I remember when the Berlin Wall fell, and suddenly we realized that the dreaded Soviet empire had collapsed. The Soviets were nothing more than a bunch of people, not all that well organized, and not nearly so powerful as we’d feared.

The same thing happened to the right wing of American politics last night. They’re a paper tiger, an artificial threat that’s been propped up too long by the media. Their reign is over.

“Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

Suddenly African-Americans look a little different—all along they’ve been feeling and thinking the same things as the rest of us, and never mind what anyone thought before. It’s their country too. Our hearts are opening. We’re one weave.

And soon we can get to work fixing things up!

Hallelujah.

Tuesday is the big election day we’ve been waiting for. It’s finally our chance to be heard!

Help the Democrats take over the Presidency, the Senate and the House! Let’s get our country working again. Let’s heal the damages of the last eight years.

And don’t assume the Democrats can win without you. Remember 2000 and 2004? A close election can be stolen. If we’re going to win, we have to win by a landslide.

We can have a free country again—if we want it.

Vote Democratic on Tuesday.

First a couple of links. I recently met a San Jose photographer called Gary Parker, who does some interesting work, including portraits of people with their pets and photos of little people.

Gary has a show of his photos at the Bear Coffee shop on Santa Cruz Avenue, in Los Gatos, with an opening last night, and some of his friends came by, including a master pumpkin-carver.

My guru-like friend Ralph Abraham has been working on his website, posting some thoughts about chaos and the stock market crash, and making all of his past articles available, including an intriguing paper called “Mathematics and the Psychedelic Revolution,” which exposes some of the hidden history of Silicon Valley. Far from being a herd of nerds, a very large number of computer graphics pioneers were ecstatic stoners.

And now for another excerpt from my memoir-in-progress, Nested Scrolls.

When I started Swarthmore College in 1963, I’d been planning to major in philosophy or in literature, even though Pop kept urging me to study something more technical. “You can read all those books on your own,” he insisted. “Read those books, of course, but learn some science too. Be a Renaissance man!”

Although my natural bent was to disagree with Pop, after a couple of semesters, I decided he was right. I wasn’t getting much out of the philosophy and literature courses that I was taking. I asked my philosophy professor about the meaning of life, and he deluged me with double-talk. And the English lit professor wanted us to read unbearable stuff like Pamela or Vanity Fair. I found these books so dull that, try as I might, I couldn’t even read their summaries in our library’s treasured resource: Masterplots, a twelve volume set with the plot stories of the world’s finest literature.

Before long, I found it too much trouble to even read the summaries in Masterplots, but by then it had became a running joke among the other introductory literature students always to check out the Masterplots volumes under the name Rudy Rucker.

At least in science you didn’t have to read a whole lot of crap. I had a vague notion of majoring in physics and inventing an antigravity machine, but physics turned out not be my strong suit either. After a grueling semester of Mechanics and Wave Motion—in which I tried unsuccessfully to make a hologram with a laser—I was off the physics track for good.

And so I majored in math. I had some difficulties with my initial calculus course, some basic issues in understanding what we were even talking about. But then I got a fellow student named Arnie to help me. He explained the mysterious “chain rule” to me, talked about the infinitesimal quantities dx, dy and dz in a relaxed, cozy tone, as if were discussing the doings of some little gnomes that lived beneath is floor. From then on, math came more easily for me. I liked that there were so amazingly few brute facts to memorize. Given that everything followed logically from a few basic assumptions, there wasn’t all that much you had to learn.

What else did I learn? A little bit about modern art. And I took a German literature class where we read Kafka’s Metamorphosis in the original German, which allowed me to understand that Kafka had meant for his stories to be in some sense funny. But other than that, most of what I learned was from the other students.

I liked talking to my friends, socializing with the girls, walking around the grassy campus, and exploring the nearby Crum woods. I was in with the in-crowd of our class, and I reveled in that. In grade school and high school I’d been more of an outsider.

With my steady stream of C grades being mailed home semester after semester, Pop sensed how little work I was doing. “It’s like you’re sitting at a lavish banquet table, Rudy. And all you’re doing is eating a sandwich that you brought in your pocket.”

Concerned as he was, Pop even paid me a surprise visit one day—appearing in my dorm room in the fall of my senior year. It ended up being the best day together that we ever had. He was accepting and non-judgmental. We walked around the campus talking about the meaning of life. I even took him down to the Crum woods and showed him the impressively high train trestle that crossed the creek.

We boys liked to walk out to the middle of the trestle—it had two tracks so that, in principle, even if a train came by, you could go to the other side, and if, by some horrible fluke, two trains came at once, you could lie down flat and hold the ties, not that anyone I knew had ever executed this drastic maneuver, although we talked about it a lot, worrying that the train might have a dangling chain that hung to within millimeters of the ties.

Pop was being such a sport on our big day together that he even walked onto the trestle with me. For those few hours, it was like we were fellow college boys. He really didn’t care much about proprieties or appearances. He just wanted me to be okay. He didn’t want me to fall off the edge.

I finished a new painting yesterday, “Romeo and Juliet.” It has kind of a New Yorker cover look to it. It emerged from a starting pattern of abstract squares that I painted to use up the paint left over from “Owl Creek.”

For I think the first time, I did the whole one-point perspective thing, drawing lines to the vanishing point, so as to determine the lines of the buildings’ edges. Unless you have buildings or streets or other man-made structures, you can get along pretty well without formal perspective most of the time.

Dig how Romeo has the Moon inside his room!

The composition is inspired by Wayne Thiebaud’s street scenes of the 1980s, not that I’d care to compare our work side to side! Something very cool about Thiebaud is that he goes beyond Renaissance perspective and uses multiperspective, that is, he has different parts of his paintings be converging in on totally different vanishing points.

My friend Jon Pearce came over to paint with me…he’s new to the game, but he had fun. He called his picture “Encroaching Weirdness,” picking that phrase from something I said.

On a different front, here’s a video segment of Bill Gosper giving a computer-animated talk on some of his discoveries on topics such as pi, the Pythagorean theorem, and cosmically large simulations of the Game of Life. The sound quality totally eats it—failing to capture the cracked, manic energy of the G-man’s voice—but the graphics are lovely.

Gosper, by the way, was the very first person to be giving talks like this, all the way back in the early to mid 1980s. At that time nobody but him had the ability to throw mathematical graphics onto the big screen. He used to use a computer projector called Light Valve, which painted its pictures with jets of dyed spermaceti whale oil inside a tube illuminated by an arc-light…I kid you not.

I really enjoy getting away from the computer and just smearing the paint around. Jon took this picture of me, note that it’s a slightly earlier version of the painting.

One more link: Fellow computerist and artist Robert X. Cadena turned me onto his image-rich blog.