I spend two nights camping in Big Sur! Even did some laptop wireless in the lawn behind the River Inn. Jack Kerouac never had it this good.

Camped at the walk-in Andrew Molera campground, walked on the beach there, also went back to Pfeiffer Beach just like last year. I made a fire from some wood lying near the river, left over from the spring floods.

Went to campsite 8, where I was last year, under the big sycamore. I was alone, a bit lonely, but that's life at my age, isn't it. One's friends are fewer and less agile. It's so great to look up and see a tree! In color. All night it was shades of gray, but with stars hung in it like Xmaslites.

Two teenage California girls slept in a dome tent near mine, I fell asleep to the faint sound of their voices chattering. I heard: “I'm all, 'I hate you.'” “And I go, 'Are you serious?'” “It was sooo good.” “And I'm like, 'What about love?'” A gentle babbling brook, our beloved native patois. I'm glad to be a Californian.

Sunny, though the continual west wind on the beach was in the 40 to 50 mph range. That's a problem. Best to walk southeast on the beach and go up on the bluffs to walk northwest. Here's a “Rocking Stick” movie I made last year of the wind.

I was able to photograph a UFO! I think I can use a UFO in Postsingular. Alerted by the Trinity test, it showed up at Hiroshima and ate the explosion.

I’m revising a set of ideas for the final Chaps 4 & 5 of Postsingular; have been doing this once or twice a day for over a week. Maybe twenty revs in all. Like a sliding blocks puzzle, so many constraints, and every fix puts in new problems. When I came into this phase, I hadn’t realized how hard it was gonna be to wire up all the constraints and making everything meet at the vanishing point.

When I’m unsure it’s easy for me to diddle around with physics and math notions. The harder thing — and what I need perhaps more —is ideas about the characters’ relations with each other, the double crosses, the alliances, the connections.

[Peaceful cove.]

The following is an idea I’m not gonna use called “log log scale” for short.

This idea is actually too unhip to use, as the physics hepcats like Lisa Randall, of “Braneworld” fame, are these days saying that in fact the distance to the next brane is only a few hundred Planck lengths, which is about a decillionth of a meter.

[BEGIN LOG LOG RAP]

There are many alternate versions of our brane or universe. They are separated by eight-dimensional space. Arranged along this single axis, a 1D continuum of possible worlds.

Suppose the unrolled eighth dimension stretches out way past the parallel brane. Punctures it and keeps going. So then the precise eight-dimensional distance of the parallel brane is an interesting piece of information.

[I made a “Talking Branches” movie of these branches kind of talking to each other.]

In order to jump to the Mirrorbrane you need to know the precise value of the distance K to that world, it acts as a jump-code. And I want the jump code to be a million digits long, so that it’s a big deal for Chu to remember it.

[This is that same Pfeiffer Beach gate that Bela Kis surfs through in Mathematicians in Love to get to La Hampa. Click here to see the “La Hampa Gate” movie I made last year.]

I also want the scaling factor S between the our brane and the Mirrorbrane to be the comfortable-to-visualize number 6.

And now I relate K to S.

The branes can be quite distant from each other in the eighth dimension. When you hop to a different brane, you experience a scaling effect by a factor of S. The value of S when going from one brane to another is coupled to the value of the interbrane distance K along the eighth dimension, as measured in meters (or, if you prefer, in Planck lengths). We view K as having a sign, so as to distinguish between the two directions that can be taken along the eighth dimensional axis. The law connecting S and K is:

S = alpha * log ( log (K) )

[I climbed this cool hill above Pfeiffer Beach; this is my fave pic of this outing. Monterey pines have these knobby little cones.]

The alpha is just an unimportant conversion factor with a magnitude on the order of 1; it corrects for whatever measuring unit you happen to use. The real action is in the log log operation. What this does is to go up two levels in the exponent stack and return the exponent that lives there.

[Dig this naturally occuring cellualar automaton.]

Thus if K is googol = 10^100 = 10^(10^2), then S ~ 2.

If K is googolplex = 10^googol = 10^10^100, then S ~ 100.

Suppose K is a number so big that it’s a million digits long, that is, K is 10^million = 10^(10^6). Then S ~ 6.

[A yucca cactus; you see lots of these higher up on the slopes above Sur. This year I didn't feel like much upward hiking, I'm still slightly weakend by that month-long flu. I didn't used to stay sick so long. Have I gotten weaker, or are the viruses stronger?]

Note that the distance K to a universe very similar to ours is exceedingly large, as it’s most unusual for two branes to closely match. In fact I suppose the distance between Mainbrane and Mirrorbrane to be on the order of millionplex or 10^million.

[END OF LOG LOG RAP]

Still more pictures! This one above harks back to a vision I had when I stopped believing everything is a computation and I was standing in the Big Sur River tired of working on my Lifebox tome, and I was like, “This isn’t computation, this is water.” I mentioned that last year already. Took the picture again anyway.

The stairway to heaven, yes. When I was there last year I made a 25 Meg “Singing To Eddy” movie of myself singing to the eddie, and I was looking for the “same” eddy, but didn't find it, but here's 's another movie from last year of the eddie, relating it to the whole world, it's an unconscionable 33 Meg. the “Universally Computing Eddy” movie. As with all of these, the sound is a bit blown out, and you have to let it run jerkily once and only then can you click and play it at normal speed. Yes, I'm a geek, but I'm a happy one.

I love these sweet little country roads.

You have to wade the knee-deep river to get to this nice meadow called the Dairy meadow. It’s like a museum of gnarly trees.

When I saw this I was so grateful to be alive. Here's a “Surf and Mountain” movie showing how the surf and the mountains fit together.

Vlog it, brah.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 9th, 2006 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.