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…
June 5th, 2006 at 8:50 pm
The brains of Alan Turing in the body of a busty transexual. Is she a top or a bottom? I’m referrring to quantum states, of course.
June 6th, 2006 at 5:09 am
There’s a statue of Turing sitting on a bench in the park near the gay village in Manchester. I used to walk past him nearly every night on my way home, and every time I saw him sitting in the gloom twenty yards from the canal I’d expect him to get up and walk off. Never did, of course, just sat there looking forlornly at an apple. There’s circuit boards and components from the mark one scattered about the lecture theatres in the CS department, all of them in big shiny glass cases. Some of the components now look wonderfully exotic in these days of millions of transistors per die and multi-layer PCBs and surface mounting and stupid-complexity – like gargoyles on buildings, they’re dated, old hat, superseded and probably couldn’t be replicated without craftsmen who aren’t around anymore, and so shan’t be seen again. Manchester’s full of Turingana if you know where to look!
June 6th, 2006 at 8:24 am
Yea, I figured the same: that would be Turing after years of hormone therapy, yoga, and healthy living in San Francisco.
But you could ascertain that it was really him by doing a (all together now) Turing Test!
June 6th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
I hadn’t quite realized that Alan Turing becomes “La Azteca” when I posted the entry, so thanks for nudging me that way.
In reality, La Azteca’s pelvis seemed wide and I’d thought she might be genetically female. But maybe that’s just an illusion. Hormones can give you that sought-after feninizing layer of subcutaneous fat that so enhances the illusion. I guess she’s TS.
Over in the Mirrorbrane, Turing of course left his body when it died of old age about year 2001, this despite his lazy eight psychic powers. But his software lives on, it’s called, indeed, the Turing Imitation. And I figure the Turing Imitation from time to time makes himself a body of convenience, possibly cobbling it together from diverse items, maybe Frankenstein style of human parts, or maybe like those paintings of “Harvest” as a congeries of fruits and veggies or whatever comes to hand. And this can be La Azteca, who appears perhaps to sing in a Parliament/Funkadelic-like band fronted by Lama Jawobul.
June 6th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
wow rudy when i knew i wasn’t crazy & it was just some sort of ray trying to increase my stratifacation of the buddha turd – i knew there was intelligent life in the universe next door –
really good work & maybe its really 8 on it’s like = is 11 if 8 is H then K maybe 11 –p–
love from KT
Gamma
June 6th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
wow rudy when i knew i wasn’t crazy & it was just some sort of ray trying to increase my stratifacation of the buddha turd – i knew there was intelligent life in the universe next door –
really good work & maybe its really 8 on it’s like = is 11 if 8 is H then K maybe 11 –p–
love from KT
Gamma
June 7th, 2006 at 8:36 am
Rudy, have you ever heard about the composer Alban Berg’s process of encoding names and phrases into his music? I was listening to Frank Zappa’s sexually aroused gasmask and wondering if another gasmask would hear that as ‘come and git me, honey.’ Then I began to wonder if Zappa had embedded any info into his music, or solos?
Well, if Zappa were kiqqed all his solos would be full of info, wouldn’t they? Not only metanovels but metamusic as well? Maybe even layer upon layer of data if we could only understand it? This has lots of singular implications. Perhaps only a modified dog could hear them?
Great, now I’ve got “Peaches en Regalia” stuck in my head all day.