My demonic computer hacker pal John Walker has made a one-year-long movie of the view out one of his windows in Lignieres, Switzerland, shooting a picture a day and assembling them into a film called Les Quatre Saisons.

[Photos from the Pride Parade in Santa Cruz on Sunday.]

I’ve been working on ideas for the final chapters of my novel Postsingular. I have an issue with there being two parallel worlds (the Mainbrane and the Mirrrobrane), and I want them similar but not too similar.

One way to have the worlds be similar yet different might be that their histories diverged at a specific time. I’d pick 1946 (my birth year) or soon thereafter. After the first atomic bombs went off, a UFO showed up on Earth in the Mirrorbrane, it was a survey drone drawn by the blasts, and it released something that upset the symmetry between the Mainbrane and the Mirrorbrane, at least in the region of Earth. Power chord!

The UFO put a lazy eight patch into the computation that generates Earth on the Mirrorbrane, but not onto the computation that generates Earth in the Mainbrane. Why the one and not the other? Maybe the UFO just happened to be from a Mirrorbrane world. Maybe there are more lazy eight worlds in the Mirrorbrane and we’re one of the earlier ones in the Mainbrane.

The eighth dimension, which has a very small Planck-length-like extension in the Mainbrane, becomes stretched to infinite length in the Mirrorbrane, although the infinite length is metricized so as to be finite. (Ph. D. = Piled High and Deep, .)

I will use the phrase “lazy eight” to speak of this change. It combines: eighth dimension, infinity as ∞, and the fact that infinity is “right here” in the eighth dimension as an ubiquitous lazy-man’s enlightenment.

It’s like you took the vanishing point of a painting and made it be at every point in space. The point at infinity, is present everywhere. The accessible point at infinity acts as an entanglement channel that connects every point with every other point in synchronicity.

How does lazy eight come to the Mirrorbrane?

Let’s just look at the historical record.

1945 A-Bomb. On July 16, 1945, in the desert north of Alamogordo, New Mexico, the first nuclear test took place, code-named “Trinity,”

1946 UFOs. In 1946, there were over 2000 reports of unidentified aircraft in the Scandinavian nations, along with isolated reports from France, Portugal, Italy and Greece. The post World War II UFO phase in the United States began with a reported sighting by American businessman Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947.

1946 Gnarly SF. Rudy is born.

1947 Transistor. On 22 December, 1947, William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain succeeded in building the first practical point-contact transistor at Bell Labs.

1947 LSD. Sandoz Laboratories begins marketing LSD (discovered in 1938 by Albert Hoffman) under the trade name “Delysid” as a psychiatric cure-all.

1949 Computer. The Baby Manchester programmable electronic computer.

1954 Turing’s death. Alan Mathison Turing (June 23, 1912 – June 7, 1954) dies of cyanide poisoning. What if he instead invented psychic powers and teleported himself to San Francisco? [Thanks to Peter Norvig for suggesting the idea of an alternate history where Turing lives happily on SF, which has been gay friendly since post-WWII.]

It all fits!

I think I’m gonna use Turing and not the UFO. The British SS is closing in on Alan, trying to shove that poison apple in his mouth, and his morphogenesis work pays off with the ability to do lazy eight in his head! Solves the Halting Problem?

I wonder if I can work this Aztec marcher in too…