My wife Sylvia and I just spent a week in Basque country in the north of Spain, in the towns of Bilbao and San Sebastian. I was there to give a talk for “Garum Day” as mentioned in a previous post. For today’s post I’ll run about half of my pictures, with comments. A few of the pictures are by Sylvia, mostly the ones of me.

Our hotel, the Domine, was right across from the famous Gehry-designed Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. Jeff Koons’s Puppy stands right outside the museum. Some people find this work annoying, but I think it’s cool, a definite heir to the work of Warhol. “Puppy” has quite a presence in person. The locals seem to like it, and the flowers (pansies) get replaced three times a year. There’s a certain camouflage-pattern quality to how the patches of flower colors are arranged—more thought went into the work than one might think.

So here I am with the museum itself, the metal skin is titanium, it’s awesome. No one picture really captures the thing.

When we got to Bilbao we were jetlagged, and slept till it was dark, and then we walked around the Guggenheim at night. In the back, the buttresses seem like castle ramparts.

There’s a nice old-town section of Bilbao too, of course, including a church that was at one time part of the city wall. A great rose window in the ceiling of one alcove.

This guy was playing great Spanish-style guitar in the street by the cathedral. And dig the woman hurrying by with her cell phone.

One of our big projects in Bilbao and San Sebastian was seeking out good tapas bars. They call tapas pintxos there, that’s the Basque word for these little canapé-like snacks that are piled on platters in many of the bars. The “tx” is pronounced “tsch”. The place in this photo is the Café-Bar Bilbao, in Plaza Nueva, a really pleasant square. They had good tapas in this place, and I loved the tiles on the walls. But, as any local will tell you the really great tapas is in San Sebastian.

A tricky thing about going out for meals in Spain is the restaurants and cafes mainly serve lunch from 2 to 4 in the afternoon and dinner from 9 to 11 at night. Seriously. Many restaurants aren’t even open before 9 in the evening. It’s a whole different rhythm, but with our jetlag it was a pretty good fit. The thing is, you kind of just do your sedentary evening activities (like lying around reading or cruising the web) before supper.

Bilbao has a little historical and archeological Museo Vasco (Vasco=Basque) museum with an ancient (maybe 200 BC) statue of a pig (or maybe it’s a bull…the locals call it the pig-bull). I couldn’t get into the pig-bulls courtyard to touch him, but he was beautiful as seen through the window with his green grass and the gentle shadow of a little tree beside him.

Another picture of the Guggenheim. The upper pieces of the building—what do you call them, battlements?—blend nicely with the clouds. One of the locals claimed it rains every day in Bilbao. But the sun comes out too.

Our hotel had angled windows that reflected the colors of the Guggenheim and of a big red arch over a bridge next to the Guggenheim.

Here’s the red arch at night with people walking along the river below. Gehry ran a long exhibition hall out of the museum that runs under the bridge and holds this collection of really enormous Richard Serra sculptures, a suite called “The Matter of Time.”

I’d never really liked Serra’s work before this trip—in the past it struck me as overbearing and blank. But it was very inspiring to be walking around inside these giant maze-like spirals with their interesting curvatures—some were spherical in the sense of curving the same way in all directions, some were “toroidal” in the sense of curving in two different directions, like a saddle. There’s amazing echoes inside the Serras as well.

One last photo from Bilbao, and in the next post or two, I’ll show pictures from San Sebastian. What’s this menacing image above? It’s Maman, by Louise Bourgeouis, photographed outside the Guggenheim at night. The jacked-up ISO on my Canon S90’s chip turned the black sky into blue.

And this sculpture is…Mama!?! Eeek. Shades of the spider attack scene in The Incredible Shrinking Man!

[ I will be speaking on some of my experiences involving software at Garum Day, an event in Bilbao, Spain, on Feburary 16, 2011. Part of my talk, and today’s post, will derive from the “Computer Hacker” chapter of my memoir, Nested Scrolls: A Writer’s Life, due out from PS Publishing in April, 2011, and Forge Books in Fall, 2011. ]

My new hacker friend John Walker was a founder and the CEO of a booming Sausalito corporation called Autodesk, and in 1988 he asked me if I’d be interested to come work for him. Autodesk had done very well with their drafting software, and they had a big surplus in the bank. Walker wanted to explore some radically new kinds of software products.

Autodesk’s core business was a product called AutoCAD, an electronic drafting program used worldwide by architects and industrial designers. Walker didn’t want me to work on that. Instead he was starting a small Advanced Technology Division, headed by Eric Lyons, and, for the moment, me and one or two other guys.

My first project was to produce some cellular automata software with Walker. He was an insanely talented programmer. He worked at the level of a grand master in chess, or at the level of a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study. Over Autodesk’s one-week-long Christmas break, Walker wrote an assembly language program that eliminated any need for a special card such as the so-called cellular automaton machine I’d been carrying around.

My role in this was to create some sample CA rules for our new software to run, and to write a manual explaining it all. I got deeply into the task. Walker and I and finished our project over the course of several months. When we were done, we’d produced a slick, boxed software package called CA Lab: Rudy Rucker’s Cellular Automata Laboratory, which sold for about $50 and went on the market in 1989. In those pre-Internet days, some people were actually willing to buy software of this kind on disks. I did demos of it at a number of computer trade fairs, always having to parry the same old question.

“What’s it good for?”

“You stare CAs for hundreds and hundreds of hours and they eat your brain, okay?”

We sold a decent number of copies, and Walker had the idea that we could develop a whole line of software packages for hackers to enjoy. These packages were meant to be like books, but interactive, illustrating new aspects of science. Walker wanted to call the line the Autodesk Science Series.

The second package in the series was James Gleick’s Chaos: The Software, designed to let users play with some of the programs mentioned in Gleick’s best-selling book Chaos.

What was the chaos craze all about? Chaos is another new idea whose true origins lie in computer science. We all know about simple, deterministic processes that do something utterly predictable—like a cannonball flying along a predetermined parabola through the air. We also know about completely messy natural processes, such as the crackling static we might hear on a radio.

Chaotic processes lie midway between the extremes of predictability and randomness. On the one hand, a chaotic process doesn’t settle into any kind of dull and simple pattern. On the other hand, a chaotic process isn’t actually random. It’s generated by some fairly simple and deterministic law of math or physics.

There’s a certain overlap here with Charles Bennett’s notion of logical depth . A chaotic pattern is logically deep in that it’s generated by a concise rule that uses a long computation in order to produce the patterns that you see.

The hard thing to grasp about a messy-looking chaotic process is that it is in fact deterministic. If, for instance, you set about computing the successive digits of pi, you’ll always end up with that same number sequence, 3.1415926… So all the digits of pi are in some sense predetermined. But yet—and this is the subtle point—the digits aren’t predictable, at least not predictable by any rapidly-acting rule of thumb. Yes, someone like Bill Gosper can compute the billionth digit of pi, but he needs to run a powerful computer through quite a few cycles in order to come up with the answer. There are some good modern formulae, bu there’s no quick and dirty pencil-and-a-scrap-of-paper shortcut for finding the billionth digit of pi. It’s going to take you about a billion steps, no matter what. Pi is gnarly, pi is chaotic, pi is logically deep.

In his bestselling Chaos, Gleick talked about some mathematical systems that were known to generate chaotic patterns. Among these were the Lorenz attractor and the Mandelbrot set, and we put simulations of these into the Autodesk Chaos software, along with some other funky things.

Working on this second Autodesk program all through 1989 and 1990 was a lot harder for me than working on CA Lab had been. The big difference was that this time Walker didn’t step in and write the bulk of the code. Instead I worked with another Autodesk programmer, a knowledgeable and irascible guy called Josh Gordon. Truth be told, my own programming skills were still pretty rudimentary. I was in over my head. And Josh was never shy about telling me this. But somehow we struggled to a conclusion and in 1991 we shipped this second product, too.

Later, on my own, I’d write a third science series program called Artificial Life Lab, which would be published as a disk with a book in 1993, not by Autodesk, but by the low-end Waite Group Press in the North Bay. I might mention that, annoyingly, the Waite Group refused to pay me my royalties on the Japanese edition of the book.

The three software packages that I worked on, CA Lab, Chaos, and Artificial Life Lab, are all long out of print by now, but you can download them for free from my website. Note that eventually we had to change the name of CA Lab to Cellab. A company called Computer Associates was threatening to sue us for infringing on their sacred trademarked initials CA. As if cellular automata hadn’t been around much longer than them!