There's a nice article about my artist friend Dick Termes in Science News

As I understand it, Termes's painting method consists of getting a spherical canvas, standing in front of it, and painting onto the canvas what you see on the other side of the sphere, in front of you. Termes does not work by painting what is behind him onto the sphere, all the while looking over his shoulder. He paints what is in front of him. Once he has finished a patch corresponding to what is in front of him, how does he add what is, say, to the left of the patch in front of him? He moves around the sphere to the right a little so that he is now looking directly at the area that was formerly to the left. And he rotates the sphere to the right so as to expose the blank part of the sphere canvas to the left of what he already painted.

Mathematically, this is equivalent to central projection of the world onto the inner surface of the sphere, followed by eversion. By eversion I mean this: turn the sphere inside out. This way the correctly projected image which was visible from the inside is now visible from the outside.

I went to visit Dick when I was working on Saucer Wisdom in 1997. The painting of mine shown above depicts Frank Shook, Rudy, and an alien. Recalling this, I just posted my Saucer Wisdom notes, a cool 50,000 words of PDF for your reading pleasure.

Here's a picture of my friend Greg Gibson “being” my Saucer Wisdom hero Frank Shook.

Down into Los Gatos for a spot of Xmas shopping. Lots of lines, as in the P. O., but it’s somehow soothing to be part of the hive mind, to be sharing common activity.

When I first moved to California and walked around Los Gatos in December, I was amazed. I still am, kind of. The first year I was here my father-in-law bought me a surfboard!

The ultra-commercial artist Thomas Kinkade lives near here and has painted a couple of Los Gatos scenes, one near this spot. Kind of a nice picture, actually. Available in spime form, in small and large sizes, signed and unsigned, with a variety of frames.

One store had a kind of terrifying Santa Claus robot who sings and dances if you get close to him. “Ho ho ho, spare change?” Is this the 21st Century, or what? Like Bender from Futurama.

My head is warped by the shop windows.

Yesterday I found a link on boingboing.net to a video of Bruce Sterling giving a talk in Munich.

So I pissed away a rather enjoyable hour watching it.

It's kind of hard to sit in your computer chair and not do anything for an hour, so I got my yoga mat and lay on the floor for most of it. I ate some cereal out of a dish on the floor like a dog. At the feet of the Ascended Master of Industrial Design.

He's talking about what he calls spimes, he spoke on this at SIGGRAPH as well. BoingBoing has the text of this speech online.

The flash is that every object CAN have an URL address. The realworld tech for this is something called an RFID (pronounced Arfid] a little chip that sings out an ID number when scanned by an RFID reader within about ten meters. No more lost glasses.

[My addition: The scifi way to do it would be to have an intrinsic ID based on an object's measurements and quantum state. If the scifi case, a spimeID reader would be something you'd have to pick up outta the universal wave fuction.]

A big practical nearterm downside of RFID Bruce mentions is if Americans have to put them in their passports, as has been proposed. Duh? Another downside Bruce mentions is the the Beagle Boys skimming data to find where the expensive loot is.

He ends the talk with what he's been know to call “the standard SF move of transcendence.” Now each object has a life history, like a person. And therefore a soul? Dear objects!

Of course objects always did have a spacetime trajectory that God/the cosmos can see. But now it's a humanized soul. I think of the story of Byron the Bulb in Gravity's Rainbow.

Might one write a story from the point of view of two objects? A two-cans story instead of a two-guys story. In this context, forget not Phil Dick's “The Short Happy LIfe of the Brown Oxford.”

Or a hive mind could emerge from the objects? Stealthy scuttling of an empty sardine tin.

Or we discover what I've always suspected, that objects ARE regularly disappearing into the fourth dimension, and now it becomes known. Big Act One reveal for that.

It was a good show, always a pleasure to see Bruce in action. His delivery is such that he continually sounds like he's making fun of what he's saying, mocking it, wrapping it in irony, and by thus throwing the listener off balance, he keeps the upper hand. A rhetoritician sublime.

Here's an excerpt from section 4.7 of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul which I was revising yesterday. The book will be out in Fall, 2005.

Consider the following bit of dialectical analysis.

• Universal automatism proposes a thesis:

Your mental processes are a type of deterministic computation.

• Your sense of having a free will entails a seeming antithesis:

Your thoughts and actions aren’t predictable.

• Wolfram advocates a beautifully simple synthesis:

Your mind’s computation is both deterministic and unpredictable.

The synthesis is supported by the following conjecture, implicit in Wolfram's A New Kind of Science.

• Principle of Computational Unpredictability (PCU). Most naturally occurring complex computations are unpredictable.

The workings of your mind are unpredictable in the sense that, when presented with a new input of some kind, you’re often quite unable to say in advance how you’ll respond to it.

Someone offers you a new job. Do you want it or not? Right off the bat, there’s no way to say. You have to think over the possibilities, mentally simulate various outcomes, feel out your emotional responses to the proposed change. Someone shows you a painting. Do you like it? Hold on. You have to think about the image, the colors, the mental associations before you decide. Someone hands you a menu. What do you want to eat? Just a minute. You need to look into your current body feelings, your memories of other meals, your expectations about this particular restaurant.

We say a computation is unpredictable if there is no exponentially faster short-cut for finding out in advance what the computation will do with arbitrary inputs. When faced with an unpredictable computation, the only reliable way to find out what the computation does with some input is to go ahead and start up the computation and watch the states that it steps through.

Once again, suppose I’m presented with some new input. Since my thoughts are unpredictable, the only way to find out what I’m going to end up thinking about the input, is to go ahead and think until my mind is made up. And this means that, although my conclusion is in fact predetermined by how my mind works, neither I nor anyone else has any way of predicting what my conclusion will be. Therefore my thought process feels like free will.

I seem to be a fluttering leaf.