Our granddaughter was visiting this weekend, also our two daughters, and our son and daughter-in-law. A great family time. We went to the beach a couple of times, once in SF and once in Cruz. The baby liked it a lot. “Wawa!” spells “Mama!” upside down. She was dragging some seaweed. She’s quite lively. I showed her my seashell collection every morning. Especially the cone shells!

The seaweed she was dragging is a funny kind of seaweed with little leaves just along one side of a band. Like a fancy ribbon. Hail Gaia, rich in gnarl.

Being with the family at Ocean Beach in SF, I was thinking about nature’s rhythms. The wheel of life, me on the downward swing, and the baby coming up, balancing. Our heartbeats. The cycle of a pregnancy. The breath and the heartbeat.

The rhythm of the surf. The wheel of the seasons. Spring’s just about here in CA.

The rhythms not quite repeating. All nesting together.

Isabel stood on a rock to see the anemones; a flock of seabirds flew by.

We visited the SF zoo as well, my first time there, I’d been waiting for a grandchild to take. We saw a nice flock of Magellan penguins, circling a rock, flying beneath the water. Imagine an animal that “flies” through the soil. It would have very thin wings.

We walked in the hills too. The wild cucumbers are out, springing their helical tendrils. Boing.

I’m grateful to be in this world.

I sometimes write about the “Lifebox,” this being my word for a near-future technology for recording all your experiences. Kind of like a blog with a very good search engine. There’s an article by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, “ A Digital Life ” in this month’s Scientific American, about Gordon Bell’s Lifebits project, see also Jim Gemmell’s CARPE page.

These notions call for a rigorous and thorough investigation via scientifictional thought experiments! As a public service—and in hopes of catching the rising wave of lifebox buzz—I’m posting “Three Stories About the Lifebox,” a PDF containing three tales of mine about the lifebox: “Soft Death” from 1986, a relevant excerpt from Saucer Wisdom of 1999, and “Terry’s Talker” from 2005.

My old kind-of friend Frank Shook was in town the other day. He materialized right out of the ether, emanating form a tree fungus. I have a lot about my adventures with him in my “novel” Saucer Wisdom.

Frank was telling me some stuff about teleportation, which fits in with my Hylozoic novel project.

Constraints on Teleportation

In order to keep the world from getting too chaotic, and also not to make things too easy for my characters, Frank suggests constraints on teleportation: No Mass Limit, and Silps Can’t Teleport.

(Mass Limits on Teleportation) On a single teleportation hop, a single person can only move a certain limited amount of mass.

(Not “Everyone” Can Teleport) The power to teleport is limited to certain people or perhaps limited to the human race. Animals, plants, and objects can’t teleport.

Mass Limits on Teleportation

Suppose that on a given hop, a person can only carry along about as much mass as would fit in a suitcase—say twenty kilograms. In PS1, the heaviest things that people teleported were the magic harp and a battlefield backpack-style atomic bomb.

But suppose that a group of people working together can teleport larger things. So if you have a two thousand kilogram pre-fab home to transport, you might need to get a dozen or more people to pitch in.

Make it thirteen, like the Last Supper. One of them flubs—the Judas. And the front porch is lost in the subdimensions. n.

[This week my dear old friend Gregory Gibson visited as well. He’s a dab hand author himself, as well as being an antiquarian maritime book-dealer. He was in town for a book fair under the aegis of his firm Ten Pound Island Books. Greg helped me discover the writing style I call Transrealism; in 1969 this sage suggested, “Suppose you were to write about your real life as if it were science fiction.”]

Not “Everyone” Can Teleport

Can objects teleport? What a mess that would be… I have enough trouble keeping track of my wallet, keys, and glasses without them sunnybucks teleporting themselves. Teleportation for objects seems risky. Think of fire, and of how joyfully the flames hop from branch to branch—wouldn’t fire want to teleport itself from tree to tree? This would be a disaster; the whole planet would go up in the spreading inferno.

How to justify the lack of teleportation by the silps? I’d like a fairly firm reason.

Disinclination. Through the eons, objects have been immobile or, at best, passively mobile—why would they want any kind of new-fangled travel now? Maybe they don’t have desires. Maybe that part is lacking. Maybe, if you don’t reproduce, that whole part of you is eliminated. So then they’d simply be too mellow to teleport. Imbued with Buddhist non-attachment. But I’d like an explanation that’s firmer and more science-like.

Interdiction. Maybe the planetary mind Gaia won’t let objects teleport because if they did it would mess up her ecosystems. That’s a little arbitrary.

Mental Structure. Silp minds differ in essential respects from human minds. Compared to a silp, a human’s methods for producing thoughts is weirdly complex and roundabout. They think via a direct quantum computation with lazy eight memory, we do it via our neurons. Perhaps silps are inherently literal minded and can’t cohere themselves into two alternate views?

But keep in mind that, I’d also prefer than plants and animals don’t teleport. Otherwise the rats and ants would eat everything or—if the vermin use third-party teleportation—all our food would always disappear down into the rat warrens and the ants hives. So let’s suppose there’s something unique about a human-style mind that permits teleportation. The painfully evolved ability to be ambiguous and unsure and self-doubting.

If Objects Teleport…

It could be that, later on, maybe bit by bit, the objects do learn to teleport . Maybe that’s a bad side-effect of the Kang parasitizing our silps’ computations, or of the Rull trying to slime us. The objects get restless and bored—or frightened—and wander around. “Where’s my chair?” “He got bored. Went for a jaunt to Alaska.” “He got scared. He’s at the bottom of the ocean.”

But the Kang or the Rull will, as I mentioned before, mess this up.

Social effects of Teleportation

People can live anywhere they can find a vacant lot to build on.

You could be stealing stuff all the time; not only can you see it via omnividence, you can hop there, grab it and carry it home.

If people can reach out and move objects by teleportation, then no woman’s jewelry is safe. Or your food, guns, sculptures, paintings, furniture, and so on. Criminal gangs like the Beagle Boys could work in concert to whisk away cars or even houses. Does property no longer matter then?

Suppose I wake up and my shoes are gone. A passerby has nicked them, and taken them home. The up side is that I can always locate my stolen shoos and teleport them back home. An ownership revision war.

Another possibility is that I can tell the silp inside a valued object to make itself and the object telepathically invisible by pinching off its connection to the point at infinity router in the eighth dimension. But silps might not like to do this. It’s lonely to be cut off.

My son Rudy is working on his cool picture sharing site www.monkeyview.net . Free!

Rudy can make computers do anything he wants them to — including splitting reality into an endless binary tree.

This weekend I saw R. U. Sirius and he interviewed me for a podcast on his MondoGlobo site.

I always enjoying hanging out with him. He’s slightly worried these days, he thinks he may have wandered into a parallel universe, further down the binary tree than the node where he was born. But I’m still shadowing him.

Click on the icon above to access my podcast.
Great sound quality on this one; thanks to Jeff the engineer.

I was up in San Francisco with Sylvia this weekend. Here are some pix and notes, with a few more remarks about teleportation mixed in for filler.

I gave a reading at Borderlands Books, always one of my favorite venues. A good crowd, a lot of sales. I forgot to bring along my tape recorder for podcasting purposes, but my old friend Faustin Bray of Sound Photosynthesis was there to videotape the event. When will this video be obtainable? ”Soon come,” as they say in the islands…

Always nice to be on magical Valencia Street.

“How does teleportation work?” Thuy asked Ond.

“Teleportation works by getting mixed up about where you really are,” said Ond. “In quantum computation, we use the word ‘coherent’ to mean mixed up. The usage is opposite of what you might expect. It’s like if you’re sufficiently coherent you can’t talk at all. If you’re sufficiently coherent your whole body folds up into a single wave function. As if you were this one exceedingly complex electron.”

“I’m not an electron,” said Chu. “I’m a Higgs particle.” He giggled and made pig noises. “Oink, squeal, wheenk.”

“Alright,” said Ond. “And I’m a quark. Thuy can be the electron.”

“I’m dark matter,” said Thuy, getting into the silly jabberwocky game. “So what’s that ocean we see in between the worlds?”

“The Planck frontier. Fall through it and the subbies eat you.”

The colors in the Mission are so great. Especially in the rain. Viva Mexico! I’m thinking for my two alien races in Hylozoic, the Rull and the Kang might in some ways resemble the Mexicans and the Chinese. Note that we do use that same word “alien” for immigrant…

The murals covering the Women’s Building on18th between Valencia and Guerrero are mind-boggling. I love this image of the woman artist. Note that she’s reaching down through a layer of reality to paint. She’s reaching into the subdimensional world. It’s great that this image is also reflected onto the sidewalk.

Might teleporting bodies ever collide with each other? Or get merged, like the scientist and the fly in The Fly? I don’t quite see that happening here as it’s all about a single coherent wave function’s behavior, and not about a signal through space.

Generally, quantum mechanical state-function waves behave linearly and don’t interact with each other. But I might suppose that in some situation we get a nonlinear interaction, a coupling, and we get The Fly. The character is all, “Buzz, slobber, hi guys!” Maybe do this to a bad character. Dick Too Dibbs.

We were staying at Hotel Boheme , a little place I like in North Beach, right by the Stella Caffe and Bakery, with their cozy (non-blinking) neon sign near our window. The pastries in North Beach…ah.

I had my scrap of paper with me, working on the first chapter of Hylozoic — I like to print out what I have, carry it folded in four in my butt pocket, then get it out and mark it up in cafes. Always more interesting for me than the newspapers.

Nice to be doing the writer thing in an actual beatnik cafe, the Caffe Trieste, with guys even wearing berets. I missed a trick and left my own beret at home. But I got in some good scribbling.

There’s this funny tradition about brass bands for Chinese funerals. When Hong Kong was a British colony, the Chinese saw the British marching bands and decided this was just the thing for a fancy cortege. So the Green Street Funeral Home has a marching band, and just about every Saturday and Sunday morning, they’re out there playing these great old hymns and then leading a hearse down Stockton Street.

The procession goes right past the Tang Fat Hotel, which I spotted about two years ago, and ended up working into Mathematicians in Love, as I like the name of it so much, also it’s handy to the Vallejo Street Garage where my characters have their getaway car.

As it happened, this weekend they had a Chinese New Years fair on Grant Street, which was cool. I like the line of the tents’ tops, it reminded me of Bruegel’s painting of the two dancers at the fair.

Using Occam’s Razor, I’d do best to suppose that the aliens—the Kang and the Rull—use a telepathic teleportation method for their intergalactic travel. A catch is that they need to be able to visualize the target. But aha, it’s precisely due to the awakened Earth’s telepathic emanations that the Kang can come to us! Like if you light a cigarette, the sniper can aim at your flame. They couldn’t teleport here until we became telepathic.

[DJs doing a live broadcast for of a Chinese radio station. ]

Perhaps an individual needs help from his or her peers in order to teleport a long distance. We might suppose that a single unaided person only has the power to teleport themselves from one side of the planet to the other, and that they need to get others to help push them for the longer jumps. However I wouldn’t want the requirement to be linear, as then I’d need so very many people to help me jump a distance of many light years. Maybe it only take about seven helpers to get you up into the light-year-jump zone, and when you’re in that zone you can jump as far as you like in our space.

I think I’d like to allow third party teleportation. So our psychic power of teleportation can be used not only as a point-to-point travel method, but also as a kind of aethereal hand by which we can reach out and move distant objects around.

How would third party teleportation work? Suppose that, sitting in my living-room, I want to teleport an apple from my fridge to the top of the table at my side. How do I proceed? I visualize the source and target locations as when doing personal teleportation, that is, I visualize the fridge drawer and the tabletop in the living room. But now, rather than doing a cohere/collapse number on my body, I need to do it on the apple. I teep into the apple and coax the apple’s state function into doing the cohere/collapse. I become the apple for a moment, I merge with it, I cohere it’s state function to produce locational uncertainty, and then I collapse the apple’s wave function into the apple-on-table eigenstate.

We saw some boys doing a lion dance; two of them per lion. It was great.

Always good to be in San Francisco, with so much to see.