: better than evens

or, more relevantly,

chance of 6 matches: 1 in 308,915,776
chance of 5 or more matches: 1 in 2,045,800
chance of 4 or more matches: 1 in 32,429
chance of 3 or more matches: 1 in 959
chance of 2 or more matches: 1 in 50
chance of 1 or more match: 1 in 4
chance of 0 or more matches: certainty

which gives a chance of 1 in 959 that a random guesser would have done as well as or better than Ghost Dog.

But that figure by itself does not mean that anything unlikely happened in the experiment, because the unlikeliness depends on the total number of participants.  If there had been several hundred participants, guessing randomly, then it would have been quite likely that one or more of them would have done better than Ghost Dog;  if there had been several thousand participants, then it would have been almost certain.

The question is, with 12 participants, how likely is it that anyone would have done as well as or better than Ghost Dog.

Here, to make the analysis more tractable, it helps to make a simplification.  Following the principle established in our analysis of the coin experiment, and approved by Mr X in post #165, let us make a conservative simplification.  That is, whatever we change, we need to change it in such a way that whatever measure of unlikelihood we eventually come up with for our simplified system, the unlikelihood of what actually happened is greater.

So let us suppose that each of the 12 participants made exactly two entries, just like Ghost Dog did.  In actual fact, some of the participants made only 1 entry and some made 3 entries, for a total of 21 entries;  but we are going to suppose that each made 2 entries, for a total of 24 entries.  Making this change makes it easier for someone at random to do as well as Ghost Dog did, because we are increasing the total number of entries from 21 to 24, thus decreasing the unlikeliness of attaining the result which was actually obtained.

That makes the final step simple.  What is the probability of all 12 participants doing worse than Ghost Dog did?  The answer is (958/959) to the power of 12, which is .98755848

Thus the probability of one or more participants doing as well as or better than Ghost Dog is .01244152, which is a chance of 1 in 80.

Summary: the chance of the coin experiment coming out as well as it did, assuming random guessing, is 1 in 33, and the card experiment coming out as well as it did, assuming random guessing, is 1 in 80.

Combining the two calculations, the chance of SR's first two forum-wide experiments coming out as well as they did, assuming random guessing, is one in a couple of thousand.

[ju4o]

So all that was to set the scene and establish that the thing in the card experiment which blew it out of the sweet spot was Ghost Dog's performance.

Now, here is something which nobody noticed at the time when it happened, I only noticed it later when I was pulling together posts in order to make the analyses.

SR was a very busy place in those days and there were always several conversations going on in parallel.

On October 18th, which was the day on the afternoon of which Tungsten revealed the result of the card experiment, there was another conversation in another thread going on in the morning.  Here is a post from that thread, and I've added bold to one sentence of it:

Re: James Randi at Caltech
Well firstly...

Of course the issue isn't that folks can't have similar dreams...
Why would that be a question? Let's see...why would self proclaimed magi fake magic...hmmm... if you've ever read much of this forum, that shouldn't be a question either.

Secondly.. I've talked about bumblebee turbulence several times... the main difference being that flying bumblebees are a common experience.

...the observation that technically they couldn't fly, was told to show science's incomplete understanding of flight... not to say they couldn't do it.

.... So if I'm reading you right, you're suggesting there is some yet unknown mechanism by which two people could share an objective dreaming environment. okay.

At this point, that's a religious belief, and you're welcome to it.

I have also commented on how Newtonian physics was once considered evidence for the "Young Earth" theory.

...and how science has been shrinking the realm of the mystical as a general trend, which will no doubt, continue into the future.

..... and that unknown areas in science are not "black boxes" where anything can happen.

So... just looking at these Golden Dawn guys...( btw... did you know there is a GD temple at the end of Branciforte there in Santa Cruz? Just learned of it myself... a woman named Joanna advertises Tarot classes, and claims a charter to initiate to the 3=10 Theoricus level)

Anyhow, anecdotes flow from them guys like political ads in October. Crowley supposedly tried to kill Mathers by possessing his hunting dogs, or the other way around, I forget, and generally.... I dunno... it's nothing to write home about...

There may be reasons to think that people can share a dreaming arena....

But those reasons aren't common experience or sense.

Even though we don't understand all the rules that comprise the universe... you can bet they're there and in effect.

Science does a good job of quantifying odd seldom seen phenomena... my favorite citation to that effect is ball lightening... very few people have ever seen it, but it's pretty much understood.

I cite that stuff to counter the argument that PSI phenomenon is too rare and unlabratorial (yeah, I know that's not a word) to be explored by science. Novas are rare and generally unseen too, same with meteorites.. but folks have figured that stuff out.

If there's something to the idea that people can dream together, there's gonna be some sign of it.

... I mean besides anecdotes, which you got to understand are just flying elephants.

... What's lacking is a falsifiable hypothesis.

Which btw, is exactly the problem with Bigfoot.... among other things.

[ju4o]

"in an formal round would this be allowed, would dam be considered the guess or blood. blood is an word on the cover of the book.
maybe your mind got caught in an loop over dam, taking you to damnation ally as you got a word correct but didnt know."

Yes it absolutely would be allowed.

My native language is Hebrew.

So look at this,



The very first word posted in the forum, after your post, was dam, which in the native language of the poster means blood



If blood is indeed a word on the cover of your book, then that is, frankly, totally amazing.  Please can we have a photo as you mentioned?

[Mr X]

hello mr j,

it will take an few read overs to digest the sr rounds summary. (i think my first question will be requesting more definition on edge effects)

the word blood is indeed on the cover of the book that is touching my computer. it is such an minor word of those available that i at first didnt notice z had guessed it.

it seems to early to post the photo. if i was were an observer, i would note that the word "bleed" was used in the same post that offered the book with the red spine. that could be considered suggestion. it was not intentional however. my camera is right next to the book.

it would seem like an waste to reveal all possible words now. even though this is informal so there is no rules or limited amount of guesses. an guess from you, an guess from g and hopefully an guess from tosk and merlin would be really nice. for fun.

i dont really want to give any clues so that you cant google-fu the answer. ms z did pretty well.

dreaming together is something i really did generally forget about. i cant remember the last time i thought about that before you mentioned it. there is something similar i have thought about recently, as it sort of seemed relevant to our discussion.

in the casta system, for "dreamers" there is all sorts of weird ideas and things, dreaming together is one of them. the casta system is divided up by dreamers and stalkers. what is the stalker equivalent of dreaming together according to casta ?

it is remembering other peoples memories.

mr x.

ps.
for novelty, as an sample of the music i was listening to when typing the post with the book,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDaxmPn7k60

ppss.
speaking of dreams, is there anyone here who as never been addicted to nicotine ? i would like to run an simple casual test regarding that.

[tally-ho!]

hello mr j,

in the casta system, for "dreamers" there is all sorts of weird ideas and things, dreaming together is one of them. the casta system is divided up by dreamers and stalkers. what is the stalker equivalent of dreaming together according to casta ?

it is remembering other peoples memories.

not posting together in a forum? 

saw the "bleeding" - AFTER posting my guess.

you did it again! with the gogle fu... but no need for googlr fu, if Hebrew translation is valid!

it's a bit complicated, since this time it's

1. a translation of a whole praze - where the order of the words is dfferent in Hebrew and English, thus difficult to say the translaton of which of the words i suplied.

2. the original, as well as the translation, is jibberish - so the mission of telling which Herew jibberish word is the translation of which English giberish word... well, i have to try, and (as usual) i'm way too tired. it's 6:06 in the morning, i had another under the bridge mission tonight... anyway - MCHAR_CACH. (baby meitar's version of "achar-cach" - later; "machar=tomorrow.)
can i say which English word?
no - not without sing the googlr fu to find those lyrics.

can i say which Hebrew word?
its 2 words- סבסו, מקדו i can't even tell how i know it's about spinning, rotating - which is dominant in the image i posted, at least this is what made me see it and post it.
this time your hint (google fu) did make me think "ah, so i have to google for the original poem."
Machar-cach hopefully.
zeh hayom - it's today.
but not sure i'll make it today.)
what about the Voinich manuscript?
and the other book?
did i see anything from reality?

yes, wait for more guesses before posting the pic.

[ju4o]

" the casta system is divided up by dreamers and stalkers. "

Well, 'stalking' in the sense you are referring to does not occur until The Second Ring of Power.  There is no hint of it in the earlier books.  To me, this means that it is of questionable authenticity.

While I was looking through those posts about the SR experiments I found a post from me which explains what I think about all this, so I'd like to quote it here:

Just because I say "I think Castaneda invented a very great deal.  Whole books even," now you're going around saying "you keep saying you don't believe this stuff"!  It seems you can only handle extremes.

So let us try again:

(1) I think it probable that Castaneda met one or more native informants who were masters of unordinary awareness and set him on a path towards engaging with unordinary realities

(2) He was discombobulated by his experience and tried to make sense of it in libraries

(3) To get a PhD he wrote three rather good books which probably involved compromises

(4) After that, he tried a variety of different approaches.  As he said in the Time interview (1973) "Now I'm at the edge, and I have to change my whole format. Writing to get my Ph.D. was my accomplishment, my sorcery, and now I am at the apex of a cycle that includes the notoriety. But this is the last thing I will ever write about don Juan. Now I am going to be a sorcerer for sure. Only my death could stop that."

(5) Some of what he did in the 1970s and 80s strikes me as very good.  I call it Mission Schenectady.  Some of it strikes me as fantastical, even phantasmagoric.  I'm not saying that's a bad thing, I'm just saying.

(6) As for the 1990s ... I'm dubious about those night schools, sunday schools, seminars etc but as I don't know anyone who went to any (except for one person who reported that it wasn't what he was looking for and went to Brazil instead) I haven't made my mind up as to whether they were a noble misguided attempt or just a scam.  Jokingly I call them the Hollywood version.

P.S. the reference to "Mission Schenectady" is based on

It isn't exactly easy, you know. It's no cinch putting whole inexplicable worldviews down on paper so that every burgher from Schenectady to Long Beach can understand.

~Margaret Runyan, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda.

[ju4o]

Some more thoughts,

The logistical problems of running a round which was cancelled before it started led to some bugs.

So it is nice in that the latest round these bugs are either cancelled or turned into features.

Bug 1: in Round B Mr G hadn't actually chosen a word, perhaps he hadn't even opened the book, in which case there are really only the words on the outside of the book to choose from, and it's not clear which.  In Round C the rules explicitly said that any word on the cover would do.

Bug 2: in Round B, Mr X's offering of Xhosa was not formally couched as a guess, it just somehow occurred.  Well it's hard to see how it could have been done better, since there wasn't even anything to guess at that stage, but it's still a worrisome blemish.  So it is nice to see how confidently and strongly Ms Z announced her guess in Round C.

Bug 3: for Round B the question which Mr X asked was, what happens if the book is in a foreign language.  But the question was not really answered, since xhosa could be counted as an English word.  In the official Collins online scrabble dictionary, xhosa is not allowed in scrabble but in the Oxford English Dictionary it is included.

So is xhosa a foreign word or not?  Not really clear, therefore it is nice that in Round C the answer was given in a clearly foreign language.

[tally-ho!]

hallo FantasticGents&Miss -

today:
afternoon i woke seeing a text, font not unsimilar to that of this board:

I didn't share behavior loose?

thought - this would be a translaton of the jaberwocky gibberish (or rather - decoding what was encoded in it?)
yes, i didn't state it clear enough, due to being so tired - it was a guess, that the second book i saw was jabberwocky.
but i don't think it is also on X's desk... and i have no clue why i saw it along with the blood including text from the book touching X's computor.
anyway shall i google for the text?

but firstly - in the lyrics of the rap you said you listend to while posting your riddle, X, "dome" is mentioned:

I’m not a clone to follow a nicely written poem
Scriptures structured to make you comb through your thoughts, your dome

damm\damnation is mentioned in other word - hell:

Am I faithful at heart and smart enough to find the right path?
Endure the wrath of a stormy past  or will I be cast?
To a hell that no one can foretell if it exists
Or do we dwell in the midst of, if so I like Hell

(the book "damnation alley" is about a world polluted radioactively, a condemned criminal  get released if he will drive medicines to soult like city thru the hell of radioactive storm)
also a reference could be interpretted as refering to the voineech manuscript:

so here I stand
Crossing hands, a man trying to understand
Whose book of plans should I follow if they’re written by hands

now, Jaberwocky (Aharon Amir's translation):

בְעֵת בָשָק וּשְלֵי פַחְזָר, ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
בּאַפְסֵי חָק סָבְסוּ, מָקְדוּ,
Did gyre and gimble  in the wabe:
אוֹ אָז חִלְכֵן הָיָה נִמְזַר, All mimsy were the borogoves,
וּמְתֵי עָרָן כּרְדוּ. And the mome raths outgrabe.

so it's gyre and gimble.

(no dam, damm or dome - but there's a mome, in the last verse:)

And the mome raths outgrabe.

the text i reckoned was it's translation:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=I+didn%27t+share+behavior+loose%3F
this is the result of googling it along with "books":
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=I+didn%27t+share+behavior+loose%3F (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=I+didn%27t+share+behavior+loose%3F)
does it make any sense to you, Fantastic Gents?

looking again at my sentence - it is in the orrect meter of Jubberwocky!
let me google  it alone...
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,157165,00.html (http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,157165,00.html)

Kennedy Smith met a woman at a bar, invited her back home late at night and apparently had sex with her on the lawn. She says it was rape, and the police believed her story enough to charge him with the crime. Perhaps it was the bruises on her leg; or the instincts of the investigators who found her, panicked and shaking, curled up in the fetal position on a couch; or the lie-detector tests she passed.

On the other side, Smith has adamantly protested that he is a man falsely accused. His friends and family testify to his gentle nature and moral fiber and insist that he could not possibly have committed such a crime. Maybe the truth will come out in court -- but regardless... (http://Kennedy Smith met a woman at a bar, invited her back home late at night and apparently had sex with her on the lawn. She says it was rape, and the police believed her story enough to charge him with the crime. Perhaps it was the bruises on her leg; or the instincts of the investigators who found her, panicked and shaking, curled up in the fetal position on a couch; or the lie-detector tests she passed.

On the other side, Smith has adamantly protested that he is a man falsely accused. His friends and family testify to his gentle nature and moral fiber and insist that he could not possibly have committed such a crime. Maybe the truth will come out in court -- but regardless...)
today continues:
fell sleep
heared a crack- electric - louder then my new muskito's killer, saw (faint vision) old-fasion package of computor pages, big and folded from long ribbon, printed with - binarics? some code anyway.
got up to write it, back to sleep

woke, seeing Hebrew text:
15:57
האם היית רוצה לראות איזה פאב?
=would you like to see some pub?
(tiny - like the address line or search window- and transparent grey)
חששתי להרים יד = i was afraid to raise a hand
 ???
or is it about that rape case?
anyway "adamant" is what Ghost Dog called himself - quotted here #1
http://www.forum4.org/index.php?topic=53.0 (http://www.forum4.org/index.php?topic=53.0)

conclusions?

dam.
[=blood, in Hebrew)or dome?
doom?
Dam.
Damm?

a book X said - so  concious and subconcious me tried to recieve Xtelepathicly and searched for books in the input.

it included
1.the book with "blood" witin the text on the cover (why don't i see any other words of this text? mabe for being flooded with information that far?)
2. 2 books mentioned in the song you, X, had in the background while writing your invintation for guesses. namely damnation alley and the voineech manuscript.

and why Jabberwocky?

P.S. now, that my misson is more or less completed, i  can tell you my yesterday's waking up vison: a shower floor (nicely rounded with good slope, unlike mine, which still causes the water to flood the whole place) flooded with blood - rotten blood.
P.S.S. x, can you ask The Miss why she wants to choose numbers?
P.P.S.S.S. - another guess, someone else? Jufosito? toskito? aspenito? gito?

edit: of course you are free not to -  it's just that i'm not such a genious comparing to the other fantastics, and it feels so... how whuld have GD put it? NARCICCISTIC to do all this discussion by myself, as if it is all about my person's perpetrations...
on the other hand  freak shaws are my spécialité. leave it to me if you're too shy... no prob.

[Mr X]

hello,

with the recent flood of posts it is hard to keep up with everything.

ms z,

not posting together in a forum? 

the art of talking ? google fu was not an hint or clue. it was said in an sentance saying i dont want to give clues. as i dont want mr j to internet sleuth the answer using some method i havent thought about.

the bloodshed tube was also not an clue, just novel that there was blood related videos around the time of posting the book.

ok what else,

gold on brown text? foreighn language? forein alphabeit? or red? picture? black small text in latin letters?  a frame anyway, text behind it.
i think i'm seeing different books - there is a third, inspired by the voineech manuscript or something to that effect

brown is an strong color on the cover. no gold text, but there is silver text. all english. there is some red. spine and rear cover is red. on the spine there is small black text, the isbn. and the publisher logo is in black.
there is only one book. we can revisit why you thought of more than one book another time.
there is an picture on the cover. when i glance over at it, the most prominent things are the book, the camera next to it, and behind the book there is the side cover of my computer, leaning against the case. in that panel there is an perspex window, or frame. funny that if i look at that window, i can see the reflection of my bookshelf behind me. there is no navajo plate behind that window, just an woefully underused gtx970.

interesting that mr j knows there is an informal round, yet chooses not to guess. what sort of statement is that. aside from blood there is more than 10 more words on the cover that have four or more letters.

mr x.

[Mr X]

hello mr j,

about the worrisome blemish. something that i havent mentioned, aside from g switching things from numbers to words so an minor increase in word attention, i think the last overflow word being an word from mr g part of the world would of given me some comfort.

such as i was googling words trying to purge some overflow and anxiety, forum4 and guessing things was the last things on my mind, seeing an word from mr g world would of given me some minor comfort. (as in "maybe this is good") later resulting in xhosa. and i felt like i was going to pass out as it was happening.

it must of been weird for people reading casta as the books were released. going from being an hunter to being and assembly point magician.
interesting how late into it he introduced stalking.

if he had never introduced it, things would of turned out very differently. while i am not an castanet expert, i suspect the concept of stalking shaped castanet very much. lots of people thinking they are master mind manipulators resulting in generally fucked up human interactions.

stalking is also very popular amoungst casta spin offs. people like eagle feather or mares who belief in casta, love stalking, made it integral to their systems.

i will have to get back to you about what i think about all of that. imagine casta books are an system. some good parts some bad. because the system is incoherent and parts are designed for one person, the only way to present the system coherently for general consumption would be to extract concepts and arrange them in and understandably way. 

given the task of extracting the good and leaving behind the bad, what concepts would you extract from the casta system ?

there might be an need for an separate thread to answer that.

mr x.

ps.