Week 2 Workshop: Siphoning

Why your CCS needs siphoning, how to turn physical books into something you can siphon, and your first run at the process

2 August 2027

In this week’s lab you will:

  1. Why siphoning is required at all? ➜ Improve and update training corpus
  2. What is siphoning (overview from lecture)
  3. How to do it ➜ book destruction

Introduction

In lectures you were told to bring in old books to siphon as an example.

Just as a reminder, siphoning is a way of enhancing and updating the knowledge of your CCS in a non-invasive way. One downside is that siphoning takes quite a lot of time as it is recommended that you look at what you want to siphon (e.g. an artwork, a page of a textbook, a movie) for a second or more (depending on how dense the information is) before moving onto the next thing you want to siphon. This might look like turning a page, looking at the page for a second, then turning to the next page and so on or looking at a frame of a movie for 30 seconds and then advancing to the next frame. Of course, in terms of movies and frame-by-frame content, you can easily just retime them to run at say 12 frames per second (or slower). However, for books automating this process is a bit more difficult as we’d preferably want to just have them as a pdf document that you could scroll through, but how to do this conversion with physical books (like the ones you should have bought in)? This is what you’ll be doing today as well as practicing siphoning — a tedious but necessary process.

Task 1: Converting physical books to digital documents

Physical books are very easy to find compared to digital versions and some books may not even have digital incarnations. Hence, to convert your physical books you will:

  1. Use the provided paper guillotines (as a tutor about this), we’ll slice off the spine of the book. Be careful and you may need to apply quite a bit of pressure if the book is thick or the pages are thick.
  2. Once you have a stack of pages, then you can put all of them in the paper feed tray of the scanner portion of the various printers that are around in the buildings (again as a tutor if you can’t find any/don’t know where they are).
  3. That’s it, the scanning process will work quickly and well, and you’ll have a pdf in no time. Feel free to dispose of the pages once you’re finished.

Task 2: Your first siphoning

Siphoning is a very simple process. Although again, as we’ve talked about before it works best where there’s less noise on the wire. So, try not to think of anything whilst you go through each page within the pdf spending about a second on each page. If you have an auto-scroller or similar software, you can automate this process so all you have to do is just sit there with your eyes open and let the CCS do the work.

Siphoning works in a way similar to how you make memories and remember things, except instead of these memories being available to you they are made highly available to the CCS. Again, it’s an easy non-invasive way of updating, reskilling, and enhancing the knowledge that your CCS already comes with.

Remember to ask a tutor if you’re having trouble, it can be difficult to concentrate for that long, but it’s a necessary process.

Bonus Task: Siphon at home

Feel free to siphon other media at home, it’ll help with your assignments as you’ll have a better understanding of the techniques and so on. Remember, siphoning isn’t a passive thing like just watching a movie or perhaps reading a book, it’s a very active thing — you must ensure that your thoughts are clear when you are siphoning in order to get the most out of it. It’s difficult, but practice makes perfect!