The Six Thousand
February 27, 2006 9:13 PM   Subscribe

The Six Thousand: 6000 [well, at least twenty or so right now] intriguing people you want to meet online before you die, edited by Cliff Pickover. My fave right now? Asya Schween.
posted by exlotuseater (41 comments total)
 
Who the hell wants to met anyone they admire online?
posted by HTuttle at 9:26 PM on February 27, 2006


Agoraphobes? The socially anxious?
posted by epugachev at 9:41 PM on February 27, 2006


I think I'll start with the Mencken bio, then the one on ayahuasca, then...and my 'to read' list goes through the roof.
thanks a lot!
posted by carsonb at 9:42 PM on February 27, 2006


Plus, arranging face-to-face meetings with 6000 people would be a logistical nightmare. You'd have to do it online.
posted by epugachev at 9:59 PM on February 27, 2006


Is it just me or are eccentric-PhD-wielding-but-hot-women a little overrepresented on the list so far?

Also there seems to be a slight bias towards DMT...
posted by archae at 10:06 PM on February 27, 2006


Hmm... 80% good looking academic women. By far the best type of academic women.
posted by delmoi at 10:09 PM on February 27, 2006


I love that Asya wished Gary a happy birthday.
and I'm in love with her.
posted by carsonb at 10:14 PM on February 27, 2006


A lot of these people don't actually interest me that much. There are only so many "I'm smart, really, I have these awesome ideas and I love to talk about them and write about them and I'm right. Also, my social skills are kind of mostly-lacking and I have ridiculous hair" people you need to meet before it gets kind of old.
posted by blacklite at 10:18 PM on February 27, 2006


What about the people you want to meet after you die?
posted by bunglin jones at 10:20 PM on February 27, 2006


He doesn't want to meet me? I'm offended.
posted by chasing at 11:04 PM on February 27, 2006


archae: I started to get that feeling as well, especially after his Pepsi Blue™-ism:

I discuss this further in my own book Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves.
posted by basicchannel at 11:09 PM on February 27, 2006


Also, I wish that sinus-less, peroxide nincompoop, Jenny Gardener... err, "Xeni Jardin", would eat a lethal dose of DMT and leave my NPR alone :(.
posted by basicchannel at 11:11 PM on February 27, 2006


Is it just me or are eccentric-PhD-wielding-but-hot-women a little overrepresented on the list so far?

Photoshop does wonders. Anyway, it's refreshing for a change to have a list of intellectuals where women are overrepresented.
posted by bobo123 at 11:22 PM on February 27, 2006


Is it just me or are eccentric-PhD-wielding-but-hot-women a little overrepresented on the list so far?

Was curious, just crunched the numbers. Of the 37 entries, 25 (67%) are female. Of the males, 5 (41%) are academics (either currently a professor or clearly is best known for publishing in academic journals) and of females, 9 (35%) are.

Regardless, yeah, my to-read list just exploded as well.
posted by gsteff at 11:25 PM on February 27, 2006


Could have sworn I surfed into Clifford Pickovers version of
AM I HOT or not.
posted by thedailygrowl at 12:10 AM on February 28, 2006


Freeman Dyson is the only person I readily recognize from that list, but he is certainly worth meeting. I saw a talk he gave several years ago, and then I had the great privilege of having lunch with him and a bunch of other people. I remember we all seemed to be mesmerized by him. We could have just sat and listened to him tell stories for hours and hours. That all too brief encounter will definitely be in my heart forever. Every time I see his name printed I want to shake his hand and thank him.

He began his talk basically by saying, "I'm just going to tell you five stories I've come across..." and after that, an auditorium full of students, from physics majors to humanities and cultural studies majors, sat silently--awestruck--as he told his five stories. It was beautiful.
posted by dsword at 12:23 AM on February 28, 2006


Asya Schween - "I'm Asya Schween, age 24. Immersed in incarnadine-hued twilight of my mind. Alone. I read no poetry but mathematical manuscripts and the Holy Bible. I'm a good girl. I will perish"

intriguing??!! She probably just suffers from low self-esteem. See her contort her face in a cry for attention here. Her blurb above reads like a bad personal ad.
posted by kenaman at 12:35 AM on February 28, 2006


Is it just me or are eccentric-PhD-wielding-but-hot-women a little overrepresented on the list so far?

there's also the many entries or people with just one name trend.

and those for whom the web page links to tribute pages "made by cliff pickover" in his inimitable and garish 1995 stylee. for eccentric-PhD-wielding-but-hot-women with no web skillz.

pickover is the butt of merciless jokes within ibm. a shameless hack and self-promoter who would patent his new method for tying his shoelaces, for years he would corner anyone unfortunate enough not to know better and try to convince them that everything attributed to benoit mandelbrot was really his work.

pickover is a "computer scientist" with a blog. on blogger. nuff said.
posted by 3.2.3 at 1:06 AM on February 28, 2006




There don't seem to be very many people who lead interesting online lives.

I mean, no Kibo?

Seems more like a list of "intellectuals that interested this site's creator and who happen to have an online presence."
posted by kmmontandon at 1:11 AM on February 28, 2006


Ick. Now I have dork all over me.
posted by RokkitNite at 1:35 AM on February 28, 2006


Where is Wil Wheaton in his list?
posted by Frasermoo at 2:25 AM on February 28, 2006


I started to get that feeling as well, especially after his Pepsi Blue™-ism:

Remember when Pickover joined here and self-linked years ago?
posted by sonofsamiam at 3:36 AM on February 28, 2006


Some beautiful women in there...
posted by ParisParamus at 3:44 AM on February 28, 2006


Pickover is a shameless self-promoter. If he had an account he'd self link. Daily. I read a couple of his books in grad school and while they have a very breezy writing style they have no content, they sound like they should be interesting and challenging but really they're written for somebody with a grade school education. There's nothing wrong with the writing as such, but neither the writing nor Pickover live up to the hype.
posted by substrate at 4:16 AM on February 28, 2006


Umm... and I did not notice sonofsamiam's comment before I posted!
posted by substrate at 4:16 AM on February 28, 2006


Why am I not on that site?
posted by 13twelve at 4:54 AM on February 28, 2006


Frankly, I would prefer 1000 Bars.
posted by Otis at 5:30 AM on February 28, 2006


Remember when Pickover joined here and self-linked years ago?
posted by sonofsamiam

Link please.
posted by tellurian at 5:31 AM on February 28, 2006


This whole thread has put me off my lunch...

And I'm an ogrish regular
posted by runkelfinker at 5:50 AM on February 28, 2006


Link please.

Sure.

And remember Lashawn Barber? I get a little kick out of it when C-list celebrities trip over the local rules.

(nothing against Pickover, really. I brought one of his books home from a recent thrift-store book-dig and it's got a lot of nice pictures and plenty of references for deeper reading. Sort of the contents of a geeky blog before blogs were around.)
posted by sonofsamiam at 6:17 AM on February 28, 2006


Hmm. From what I've seen so far, if you've ever been around real scientists you'll know that the ones on this list are more likely known as The 3,000 Wankers Who Haven't Done Real Science In 10 Years, If Ever.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 6:59 AM on February 28, 2006


and EB knows a wanker when he sees one. He's practically a wanking expert.
posted by crunchland at 7:04 AM on February 28, 2006


Damn straight.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 7:12 AM on February 28, 2006



Does clifford pickover ever sleep? he's like a one-man timecube
(with a *bit* more sense!).

Some of these people have read way too much sci fi/cyberpunk and internalized it.
posted by lalochezia at 8:53 AM on February 28, 2006


he's like a one-man timecube

...uh, how many people is Wisest Human Gene Ray?
posted by sonofsamiam at 9:15 AM on February 28, 2006


Four, of course.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 11:11 AM on February 28, 2006


It must be said however, that Reality Carnival draws my attention to some rather neat stuff sometimes. I actually emailed Cliff to try and persuade him in creating a feed for it. He politely declined, citing a reason along the lines of not being able to stick the ad images for his books in the feed (although I believe something like that can be done, if he insists).

Oddly enough, he also remarked that RC was manually updated every day in a text editor.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 11:16 AM on February 28, 2006


Thanks sonofsamiam. What a loss - great posts and comments.
posted by tellurian at 2:27 PM on February 28, 2006


Xeni Jardin (say: /SHEH-nee zhar-DAN/)

Like fuck I will.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 6:48 PM on February 28, 2006


am i the only one getting tired of hearing about things i have to do before i die?
posted by Miles Long at 8:27 PM on February 28, 2006


I’d like to meet myself online. This is very likely as I have a quantum computer.
At least the other me does.
posted by Smedleyman at 9:50 AM on March 1, 2006


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