I’m still working on the second draft of Hylozoic, without much time to think or write anything fresh for the blog. I do have a few new pictures, so to have something to weave among them, here’s an unused bit I cut from Hylozoic for being too arcane.

Chu felt confident. His dreams had unearthed a powerful quantum-mechanical metashape, a hyperdimensional operator resembling a tesseract pattern with a tiny cube set into the center of a large cube, and slanting lines connecting the two cubes’ corners. The lines sketched out six skewed cube-like shapes connecting the inner and outer cubes.

The little cube was the size of an atom, and the big cube was ten centimeters on an edge, the size of a large man’s fist. The vibby thing was that the pattern was undergoing a four-dimensional rotation that continually had the center cube sliding over to become one of the skewed in-between cubes and then somehow jiggling out to be the outer cube, then skewing in from the opposite side and eventually ending up in the center again.

In a painfully strong flash of inspiration amid the lucid dreams, Chu had deduced that his tesseract-shaped operator could transform an atomic-level rune into a rune to be cast onto a quantum-computation to be carried out by a fist-sized region of space. Instead of having to program ten tridecillion atoms with the original rune, it would be enough to program a quintillion cubic decimeters—in exponential notation, 10^18 cubic decimeter chunks instead of 10^43 atoms. A quintillion was just on the border of the current abilities of a kiqqie human who didn’t happen to be a zenohead.

“Tesseract?” said Kakar, shadowing the motions of his mind.

“Gaia dug up the name,” said Chu. “But I thought of the math.”

Feeling a little shaky with excitement, he squeezed the conch-like rune into the tiny central cube of his tesseract, and watched as the shape spun around, producing an warped, inside-out seashell with most of the extra spikiness smoothed away.

“Wait, wait,” clucked Kakar. “I don’t get it. Show me again how you did that.”

“You put the atomic rune into the middle of the tesseract and it turns into a puffed rune that you map onto fist-sized chunks of space,” said Chu.

“Oh,” said Kakar, trying to keep his cool. “I see. It’s simple.”

“Now it is. And we’re going to name the trick after me. Chu’s Kludge.”

“Kludge…” said Kakar, searching Gaia’s database. “Ah. A clumsy and inelegant workaround.”

“I’m brilliant but humble,” said Chu.

Sunday (tomorrow) you can hear me on the radio live in the Bay Area. I’ll be on the Stanford sponsored Philosophy Talk show, talking about my books Infinity and the Mind and White Light. The show airs on KALW, FM 91.7, San Francisco, CA, Sunday, 10am PT, Feb 24, 2008, and at other times nationally. In a week or two a podcast version will be online.

Yesterday the so-called permalinks (sometimes a sad misnomer) on my blog were temporarily broken as we upgraded to the latest version of the WordPress ware that runs the blog, and we needed to do some Apache type deep Weenix alteration as well. Yesterday, all you could see was this top page of the blog, and all links to past entries or dates were temporarily broken. But now, thanks to the genial tech support at our host Monkeybrains, it works again. Nothing like doing live brain surgery on your lifebox in public.

The built-in Search box is currently broken, but I’ve added a “Google Search Blog” box that uses the Google engine. In some ways this is nice, but the link info is a bit confusing as it lumps in stuff from the page titles.

Before getting into some links regarding the burgeoning metaverse business, let me mention that the pictures in this entry are mainly from a day recently spent on the bluffs at Davenport with our daughter Isabel — check out her online jewelry site isabeljewelry.com! Hammered wedding rings a specialty.

I took a day off from working on my Hylozoic revisions and went to a conference called Metaverse U organized by Henrik Bennetsen of the Stanford Humanities Lab. As I explain in my nonfiction tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, and dramatize in my novel, Postsingular, my sense is that virtual reality can never replace actual reality—but maybe I’m missing the point. It’s stimulating to see what’s up in this rapidly morphing nexus of ideas. The latest wrinkle is to think of the metaverse as business.

As I mentioned in my notes on the NASA Virtual World conference, the people who talk about “metaverse” are particularly thinking about Stephenson’s Snow Crash. The word’s taken on a life of it’s own, usually referring to some kind of shared mixed reality. I had my laptop open during the talks and here in classic weblog style, are some of the links that went by.

Metaverse Roadmap Overview
What happens when we mash together video games, virtual worlds, geospatial maps, simulations, virtual business, and online avatars acting as your agents? The Metaverse! One of the biz talks was about how something’s added if a team works together in the form of online avatars instead of just via email. It’s science-fictional, imagining having to actually “go” to an office building and roam the halls so as to potentiate chance interactions with your fellow workers. The “water cooler” effect. Another guy remarked that just having a visible grid of webcam photos of everyone who’s at their machine might be enough.

Technology Review: Second Earth
Tech article about how the World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an environment combining elements of Second Life and Google Earth. I myself have had problems getting interested in Second Life — this stems from the “bus station” effect, which refers to the fact that new arrivals to this locale find themself in a somewhat dull and crummy part of “town” among unfriendly predators and mockers. Also, when you arrive, you’re “dressed” as a noob. Also I really dislike the way the world looks—all those blank polygons, it’s the same in videogames. But I guess if I was socializing there I might like it. And if it’s blended with the physical world, it could really take off. We’re almost talking about telepathy here…

SceneCaster – Design 3D scenes!
A tool for making 3D rooms to attach to something like your Face Book page.

Welcome to VastPark
Another tool for creating metaverse content such as a virtual World, online game or 3D visualization. I guess you could build a virtual office for your drones as well.

Stanford Virtual Worlds Group
The Virtual Worlds Group, Stanford University, Computer Science Department. They built an artificial life app called Dryad, which is about farming virtual trees. The novel idea is to use user selections as the fitness function for searching a 19 dimensional space of all possible trees. This is perhaps a foreshadowing version of Will Wright’s Apocalyptic SPORE game due Sept 7, 2008, when life as we know it will change 4ever.

3D Models, Plugins, Textures, and more at Turbo Squid
3d Models, Plugins, software, Textures, at Turbo Squid for purchase and free. A Borgesian universal library with one of EVERYTHING. The guys running this site (out of New Orleans of all places) told me that occasionally noobs will buy one of their meshes and then be looking for it to arrive in physical form in their snailmail—as opposed to downloading the mesh file using the key they purchased. One guy was hounding them for the glass bong he thought he’d bought. Some Nigerians, who’d been very pleased with buying seven hundred tennis balls for the price of one, were upset when they got no balls at all.

I’m getting to be like those old masters who’d paint a whole picture in grisaille before putting the colors on top. I finished Hylozoic with one more outline of the final chapter—finally it seemed clear and made sense; I could see the light through the brush and trees. Then I pasted the outline into my Novel document (as grisaille) and kept revising it until it’s the actual text.

I did the very last revisions on paper, lying out on a hilltop in Almaden Quicksilver Park near Guadalupe Reservoir. I’m tired of staying inside on these nice spring days, I feel nostalgic for the freedom I felt when I wasn’t working on this book. I gave Bosch a line to this effect in Chapter Eight: “It’s refreshing to put my life into upheaval. As a youth I dreamed of being a penniless wanderer. My small success has imprisoned me.”

So now it’s time for the second draft. I printed out the whole novel and am going through it from beginning to end.As I’ve mentioned before, I’m always shocked how very many things I find to correct. It feels good, like picking scabs off your skin or sanding a peeling wall. But for me there’s always an element of anxiety as well. Is it fixable? Are the changes ever going to converge?

I correct at various levels. Some of the things I deal with: avoiding overuse of the same word, making it clear who’s talking both by attirbution and by editing their style of speech, making harmonious phrasing by mentally reciting each sentence aloud and fixing rhythms and alliteration, putting in smooth segues so the reading flows without a hitch, supplying character’s motivation and showing it in their expressions and pauses, balancing underexplanation vs. overexplanation, livening up dialog so it’s fun to hear, toning down my overly idiosyncratic and ranting viewpoints, foreshadowing things to come for a unified effect while makings sure the more startling plot turns are still a surprise, ferreting out and reparing any logic flaws or science inconsistencies, checking the time sequencing and “stage blocking” of characters in space and time, putting in plenty of ambient descriptions of smells/sights/sounds, filtering out stereotypes and received ideas, trying for some really funny jokes, etc.

Sometimes I can hardly believe how much effort it is to write a book. On Hylozoic, I have, like, 180,000 words of notes for a 90,000 words book. It especially chapped my butt the other day to see a comment where some guy said my work is “sloppy.” I wish! It’s a lot of work to make something look so loose and rambling. And it’s stressful to work so high off the ground without a net.