
The Temple Operating System - flipstewart
http://www.templeos.org/
======
aegiso
I don't have a dog in this fight, but some context might be useful to those
who didn't instantly recognize this as I did:

This is a from-scratch operating system by LoseThOS, an absolutely brilliant
but (allegedly) schizophrenic programmer who posts on HN but has been
hellbanned countless times for the unintelligle religious rants and insults he
posts.

This version looks like a rebranding of LoseThOS, the previous iteration of
the operating system. It's worth Googling if you'd like more history.

~~~
jevinskie
SparrowOS is another name for the project. I find the author's hellbanned
posts fascinating, at least when they aren't racist!! The project is quite an
undertaking for a single human.

Edit: After watching this video, I understand the SparrowOS name (audio
required):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tuXweEJNFI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tuXweEJNFI)

~~~
clicks
Terry is the guy behind the LoseThOS monicker, he does not appear to conceal
his identity, so it's not hard to find his contact information if you try. I'm
wondering if one of us should try to reach him and make an effort to get him
to understand that if he lays aside the gibberish addendums and racist insults
in his communications he's more than welcome to be a part of this community. I
mean, this is actually someone who has _gradually_ been losing it because the
world has not been kind to him.

Look at his post from a little more than two years ago:
[http://i.imgur.com/qL01m.png](http://i.imgur.com/qL01m.png)

There are no insults in that post, instead you see a man who's created
something wonderful and isn't getting anything back for it. Of course the
icing on this cake is that, that very post was marked as dead... his cry for
help was not seen or heard by anyone.

~~~
billadoid
He's quite racist[0] and people won't tolerate his hate. It's for the best he
got hellbanned, so the "saner" ones won't be tempted to get into a flame war
with him.

[0]:[http://i.imgur.com/IIMGYKE.png](http://i.imgur.com/IIMGYKE.png) (the last
comment made me laugh)

~~~
sillysaurus2
He's not necessarily racist. He's suffering from a mental illness. He believes
god talks to him.

~~~
tinco
Saying racist things makes you racist, wether you are mentally ill or not.

It does mean we should judge him less for it. But it also means it might be a
good decision to ban him so that he does not tarnish the community with too
many flame threads.

~~~
tippytop
Then does not saying racist things automatically make you not-racist? Or is
there other criteria we need to apply before hanging the label? For example,
do they believe the words coming out of their own mouth? What about someone
with Tourette's? I'm not trying to fall in a philosophical hole, but I believe
that racism is a conscious choice at some level and mental illness is not.

~~~
lutusp
> Then does not saying racist things automatically make you not-racist?

No, that doesn't work. A person not saying racist things might be a racist on
his day off. The absence of racist speech cannot be used to declare a person
not racist, because:

1\. The person might harbor racist but unspoken thoughts.

2\. We're all racists.

Number (2) pretty much settles the issue. I emphasize that the fact that we're
all racists doesn't mean we're all bigots, or that we're not ashamed of our
racism and sincerely wish to be free of racism.

> I believe that racism is a conscious choice at some level and mental illness
> is not.

I've met people raised in the south before modern times, and for many of them,
racism was not a conscious choice. I've often disagreed with federal
intervention in local politics, but as to civil rights, I have to say that was
one case where federal intervention was absolutely necessary and just:

[http://media.northjersey.com/images/0825t_shuttle2_50p.jpg](http://media.northjersey.com/images/0825t_shuttle2_50p.jpg)

Also, mental illness can sometimes be a conscious choice as well. We can talk
ourselves into a very unhealthy mental state -- or out of one. I'm talking
only about the many kinds of mental illness that aren't biological in origin
-- the kinds of mental illness that were voted into existence, and that make
the DSM* noticeably bigger with each new revision.

* More about the DSM controversy: [http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/the-s...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/the-scientific-backlash-against-the-dsm.html)

EDIT: I cannot believe someone downvoted this terrific reply. If I say so
myself, it's first-rate, and it represents the height of irony that it was
downvoted.

~~~
sillysaurus2
_Also, mental illness can sometimes be a conscious choice as well. We can talk
ourselves into a very unhealthy mental state -- or out of one._

Lest anyone believe this, let me emphasize that this project's author is
suffering from schizophrenia, and schizophrenia is a physical disease. Your
brain physically deteriorates.

~~~
lutusp
> Lest anyone believe this, let me emphasize that this project's author is
> suffering from schizophrenia

That doesn't contradict the idea that many mental illnesses have no physical
or biological connection, indeed many are inventions of psychologists for
their own personal benefit, and were created by votes, not research.

> and schizophrenia is a physical disease. Your brain physically deteriorates.

Very true, which is why schizophrenia isn't a mental illness, it's physical
illness with mental symptoms. This isn't remotely controversial.

~~~
wbhart
According to wikipedia, it is associated with (doesn't imply causation)
physical changes to the brain in 40-50% of cases. I'm not any kind of expert,
just reading what I see there, but apart from small decreases in brain volume
(not known whether this is preexistent or not), I don't see any mention of the
brain "deteriorating". Indeed, it seems that around a quarter of sufferers
recover completely, others may have long periods between relapse. It is also
possible to suffer schizophrenia with a high intelligence quotient.

~~~
lutusp
Yes, noted, and perfectly reasonable. All this will eventually be resolved by
neuroscience, as it takes over from psychiatry and psychology, a process that
has already begun.

Neuroscience has a long way to go before it can offer what medicine offers for
conventional diseases. But in the long term, it will make psychiatry and
psychology look like astrology.

[http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/the-s...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/the-
scientific-backlash-against-the-dsm.html)

------
archgoon
A nice cogent summary of the goals of the project:

"The main reason TempleOS is simple and beautiful is because it's ring-0-only
and identity-mapped. Linux wants to be a secure, multi-user mainframe. That's
the vision for Linux. That's why it has file permissions. The vision for
TempleOS is a modern, 64-bit Commodore 64. The C64 was a home computer mostly
used for games. It trained my generation how to program. It was simple, open
and hackable. It was not networked. The games were not multimedia works of
art, but generated programmatically with innocent, programmer (non-artist)
quality graphics. It was simple and unsecure. If you don't have malware and
you don't have bugs, protection just slows things down and makes the code
complicated."

------
eck
I know the author is a long-hellbanned hn user, possibly with some kind of
mental illness.

But just out of curiosity, I downloaded the 24MB ISO from the website and
loaded it up in a VMWare instance. It _does_ boot...

It's an odd curses-like interface, with lots of blinking and scrolling. There
are command-line looking things around, but all of the commands are kind of
like C statements, like instead of 'cd ..' you have to do 'Cd("..");'. Really
odd. There's a blue box that pops up possible completions, but it seems to
have a whole dictionary in addition to commands.

Play with it if you have VMWare and you're bored, but I'd strongly recommend
fully isolating it...

~~~
sillysaurus2
_Play with it if you have VMWare and you 're bored, but I'd strongly recommend
fully isolating it..._

He's said that networking isn't a goal of the project, as the OS is intended
for gaming. So it doesn't have any way to connect to any network.

~~~
thu
Isolation is not just about networking.

~~~
sillysaurus2
Hmm.. What else is it about? Using VMware or Virtualbox is actually more
dangerous from an isolation perspective because of shared folders and sharing
USB drives between the guest/host OS.

~~~
thu
Isolation is meant w.r.t. the concept of resources. Resources include, but are
not limited to, network and file system access. Other resources, from which
you might want to isolate processes, are other processes (or even just PIDs),
CPU cycles, and memory. Isolation is also about limiting the impact of an
exploit.

------
chez17
Will people here show some fucking respect? Using terms like "bat shit crazy"
and "inane" are extremely selfish and only serve to make yourself feel better
at the expense of someone who is disabled. You don't need to qualify
statements. You can appreciate this for what it is and not comment on the
author's disability and the negative effects of it. The sad truth is that what
was done here is too far advanced for most of us so people can't comment on
the actual content and instead decide to publicly humiliate a disabled person.

~~~
joyeuse6701
No, I will not pity someone who you, and or society may determine to be
'disabled' for one thing or another. I will appreciate TempleOS as much as the
author's other works including the rants for they are one and the same,
expressions of self. So guess what, this is an interesting piece of work, you
know what else? I don't like being called racial slurs. I'm not going to show
any respect for anyone who thinks they can call me or my brethren a racial
slur, disabled or not. To tell me to respect someone like that IS insanity. So
no, no respect given.

~~~
thefreeman
I find it abhorrent that you are offended by the words of someone who clearly
has no control over themselves. Are you that insecure that you will take the
rants of a schizophrenic and use them to play the race card?

~~~
jessedhillon
_...the race card_

A word almost solely employed by racists, when expressing dislike about the
fact that anyone dare identify a racial component in anything, anywhere. Just
FYI.

People have a right to be offended by derogatory words, especially -- but not
only -- if they are directed towards themselves or people like them. The issue
here is that Terry most likely doesn't have the ability to use a different
word, or express his fear/anger in controlled way. His vocabulary is an
expression of the culture in which he lives -- if he were in Russia he would
be expressing fears about the KGB, not the CIA, for example.

Someone else compared his writings to a Markov chain -- the n-word is part of
the input corpus to his diseased mental processes then. I personally don't
infer intent on his part.

~~~
kristofferR
Being offended by racist speach from someone with Schizophrenia is like being
offended because the guy with Alzheimers couldn't remember your name.

Taking offence to those things isn't a good thing at all, it just shows a
massive lack of sympathy and understanding in the people who chose to take
offence to it.

------
integraton
The basic idea behind this, as I understand it, is that the author views the
operating system as a way to interact with God.

See the following thread of comments on reddit:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1aqdxn/temple_o...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1aqdxn/temple_operating_system_v100_released/c9024cn)

This is essentially the equivalent of "outsider art" in the technology world.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Indeed. He has the bizarre belief that his computer's PRNG is actually the
holy spirit.

~~~
chris_wot
Wouldn't a deity be insulted by a _pseudo_ random number generator?

~~~
krapp
Perhaps, given such a deity, no such thing as true randomness would even
exist.

~~~
lutusp
Here's my proof that we will never prove the existence of true randomness.

* To demonstrate the randomness of the members of a set, we must examine the entire set.

* A candidate set cannot be finite in size, because a finite set is by definition not random.

* Therefore the only legitimate test of randomness is against an infinite set.

* To examine all the members of an infinite set would require infinite time.

This doesn't mean randomness doesn't exist, it only addresses the issue of
proof.

~~~
mappu
Why is a finite set not random? What if it's a random selection from the set
of all sets?

~~~
lutusp
> Why is a finite set not random?

First, for a given finite set, one cannot say it's not random, only that its
randomness cannot be proven.

Let's think a bit about what we mean by "random".

* Is an even distribution of the digits 0-9, and no preferred sequential order, evidence for randomness? Yes, but not very good evidence.

* How about sequences of digits taken two at a time -- if each pair of digits is equally likely and shows no discernible pattern in their order, then we can say that the set meets the twin test.

* Now to triplets -- does each set of three digits show a complete absence of pattern, i.e. are 000, 001, etc. equally likely and have no preferred ordering?

Do you see where this is going? For any finite set size, the randomness tests
must end when the digit sequence size to be tested equals the set's finite
size. That means we cannot fully test the set, and the reason is that it's
finite in size.

> What if it's a random selection from the set of all sets?

Well,

* Typical examples drawn from an infinite random set won't themselves be provably random. Consider if we draw three digits from an infinite, random set -- they won't be likely to be random in isolation. Extend this to a selection of N digits from an infinite, random set -- as N increases, the probability of the selected set being random increases, but cannot be truly, provably random for any finite value of N.

* A random selection isn't the same as a random set. If I randomly select a location within an infinite set, I have no assurance that my random choice of N digits will itself prove to be be random, therefore my having chosen a random starting point doesn't either aid or hinder the process.

Consider these seeming paradoxes (not really paradoxical):

* Within an infinite random set, there will be an infinite number of examples (and repetitions) of infinitely repeating digits, i.e. infinite sequences of 1111 ... , 2222 ..., etc. In fact, if we accept the premise that the infinite set is in fact random, such repeating sequences _must exist_ somewhere in the set, or the set is not random.

* Within an infinite random set, with appropriate search tools, we _will find_ every book ever written or to be written, every state secret, every mathematical equation ever written or to be written, essentially everything. It's a simple matter of knowing where to look.

Given these examples, if we choose an arbitrary index within the infinite
random set from which to extract 40,000 numbers in base 26, we cannot be sure
the extract will not be a work of Shakespeare with every word spelled
correctly. Obviously that's not a random subset. Therefore we cannot have any
assurance that a subset of a random set is itself random.

Consider the infinite sequence represented by the digits of Pi. If we examine
the digits of Pi expressed in base 26, where A = 0, B = 1, etc., it should be
obvious that we will begin to see dictionary words of increasing size rather
quickly in a practical search using present-day tools. To get a work of
Shakespeare, one need only search more deeply.

~~~
mappu
Thanks for your answer!

You mean consecutive n-tuples, right? If you're checking every permutation of
n-tuples in the set, it's equivalent to checking single indices.

I see what you're getting at, but i'm not sure i can accept it as-is - the
result is pretty closely tied to your particular choice of a randomness-test,
which predetermines several of the later examples. My concept of "random"
would not be strictly based on comparing n-tuples, but more about
'unpredictability' \- so how about a randomness test based on kolmogorov
complexity? Although i expect that finding the shortest possible algorithm
that describe a set must be NP, if possible at all (that consecutive n-tuple
comparison algorithm certainly isn't guaranteed to find it).

~~~
lutusp
> Although i expect that finding the shortest possible algorithm that describe
> a set must be NP, if possible at all (that consecutive n-tuple comparison
> algorithm certainly isn't guaranteed to find it).

Okay, you've mentioned Kolmogorov complexity, that's a reasonable approach. In
that definition, a function able to produce random numbers is not (cannot be)
smaller than the resulting set, i.e. it has maximum entropy. The reason is
that a function that is smaller than its result implies that a pattern is
being exploited, and that, in turn, implies that the set isn't random (such a
set by definition would have no exploitable patterns).

Another test, based on the same ideas, is a hypothetical compression
algorithm, not one that we know of or can write, that is put to the task of
compressing the "random" set. If the compression algorithm cannot make the set
smaller, the set is random. This also addresses the issue of exploitable
patterns and entropy.

But all these ways of thinking about randomness relies on the set being
infinite in size (or an inexhaustible function as a source for the test
values). If this condition isn't met, and if we acquire a finite set of
numbers of size N, one can argue that the next set of that size will be a
repetition of the same values, therefore not random. This objection can only
be answered by defining the problem in terms of an infinite set.

~~~
mappu
That last paragraph sums it up pretty well. You're obviously correct, an
inexhaustible function = infinite set is required.

Thanks!

------
cromwellian
Anyone trying to bring back the spirit of the Commodore 64 gets a +1 from me,
even if they are batshit crazy. In fact, you have to be crazy to do a project
like this.

Here's to the crazy ones.

------
dylz
So I will just leave this here:
[http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Demo/DateTime.html](http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Demo/DateTime.html)

~~~
rsync
I love this.

First of all, a single day being equal to 32 bits - that's a nice touch right
there.

Second, given the way most of the world reckons time (it is the year 2013,
after all) seconds since Christ makes a lot more sense than seconds since 1970
...

------
oscilloscope
This is the operating system made to run Dwarf Fortress.

------
icelancer
Oh god, the LoseThOS guy returns.

Do yourself a favor: Turn on showdead in options and browse a bunch of
threads. You will see his markov chain generator going nuts, plus his rants.

~~~
givehimagun
Ohh man, I used to work with a guy like this....though he would sing and write
poetry to you over IM and slowly descend into madness.

He also believed his code was bulletproof and never needed
changing/refactoring. He was a team culture killer.

------
devindotcom
I really want to have a spare laptop on which I can install all kinds of
weirdo OSes just to see what they're like, not for "real" use. I'm perfectly
happy running Win7 and OSX but that's like being happy with vanilla and
chocolate at Baskin Robbins! I need some kind of heavy-duty bootloader and
partitioning agent, though. Any recommendations for a starting place?

~~~
S4M
>> I really want to have a spare laptop on which I can install all kinds of
weirdo OSes just to see what they're like

Actually, is there somewhere a list of all the weirdo OSes? I'd be interested
to see that.

~~~
sounds
Here are some links for when you have a few minutes:

What does your OS look like? Screen shots
[http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12087](http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12087)

Wiki list of projects
[http://wiki.osdev.org/Projects](http://wiki.osdev.org/Projects)

I don't meant to only report on the ones at osdev.org, but from the osdev.org
wiki you can find the other main osdev sites and find their project lists. If
you approach this with the attitude of open exploration, I think you'll enjoy
it more.

~~~
S4M
thanks!

------
krelian
I love this project no matter in which iteration it's sent (just hate the
inevitable wtf comments from those who don't bother to do the minimal dig-in)
It's as if it was taken from some (good) psychological thriller/hacker movie.
A genius schizophrenic writes an OS that will bring him closer to God,
sprinkled with esoteric religiously sounded phrases throughout.

------
orclev
I don't even... is this some kind of joke? The website reads like a Christian
version of the timecube website.

~~~
meowface
The author has some mental issues of some kind.

He is a great programmer, though, and his work shouldn't be discounted just
because he's a bit off.

~~~
noir_lord
A bit off, that's like saying Stalin had the odd off day or Machiavelli was a
tad manipulative.

LoseThos is balls to the wall flat out crazy.

~~~
sillysaurus2
It's interesting that he's done more actual work than most of us. I would
imagine he spends most of his time working on the OS rather than interacting
with people. Kind of puts into perspective how productive we could be... And
also how useless some forms of productivity are.

~~~
munin
has he? making a booting from metal OS is a semester long undergraduate
project, and this person has been working on it for way longer than that. in a
semester, university programs expect you to write a kernel that boots to a
shell with virtual memory management and multi-tasking. templeos doesn't even
have virtual memory management.

~~~
X-Istence
He doesn't want virtual memory management... the guy wrote his own just in
time compiler that compiles and runs programs on the fly...

------
Iuz
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0MsDl39UL0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0MsDl39UL0)
what is going on here...

------
seunosewa
Can we reach out to this guy and help him somehow?

------
pearjuice
This project would greatly benefit from a Github repository and an appropriate
issue tracker. But then again, Terry completely loses foucs of reality every
now and then (this is partly because of his mental disorder) and goes on to a
path of complete anhiliation, destroying everything he created. This happened
a few times with documentation and supporting websites he put up.

Can't anyone of the fine folks here help him with that?

------
koala_advert
More info and examples of the developers schizophrenic chatter here:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1aqdxn/temple_o...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1aqdxn/temple_operating_system_v100_released/)

------
zokier
Why is this (re)posted now? Personally I find these kinds of submissions (just
link to front-page of a old project) bit annoying as they provide no context
for why it's supposedly relevant now.

edit: here is some background info for those who are not familiar with this
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992749](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992749)

------
bobsgame
Regarding schizophrenia/psychotic states and the religious connection:

People here do not realize this is what happens when your spirit gets crushed-
the psyche regresses into a state where hope is the only thing left. That is
where religion comes in, which is fundamentally the psyche's last grasp on
reality by clinging onto hope in society. (Father, save me.)

The psychology involved is absolutely real, and the effects can be seen in any
brainwashing victims who have had their will destroyed through deceit or
betrayal. This is documented stuff- you can _make someone schizophrenic._ Ever
been dumped by a girlfriend and felt "lost" for some time, losing some ability
to reason? Congratulations, you have experienced damage to the psyche caused
by emotional shock, otherwise known as "heartbreak." This is what religion is
referring to through the metaphor of the "soul."

Furthermore, society has responded to this man's determination and faith in
redemption, i.e. "God's Will." We're adjusting and slowly coming to accept his
mental state and are beginning to appreciate the impressive effort put into
his project. His faith is _working_ , and in this we are both observing and
are participating in the 'miracle' of faith, which is due to the emotional
bonds that humans create.

We are pack animals like many others in nature, we create family units, and we
are essentially structured just like the natural world around us despite what
we like to think about ourselves- our conscious thoughts are produced by our
subconscious, we're not in control, and we have no idea what the hell we're
doing except chasing a vision of success. Success in what, exactly?

Religion is not what you think it is! It is not entirely pointless
superstitious nonsense, it is an ancient way of describing the matters of the
pull of emotion from the heart and the effects it has on the human psyche
through abstractions and metaphor. It is very difficult to understand except
through experience, because it's relying on a different state of the brain and
attempting to describe feelings. People call it "wisdom" because that is the
easiest explanation, since it is dealing with emotional states of the human
mind that cannot be explained logically, only through abstract stories,
warnings, and the like, same as Greek mythology (don't fly too close to the
Sun). Thou shalt not steal, because the subconscious guilt may eventually
damage your trust in yourself and you may be cast out from your peers. (i.e.
the Kingdom of God.)

Likewise, Hell is a metaphor for what happens when you are lost in the world
with a shattered psyche, with no social bonds to pull you back up. It is a
terrifying fate, and it certainly happened thousands of years ago to men just
as it happens today- where do you think the minds of the homeless pushing
around shopping carts are? Modern psychology (at least some of it) is
essentially a scientific explanation of the situations and consequences that
the ancients described in the Bible.

It is not literal, nor did that have any meaning when it was written. It is
the "Word of God" as again, a metaphor, describing the nature of human beings
and their common behavioral patterns leading to predictable consequence. The
Old Testament is essentially an ancient Almanac, containing metaphor about the
creation and nature of the universe, orally passed down legends and tradition
about the beginning of mankind, a history of the fate of various sects and
tribes and family lines of man originating from Israel, and collections of
poems, songs, and Confucian-like snippets of wisdom collected by kings.

The traditions, symbolism, culture, music, and weird mannerisms of the church
(or any religion in any culture) are there for a reason. They are symbols that
affect the subconscious and evoke emotion, the same way that subliminally
seeing a fast food sign in your peripheral vision will make your stomach
rumble, and the reason why all advertising works. Described in an ancient way,
this is _magic_. It's real, and you're exposed to it every day in both
positive and negative forms.

The "house of religion" where participants submit into a particular culture of
tradition gives humans in various situations and walks of life something to
bond together with, creating a social family unit i.e. "children of God,
flock, congregation, etc." This feeling is subconsciously _uncomfortable_ to
the logical crowd like this one, which is compromised of young men driven by
their very nature to break free of their parental family unit and create their
own, while _not realizing_ that is exactly what they are doing or where their
ambition comes from. They are clinging to their _confidence in themselves_ ,
and if that doesn't pan out, the only thing left to hold onto is hope in the
compassion of your fellow man as a collective. It is sort of like a recursive
self-deception where people place their faith in their own emotions (God's
name is Jealousy) which actually works and helps people pull themselves back
out. Hard to wrap your mind around the illogical!

Let's not disappoint the man. He deserves recognition, and it is in our very
nature to give him a hand and pull him out of his rut. Perhaps he will even
find a woman to bond with, set up a steeple above their heads in "holy
matrimony," and become a King himself.

~~~
sillysaurus2
_You can make someone schizophrenic._

I have no idea what you're talking about. Schizophrenia is a physical illness.
Your brain physically deteriorates. You can't make anyone schizophrenic any
more than you can make them lose an arm. In fact, making them lose an arm
would be much easier than making them schizophrenic.

~~~
tazjin
No, there is a large amount of factors that have been linked to being able to
cause schizophrenia. There is no final answer to the debate at the moment.

See also
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_schizophrenia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_schizophrenia)

~~~
sillysaurus2
Interesting...
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_schizophrenia#Urbanic...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_schizophrenia#Urbanicity)

"A particularly stable and replicable finding has been the association between
living in an urban environment and the development of schizophrenia, even
after factors such as drug use, ethnic group and size of social group have
been controlled for.[142] A recent study of 4.4 million men and women in
Sweden found a 68%–77% increased risk of diagnosed psychosis for people living
in the most urbanized environments, a significant proportion of which is
likely to be described as schizophrenia.

The effect does not appear to be due to a higher incidence of obstetric
complications in urban environments.[144] The risk increases with the number
of years and degree of urban living in childhood and adolescence, suggesting
that constant, cumulative, or repeated exposures during upbringing occurring
more frequently in urbanized areas are responsible for the association.

Various possible explanations for the effect have been judged unlikely based
on the nature of the findings, including infectious causes or a generic stress
effect. It is thought to interact with genetic dispositions and, since there
appears to be nonrandom variation even across different neighborhoods, and an
independent association with social isolation, it has been proposed that the
degree of "social capital" (e.g. degree of mutual trust, bonding and safety in
neighborhoods) can exert a developmental impact on children growing up in
these environments."

So it does seem that it's inflictable, though we don't quite know by what. I
can see that brainwashing may trigger it if someone was genetically
predisposed to it. One theory may be that living in an urban environment is
more of a trigger for those who are genetically predisposed to it. It seems
like genetics is a requirement, though, suggesting it's not inflictable at
will.

~~~
bobsgame
Yeah. We do sort of know why, it's just not exactly something that is easily
proven or explicitly demonstrable through scientific method.

However, anyone who has gone through a bad breakup and gone a bit wacky has
felt what emotional stress can do to the mind, you see it all the time seeing
couples arguing and yelling psychotic things into the phone and slamming it,
etc. It jams up the conscious process! Too much of this _does_ cause
schizophrenic states, and left unresolved can cause significant damage.

------
kghose
I say this with great respect: Mad Genius.

------
anonymousDan
I don't quite understand what he meant by 'identity-mapped' \- can anyone clue
me in?

~~~
ekr
I haven't looked through it, but it probably means that you can access
individual physical bytes in memory by using their physical address (there's a
one to one correspondence between the physical address and the logical address
of a byte).

I'm not exactly sure how that is achieved, as far as I know, in order to
switch to long mode, you need to have enabled paging.

I've been myself looking to start my own OS (protected mode), but it will
probably be a unix code. What this guy has done obviously deserves a lot of
admiration.

~~~
munin
virtual memory makes a translation layer between virtual addresses and
physical addresses.

an identity-mapping for virtual memory is then a mapping that directly
translates a VA into the same PA, so VA 5 is PA 5.

the word 'paging' is overloaded to mean, to the cpu, the act of having the mmu
perform translation from a physical to a virtual address, and, having the OS
perform demand-loading of certain physical pages.

so non-identity mappings would happen when you switch a VA from mapping to a
PA to mapping to nothing. the OS takes the contents of the PA and stores it on
disk. the next time the VA is accessed, there is a 'page fault' and the data
for the page is brought in to some other available PA and the VA is remapped
to that PA (if the mapping exists in the stored pages on disk).

identity mappings are very simple because they remove the layer of indirection
normally present in a virtual memory system. so you can run the processor in
long mode, and use as much of the memory as you can address, but have none of
the benefits of disk-paging, processes, separation, etc.

it's ironic because if you used processes, your system could be more
performant, because your address space only contains the pages needed to run
your particular task. if you run everything in r0, then you don't even need an
OS. you sidestep a lot of the challenges in writing an OS at the expense of
performance...

------
tjaerv
Released into the public domain, very cool!

------
sgt101
The crack about the holocaust in this story is not funny, sorry it just isn't.

~~~
mattdeboard
You should understand a bit about the author before you let this concern you.
It certainly wasn't intended to be humor.

~~~
icelancer
Or anything. I doubt he "intends" much.

------
mwally
I spent longer than I care to admin playing AfterEgypt.

------
hga
A "muflax" created a distribution on GitHub:
[https://github.com/muflax/templeos](https://github.com/muflax/templeos)

One minor version/2 months or so behind.

