December 12, 2001
9:49 AM   Subscribe

"There are 4 different Worlds on Earth. Yours is 1 of them. You're ignorant of 3 of them. Such ignorance is damnable." Gene Ray's "Time Cube" has been joked about and marginalized for years, but now it looks like he'll finally get his wish to lecture on the subject and debate with MIT and Harvard "representitives."
posted by moz (34 comments total)
 
Other MeFI TIMECUBE mentions:

here, here, and here. TimeCube gets around.
posted by mkn at 10:17 AM on December 12, 2001


There are 4 different threads about TimeCube on MetaFilter. This is one of them. You are ignorant of three of them (except you, mkn). Such ignorance is predictable, really.
posted by gazingus at 10:23 AM on December 12, 2001


Hey! I learned a new word today... obscurantism.
posted by johnmunsch at 10:29 AM on December 12, 2001


my favourite bit of this theory would have to be the proof of '4 full days simultaneously on earth'.

this character seems to come from the school of loud tourists. if someone cannot understand you, SHOUT!
posted by asok at 10:31 AM on December 12, 2001


if you can't see the cube it can't eat you
posted by signal at 10:32 AM on December 12, 2001


After the lecture, Gene plans to host a symposium on effective web design.
posted by SilentSalamander at 10:48 AM on December 12, 2001


Somebody better record this debate for posterity.
posted by icathing at 10:48 AM on December 12, 2001


gazingus: LOL, that was great.

Here is an interview with gene ray

Gotta remember this one next time someone complains about a site I'm working on:
Satanosphere: Have you thought about hiring a professional web designer to better get the Timecube message across?

(Gene Ray)WisestOne: No I will not chage the web. There is no problem with the web - except erroneous academia blocks the brainwashed and indoctrinated from comprehending it.

posted by malphigian at 10:50 AM on December 12, 2001


Follow up: I find the MIT thing actually a little obnoxious. I'm all for having fun with this, but the guy is clearly a disorganized schizophrenic, and a room full of public humilation seems kinda mean.
posted by malphigian at 10:53 AM on December 12, 2001


Maybe it's his use of big colorful letters that has makes his cause seem... well, wacky. It looks like MIT meets Fisher Price.
posted by Hugh2d2 at 10:59 AM on December 12, 2001


What a quack.
posted by aaronshaf at 11:11 AM on December 12, 2001


Reading that site is like reading the back of a Dr. Bronner's soap bottle.
posted by Shadowkeeper at 11:14 AM on December 12, 2001


Yeah, but Dr Bronner's right. All-One! All-One!
posted by retrofut at 11:21 AM on December 12, 2001


Shadow, I thought the same thing! I was doubting how many MeFiers would know what it was, though.
posted by gnutron at 11:27 AM on December 12, 2001


And Dr. Bronner makes some kind of sense. Plus you can read it in the shower.

For those not familiar: Dr. Bronner's Soap Labels
posted by mccreath at 11:33 AM on December 12, 2001


Of course I posted so quickly that I neglected to actually see where ShadowKeeper's link went. Doh.
posted by mccreath at 11:35 AM on December 12, 2001


what this issue needs is a good debate between Gene Ray and Archimedes Plutonium to really flesh it out. Maybe Wesley Willis could moderate.
posted by badstone at 11:47 AM on December 12, 2001


What about Alex Chiu? No discussion of web crackpots could be complete without mention of the guy behind the immortality rings.
posted by zempf at 11:53 AM on December 12, 2001


Wise people call me a genius. Stupid and evil people call me crazy.

i can just picture some huge nurse in a mental institution pacifying this weirdo by calling him a genius.

"oh, surrrre! the Tiiiime Cube. only a geeenius would figure that out. now just take this pill..."
posted by carsonb at 12:00 PM on December 12, 2001


those bronners labels are cool...though, they aren't tested on animals. If the magic soap is so good for you, why deprive animals of the experience?
posted by th3ph17 at 12:20 PM on December 12, 2001


In college, in the astrophysics dept where i worked, the professors would regularly get letters from Archimedes Plutonium types. Usually it was some badly scrawled, handwritten thesis about how this or that universal principle could be used to rewrite entire cosmologies.

Inevitably, a poster board in one of the hallways was used to tack up and display these letters for the amusement and edification of others. Walking by, I would notice someone paging through one of these tracts and either laughing at it or pondering it quizzically.

Oddly, it was the graduate students who would laugh and poke fun at the writing. The senior professors (and def. the most brilliant ones) if they did read them, would read them attentively, even respectfully sometimes finding in them a kernel of an idea or a way of looking at things which was being overlooked in current theories.
posted by vacapinta at 12:23 PM on December 12, 2001


I always get Alex Chiu mixed up with Frank Chu. I guess it's because they're both... underappreciated.
posted by jjg at 12:47 PM on December 12, 2001


....that guy needs a lithium biscuit.
posted by bunnyfire at 1:46 PM on December 12, 2001


Yeah, but Dr Bronner's right. All-One! All-One!

About a decade ago my grandmother mentioned to me that she knew Dr. Bronner personally, and asked if I ever used his soap. Although I hadn't ever actually used the soap, I had heard of it, so I said "oh yeah, I use that soap all the time" just to humor her.

I'm not sure what my Grandmother did after than, but about two months later I received, at my college address, a box of, like, 24 bottles of undiluted peppermint soap sent to me directly from Dr. Bronner (or his company, at least). After diluting with water, one of these small bottles equaled, like, two large shampoo bottles worth of soap. I used it for the rest of my college days (although never as a contraceptive, despite the claims on the bottle).

So, yeah: Dr. Bronner rules.
posted by Shadowkeeper at 2:00 PM on December 12, 2001


Forget Dr. Bronner, Senor TimeCube was obviously seperated at birth from his evil twin, and with good reason.
Visualize these two bozos trapped in an elevator together for a few hours...
posted by BentPenguin at 3:11 PM on December 12, 2001


I had a good look at this thing, and as far as I can tell his 'insight' is in the observation that each person gets a 24-hr day containing midnight, dawn, noon, and dusk, no matter where on the Earth they are standing. My noon is your dusk, if you are 90 degrees away from me.

He has fixated on this fairly obvious fact, which derives from our use of an Earth-rotation based clock, as though it were something of significance. He misses the point that, objectively, my noon and your dusk are the same time, and if I was to telephone you, for instance, we would carry on our conversation in different levels of daylight (subjective time), but at the same objective time.

There is no more to it than that. In fact there is less to it than there appears, because an equally insignificant observation can be made about people over the horizon from one another. There's no need to go the full 90 degrees before you get to a different 'day'; anywhere out of sight will do.

Ash.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 3:18 PM on December 12, 2001


So like, say then if Superman were flying around the Earth at 90 degrees to me, and I called my mother Geogina in Alabama, from my bed in Tokyo, where I am lying sideways with my feet up against the wall, and then if I looked up to see Superman from my window and said "TOO!" every time he passed overhead, and my Mother said "NA!" every time she saw him, would he like, be hearing "TUNA!" from the 4th dimension cubed? Or would that be like "NATU!" from the 3rd dimension to the 4th power? And would he be getting older or younger as this happened? And would his hands be older or younger than his feet when he was done? If he didn't like Tuna, he might turn around and go the other way, in which case I would wind up eating Lox in Georgia and my mother would wind up listening to Alabama in Nagasaki. Or perhaps playing Nintendo in Birmingham? STOOPID MIT SCIENTISTS NEED NOT RESPOND!!!
posted by scarabic at 4:11 PM on December 12, 2001


"Mr. Time Cube Man, if you crossed the international date line on my birthday, would you still get presents?"
posted by brownpau at 6:30 PM on December 12, 2001


Reading the interview, I expected hte guy to start talking about push robots and the terrible secret of space.
posted by chiheisen at 9:07 PM on December 12, 2001


If he would have just made his argument instead of spending so much space talking about how everyone thinks he's a lunatic, I would have taken him seriously. Instead, I eventually gave up and came here to read Ash's summary.
posted by bingo at 8:06 AM on December 13, 2001


"You are an educated stupid ass."
—Gene Ray, mad ranter

"I'M NOT CRAZY! YOU'RE THE ONE WHO'S CRAZY!"
—Suicidal Tendancies, punk band
posted by Down10 at 10:59 AM on December 18, 2001 [1 favorite]


My theory of time is correct.
The global understanding of time is incorrect.
You are stupid, and unable to comprehend my theory of time.
Please allow me to point this out repeatedly on my Web site.
posted by Down10 at 11:04 AM on December 18, 2001


many months later, the lecture that had been videotaped is now available online. found via memepool.
posted by moz at 8:30 AM on April 17, 2002


also, pictures. (also from memepool.)
posted by moz at 8:35 AM on April 17, 2002


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