On 02-26-98 richard claypool wrote to All... 
 rc>    Let's say that yjou're in a room.  You have in the  
 rc> middle of a room a  field, inside the field time is speeded  
 rc> up to twice our speed.  You walk over  to the field and  
 rc> atempt to put your hand into the otherside.  what happens  
 rc> to  your hand? 
Spoze you were born on a holodeck Richard, and you find this room. 
The rules for the holodeck allow the computer to provide your 
central nervous system any set of virtual reality data you can 
think of, and many that you cannot.  As such, the perception you 
will have will be dependent on that subroutine in place when you 
perform the appropriate action.  Since you dunno what the routine 
will do, you may notice nothing, or your hand may disappear, or  
age, or damn near anything else.  And just because you got one 
kind of perception does not mean you will again. 
 
I would not try it. ;) 
 
Now, the holodeck I was born on does not seem to have such a room. 
Although, it does have some pretty strange places.  I think that 
the software that presents this virtual reality to my cerebral 
cortex has some bugs.  Sometimes stuff dissappears, usually small 
rather insignificant items, pens, money, hand tools; other times, 
I see stuff reappear that has been gone for months, or came from 
god only nose where.  It occurred to me that the glitches loose 
the co-ordintes for trivial stuff, and it moves around. 
 
Sometimes stuff disappears for a short time, others take longer, 
sometimes centuries or eons.  When they dig something up that is 
not from the right time, they call it an anachronism. 
 
Now, before coming to this holodeck, I was given the choice to do 
it here, or be something else somewhere else.  To make the choice, 
I was given a 'sneak' preview of selected sequences, to see if the 
RPG character was something I might be able to handle.  From time 
to time, I am in a room or someplace, and immediately recognize I 
am looking at a scene I saw in the sneak preview.  I know what all 
the people present will say, and do, for the next dozen seconds. 
 
Looking back on these "vu'jede" I see that each scene was trivial
in terms of my own kharma, and while I was never aware of my own 
physical body during one of these, except as a 'point' of view, I 
can nevertheless, draw some conclusions about what sort of roll it 
was that I had in each scene.  I don't call it "de' jevu" because 
I can tell that I have not 'been there before', but that what I 
was about to see had never happened yet. 
 
Maybe you noticed some folks, like I have, Richard, who go through 
life just as smooth as the DRAM boot count, everything just clicks 
into place, no sweat. They got cluebooks. don't let it bother you. 
When the game is over, everyone will know who had the cheatsheets, 
and who did it the challenging way. 
 
Plato realized that when life is over, there is the playback that 
remains to see how well you did.  He thought that your harshest 
critic will be yourself, and I havta agree. nobody else will care 
all *that* much.  I am amazed that he was able to figure this out, 
well before the idea of a virtual reality videotape was conceived. 
___ 
 * OFFLINE 1.58 * I dont make the rules- Im lucky if I can see what they are. 
--- Maximus 3.01
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