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.

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!