So yesterday was my 61st birthday. I had some fun getting out the trusty old ruler and compass and making a Pythagorean-style pattern with 61 dots. Note that it consists of six “tetractys” patterns whirling around a central dot. Tetractys was what the Pythagoreans called the familiar bowling-alley pattern of 1+2+3+4. One can also speak of 61 as a hexagonal number.

I figured all this stuff out in 1985 and 1986; that is, how to represent many of the “birthday numbers” (from 1 – 100) as nice patterns of dots. I uploaded a very useful file about this for the world today:

Dot Patterns for Birthday Cards

[The file is the Adobe Reader PDF format; I found that with my latest version of Firefox, I needed to install the new free Adobe Reader 8.0.]

The material is drawn from my book MIND TOOLS: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality (Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1987). Twenty years ago! I think it’s out of print but there’s used copies on Amazon.

For the last twenty years, I’ve been putting these dot patterns on almost every birthday card I’ve signed—and now you can do it too!

By the way, you’ll notice that some numbers don’t seem to have any nice dot patterns. For these difficult birthdays (or anniversaries), I turn to Plan B:

David Wells, The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers.

(I always get a chuckle out the picture on the cover because the guy looks like such a complete pinhead.)

This valuable, nay, indispensable book has an entry for—well, not all—but lots of numbers. Though, let it be said, many of the entries describe properties that are not exactly box-office gold. Like, “1/61 has decimal period 60 which includes 6 occurrences of each of the digits 0 to 9, the smallest reciprocal whose period has this property.”

The Mathematician Godfather makes you an offer you can’t understand… The virtue of my Dot Patterns for Birthday Cards is that most of them are visual patterns you can readily fasten onto. Patterns for a cheerful, uncomplicated Birthday Pig.

By the way, I first heard about Wells’s book from the mathematician Richard Guy when I jokingly asked him what, in his opinion, was the first uninteresting number. He said it would the first number I would not find in the Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers.

The reason my question wasn’t entirely serious is that asking about the first uninteresting number poses a paradox (related to the Berry Paradox in the philosophy of mathematics). For the first uninteresting number is, hmm, kind of interesting.

Wells, too, is aware of the paradox, and he lists 51 as being the first number with no interesting properties, and duly notes that this makes it interesting.

The first number so truly dull that Wells doesn’t even list it all is—drum roll—54. But if you’re 54, don’t despair. It’s meta-interesting!

More video of me on the Ten Zen Monkey’s video site, http://10zm.blip.tv/.

Talking to R.U.Sirius about parallel universes and the infinite universe.

Click To Play

One thing about the blip.tv player is that at first it was popping up an ugh blinking ad! But now 10ZM has kindly turned off the ad feature for me.

To muse upon my remarks at leisure, see the Ten Zen Monkeys print site www.10zenmonkeys.com . Or, even better, see the version, carefully re-edited at my leisure, in my cumulative interviews document. As a writer, I firmly believe I should be allowed repeated edits of my life—a theme that comes up in Mathematicians in Love.

Good news, I finished the first draft of the first chapter of Hylozoic today! Only seven more chaps to go (according to current outline plan).

Last week, when I was complaining about being left out of some random anthology, I was feeling sorry for myself and even thinking thoughts like, “Why bother? Why not just quit? I’m tired of p*ssing into the wind. They don’t deserve my books!”

But then I realized that I can’t just sulk and stop writing. If I do that, I’m only punishing myself. If I quit, then “they” win, don’t they? I can’t give in to envy and resentment. Forget about the biz and enjoy the fun. I wrote something today, for instance, that made me laugh out loud for a minute.

It’s all good. And it’s spring. And tomorrow’s my birthday!

When I started this post, on March 19, 2007, many of the links on my blog were screwed up because I was blundering around trying to fix what I perceive as a problem with the way WordPress handles Permalinks—by default they use the “?p” method of labeling by post number instead of the more sensible “?m” method of labeling by dates. The bad thing about using post numbers instead of dates is that if a link stops working you can figure out what a date-containing link actually refers to.

But WordPress does have a “pretty permalink” option where you can use a nice format for the permalinks with year, month, day and post name. For instance, now that I’ve got this working (I am re-editing this post on March 21), this post has the pretty permalink https://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2007/03/19/permalink-problem.

At first whenever I tried this, my site would go down. Finally I figured out that I needed to tell the genial and intrepid director of www.monkeybrains.net to put the Apache mod_rewrite service on my blog server. Those “pretty” directories don’t actually exist; mod_rewrite munges them into actual data-base code to pull the right posts out of the blog archive. Lightbulb?

Yawn, snore, hm? Is he still talking about code?

The whole issue came up because someone wrote me about a bad link into my site from the Wikipedia entry on Transrealism. For the record here’s the correct pretty link to Rudy writing about transrealism at an airport. Does anyone have the energy to fix that on Wikipedia? I don’t feel like wrestling with that, too.

On another front,

Rudy Rucker video about computation, from San Francisco. Filmed talking to R. U. Sirius. Thanks to Jeff Diehl for putting this together for the Ten Zen Monkeys site.

Bruce Sterling video about architecture from Belgrade. This is a very well made piece, with two camerapersons and an editor. Nice white out fades, and a good soundtrack. Bruce is having fun. Would be nice to see his face on, like the little video screens on gas pumps and in elevators. Like the ubiquitous dictator of Half-Life Two, but in a good way.

There’s a show of M. C. Escher prints at the San Jose Museum. The lithographs and woodcuts look nicer in the original than in reprint. I liked this one, called Liberation. I like the expressions on the birds.

The Escher images are Copyright © 2007 The M.C. Escher Company-Holland. Many more images can be found on the Escher website. Including our friend the ant.

If you go to the online Escher Shop, you can even buy sculptures. (Note that the default Escher Shop page comes up with mugs; at the top of the page in the Search area you can scroll to what types of goods you wanna see.)

After the Escher show, we went to see this awesome Korean monster movie called The Host. Usually you watch monster movies in quotes, like mocking them, like Mystery Science Theater 3000. But this one was a real movies. I loved getting to know the family. The movie had the feel, somehow, of a New Wave film by Jean Luc Godard.

There’s an interesting countercultural feel to the movie, too. The authorities are dishonest and heartless. They are obsesed with the notion of a virus which may not actually exist. Somehow this struck me as a metaphor for many governments’ current move of using “terrorism” as the all-purpose justification for whatever they want to do.

The monster was very cool, partly designed my New Zealand pals at Weta Workshop. He had ripply feet. He did not look at all like this cow, but that’s the last picture I’m posting today.