Mermaids of Calabar Beginning

Introduction

It is often said that life is stranger than fiction. Indeed, I can attest to that. Life can truly become phantastic when the lines between "truth" and "fiction" blur into a fractal basin boundary. This may have happened to you at some point in your life, if you're lucky. High-level synchronicities too high level to be written off as mere "coincidences", breadcrumb trails that lead to pots of gold and ecstatic breakthroughs—is reality elastic? Are the present and the future co-creative? What about the past? Can the endless possibility waves and bifurcation points along the seemingly linear flow of day-to-day life be codified and transmogrified? My observations, experiments, and results over the last 20 years seem to point to the answer: maybe. You may be disappointed to hear that after 20 years all I concluded was maybe? Sometimes research moves in baby steps. I wasn't even sure that universe was possibly plastic when I began. Now I have some experiences under my belt that seem to point to "maybe". "Maybe" is a reason to pursue further experiments, so maybe is in essence a positive result. So you see, sometimes we must inch forward in order to give ourselves time as both individuals and as a species, time to absorb the incredible paradigm changes that seem to lie just ahead on our road to… We have become so entrained with the concept of instant everything; I sometimes envision many babies being thrown out with oceans of bathwater in our mad attempt to get it all now, right now, no waiting, chop-chop!

This of course leads us to the question: What are the Incunabula/Ong's Hat documents and where did they come from?

Here are the facts as I know them.

Where is Ong's Hat?

It will be interesting to backtrack and let everyone know what historical facts have been gathered about the remote and enigmatic location in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey known as Ong's Hat.

Ong's Hat appears on some state maps, but not on others. The designation appears just under thirty miles east of Philadelphia, and just north of New Jersey State Highway 70. There, you will find Ong's Hat Road and a bar in a little triangle. If you're lucky (and buy a round), some of the people in the bar might tell you some strange stories about the area. The legends in this area proliferate like flies on honey, so be prepared for some puzzlers and probably a few whoppers.

The Pine Barrens themselves have always been a mysterious and enigmatic location. It was settled in the pre-revolutionary days and eventually included Hessians, the German soldiers paid by the British, who did not desire to return to their Germanic homeland. You may recall the headless horseman was a Hessian, but I digress.

What little there is to learn of the history of Ong's Hat comes from Henry Beck, who penned a book in 1936 entitled Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey. At that time, Ong's Hat had appeared on maps and been around for over a century, but no one had ever taken it too seriously. Mr. Beck took a photographer, a "State Editor", and traveled to the region to interview what remaining natives were left in the area that had been designated as Ong's Hat. According to them, the name originated from a young man whose last name was "Ong." Mr. Ong was quite a dancer, who captivated the ladies with his smooth moves and his fashionable and shiny high silk hat. At that particular time, the little village consisted only of small houses and a dance hall. There was also a clearing where semi-pro prizefights were held. It seemed that, one Saturday night, Mr. Ong snubbed one of his female partners, at which point she took the hat from his head and deliberately stamped upon it in the middle of the dance floor. Another account picks up the story at this point, but offers a little more information. It was said that Mr. Ong, who was quite inebriated at the time, tossed his distinguished hat into a tree in the center of the village. There, it stood in the tree, unreachable and battered. It hung there amidst the rain and wind for many months. At some point, the little town acquired the name of Ong's Hat.

The Ong's Hat Ashram story, as told in the following chapters, seems to trace its roots back to the beginning of the Second World War. During the early days, post Pearl Harbor, America suddenly found itself in the position of having its eastern seaboard invaded by German U-Boats and its western seaboard invaded by Japanese submarines. Feeling behind in the race, so to speak, the military-industrial complex was born and given carte blanche to proceed with any means necessary to get on top of the ball. From this initiative came many "secret projects". The military got its brainpower for a lot of these programs from Princeton University, which is located very near Ong's Hat. Read the bestselling book, A Beautiful Mind, for a deep look into the group of unique minds that gathered in Princeton at this time. Also, see the opening chapters to Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon for more wonderfully written metafiction which will supply further insight into the milieu that emerged at Princeton during this time.

John Tukey was one of the many Renaissance minds that wandered in and out of the many groups—both official and unofficial—at Princeton during these formative years. Tukey attracted international attention for his studies in mathematical and theoretical statistics and their applications to a wide variety of scientific and engineering disciplines. He led the way in the now-burgeoning fields of exploratory data analysis and robust estimation, and his contributions to the Spectrum Analysis of Time Series and other aspects of digital signal processing have been widely used in engineering and science. He has been credited with coining the word "bit", a contraction of "binary digit", which refers to a unit of information, often as processed by a computer.

In addition to strong continuing interests in a wide variety of areas of statistical philosophy, techniques and application, Tukey was active in improving the access of the scientist to scientific literature, particularly through the development of citation and permutation indices to the literature of statistics and probability.

Looking at an 11 April 1984 interview with the enigmatic Mr. Tukey, we see this strange admission:

Tucker: Wallman ended up as a professor of electric techniques at the Chalmers Institute in Gothenburg, Sweden, where he is now retired. He wrote a book with Witold Hurewicz on dimension theory.

Tukey: It was intellectually about as strong a group as you are likely to find.