I’ve been taking a lot of photos with my new Canon 5D. For awhile my blog may resemble a photo blog even more than usual. To fill in the cracks today, I’ll post some links that people recently sent me.

Emil Rojas sends a link to YouTube video of huge flocks of starlings in Otmoor, England. Just the kind of emergent gnarl I like to see.

In my weighty tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, I was writing about flocking and to celebrate the phenomenon, I quoted some lines from John Updike’s poem, “The Great Scarf of Birds,” describing a flock of starlings lifting off from a golf course:

And as
I watched, one bird,
prompted by accident or will to lead,
ceased resting; and, lifting in a casual billow,
the flock ascended as a lady’s scarf,
transparent, of gray, might be twitched
by one corner, drawn upward and then,
decided against, negligently tossed toward a chair:
the southward cloud withdrew into the air.

Bruce Sterling sent me a link to a simulation of butterfly wings.

John Roche and Bob Reary both sent me links to article about computer-eating ants in Houston, reminiscent of the story “Hormiga Canyon” I wrote with Bruce.

Greg Parker links to his a photo of the Rosette nebula.

Gamma sends news of a Frank Zappa conference in Paris this July.

Nathaniel Hellerstein sends a link to a list of SF cliches. The underlying inspiration for the list is, I think, a desire to systematically list essentially all possible SF tropes and power chords. I myself did something similar in my essay, “What Do SF Writers Want?”

But object to the jaded, snarky, know-it-all tone of the SF Cliches list. I mean, why is every possible idea or archetype to be dismissed as a cliche? Life is a cliche, from beginning to end, and great SF isn’t necessarily about brand new ideas and plot structures. It’s more about language, characterization, and eyeball kicks. If I took the implicit injunctions of the SF Cliches list seriously, it would inhibit me from writing at all.

I rather suspect that working on such a list can become an excuse for not trying to write fiction. It’s as if an aspiring painter were to say, “Hell, I’m not gonna use red, yellow, oragne, green, blue or violet! Those have been done to death. And forget about black and white!” Oh, wait, that’s already happened…

Paul Di Filippo sends a link to an io9 post about colorful nudibranchs, a.k.a. sea snails. I have a nudibranch character named Unger in Mathematicians in Love. He was inspired by a guy I went to grad school in math with at Rutgers.

My son Rudy Rucker, Jr., posted a page of increasingly absurd “cute animal in a bucket illustrating the theme of Thank God It’s Friday,” images on Monkeybrains.net.

Rebecca Sandford-Smith noticed a Wired article that seems to echo the scene in my novel Software where the robots grind up Cobb Anderson’s brain to extract his personality software.

Coop has been Flickr-documenting his insanely comprehensive collection of plastic Japanese figurines.

And my jeweler daughter Isabel Rucker sent a link to an incredible video “Muto” created by Buenos Aires artists as stop-motion photos of repeated overpaintings of wall-graffiti.

On the publishing front, my other daughter’s Georgia Rucker Design is turning two of my paintings into covers for my novels The Sex Sphere and Spacetime Donuts , which will be released in e-book and print-on-demand form by E-Reads later this summer. I used PhotoShop to stretch out the middle of my Spacetime Donuts paintings so as better to fit into a narrowish band wrapping from front to back cover.

I finished another acrylic-on-canvas painting: Dawn, and posted it for printing at rudy.imagekind.com.

In the morning, the sun comes up behind our house and slants across the yard, coating the trees with warm light. My wife, Sylvia, calls it “the lamp,” as in “Is the lamp on yet?” This is a painting of her standing on the back porch greeting the dawn. I redid that tiny face about twenty times to get the right look, although it still doesn’t look like her, but it looks okay. We’re so highly tuned to recognizing faces that the tiniest smidgen of paint changes everything.

Some of you may recall that a couple of weeks ago, I blogged about my hassles in converting paintings into digital files that I use to sell prints.

This weekend there was a good camera sale at San Jose Camera, and I went ahead and got a Canon EOS 5D in a kit with a nice zoom lens. I’m getting amazing detail, and great images of my paintings in seconds instead of in weeks.

First of course, I did the traditional calibration shots of myself looking like an idiot in a dimly lit mirror, and of my feet with something ordinary.

What makes a Canon 5D special is that (a) it costs several thousand dollars less than the top end pro cameras, but (b) it has a “full-frame” sensor.

Full-frame sensor means that CMOS chip that turns the light into pixels is big: the size of a 35 mm film frame. Most other cameras use much smaller sensor chips. In some ways, small chips are good, in that they don’t require such big lenses, so the cameras with them are small and light. But the full-frame sensor produces images with crisper details, better color, and less noise—basically because the individual “pixel sensors” are bigger and receive more photons. For details see this impassioned and even fanatical post by photog-maven Ken Rockwell .

My photographer nephew, Embry Rucker III, also recommended the 5D. Little Embry knows his stuff, he’s even shot portraits of Snoop Dog!

Talk about details! Here’s a picture of a cactus.

And here’s a detail cropped from that same file!

The 5D’s sensor is a “mere” 12 megapixels (twinge of meg envy), but the full-frame advantage makes those pixels really count. (Of course this fall, Canon will probably offer a 5D Mark II with 18 Megapixels, but that’ll cost a thousand more than what the original 5D currently sells for.)

So I’ve been wandering around the house taking pictures of things. You can dial up the “film speed” fairly high and shoot reasonably well at night, not that the lens that came with the camera has a big aperture but, I’m planning to remedy that with a Hong Kong adapter ring so I can mount old wide-aperature Leica lens on it.

A fuse-box is a never-fail shot. Objective correlative of my brain.

This is the hammock rope that broke last year and sent me rolling down the slope.

Hey, why not a picture of my leftover dinner salad? Wow. Those greens…

If all else fails, there’s always the sky.

I’m getting started on my painting of Montgomery Hill, and working on a couple of short stories about the Big Splat that I’ve been posting about lately.

But today I’m going up to Google world headquarters to give a talk on Postsingular. I’m nervous. I’ll try and record it for podcast.

Okay, now I’m back home. I taped my talk and put it on Rudy Rucker Podcasts, the sound is pretty good, and eventually the video will be on Google video, I think. I also added a phone interview by an Australian guy who does a podcast called The Sci Phi show, with suboptimal sound. Click the button below to access the MP3 audio files.

I had a great lunch with Peter Norvig, an AI expert who’s now a Director of Research at Google. The Google cafeteria stands head and shoulders above the other hi-tech cafeterias I’ve sampled around here: Apple, Electronic Arts, and Adobe. And Norvig is an interesting guy, his site includes, for instance, the world’s longest palindrome. It was partly due to a suggestion by Norvig that I wrote my two stories about Alan Turing: “The Imitation Game” and “Tangiers Routines.”

I’d have to say that the talk itself didn’t go over all that well. It was one of those times when I feel like a twittering beetle who’s just crawled out of a flying saucer. I always imagine the rest of the world is keeping pace with my modes of thought, but by now I’ve dug myself awfully deep into the gnarl. Uneasy incomprehension was the order of the day.

And then a woman in the audience (not a reader of my work, I don’t think) accused me of being a sexist because I hadn’t mentioned the career occupations of my characters Nektar and Jil—and never mind that these formidable women are anything but Barbie dolls or submissive Stepford Wives! I’d like to think that, among male writers, I have stronger and more fully realized women characters than most, so it felt unfair.

After the talk, I consoled myself by checking out Babbage’s Difference Engine, on display for one year only in the nearby Computer History Museum. There was a pleasant guy fiddling with it, trying to get it to work—it’s balky just now as a result from being flown here from England. I love the concept of turning a big crank to run your computer.

I started a new painting at Montgomery Hill park in East San Jose yesterday, next to Evergreen Valley Community College; the park is named after aviation pioneer John Montgomery who died when his glider, The Evergreen, crashed here in 1911. Sylvia suggests that I might add a painting of a UFO-type Flying Wing to a painting of this hill, like the one I wrote about in my novel, The Secret of Life. By the way the image above is an High Dynamic Range image fused from three exposures.

Word form your sponsor: “Jeez, not a single person has bought a notecard of my paintings at, ahem, rudy.imagekind.com, and they’re only $3.29 each (plus shipping). Whaddaya whaddaya.”

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m currently interested in a new cosmological model called the Cyclic Universe and have posted on it before. The theory has been popularized by the scientists Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok in their very readable book, The Endless Universe. The basic idea is that our cosmos consists of two parallel sheets of space which are called branes.

Every so often (one guess is every trillion years), the branes slam together, which fills them with energy that can be in some sense gotten for free from the boundless riches of the gravitational field. This space-filling Big Splat replaces the point-like Big Bang. While the branes are apart, they expand, with the galaxies moving apart over the years. And eventually they embrace once again. It could be that there are an endless number of cycles in the past and in the future, and that the spaces involved are infinite.

The theory of the Cyclic Universe is controversial and some well-entrenched phycisists such Stanford’s Andrei Linde (whom I interviewed for Wired , years ago) and his wife Renata Kallosh are fighting against the theory with what I would call excessive or even hysterical or persecutional zeal. You can (vaguely) follow the battle on the boffin-zone arXiv.org site (see this Wikipedia entry on arXiv to learn what arXiv is all about).

In my amateur outsider’s opinion, Steinhardt’s camp is right. LInde’s inflationary theory is falling apart. One of the nicest things favoring Steinhardt’s side is that the Cyclic Universe theory only requires for there to be one (two-braner) universe, whose parameters are what they are due to certain underlying mathematical reaons. The Lindean inflationary camp claims there are perhaps googolplex universes and the one we’re in just happens to have the particular values we observe. Hopefully some new measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation can help resolve the dispute experimentally before too long.

In any case, I decided I might write some science fiction about the Cyclic Universe, and I sent Paul Steinhardt a few questions about the theory via email. He answered them and kindly offered to talk on the phone so that I could ask some follow-up questions. The following is a distillation of the email and phone conversations. As it’s been edited by me, any errors should be ascribed to Rudy rather than to Paul.

(R1) It would be cool if a story’s main character finds out that the Big Splat of the recolliding branes is going to be TOMORROW, rather than in a trillion years.

(P1) According to our current models, the soonest the next splat could really happen is in ten billion years. The reason is that it takes nearly ten billion years for the branes to move back together, and as soon as they start approaching each other we can notice subtle changes. So if the branes were on the road to colliding, we would have noticed by now.

(R2) What are the kinds of observational evidence that tell you the tenth-dimensionsal separation between branes is dwindling? As I understand it, our universe itself will continue to seem like it’s expanding, so how might we notice the impending splat?

(P2) You’ll like this: as the branes begin to move towards one another, nature’s fundamental “constants” begin to change— Newton’s gravitational constant, the fine-structure constant that controls the strength of electricity and magnetism, etc. And the rate of change picks up the closer the branes get. It would seem like the laws of physics are changing faster and faster.

In the earliest stages, the first thing we’d notice would be slight variations in the spectral lines between nearby atoms and distant (older) atoms. Later on, the changes would be more dramatic. We’d notice the positions of spectral lines in a single sample of matter changing over the course of a day.

Later on, atoms might get larger, but you’d have other effects mixed in as well. It would become in some sense hard to say what size anything is, as our definitions of size are ultimately based on the fundamental constants.

(R3) Presumably any humans would be destroyed at some point; our molecules would fall apart, and so on. And then, of course, you’d have the Big Flash. Might we have any hope of surviving to the next cycle?

(P3) We might draw on the fact that the collisions between the branes only occur in places where the universe is nearly empty — which is ALMOST everywhere. But where there are black holes, their gravitational field is strong enough that the collisions do not occur near them. It is as if the black hole pins the branes together in those places where they lie, and that means there are no collisions.

If an advanced civilization could figure out how to create/manipulate black holes so that they are surrounded by them but do not fall into them and if they could protect themselves from the intense radiation of the collision (about 10^10 times the temperature of the sun), they could survive into the next cycle. One problem here is that, because of all the stretching of space that occurs from cycle to cycle, surviving black holes are spread out to an enormous degree — so the chances are that, by the time the Splat approaches, there are no black holes within mankind’s observable horizon. So, even if a civilization managed to do this, they would not likely be anywhere we could see them.

(R4) I like that idea. Maybe a science-fictional civilization could manufacture black holes! Of course it would be tricky to surround our planet with them and not have the holes collapse together. Maybe they could be furiously orbiting in some chaotic dance.

On a slightly different topic, I’m intrigued by the notion of finding some way to perceive that space is infinite. But we’re to some extent limited by that big flash that happened 14 billion years ago. If the universe is spatially infinite, might there perhaps be SOME kind of signal that makes it through the haze of the Big Flash, reaching us from distances larger than the light horizon? I’m thinking, for instance, of gravitons that started on their way before the last Splat, or even from several Splats ago.

(P4) Yes and no. There would be gravitational waves produced just before the last bang that we could detect in the present universe. But the signal is very, very weak. And I suppose a civilization that existed just before the end could send that signal. But the bigger problem with the gravitational waves and photons from earlier cycles, is that their wavelengths will have been stretched by the expansion of space. The 14 billion light year diameter sphere that we see around us began as a region less than a meter across. A meter-long gravity wave from those times would now span the visible universe. There would be no way to construct an apparatus to detect it.

(R5) So there’s no way to pass information from one cycle to the next?

(P5) One very speculative idea is that you might store information inside a black hole. Although we think of the two branes as parallel with a tiny separation, in the neighborhood of a black hole, as I mentioned before, the two branes dimple out and touch each other, merging into a single brane. So there’s not going to be an big splat and radiation burst inside a black hole.

Of course the hard part about storing information inside a black hole is getting it back out. There’s an ongoing debate among physicists about whether information that goes into a black hole disappears for good, or whether it might be retrievable if the black hole spontaneously evaporates. Or perhaps if you scatter some object off of the black hole. In the scattering case, it may be that you need something like an encryption key to retrieve the information, that is, you have to in some sense know what the black hole has eaten so far.

(R6) In terms of a smooth motion, it seems like it would be nicer if the two branes could pass through each other, rather than splatting and rebounding. Is that a possibility?

(P6) Sure, I like to think of it that way myself, as then you feel less worried about the branes getting stuck together. Whether we say they bounce or pass through each other is really just a matter of how we set up our coordinate system.

(R7) Might there be life on the other brane?

(P7) We think of the other brane as probably not being something like a mirror of our world, so it would be a very different kind of place. One might not have atoms or particles there in the usual sense.

I put some more of my paintings up on Imagekind where you can buy prints of 34 of them and — tada! — you can now buy them as inexpensive greeting cards!

It’s a major hassle getting the pictures into digital form. I reshot some of the older ones too, by the way, to enhance the resolution. I photograph them on high-end slide film with my old “safari model” (i.e. green) Leica R3 single-lens reflex on a tripod, get the film devloped at Superior Color Lab in the Willow Glen neighborhood of San Jose, then send the slides to this nice place, My Special Photos, in Los Altos up the peninsula that scans them at 4,000 dpi to 16-bit deep color TIF files with effectively 24 megapixels per image, using a high-end Nikon scanner.

And then I PhotoShop the hell out of the images to make them pop. Speaking of PhotoShop, I just got CS3 and am playing a little with the HDR (High Dynamic Range) gimmick where you can fuse several images taken at different exposures so as to get better highlights and shadow areas; the image above is made of three exposures. The one below is a better picture, compositionally, using just one exposure, though it’s not all that sharp and maybe I over-PhotoShopped the color. Both shot at Castle Rock Park.

Every step of the way, in turning my paintings into digital files, I’m dogged by uncertainty and worry; the most maddening thing is that at the end of the road, I’ll often feel that the original photo I shot wasn’t as good as it could have been in terms of lighting. Glare is a problem, as is over or under exposure, even when I shoot bracket shots.

In any case, I’ve come to accept that the final colors are more or less arbitrary, with only a casual relation to the original. ‘s all PhotoShoppable. But bad glare or a blown-out negative is hard to compensate for.

My friend Mimi was kidding me about “learning to suffer for my art.” Uploading the 80 megabyte files to Imagekind is a hassle too, I might add, it takes about an hour per file, and doesn’t always work.

I’m feeling a little frazzled these days, as I’ve had a frikkin’ cold for three weeks, which gets depressing. Also I miss the “narcotic moment of creative bliss” that I get from writing. Now and then a photograph gives me a tiny hit. PhotoShop CS3 has this nice FilterDistort|Lens Correction filter that lets you get rid of barrel and keystone distortion in a shot of something rectangular like the frame above. I love neon martini signs.

It would be simpler to shoot my paintings with a heavy-duty SLR digital camera, of course, as then I could right away see what I’d shot, and I wouldn’t have to deal with two separate photo labs. But (a) I don’t have one, and (b) if I did, the current typical 12 megapixel size would be about half of the 24 megapixel I get via the hig-res scan, although it could be that the crispness would be just as good if I was doing it digitally, also I could be sure I got the framing and exposure right. It could well be that the slide to digital conversion puts in more noise than you’d have if you shot straight to digital and just did a resampling to raise the size.

I do love using that old Leica. Actually you can get an adapter to put Leica lenses onto Canon EOS bodies, although then you have to do manual focusing. The lower end bodies are plastic, which I hate the feel of, but you can get a magnesium body Canon 5D for under $2K, or a Canon 1D Mark III with a 20 megabyte sensor for maybe $5K, but that’s really a lot of money to spend on something I might not use that much.

In practice, I really like shooting with my pocket SONY Cybershot 8 Megapixel T100. If I have a camera in my pocket all the time, I get lots of shots, and if I have to put pounds-heavy camera around my neck, I hardly use it. And, after all, mostly I just use my photos for my blog at some really low pixel count, like 2 or 3 megapixels. Of course if I got into selling prints I could open up a whole new world of effort…

Anyway here’s descriptions of the five latest paintings of mine that you can buy prints of.

31. Mossy Trees

Acrylic on canvas, 18" x 24", November, 2007.

I got into an en plein air thing again in the sunny winter of 2007. I wore a paint stained overcoat and wedged my paints into a knapsack and strapped a canvas to that. It was great to be all covered in paint clothes with a knapsack. I looked like a bum. People looked askance.

On a ridge in the Castle Rock park above Los Gatos and Saratoga I found some trees that were completely covered with fronds of moss. The sun was going down in the west over the Pacific Ocean, edging the mossy trees with brilliant yellow-green. The tree’s a little like a woman’s legs, too, very fertile. To pep up the picture, I added an eye. I like to wrap my paintings around, painting on the edges so I don’t have to frame them. I put another eye on the left edge, though you can’t see it in this image.

It was beautiful here. I was thinking of a drawing by Hieronymus Bosch were he sketches an eye on the ground and an ear on a tree.

32. Giant’s Head

Acrylic on canvas, 18" x 24", December, 2007.

Like “Mossy Trees,” “Giant’s Head” is a painting I started outdoors in Castle Rock Park near Saratoga, California. This particular rock is called California Ridge. I circled around on a narrow ledge to get to this vantage point. I was somewhat worried about falling off, there was a hundred foot drop to the ground. I painted my hand in there, like clutching at the rock to show that I was scared.

The rock itself reminded me of the profile of Homer Simpson. There were a lot of little lichen patches on it, I just tried to suggest those with some spots of color. That white line in the sky is a jet contrail. The green of the trees was really lovely, it felt good being alone up here on the ledge. I didn’t have room to stay very clean and I got a lot of paint on myself.

33. The Muse

Acrylic on canvas, 24" x 18", January, 2008.

My wife was out of town for a week visiting our daughter in New York, and I took my knapsack of paints and a canvas out to a cliff overlooking Four Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz, California. This spire of rock was probably part of a natural bridge many years ago. I often walk along the beach to this spot, it’s usually deserted and very beautiful. You don’t see any sign of human activity in any direction.

This was the first time I’d gotten onto the cliff right above the rock. It was a very windy day, and I found a depression in the cliff, a little grassy dell, and I settle in there. I particularly wanted to get the shape of the long, breaking dark wave near the horizon. A pelican flew past and I got a digital photo of him. I wished my wife were there with me.

When I got home, I kind of had to laugh at the inadequacy of the few daubs of paint I’d made—compared to the joyful, living seascape that I’d been looking at. It’s insane. You’re daubing ground up bits of stone onto a cloth and hoping to capture the physical world. But I did two more layers on the painting and finally I was happy with it.

To liven it up, I printed out a large image of the pelican I’d scene, also an image of my wife, and I slid those images around on the canvas until the composition looked right. And then I outlined those spots and painted copies of the images. I wasn’t sure I could do a human face—and the woman doesn’t really look that much like my wife. I think of her as “The Muse.” When I go out alone in nature, that’s who I’m hoping to hear from: the muse.

34. Spacetime Donuts

Acrylic on paper, 17" x 13", April, 2008.

In April of 2008, I arranged for a small press to reprint two of my early science fiction novels, Spacetime Donuts and The Sex Sphere. As part of the deal, they agreed to let me design the covers.

Spacetime Donuts is about a somewhat punk-like young mathematician who finds a way to shrink down so small that he wraps around the scale axis and gets big. Scale turns out to be circular, and spacetime is in some sense like a donut. I wrote this novel in 1979, and it can be argued that this was one of the very first cyberpunk science-fiction novels. The characters in the book plug their brains into computers, which is why I have that wire coming out of his neck.

He’s wearing an earring that’s a variation on the W.A.S.T.E. symbol in Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49. As it turns out, the book’s plot resembles this symbol. I had fun making this image really pop with cadmium red and cadmium yellow.

35. The Sex Sphere

Acrylic on canvas, 14" x 18", April, 20087.

In April of 2008, I arranged for a small press to reprint two of my early science fiction novels, Spacetime Donuts and The Sex Sphere. As part of the deal, they agreed to let me design the covers.

The Sex Sphere is about a being from the fourth dimension named Babs. Her intersection with our 3D space looks like parts of a woman, squeezed together and rounded off. She manipulates some of the characters into setting off a terrorist A-bomb in Florence, Italy. You can see the mushroom cloud in the background. I liked painting this, as it’s so intense and cartoony and surreal. I think the sex sphere looks a little scary.

Originally this painting was going to be a landscape looking out over Silicon Valley. I went up on St. Joseph’s Hill with a canvas and paints and started the picture there with my painter friend Vernon Head. Vernon knows my working habits by now, and he knew something weird was going to show up in the foreground. For awhile I wasn’t sure what it should be, but when I realized I needed a cover image for The Sex Sphere, I was ready to go.

Click here to see an earlier blog description of my first thirty paintings.