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PAHRUMP, Nev. - Nicki Amouri hands her camera to a friend, throws her arm over another and smiles wide as she leans in for a shot with the monument her class came to visit.
It’s a typical field trip memento — except that Amouri is in a brothel. The monument is a fluffy, queen-sized bed in a Western-themed party room reserved for VIPs and big spenders.
Amouri was one of a dozen Randolph College students who toured the Chicken Ranch, a legal bordello in the desert 60 miles outside Las Vegas. Thursday’s class trip, which included seminars from the working girls, capped a course on American consumption and “the ideas that consume us.”
“I think it’s fascinating, this is fun for me,” said Amouri, a junior at the private liberal arts school in Lynchburg, Va., that until last year admitted only women. “Not many people get to do this.”
Academic and media inquiries are daily occurrences at many of Nevada’s 27 legal brothels. Some shy away from the scrutiny, others, like the Chicken Ranch, welcome the publicity.
“We’re always open to trying to educate the public about legalized prostitution,” said Chicken Ranch general manager Debbie Rivenburgh, who acknowledged this was the first class tour request she’d received in 21 years.
The brothel tour was a natural fit for a class that tells students “don’t just study America — live it,” said Julio Rodriguez, the director of the college’s American Culture Program.
Each semester the course examines a strain of American culture and ends with a class trip. Past destinations included post-Katrina New Orleans, Walt Disney World and the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery, Ala.
This year’s focus on Nevada started with a professor’s interest in water rights and conservation. It grew to include discussions of the wedding and entertainment industries and, inevitably, prostitution.
Nevada is the only state where prostitution is legal. Brothels are allowed in 10 Nevada counties, though not in Las Vegas.
As part of their research, students were assigned “The Beauty Myth,” by feminist author Naomi Wolf, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” by Hunter S. Thompson, and a “20/20″ episode on prostitution with Diane Sawyer, among other research, professors said.
“We gave them all the option to either opt out or express reservations privately. No one did,” said Rodriguez, adding that he received no objections from parents or administrators.
Prostitutes at the Chicken Ranch had plenty of reservations. Most don’t jump at the chance to talk to strangers about what they do, Rivenburgh said. They worry about friends or family finding out. They know how others see them. It can be uncomfortable.
“Ninety-nine percent of the working girls will not participate. Each woman’s got her reason and her limitations,” Rivenburgh said. “I couldn’t have done better with the two that said yes, though.”
Alexis, 38, and Alicia, “over 30,” sat on white folding chairs in front of the young, earnest women in the brothel’s Victorian-style parlor, usually the setting for the “lineup.” They would not give their last names. The group took close notes as a handful of television cameras and reporters looked on.
A blonde in jeans and platform boots, Alexis talked about the job’s flexibility and the free time it has allowed her to write a book about her life. Alicia wore a black-and-white gingham nighty and a tattoo on her left breast that read “Famous.”
“I enjoy giving back what some people don’t get in their lives, as far as companionship, time, just the touch of a woman,” she said. The job allows her to take care of her mother and grandmother. She’s also in real estate.
The introductions gave way to questions.
Do you consider yourself a feminist?
Alexis: “Most women in this business wear the pants in the family.”
Is there a certain look most men prefer?
Alicia: Every man wants something different. “There’s all different kinds of girls.”
Why aren’t there brothels with male prostitutes?
Rivenburgh: Former Hollywood Madame Heidi Fleiss is trying.
Do you still give a military discount?
Rivenburgh: Yes.
What’s the worst part?
Alicia: “Being confined, being cooped up. I have to be here 24 hours a day.”
With a tour and time to mingle, the students packed up gift bags containing a menu of services, a Chicken Ranch key chain and a brochure. They had to get back to Las Vegas in time for a backstage tour of the risque revue “Jubilee.” With any luck, they might get to interview the showgirls.
[Via - Newsday.Com]
Oops! Programmer Destroys Multibillion Industry With A Single Software Application
In a research park outside the low-key bustle of downtown Huntsville, Ala. Mark Spencer finishes his barbecue and resumes wreaking havoc on the multibillion-dollar phone equipment business.
Spencer is the inventor of Asterisk, a free software program that establishes phone calls over the Internet and handles voicemail, caller ID, teleconferencing and a host of novel features for the phone. With Asterisk loaded onto a computer, a decent-size company can rip out its traditional phone switch, even some of its newfangled Internet telephone gear, and say good-bye to 80% of its telecom equipment costs. Not good news for Cisco, Nortel or Avaya.
“We have to figure out ways to get into everything: Carriers, businesses, equipment companies,” says Spencer. “For better or worse, I don’t tend to think small.”
Spencer, who is all of 29 years old, is poised to disrupt the $7 billion market for office telecom switches (often called PBXs) much the way the Linux open-source computer operating system crushed the price of business computing and brought woe to established leaders such as Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.
Since Spencer released Asterisk to the world in 1999 as a phone operating system, it has been downloaded 500,000 times, and it continues to be downloaded 1,000 times per day. Some 350 contributors have taken it from a rocky voice system to one with clear calling and more than 100 features.
Electric utility Southern Co. is using Asterisk in a pilot program to translate voicemail into text messages for 30 managers’ BlackBerrys.
The town of Manchester, Conn. is about to begin using Asterisk to run an application tied to the 911 service that will cost less than $1 million, half the price it would have paid had it used traditional phone equipment, and at 10% of the operating costs. Outsourcing company Sutherland Global Services has tested Asterisk in 400-person call centers, finding it cuts telephone costs by two-thirds.
In Rensselaer, Ind. computer science professor Brian Capouch has built a commercial-class phone system that already touches 20 communities and covers more than 1,000 square miles with just $100 in personal computer equipment and $125 to customize each location.
For a little more he built an Asterisk system of motion detectors and Web cameras that send video to his office laptop and can call any phone when something happens at his house. One of his students created a business sending other kids automated wake-up calls. Other Asterisk hacks include a way to pay your parking meter by phone.
“You couldn’t set out to build a system like this. No one company could do it all. When you open source, people just keep improving things,” says Spencer.
Asterisk could lead to the creation of thousands of businesses, as people begin thinking about the phone the same way they saw the personal computer in 1980, as a platform on which to build. Spencer had this in mind when he named his software after the symbol used in Unix computer programming to signify “everything.”
Digium, the company Spencer created in 1999, now has 50 employees and more than $10 million in revenue from selling hardware loaded with a tested business edition of the otherwise free Asterisk, much the way Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT - news - people ) charges for a widely used standard for Linux. Digium makes a profit, though Spencer won’t say how much.
Overhead is low. Spencer pays less than $15 a square foot for space (per year) and does up his own quarters in geek chic: reworked computer guts, testing screens, a fridge filled with caffeinated sodas and a sculpture he made of a robot holding a rotary phone. He shares his office with a 23-year-old programmer who was still a teen when they met. Spencer once had to write a note to his principal years ago when a job conflicted with the school day.
Spencer’s parents are professors at Auburn University (his American father teaches education, his Egyptian mother French). In eighth grade he wrote a grading program for his teacher and sold it for $5. While still in high school, Spencer hung around Auburn’s electrical engineering department, designing integrated circuit structures for fun. “I’d go over to his house [to discuss semiconductors] and he’d be finishing writing a symphony on his synthesizer,” says Thaddeus Roppel, an Auburn professor and early mentor. “He kept up with his high school homework, too.”
While on a full scholarship at Auburn, Spencer started Digium as a Linux consultant. He sold one-seventh of the firm for $500,000 to Adtran, a Huntsville telecom equipment maker where he had interned two years before. He wanted a really cool phone switch to handle sales orders, but when he learned that it would cost $10,000, he began writing Asterisk. “I’d never touched a traditional pbx,” Spencer says.
But he knew a ton about open-source software, whose source code is given away in order to attract improvements. He had earlier built an instant-messaging client called Gaim, which has become popular among the open-source crowd. Spencer based Asterisk on Apache, the freebie software that powers many a Web server. Aided by a couple of Internet telephone veterans, he put the telephone switch at the center of the operating system and made it possible to connect it to almost any Internet phone system (except Skype).
Asterisk was still a hobby until the spring of 2001, when the tech crash killed Digium’s Linux business. Spencer saw there was interest in Net phones and shifted gears. By the end of the year Digium was selling computer cards with custom boards and Asterisk software.
Spencer is picking up a few big allies. Intel now makes Asterisk-compatible cards for computers and has tested large deployments. “Open source is one of the hottest topics in telecom today,” says Intel marketing director Timothy Moynihan.
Yet IBM, which styles itself a champion of all things open, will only say it has a “positive but very informal” relationship with Asterisk and Digium. That distance may owe something to the fact that IBM resells Cisco’s Internet telephone gear to big firms like Ford and Dow Chemical.
In an internal study last summer Cisco identified 100 corporate customers making big use of Asterisk. Open-source Internet phones, the document said, will force Cisco to excel in “reliability, productivity, enhancements, features, vendor reputation, service [and] support.” Cost was unlikely to be Cisco’s selling point.
“I used to go on industry panels, and the guys from Cisco would be nice and baby me, never saying anything bad about Asterisk,” Spencer says. “Lately they’ve stopped seeing me as a charity. It’s their business.”
Says Cullen Jennings, a senior Cisco engineer: “The bulk of PBXs that people deploy five years from now will not be open source, but that is just a guess.” Either way, he figures that if Asterisk destroys Cisco’s valuable PBX business, Cisco can sell services and related networking gear based on it, the same way ibm embraced Linux-based computing.
Spencer hopes he doesn’t have to choose between spreading the Asterisk gospel or getting rich on Digium. “The existing telephony business, for some companies, is going to get collapsed way down,” he says. “What will be the new services? The new industries? Like a lot of things, you do this because it’s interesting, and you don’t really know where it’s going to go.”
[Via - Uncommon Business Blog]
Who Is Shawn Casey? Is He For Real?
41 Money Facts That Will Blow You Away
#1: The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest
In 1957 the respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in. Many called the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this the BBC diplomatically replied that they should “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”
• Read the full article about the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest.
#2: Sidd Finch
In its April 1985 edition, Sports Illustrated published a story about a new rookie pitcher who planned to play for the Mets. His name was Sidd Finch, and he could reportedly throw a baseball at 168 mph with pinpoint accuracy. This was 65 mph faster than the previous record. Surprisingly, Sidd Finch had never even played the game before. Instead, he had mastered the “art of the pitch” in a Tibetan monastery under the guidance of the “great poet-saint Lama Milaraspa.” Mets fans celebrated their teams’ amazing luck at having found such a gifted player, and Sports Illustrated was flooded with requests for more information. But in reality this legendary player only existed in the imagination of the author of the article, George Plimpton.
• Read the full article about Sidd Finch.
#3: Instant Color TV
In 1962 there was only one tv channel in Sweden, and it broadcast in black and white. The station’s technical expert, Kjell Stensson, appeared on the news to announce that, thanks to a new technology, viewers could convert their existing sets to display color reception. All they had to do was pull a nylon stocking over their tv screen. Stensson proceeded to demonstrate the process. Thousands of people were taken in. Regular color broadcasts only commenced in Sweden on April 1, 1970.
• Read the full article about Instant Color TV.
#4: The Taco Liberty Bell
In 1996 the Taco Bell Corporation announced that it had bought the Liberty Bell and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Hundreds of outraged citizens called the National Historic Park in Philadelphia where the bell was housed to express their anger. Their nerves were only calmed when Taco Bell revealed, a few hours later, that it was all a practical joke. The best line of the day came when White House press secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the sale. Thinking on his feet, he responded that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold. It would now be known as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.
• Read the full article about the Taco Liberty Bell.
#5: San Serriffe
In 1977 the British newspaper The Guardian published a special seven-page supplement devoted to San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands. A series of articles affectionately described the geography and culture of this obscure nation. Its two main islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. Its capital was Bodoni, and its leader was General Pica. The Guardian’s phones rang all day as readers sought more information about the idyllic holiday spot. Few noticed that everything about the island was named after printer’s terminology. The success of this hoax is widely credited with launching the enthusiasm for April Foolery that gripped the British tabloids in subsequent decades.
• Read the full article about San Serriffe.
#6: Nixon for President
In 1992 National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation program announced that Richard Nixon, in a surprise move, was running for President again. His new campaign slogan was, “I didn’t do anything wrong, and I won’t do it again.” Accompanying this announcement were audio clips of Nixon delivering his candidacy speech. Listeners responded viscerally to the announcement, flooding the show with calls expressing shock and outrage. Only during the second half of the show did the host John Hockenberry reveal that the announcement was a practical joke. Nixon’s voice was impersonated by comedian Rich Little.
#7: Alabama Changes the Value of Pi
The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the ‘Biblical value’ of 3.0. Before long the article had made its way onto the internet, and then it rapidly made its way around the world, forwarded by people in their email. It only became apparent how far the article had spread when the Alabama legislature began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation. The original article, which was intended as a parody of legislative attempts to circumscribe the teaching of evolution, was written by a physicist named Mark Boslough.
#8: The Left-Handed Whopper
In 1998 Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a “Left-Handed Whopper” specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, “many others requested their own ‘right handed’ version.”
#9: Hotheaded Naked Ice Borers
In its April 1995 issue Discover Magazine announced that the highly respected wildlife biologist Dr. Aprile Pazzo had discovered a new species in Antarctica: the hotheaded naked ice borer. These fascinating creatures had bony plates on their heads that, fed by numerous blood vessels, could become burning hot, allowing the animals to bore through ice at high speeds. They used this ability to hunt penguins, melting the ice beneath the penguins and causing them to sink downwards into the resulting slush where the hotheads consumed them. After much research, Dr. Pazzo theorized that the hotheads might have been responsible for the mysterious disappearance of noted Antarctic explorer Philippe Poisson in 1837. “To the ice borers, he would have looked like a penguin,” the article quoted her as saying. Discover received more mail in response to this article than they had received for any other article in their history.
• Read the full article about the Hotheaded Naked Ice Borer.
#10: Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity
In 1976 the British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 AM a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth’s own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.
[Via - Museum Of Hoaxes.Com]
Market Rises Sharply On April Fool’s Joke
Early 1800’s: The Black Rock was a slave boat crossing the Pacific. The boat was transporting a large assortment of metallic minerals, which were highly reactive to other forces of magnetism. Unexpectedly, the boat encounters the island of LOST. Being that the island has unique magnetic properties, the magnetic materials on the boat “react” with the magnetic forces on the island, and the boat is literally hoisted onto the island. The boat, having strong levels of magnetism, creates a hole in the invisible bubble that surrounds the island – this hole is at coordinate “325”, or the “special location/coordinate” that Daniel’s team travels through to get to the island. Once the Black Rock crashes, the leaders aboard the ship, including Alvar Hanso, begin studies on the magnetic aspects of the island. Their descendents ultimately form the DHARMA initiative in the late 1900’s.Â
 
 
 
1960’s: The DHARMA initiative was created for the enhancement of the human race. What initially began as a simple research initiative developed into a massive project that was designed to test fate. At some point during DHARMA’S studies, someone managed to leverage the magnetic properties of the island to bend time and space – thus, a time machine was created. This time machine isn’t a Delorian with a flux capacitor. It’s, in fact, much simpler. Let’s say that DHARMA created a time machine, and activated it in 1960 – then, after 1 year of the time machine running, someone decides to enter the machine in 1961. They can only go back in time, and they can only go back in time up to 1 year (back to 1960, when the time machine started “running”). Furthermore, once you go back in time, you’re STUCK in the past. You cannot go back to 1961, because you now EXIST in the past. In addition to your body going through the time machine, say you contracted a deadly disease in 1965, but went back to 1960, before you developed the disease – you wouldn’t have the disease when you stepped out of the time machine in a past time.
 
  
In the beginning stages of testing the time machine, DHARMA chose to run tests on animals (namely, polar bears), as to avoid creating any time-related catastrophes or paradoxes. The first initiative of testing the time machine was to see they could extend the life of an animal. They sent a polar bear back in time a few years, and then changed its habitat to see if it could “survive.” DHARMA used the same type of mechanism to work with polar bears that Daniel Faraday had discovered back in 1996. DHARMA saw that once polar bears had gone back in time, they could survive off the island, and even in remote extreme climates (such as deserts) – thus making them partially invincible. Realizing the power of this time machine, the leaders of DHARMA opt to only keep limited knowledge of the time machine’s existence. Thus, many of the experiments on the island of LOST are just a façade to conceal the “true” research behind the DHARMA initiative.
 
 
Shortly after the experimentation with the polar bears, DHARMA starts sending people back in time. Over a few years of researching the time machine, DHARMA becomes curious to see if this time machine can allow people to alter the course of history. In order to see if people can “change a future that’s already written,” DHARMA begins simple tasking their time travelers with doing things to alter the course of history. Unfortunately, these time travelers were not able to do anything to permanently alter the future that was already laid out.Â
 
Now getting desperate to prove that there’s ANY benefit to the new time machine, the leaders of DHARMA find a group of their own people to involuntarily become “test subjects” of their next experiment involving time travel. This being: can sending people back in time permanently cure them of a deadly virus?  Without proper warning, DHARMA releases a virus in an area of the island that infects many of the “test subjects.” Then DHARMA claims that they can cure the disease with this special “device,” that device being the time machine. This, however, is NOT obvious to the test subjects - they just want to get cured, and think the time machine is some type of complex vaccination. As fate would predict, the test subjects go back in time and are cured of the virus, only to be later killed by the smoke monster, as the monster is the “physical means” in which the timeline course corrects itself. DHARMA, seeing this smoke monster for the first time, is now officially fearful that this time machine will end up serving no purpose whatsoever. The only thing DHARMA has accomplished is pissing a small portion of their work-force. The surviving test subjects who weren’t originally infected by the virus become a faction of the DHARMA initiative, and are subsequently referred to as the Others/Hostiles – Richard and Jacob are among that group.
 
1970-1985: Ben’s mother is recruited by DHARMA to come to the island and work on this time machine. After several years of testing the time machine, she too has given up on its abilities. She has also met Richard, the leader of the Others, and he tells her about the horrible experimentation that DHARMA did to his people, resulting in the death of several of his friends. Ben’s mom quickly grows to hate DHARMA for the morals that they’re willing to ignore in the name of science. She deems it her destiny to bring down DHARMA for the pain that they’ve brought upon the innocent. But, instead, she decides to kill two birds with one stone: instead of just leaving the island and possibly angering DHARMA at her departure, she decides to use the time machine to go back in time to the point at which she came to the island. Then, she leaves the island. This way, it would appear to the outside world that she never even left to go to the island. She’s going back in time to re-live 15 years of her life that she lost out on while she was doing testing in the island. Brilliant!
1970: Ben’s mother has traveled approximately 15 years back in time, back to 1970, where she finds herself back in
When the time comes for Ben’s mom to give birth, she dies, but still manages to produce a baby boy.  The reason she died was because the timeline was course correcting to replace her with Ben. In a way, Ben is the embodiment of her, and was thus “created” to fulfill her legacy as the disgruntled DHARMA engineer that would ultimately bring down the shady corporation. It’s Ben’s role to figure out how to “work around” fate, and to find a way to make the time machine “work” without using DHARMA’s methods.
  
1980: It’s not long after Ben’s mother’s death that their good friend Horace recommends that they go to the island. Horace is likely affiliated with DHARMA, and was sent to investigate Ben’s mother. After finding out about her death, he sent her husband and Ben to the island so that DHARMA could “contain” a potential hiccup in time. When Ben and his dad get to the island, we find out that Ben’s father was merely to become a peon for DHARMA. Ben was the real reason that they came to the island: It was Ben’s legacy to fulfill his mother’s destiny. Ben, unfortunately, isn’t aware of this at the time. He’s just trying to enjoy himself, and make sure his father isn’t too much of a jerk.
 
1981: After a good bit of time on the island, Ben hears and sees his dead mother outside his house on the island! The reason he sees her is because in an “alternate future,” she was actually alive and working on this island for DHARMA. She appears half-dead to him because her dead spirit is designed to “help Ben understand his destiny” so that he can carry on her legacy. Thus, her spirit is time’s way of course correcting the future.Â
Shortly after Ben sees his dead mom, he sees Richard in the jungle, who says “you’re not ready.” Richard is a time traveler - and a DHARMA-hater. When Ben first encounters Richard in the jungle, Richard has traveled back in time from the year 2007 to 1981. Thus, while Richard is working with Ben, Richard is not aging. Why did Richard go back in time to get in contact with Ben?  To recruit him. Richard knew Ben’s mother in the alternate timeline, so he knows that Ben is an incarnation of his Mother, and that he is some type of prodigy on the island. From there, Richard and Ben then spend their years plotting on how they will ultimately bring down DHARMA, and use the time machine for tests that don’t involve killing people.
 
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1988: Rosseau’s crew was an opposing force to DHARMA. They weren’t affiliated with the Others; however, they were going to the island to investigate “shady business practices” being conducted by DHARMA - These business practices being the releasing of the virus to the locals on the island. Unfortunately, at the point in time, other Others and Ben hadn’t conceived their “master plan” to bring down DHARMA. However, they didn’t want to expose children to the experiments of DHARMA. Once Rosseau lost her baby, she set up a looping signal. That ran for years on the island, but the signal was being blocked by the looking glass.Â
 
1981-2007: Ben grows up from the age 10 to 37, planning with Richard and Jacob the “ultimate plan” to wipe out DHARMA, the purge. In the mean time, DHARMA continues to test other unique aspects of the island in order to see if they can leverage the time machine for some other purpose. In the midst of this, DHARMA discovers the magnetic anomaly in the island via the SWAN station. This magnetic anomaly is a bubble that encompasses the entire island. Unfortunately, DHARMA only does some basic tests on this anomaly, as they don’t really know how to use it for anything. During this time, both the others and DHARMA are trying to learn how they can leverage the time machine “for the greater good.”Â
During the testing of the time machine, DHARMA and the others make the following discoveries about time travel. Note that there is not a specific “definition” of time travel that applies to the show – time travel is simply used as a concept in the show, and the “weird things” that we see are typically fate’s way of course correcting to preserve something that’s meant to happen in the future.
- When someone enters the time machine, they can only go back in time – and only to a time where the machine was currently running.
- When you go back in time, you do not de-age. For example, if you are 50, and go back 10 years in time, you do NOT have your 40-year-old body. HOWEVER, while you are re-living 10 years of your life, you body will not age until you catch up with the time in which you entered the time machine.
- When you go back in time, you will still have your current hair style, tattoos, and memory. However, say you were paralyzed; fate would need to do some course correction to make sure that you are still able to play your past role in life. Thus, time travel can TEMPORARILY cure any physical ailments you may have had prior to entering the time machine. However, fate will still find a way to paralyze you once you catch up with the current time. Say the first time you were paralyzed, it was because you were pushed out of a window. Because “the universe has a funny way of course correcting,” you may get hit by a car the second time around.
- When you go back in time, you can only “change” things that don’t have an impact on your destiny. In other words, if you went to church on a specific date in the past, and then went back in time, you wouldn’t necessarily go to church in your new timeline. However, if you changed a belief as a result of going to church the first time around, “fate would find a way to influence you into that belief.” Perhaps you would have a near death experience, or maybe a mysterious person would greet you in a jewelry store and tell you that you need to change your beliefs… or, maybe fate would just kill you since it couldn’t find a way to change your belief.
- If you go back in time and die, you are not “totally” dead because there has already been a variation of the universe where you were alive in the future. Thus, you become “half dead” until time catches back up. In other words, your presence may be known to some people but not others. Your presence would only be known when you are required to make an impact to fate.
- If you have never had a child, you cannot go back in time and give birth. Fate does not allow for a new entity to exist in a past where it originally did not exist. Thus fate would either have to kill the mother, the baby, or both in order to course correct. UNLESS, fate decides to use the baby or mother to “replace” someone else in the timeline.
- Basically, the “rules of the time machine” are not governed by any physical definitions of time travel. The “rules,” if you will, are governed by how FATE decides to preserve the timeline. Thus, if you are required to do something profound in a future timeline, fate will find any way possible to preserve the timeline – we’ve seen ghosts and smoke monsters in LOST. So according to the show’s definition of time travel, fate “does have a funny way of course correcting.”
 
2007: Swelled with hatred, Ben, Richard, and Jacob find a way to hijack the time machine, and go back in time to the year 1996 to wipe out all of DHARMA on the island (The Purge). Note that in Ben’s original timeline from his birth to 2007, Oceanic 815 did not crash on the island and Ben did not come down with cancer. The fact that Ben, Richard and a few others lived out a life to the year 2007 gives them some unique powers: they know that they will technically remain alive until 2007, no matter what happens (unless fate deems their existence as not necessary in preserving their original timeline). This is one reason for Ben being able to survive through the whole power struggle on the island in season 4, and the reason he can take a severe beating from the Losties in almost every episode.
1996 (new timeline on the island): Having gone back in time, and realizing that there are plenty of DHARMA folk in other aspects of the world (Penny’s father), the Others need to quickly think of something that will prevent DHARMA from ever reaching the island. Thus, Ben figures out a way to put the entire island into a “time loop.” This time loop will keep the island suspended in time in the past (in the year 1996) – thus preventing any outside DHARMA people from reaching them on the island. Once Ben and Richard start the time loop, they round up the remaining locals on the island – these people ultimately grow to become the opposing force to DHARMA, the “others.”Â
In order to create this “time loop,” Ben and Richard snatch up the time machine from the ARROW station, and move it to the swan station. With the engineering mind of Mikhail, they are able to cement the time machine into walls deep within the swan station. In addition, Mikhail is able to “sync” the time machine up with the magnetic anomaly that encompasses the island – thus giving the Others the ability to send the entire island back in time! They then rig-up the computer system that requires the pushing of a button every 108 minutes; however, this button pushing is actually activating the time machine every 108 minutes. So, for a great number of years, DHARMA is able to suspend time on the island by “resetting” the time machine every 108 minutes. Unfortunately, one of the downsides to this is that time on the island is contained in its unique magnetic bubble – thus, time in the rest of the world is still running its course. Therefore, island time stays in the year 1996, while real world time eventually reaches the year 2004 at the time of the plane crash. The only way to pass through the island time and the real world time would be to use the “special” coordinate, which is referenced in season 4. Note that in season 3, Ben makes a comment to Richard “Remember when we used to celebrate birthdays?” Well, there wouldn’t be any reason to celebrate birthdays if the Others are repeating time every 108 minutes, and thus not aging.
 
1996-1996 (8 years elapse on the island): While time is staying constant on the island, the others, now invisible to the outside world, are able to continue tests in time travel. The Others want to start a new “world” on the island. They want to keep the island in its time loop forever. They believe that with time stopped on the island, the rules of fate won’t apply. But, what’s the only problem? With time suspended, and the fact that fate always kills mothers and babies, the others need to find a way to pro-create on the island. Thus, they recruit Juliet to explore the known pregnancy issue. They also find a prestigious military officer (Kelvin) to press the button, making him think that he’s saving the world.  Meanwhile, the rest of the natives are living out their days while not aging (including Richard, Ben, and all of the others). Â
Because the island is hidden from the outside world, Ben and Richard have to be careful in letting people on and off the island. Furthermore, you can only leave the island through the “special coordinate” that the Black Rock created over a century ago. If you don’t leave through that coordinate, you could end up leaving in the year that the island exists, which would be at some point in the past – this would require you to find a “constant” between island time and real world time in order to survive. Conversely, if you were to try to enter the island from the future into the past island time (assuming you don’t use the special coordinate), then your mind would become “stuck” between the island time and the real world time – also requiring you to find a constant.
Jacob is also a time traveler with Richard and Ben; however, we haven’t seen him in his “alive” state. At some point in time after Jacob goes back in time with Richard and Ben to start the time loop, Jacob dies. However, being that Jacob lived in a previous timeline on the island up to the year 2007, his “spirit” is able to stay alive in order communicate with Ben and Richard.Â
 
1996-2004 (Off-Island Time): While the island is stuck in the year 1996, all of the main characters of LOSTS’ lives play out via flashbacks. We see the initial backstories from their second iteration through time. Keep in mind that when Ben, Richard and Jacob lived out their first timeline to the year 2007, the plane did not crash. The Losties’ flashbacks that we see in seasons 1-3 are taking place as the Others are in the time loop on the island (or the Other’s second iteration through time) – and the flashbacks are designed to represent how fate changed the lives of the Losties to ultimately bring them to the island.Â
For example, in Jack’s original timeline, his father was perfectly normal and didn’t end up getting killed in
1996 (Island Time - around 2001 in Off-Island time):  Richard and Ethan leave the island via the special coordinate, about 5 years into the time loop to carry out a recruiting mission. They pinpoint Juliet to explore the child birth issue on the island. She is genuinely a good person, and will do anything to help her sister. However, she is not aware of the time loop which is occurring on the island, and Ben is using her lack of awareness to keep her at the island. Since Ben was from the future, he knew that Juliet’s husband would get hit by a bus on a certain date – so he strategically timed Richard and Ethan’s visit to be a few days prior to the husband’s accident, knowing that would be a trigger to get Juliet to the island. Also, Ben knew that Juliet’s sister would ultimately get cured of her cancer and have a baby girl. That’s why Ben is so persistent on the fact that if Juliet comes to the island, that they can cure her sister. Thus, Ben isn’t a liar. He knows from his past timeline what is going to happen, and he’s manipulating things based on his knowledge.
 
  
1996 (
 
2004 (Off-Island Time): Oceanic 815 crashes on the island because Desmond didn’t press the button to reset the island time back 108 minutes. Not pressing the button temporarily stopped the time machine from harnessing the power of the magnetic bubble, thus creating an opening over the island the split second Oceanic 815 flew over – 8 years into the island timeloop, and in the year 2004 outside the island. The resulting power of the current flowing through the magnetic field ripped the plane in half. We, as viewers, are left with two huge questions: was it a complete coincidence that the plane just happened to crash over the island leading Locke to not press the button OR did DHARMA somehow engineer this plane crash to happen the exact second that the plane flew over the island, knowing that specific group of people would free the island of its time loop? That, my friends, brings us back to the theme of LOST – did fate cause the plane crash, or had DHARMA staged certain “characters” to ultimately “lead” our heroes to the island… OR was it some combination of both fate and the work of DHARMA?
After the plane crashes, our heroes now exist in the year 1996 on the island, and they have taken on their physical attributes from the year 1996. Locke is healed because he hadn’t gotten into his accident until around 2002 – the same with Rose.  Also, in the original timeline of the universe, Oceanic 815 did NOT crash. Therefore, if the losties ever got off the island and back into the year 2004, fate would deem that they survive at least until 2007 (which was how far the future had been written in Ben’s original timeline).
 
1996 (island time): All of the events in the first 2 seasons of LOST take place. The hatch is discovered and Locke ultimately ends up not pressing the button and Desmond turns the fail safe. The turning of the fail safe destroys the time machine, and now the island time is officially moving again; however, the purpose of the fail safe was to permanently set time back to the original start date of 1996! Now the island is moving at about 8-9 years behind real world time. When Desmond turned the fail safe key, his life flashed before his eyes… Well, actually, he got to “re-live” about 9 years of his life! He got to relive being rescued from the island, witnessing Charlie’s death, and then starting his life up again off the island, meeting Penny, and then ultimately coming back to the island, thus creating a full loop for his life story. Desmond could not escape his fate. The reason only Desmond got to re-live his life was some function of him being the “key turner” OR the fact that he was exposed to the extreme magnetic radiation levels in the hatch (which is referenced in Season 4). I’d venture that he was probably “at the heart of the time machine” thus, he was a little more clairvoyant to his alternate future than say, the folks who were out on the beach. And, that is ultimately how he gets “flashes” of Charlie’s death. Who knows how many times Desmond actually got to “re-live” his life. And, each time Desmond re-lived his life, he saw what would ultimately lead our heroes to getting off the island – and that would be Charlie sending out the message.
 
2004 (Off-Island time, after the plane crash): Widmore stages a fake Oceanic 815 plane crash because he has gotten wind that the plane may have entered the secret DHARMA research island. The fact that the plane can’t be found at the island’s location leads Widmore to believe that time travel does truly exist on the island. Widmore is a rich man, so he wants to use time travel for his own benefit.Â
On another side of the power struggle, there are a few DHARMA folks left in the real world, who also are desperately trying to get back to the island, ultimately to kill Ben – because he is responsible for the disappearance of their research team on the island (aka, the purge). Once DHARMA discovers that Widmore is sending a ship to the island, they round up a small crew to travel to the island as spys: Naomi, Faraday, Lapidus, etc.
Ben is on the third point of this power triangle. He knows that he’s destined to survive until at least 2007 – yet in his original timeline, he didn’t have to deal with this struggle. However, since Ben believes that there is a pre-written future for him, he doesn’t have much fear that Widmore or DHARMA will ever be able to succeed in bringing him down. So, with that, Ben sends Tom off the island to recruit Michael to destroy everyone on the boat: DHARMA and Widmore’s folks. So, from Ben’s perspective, he’s killing two birds with one stone.
1996 (island time): after Desmond is able to finally lead Charlie to his destiny and losties remove the blocking-signal, Jack is able to communicate to the freighter using Naomi’s device. Her device is a specially manufactured DHARMA device that allows Naomi to communicate in the past (on the island) with the future DHARMA in 2004 (on the freighter). Note that even Sayid pointed out how futuristic the device was – it’s futuristic because it’s used to communicate between different times!Â
Daniel has his friend on the freighter launch a payload in order to “test” the special coordinate that allows passage from the island. If the payload had been launched very far away from the special coordinate, it may have arrived as much as 8 years later in time! The fact that the payload arrived 31 minutes suggested to Daniel that they had almost found the exact coordinate. As for the motives of Naomi’s crew - these are working for DHARMA, they are not happy, and they are after Ben. They want to know why DHARMA was wiped out on the island.
 
1996 (Desmond’s timeline): As Sayid and Desmond leave the island, they pass through the time barrier between the island time and the real world time. In other words, Desmond is instantly passing from the island time of 1996 to the future time of 2004. Only Desmond is impacted by the “time transition,”