We were in San Francisco today, taking down the paintings from my show at Borderlands Café. They still have some high-quality signed prints of my paintings on sale at Borderlands Books next door. In the photo below, note “Turing and the Skugs” on the wall.

It was nice to be in the city for the day, on the loose. We went to see a great print show at the Legion of Honor Art Museum out on the cliffs near the Golden Gate Bridge. The show was called Japanesque—it’s about Japanese prints in the time of French Impressionism. (The French used the word “Japonisme.”)

The big show-stopper is a nearly complete set of Katsushika Hokusai’s series of woodcuts, each in about eight colors, 36 Views of Mount Fuji , completed in the 1830s. The most famous of these is The Great Wave, but I’ve posted a picture of Asakusa Temple in Edo. Actually you can see rather good images of all 36 prints on Wikipedia! The show also has an “answer” series by French artist Henri Riviere, 36 Views of the Eiffel Tower.

I wandered into the porcelain gallery and saw this plate with Adam and Eve. Eve looks like the Headless Horseman carrying her head. Porcelain galleries are kind of interesting, so brittle and polychrome, quite unlike painting galleries.

Outside the wintry sky looked like…a Japanese woodcut, with printed areas of pink among the blues, framed by the the Art Nouveau curves of the Monterey pines.

Naturally, Sylvia and I pondered creating a series, 36 Views of the Golden Gate Bridge. In this vein I should mention the wonderful California artist Tom Killion, and his series of prints, 28 Views of Mount Tamalpais, views of and on a mountain just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Killion’s also published a related book with the poet Gary Snyder.

On the writing front, I keep rewriting a long journal note called, “What’s the Plot Again?” about my plans for Turing & Burroughs. This material is a little too detailed and preliminary to put up in a blog post—I’ll only quote the start:

I’m getting close to being a third of the way through Turing & Burroughs, and I need to think about the plot some more. Once again I’ve reached what the writer Robert Sheckley used to call a “black point.” I’m not at all sure where to go.

So, okay, fall back on craft. Around the end of the first third, a book needs a conflict, a bump, an unforeseen development. So far it’s been pretty straight-ahead. Turing learns to tweak biocomputations, he creates a skug, the skug can convert humans into shapeshifting skuggers. Now the plot thickens. Somehow.

I have picked out a car for Alan and his companions to drive, heading from Palm Beach to Los Alamos, New Mexico. It’s a 1955 Pontiac Catalina that I found for sale online.

It goes almost without saying that the skugs are, being 1950s mutants, really into nukes, and therefore into visiting the Los Alamos National Laboratories. They plan to get some kind of boost from nuclear power or from a nuclear bomb. Alan takes advantage of his new friend Ned Strunk’s Los Alamos connections—Ned underwent training there to be a nuclear-reactor tech for the Nautilus submarine.

I think Alan, posing as a woman, gets hired to work at Los Alamos as, get this, a programmer. Stanislaw Ulam, mathematician and co-inventor of the hydrogen bomb, had a woman assistant who coded up his nonlinear wave equation simulation for him. “We wish to thank Miss Mary Tsingou for efficient coding of the problems and for running the computations on the Los Alamos MANIAC machine,” reads a footnote in E. Fermi, J. Pasta, and S. Ulam, “Studies of Nonlinear Problems”, published in 1955, and based on work done in 1952.

This paper is dear to my heart, I spent a number of years creating the cellular automata package Capow (still free online for Windows), for viewing Ulam’s creations. See also my own paper on this topic, “Continuous Valued Cellular Automata for Nonlinear Wave Equations,” co-authored with the mathematician Daniel N. Ostrov.

Alan becomes Ulam’s programmer, and works on nonlinear wave equations for use in creating, I dunno, small hydrogen bombs that fit inside lightbulbs for illuminating the home? Perhaps, along the way, Alan so improves his skug technology that skugs can be inhabited not only by human minds but by aethereal, invisible beings. And maybe in a Pied Piper ending, Alan creates some bomb-that’s-not-a-bomb that lures all the skugs to their demise like moths to aflame, like the children of Hameln into the cave beneath the mountain.

“Getting a little skuggy in here, isn’t it?”

I’m still working on my novel, Turing & Burroughs, one scene at a time.

I need a word for the people who’ve been taken over by skugs. They aren’t exactly skugs themselves; I think of a pure skug as being one of those globs that doesn’t necessarily have any human personalities inside it. When a skug eats you, you are a skug, yes, but you’re also to some extent yourself, in that you can look like yourself and act like yourself.

“Turing and the Skugs”, 40″ x 30″ inches, Oct 2010, Oil on canvas.” Click for larger version. The painting itself will be on display as part of my show at Borderlands Cafe on Valencia St. in SF, CA, until December 1. More info on my paintings site.]

I’ll go with skugger. “He’s a skugger,” sounds right. “She’s a skugger, too.” There’s an echo of slugger, which suggests a heavy hitter. I do like the er ending, which suggests an on-going activity. Like “bopper” in the Wares. Bopping it up. Skugging it up.

Speaking of nomenclature, I think I’ll use skug as a verb to describe the act of turning someone into a skugger. “They skugged her.” “I got skugged, too, man. It’s great.” I think of the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s song, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”. Here’s a verse with “skug” instead of “stone,” and with the second to last line changed for the sake of the rhyme.

Well, they’ll skug ya when you’re walkin long the street
They’ll skug ya when you’re tryin to keep your seat
They’ll skug ya when you’re walkin on the floor
They’ll skug ya when you’re walkin to the door
But I would not feel like such a grub
Everybody must get skugged

We can suppose that the skuggers like to band together. They’re an endangered minority, at least for now. And I think that it’ll soon be clear that they’re bent on world domination, as befits their role as objective correlatives for the 50s bogeymen: intellectuals, artists, racial minorities, communists, dope-fiends and homosexuals. “Everybody must get skugged.”

As the book goes on, I want Alan to realize that the skugs have very powerful minds, more so than he anticipated. Their high intelligence is due to (i) parallelism, that is, they’re using each organic cell as a computing unit and (ii) connectivity, that is, via radio waves, they’re in touch with each other, and with as much of the human data-base as is being broadcast on radio, TV and telephone.

When imagining the skug experience of hearing all the radio stations at once, I think of Patti Smith’s album, Radio Ethiopia…

I’m thinking about the mathematician/computer-scientist/physicist Stephen Wolfram today, as his company just released version 8 of the Mathematica program, a multi-faceted mathematics-helper program; it simplifies and solves algebraid equations and generates very nice graphs, among otheg things. Wolfram’s latest wrinkle is that Mathematica now (to some extent) understands natural language. So you can ask it, for instance, to draw something for you without having to use the precise Mathematica-language symbolism. Wolfram has a blog post about this, “The Free-Form Linguistics Revolution in Mathematica.”

[Some of today’s photos are partly drawn from a large Thanksgiving Day gathering we went to in the Mission yesterday, organized in part by my son Rudy.]

Over the years, Wolfram’s had a huge influence on my thinking. Indeed, my 2006 tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul was to a large extent inspired by Wolfram’s even fatter 2002 book, A New Kind of Science

As the years go by, I’m a little surprised by how slowly our new ideas seem to be sinking in. It’s as if people never will understand that a deterministic system can be unpredictable, and that computer science has pretty well established this as empirical fact. Or that natural systems in particular, being computation universal, are inherently unpredictable. So the media is always furiously casting about for the proximate cause of the latest disaster.

Re. my impatience, Wolfram recently emailed, “It will come. But I think the bigger the concepts, the longer the time needed for humans to absorb. So we’re mostly just learning that these are in fact big concepts (even though to you and me they now seem pretty obvious)…”

For today’s post, I thought I’d summarize Wolfram’s tenets once again, drawing on a version that I recently wrote up for my forthcoming autobiography, Nested Scrolls: A Writer’s Life. The context of this passage is that I’m recalling my mixed success in proselytizing Wolfram’s teachings, as presented in his New Kind of Science book. Some audiences had been actively hostile.

First of all, Wolfram was arguing that we can think of any natural process as a computation, that is, you can see anything as a deterministic procedure that works out the consequences of some initial conditions. Fine. Instead of saying the world is made of atoms or of curved space or of natural laws, let’s see what happens if we say it’s made of computations. This notion gets some people’s goat, but if you’ve hung around computers a lot, it seems semi-reasonable.

Secondly, Wolfram made the point that, by studying cellular automata, he’d learned that there are basically three kinds of computations. The simple ones peter out or repeat themselves. The pseudorandom ones generate a seething mess. And the interesting computations lie in between. They generate patterns that seem to have some kind of structure to them, but they don’t repeat themselves or turn boring.

This second idea is simply a taxonomic observation about the kinds of things we find in the world. The in-between computations are akin to what we might earlier have called chaotic processes. I myself came to call them “gnarly computations.” So, if everything is to be a computation, then pretty much all of the interesting patterns in nature and biology are gnarly computations. Fine.

Thirdly, Wolfram argued that all gnarly computations are in some sense equally powerful, that is, given enough time and space, any given gnarly computation can in fact emulate any of the others. If everything is an equally-powerful computation, then we’re all in some sense the same.

Note that a computer doesn’t have to be made of wires and silicon chips in a box. A cloud can emulate an oak tree, a flickering flame can model a human mind, a dripping faucet can behave like the stock market. And we’re not talking about vague, metaphorical resemblances here, we’re talking about mathematically precise bit-for-bit representations. (I wrote about this idea in my recent pair of novels Postsingular and Hylozoic.)

For someone who’d become as steeped in computer science as I had, this third point also seemed reasonable, but outsiders had trouble making sense of it—and in their confusion, many of them grew angry.

Fourthly, Wolfram said that gnarly computations are unpredictable in the specific sense that there are no quick short-cut methods for finding out what these kinds of computations will do. The only way, for instance, to really find out what the weather is going to be like tomorrow is to wait twenty-four hours and see. The only way for me to find out what I’m going to put into the final paragraph-sized “scroll” of Nested Scrolls is to finish writing the book.

Wolfram’s fourth point is very nearly provable on the basis of some well-known theorems from computer science but, again, many scientists don’t like it. They still subscribe to the pipedream of finding some magical tiny theory that will allow them to make quick pencil-and-paper calculations about every aspect of the future. They haven’t taken to heart the essentially chaotic nature of the world. We can’t control; we can’t predict—but even so we can hope to ride the waves.

We were out at Four Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz yesterday with my big brother, Embry.

I shot some nice photos, using my pocket Canon S90 in RAW mode, and editing the RAW images in Adobe Lightroom. The camera’s RAW images have 14 bits per pixel instead of the default 8 that JPGs have, that is, so RAW images have, I guess, sixty-four times as many possible shades per pixel, which helps, especially in recovering stuff from underexposed or blown-out areas.

This is an interesting shot of scattering gulls, although weakened by being a detail of a larger shot. This is where having your four-pound SLR along could kick it up a notch. But I don’t geek it that hard most days. A flock of maybe a thousand gulls were sitting on the beach, all their little stick legs parallel lines above the sand. Caw, skirl, skree.

I’m still getting used to using Lightroom, it’s a different paradigm than I’m accustomed to with my old Photoshop workflow. In Lightroom now, I shoot in RAW mode, save this as a “digital negative,” or “DNG,” then tweak this image as much as I like in Lightroom, which has a very nice “Developer” module. The original bytes are unchanged, but you see previews of the tweaked image in Lightroom and you can export 16-bit TIFF or 8-bit JPG files as if you were making “prints” from the digital negative.

Here’s your Thanksgiving turkey with barnacle garnish.

Certain of the more heavy-duty Photoshop tweak tools aren’t available in Lightroom, so once in a while I might export a TIFF and do a further tweak in Photoshop. But this isn’t happening as often as I thought it would. I can pretty much live in Lightroom now.

I love Four Mile Beach, it’s a favorite spot, usually fairly uncrowded. On big wave days you’ll see a lot of surfers—the surfers are generally friendly or indifferent to mere beach walkers.

Embry spotted this cute little crab. For crustacean-ovores: the big California Dungeness crabs are in the supermarkets now, we got a bunch of them for a family dinner the other night. Really good.

My son’s chickens are a little uneasy these days, but they’re safe. It’s great so see the granddaughters collecting their eggs.

My father, the first of the four Embry Cobb Ruckers, loved William Saroyan’s book, The Human Comedy, and often quoted from a passage where a four-year-old boy finds a fresh-laid egg. “He looked at it a moment, picked it up, brought it to his mother and very carefully handed it to her, by which he meant what no man can guess and no child can remember to tell.”

The years flow by; the holidays come at us like tracer bullets. We advance towards the dark. And sometimes it’s still sunny.