Happy Pi Day!

Today’s date, March 14, can be written as 3/14, and pi, as some of us will know, is
3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510 …

So of course today I got a cryptic email from hacker king of high weirdness, Bill Gosper.

“Today is the picentennial of January 15, 1693. Various math-fun events of 1693: Newton’s 2nd mental breakdown, 1st published description of fluxions, the 1st publication of Wallis’s Algebra, Leibniz rediscovers determinants.” —rwg

I decrypt this as follows.

In Gosperese, “Picentennial” means “The 314.159… year anniversary.” Bicentennial is Two * 100 years, right, so Picentennial is Pi * 100 years! Now, as 0.159 of a year is 58 days, this in turn means “The 314 years and 58 days anniversary.” And 314 years and 58 days before today, March 14, 2007, would be January 15, 1693.

Although some might raise issues about the change from Julian to Gregorian calendar entailing the notorious 11 skipped days of September, 1752, but any reasonable person should agree that the missing days of 1752 only involve questions about fractions of the year 1752 itself.

So today, Pi Day, 2007, is the picentennial of Jan 15, 1693. Party!

Yesterday John Shirley and I exchanged some email, sharing our annoyance at being passed over by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly for their anthology, Rewired: The New Cyberpunk Anthology, due out from Tachyon in October, 2007. As if K & K ever really “got” cyberpunk. [Picture below shows me being vexed.]

Suggested alternate title for K & K’s book, were it a music compilation:
Pete Seeger and Mel Torme Present: Woo Hoo! Punk Rock For The 21st Century.

Brooding with Shirley (we’re good at that), the same old feelings that I had in the early 1980s came welling up. Excluded. Defiant. Nobody ever put it better than the Clash in “Garageland.”

Back in the garage with my bullshit detector
Carbon monoxide making sure it’s effective
People ringing up making offers for my life
But I just wanna stay in the garage all night

We’re a garage band
We come from garageland

Meanwhile things are hotting up in the West End alright
Contracts in the offices, groups in the night
My bummin’ slummin’ friends have all got new boots
An’ someone just asked me if the group would wear suits

I don’t wanna hear about what the rich are doing
I don’t wanna go to where the rich are going
They think they’re so clever, they think they’re so right
But the truth is only known by guttersnipes

Enough of that. I actually like Kessel, he’s an old friend, and from the little I’ve seen of Kelly, he’s a good guy, too. Maybe their anthology is great—but if you can’t be unfair and resentful in a blog, then where else? A wheel’s gotta squeak. Maybe some day K & K will edit a Transrealism anthology and if I don’t start bitching right now, they’ll leave me out of that too!

Well, hey, it’s just a story anthology. I can be bigger than that. After all, my cyberpunk novel Postsingular will be coming out in October, 2007, too.

Further consolation: a new issue of FLURB is coming soon. I have some good pieces lined up by John Shirley, Nick Herbert, Kris Saknussem, Mac Tonnies, and Paul DiFilippo. For my own contribution, I might run a little piece about a telepathic stoner gang called The Big Pig Posse, or possibly a story about Alan Turing’s murder by the British Secret Service. Not that there’s anything cyberpunk about that…

I was at the Sunnyvale Library on Wednesday night, I gave a talk about my life as a writer, read a short-short story “Panpsychism Proved,” and did some Q&A. I recorded the evening (with some fan noise in the background) and broke it into two podcasts, click the button below to hear them.

My neighbor Gunnar had his 73rd birthday. Gunnar is very New Age. He’s even been to India! He’s a fanatical coot like me, we both think everything’s alive. I fed him lunch in my back yard. We ate tofu. And then we went for a hike at Castle Rock.

This is getting to be one of my favorite parks. There’s a whole hidden zone that you can find if you buy the rock-climber’s map for the park. These rocks each have names. This is the Castle Rock itself. I’m glad I live in California.

Some idiot drew UFOs on a bunch of the rocks. As if you needed to draw them—when people like Gunnar and me can clearly see them anyway. This rock is called Platypus Rock by the way. Gunnar’s Norwegian, he’s never heard of a platypus.

The branches are ideograms spelling out the code for the rest of my novel. I can’t quite decipher them yet, though. It helps to take naps.

If you relaxed enough, maybe you could turn into dust. And turn that into something else. As my brah Sonic says, “If you push it far enough, your atomic silps lose it—and your molecules fall apart. They’re like, ‘Never mind that H-2-O jive, we wanna just be two H’s and an O.’ And then if you knife right in, the dust congeals into a tree.”

Shapeshifting for nice skin.

Here’s a few paragraphs from my novel-in-progress Hylozoic, along with a note on the math involved.

Passage from Hylozoic

“You just have to listen. Like this.” Thuy teeped him a new mental maneuver she’d invented to convert a silp’s self-image to an English name.

Jayjay listened inwardly to the crabby spirit of the stream. And, yes, Thuy was right, the silp’s name was Gloob. Gloob had telepathically overlaid a face upon the stream’s eddies and lines of flow, the visage of a stern old man with trembling cheeks and flowing beard. He didn’t like their talk of a dam.

The friendly rocks at the stream’s edge had names too: Clack, Bonk, Rollie, and Harvey. And the redwood overhead—her name was Grew. Unlike Gloob, Grew was happy to have Jayjay and Thuy as neighbors. She was looking forward to their fertilizing influence upon her roots.

Intrigued his newly-learned ability to sense the silps’ names, Jayjay teeped down into the aethereal chorus of atoms that made up his body. Each of his ten octillion atomic silps had its own timbre and, thanks to Thuy’s mental gimmick, he could encode each little voice as a name consisting of six English words. Anonymized superabsorbent oratorical sluggardly expectorant. Exoteric velocipedal trigamist township conglobation. Villanous inky gowk curator walloper. Like that. Crazy as it seemed, Jayjay had room for all ten octillion names in his endless lazy eight memory.

Teeping a bit higher up the great chain of being, he perceived that his organs and muscles had voices and names as well. Larry Liver. Ben Bone. They’d still be talking after he died. At least for awhile.

Note on the Passage

Here’s the calculation that a human body has ten octillion atoms has a name. So how does Jayjay come up with ten octillion different names? Well, ten octillion is 10 to the 28th power. According to the Global Language Monitor, English has about a million words now. If I pick five words at random, there’s one million to the 6th power ways to do that, which equals 10 to the 30th power, which is a hundred times as big as the range I actually need. So I can definitely give each atom in my body a name consisting of a five word English phrase. In order to come up with some truly random samples, I found Word Browser, a cool site providing random English words online. (I suspect that the main users of this site are spammers wanting to make filter-baffling email messages, but it’s nice to have it for the rest of us.)

Anonymized superabsorbent oratorical sluggardly expectorant.
Exoteric velocipedal trigamist township conglobation.
Villanous inky gowk curator walloper.

I’ve cheated just a bit and made Jayjay’s sample phrase names for his atoms have a decent grammatical form, but there’s room to do that, given that I only need to use one in a hundred of the possible phrases. If I wanted to craft my phrases even more, I could bump it up to six-word names.

But, oh oh, someone might protest that I’ll need a different set of names for different people’s bodies. In a way I don’t (if I’m just talking to my own atoms), but in a way I might (if I want to talk about other people’s atoms too).

An easy solution would be to use topynymic surnames, that is, to append the name of the owner object to an atoms name, so that Jayjay’s “Villanous inky gowk curator walloper” would have the full name “Villanous inky gowk curator walloper of Jorge ‘Jajay’ Jimenez.”

Or I could bite the bullet and assign a separate name for each atom on Earth. Once again going online, I find there are 10 to the 50th many atoms on Earth, a number which you could also call a hundred pentadecillion. I need to raise a million to the ninth power to get more than that—actually a million to the ninth is 10 to the 54th power, comfortably bigger than I need.

So I can give each atom on Earth an individual name by using nine-word names, and I can be a little picky about which nine-word phrases I use (I only need one out of ten thousand of them).

Going back to Word Browser, I get this name for this one particular atom I just breathed in:

“Hi, lurch nonmental hearty unsteadiness multiplexing putrescent unrepented immoderate nucleoplasms!”

“Hi, Rudy!”