I came across some video I shot in Kyoto, Japan, October, 2007, of kids freestyle hiphop dancing to boom boxes on a plaza outside the gym at Kyoto University on a Sunday afternoon. You can see Thuy Nguyen there near the end, dancing.

I finished my story about infinity, “Jack and the Aktuals, or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory.” I managed to work in a cameo role for a cuttlefish:

A cluster of alef-null easy chairs sat jigsawed around the fireplace, fitting in via odd warps in perspective. But all were occupied, and by a single rude guest, a cuttlefish who was letting his tentacles loll onto each and every one of the chairs as he scribbled inkily in an alef-one-paged notebook.

“Just move each of your limbs three chairs to the right,” Stanley told the cuttlefish.

“No,” snapped the selfish cephalopod. “Too much work.”

It’s too cold this week to paint outside, so now I’m back to working on Hylozoic. It was good for me to take this break and write a story about higher infinities, as I’d kind of like to have infinity in volume 3 of the trilogy (should I get that far).

By way of getting up momentum to dive into writing Chapter 7, I’m revising some of the earlier chapters. Yesterday I found a nice passage that doesn’t fit into the flow anymore, so I’ll just post it here.

Note that this passage addresses a problem with panpsychism, which is the question of how the minds of the components of something mesh with the mind of the whole thing.

Recalling his contact with his cells and atoms this afternoon, Jayjay focused down into himself again. He felt impelled to pick out one particular cell, and one particular atom within that cell. The cell was inside his heart, thump thump; and the atom was a cozy carbon inside the heart-cell’s genetic code.

How did all the silps fit together? Empowered by his contact with Gaia—and coached by the pitchfork—Jayjay had a sudden scientific insight. Objects were more than the sum of their parts. Each object’s contents were wrapped in a knotty net of dark-energy string. An object was more than an inventory, it was an overarching gestalt.

Jayjay’s self, his soul, his I—it was a woven bag: his. The carbon atom was a bag too, and his heart, and the human race, and Gaia, and the Milky Way galaxy—each was a dark-energy string bag of knotty info. And that explained why an object’s silp was more than just a squabbling congress of member silps.

Pleased by Jayjay’s pitchfork-promoted discovery, Gaia flashed an oblique reference to a children’s book, The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, in which Mr. McGregor put Flopsy’s six baby bunnies into a cloth sack, Flopsy and her friend Thomasina Tittlemouse chew open a corner of the sack and replace the bunnies with three rotten vegetable marrows, an old blacking-brush and two decayed turnips—fooling Mr. McGregor. Moral: in either case, the sack is the same.

Jayjay was a sack and so was Gaia. The sacks were woven from dark-energy string, each sack a single loop. Jayjay’s loop had a gazillion turnings and Gaia’s had—maybe the same number, or maybe more. Jayjay lost track of Gaia as he focused on tracing the pattern of his own soul’s string.

In order to get Thuy really hitting on all cylinders again, I need to have a notion of what her new metanovel is about. I was, for lack of a better idea, titling Thuy’s new metanovel, Vib. As in:

“Vib,” said Thuy, telling him the name for the first time. “As in vibby.”

“Pure genius,” said Jayjay.

“What’s vib?” said Jil irritably.

“A vib is like a kick,” said Jayjay. “A vibe, but faster.”

“A vib is when your mind spreads out, and the world is thinking you,” said Thuy. “Instead of writing Vib, I want Vib to write me.”

“My best murals are vibs,” said Kittie. “They paint me.”

And that’s hip and snappy, but I don’t think it captures a reasonable notion of where Thuy is actually at. She’s not an addict anymore, she’s trying to write her second metanovel, and to make her marriage work. She’s really interested in the way everything is alive. I think I’ll be calling her new metanovel Hive Mind.

This fits, as having everything alive makes for a hive mind. The “universal mind” that arises from the cosmos can be regarded as a hive mind. And telepathy makes humanity more like a hive. And being in a pair with a spouse puts you into a small hive mind. The street notion of hive minds as dull pits hive minds against natural gnarl (although in fact ant hive minds are indeed very gnarly, and humanity’s hive mind is in fact gnarlier than any individual human.)

Went to the Los Gatos Xmas Parade this weekend. Sometimes it feels like a little mountain town here.

A bunch of guys had a giant zucchini squash marching drill team. The women standing in front of me where enthralled. “I want to be with those guys.” Phallic displays work!

Every year there’s a new twist on the Santa hat. Leopard fur is the new flash for 2007. This couple were cute and happy, you could tell they’d planned their outifits.

The best parade float is always from Jiffy Mart, which is basically a liquor store on Los Gatos Boulevard. I’m alway surprised—and glad—that the Authorities let this raffish crew bring their movable jump.

Yesterday we were at the SF MOMA to see the Olafur Eliasson show, definitely worth seeing. This one exhibit, called “Ventilator” is just a large fan hanging from a cable and moving chaotically, slowing down, speeding up, wandering about.

There are two dynamics at work: (a) as a suspended pendulum, the dangling fan tends to want to swing back and hang straight down (b) the fan’s blast pushes the fan according to which way the fan is pointing, and the fan itself is twisting back and forth simply because it’s a suspended object subject to torsional rotation.

If I was still teaching CS, I’d have my students write a program to emulate this. I think you could write the program as a 2D Java applet. Just think of the shadow of the fan on the floor. We’d have a moving object with (a) a centrally directed spring force proportional to some constant A times the distance from the center and (b) a force with a fixed magnitude B and a direction given by the formula C*sin(D*t), where t is the elapsed time in the simulation world.

Think of tracking a moving position. Update in time increments dt, tracking scalar t, and vector position, oldposition, newlocity , oldvelocity, acceleration. At time t, the accleration on the point can be expressed as follows if I temporarily convert the position to polar coordinates (r, theta). In polar coordinates, the central force is the vector (-A*r, theta) and the fan force is (B, C*sin(D*t). Convert these back to cartesian coordinates and add them to get the acceleration. Play with the algebra a little to get the back and forth conversion simple — really the conversion is just a coneptual thing to help you figure out the right cartesian formulae.

To simulate the motion, pick any old starting position=oldposition and velocity=oldvelocity, and then update as follows (i) Compute the acceleration for position and velocity. (ii) set velocity to oldvelocity + dt*accleration. Set position to oldposition + dt*velocity. (iii) Draw a line segment from oldposition to position. (iv) Then copy position to oldposition, velocity to oldvelocity, add dt to t, and return to (i).

Problem: Get the simulation working as a Java applet (keeping in mind that some of my suggestions may be wrong as I haven’t actually written this program (although I have written programs like it)), tweak A, B, C and D to produce attractively chaotic motion and send me the link! First person to get it right gets a free signed hardback of Postsingular in the mail.

Lovely winter mist this morning. The etching of the oak branches.

As well as that reindeer song, I keep hearing about “Rudy” and then they’re talking about an ugh Republican ugh Presidential ugh Candidate. Bring back the Clash song: “Rudie Can’t Fail”!

Let it go, merge into the mist.

Mentally I’m at the Szkocka Cafe (Scottish Cafe), fave hangout for Stan Ulam and other topologist/analyst/set theorist types in Lwow in th pre-war 1930s, and home of the famous Scottish Book of problems! Working on my story about infinity…

Today I was back at Castle Rock Park in my Monet/bum outfit; canvas strapped to the leather knapsack of paints on my back.

I also brought along some papers about infinity by Hugh Woodin, I’m trying to write this story, “Jack in Alefville”, for a special volume about infinity.

Scrambling up and down ravines, almost like where I lost my glasses last year. Nice trunk and boulder. Yin and yang.

Halfway up this rock called California Ridge I found a ledge leading out to some exposure.

A branching tree. It has c leaves. We don’t limit Alefville to being just countable sets. The higher world isn’t stratified this time. Everything’s mixed together, all the cardinalities. The branching streets lead to c houses.

Around the corner was a giant stone Homer Simpson! D’oh!

It occurs to Jack to check consistency of some theories. Could we have an issue with non-standard integers? The only theory that’s clearly inconsistent is physics.

In order to paint this I had to perch on a tiny spot with fifty foot drops on two sides. I figured if I moved slowly and stayed highly aware it wasn’t actually risky. Just don’t step back from the canvas…

The antagonist crab hides. They look in an infinite restaurant, it’s more than an Escher omega disk, it’s omega to the omega power, with infinite eddies and back rooms like a dream. The crab gets away, flees to his house

I got the underpainting done and took a bunch of pictures to work on at home. Rested lying on the ledge, trying to visualize levels of infinity, getting back into the old White Light head space—but 21st Century style with Woodin in mind.

Out across the San Lorenzo River basin I could see the sun shining on the Pacific Ocean.

They look for a city directory to locate the crab’s house. They find a book of size alef-one but it’s not big enough. They find an alef-two-sized book. It’s not big enough either. Etc.

Yesterday I finished my painting, “Mossy Trees,” that I started last week in Castle Rock park.

I spiced it up with an eyeball in one of the trees. I was thinking a little of Magritte, the way he’d slip fantastic details into so many of his more-or-less realistic paintings. Also it’s a way of making manifest the hylozoic notion that the trees are conscious.

And I put another eyeball in a part of a trunk that’s painted on the canvas edge. I’m into painting all around the edges, I like the effect, and it means you don’t have to worry about framing. The canvas becomes a sculptural object in itself.

Today’s egoboo: Matt Groening reads my books! I saw this in a Wired article about the return of Futurama. (Thanks to Paul DiFilippo for the heads-up.)

This explains why I felt such a shock of recognition when I saw one of the early Futurama episodes, and the robots were getting stoned and selling replacement human organs out of back alleys. That’s totally the world of my Ware series: Software, Wetware, Freeware, Realware. By the way, I’m making slow progress on getting the Wares back into print—more on this in a couple of months.