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!”

I wrote about “Telportation via Fear and Doubt” a week or two ago, and got into a comment thread with “Al” who, by the way takes really interesting gnarly photos, like the one above. Rather than answering his latest comment in the thread, I’m making a post out of my answer.

For the sake of an interesting story, doubt and fear seem like good emotions for basing teleportation upon — exactly because they are normally viewed as negative things we want to get rid of. I think it’s kind of pleasing to have the powers come from familiar negative emotions rather than positive emotions or from intellectual feats. This way, there’s a reversal of expectations.

Something I learned from Sheckley is to have my characters be as fallible and screwed-up and neurotic and human as I know myself to be. If you’re not familiar with Sheckley, you might think of him as being a writer a little like Woody Allen. I’ve never liked the bombastic superhero kind of SF where the characters are conventionally heroic. I like my characters to be more realistically flawed, more human, or, as I often say, more transreal — see my “Transrealist Manifesto” off my writing page.

Given that the Sheck-man is the master, my first impulse was simply to make things easy for myself and copy him with no further thought. But, okay, with all this said, let me think a bit more deeply about the questions Al raises. After all, when I post these ideas of mine, I’m asking for suggestions, so I need to open my mind enough to actually think about intelligent responses. As opposed to reacting with defensiveness and blind fury (always my default response!) It’s painful work to actually listen to another mind…

Let’s see — my underlying scientific idea is that the ability to teleport results from a heightened ability to imagine other realities. Which emotions in fact involve this? Hmmm.

Regret involves imagining alternate pasts (like one where I attended or worked at Stanford!) If you want to flip this to a positive emotion, you might think of gratitude that things came out the way they did instead of in some other way. Like the gratitude you might have over that you were able to raise your children fairly well. You might even speak of this as pride, like a quiet pride in a job well done. But pride easily curdles into a negative, after all it’s a Deadly Sin.

Doubt involves imagining alternate present times and locations. In doubt, you wonder if everything you believe is wrong and the world is different than you imagined. Flipping to a positive, we could speak of humans have curiosity or adventurousness or enterprise.

Fear involves imagining bad alternate futures. Hope and yearning and longing are about positive futures. This said, yearning can be a negative in that it saps your appreciation of the present.

I think it’s subtly funny to have teleportation arise from what we (perhaps mistakenly) consider “bad” things about human personality. Regret about the past Doubt regarding the present, Fear regarding the future.

I’m well aware that these aren’t pleasant feelings. Meditation often involves trying not to think about the future, about the outer world, and about the past, that is, to stay away from regret, doubt, and fear. But it’s also true that, when meditating, you can learn to accept these negative emotions as an inevitable part of your psyche — but without letting them take over the driver’s seat.

If we wanted to speak only in terms of positive emotions, we might say that the ability to teleport arises from gratitude, curiosity, and hope. Instead of saying it comes from regret, doubt, and fear. To me the positive version seems duller to read about, too self-congratulatory. The quirkier, more perverse, negative formulation jolts you up and makes you think—the rah-rah “uplifting” version sound soporific, like a platitude, and may even provoke resentment, as in: “Why don’t I have all those good feelings?” Everyone can relate to negative feelings; they’re in some way more universal.

As I mentioned, I’m seeing a kind of transreal equivalence between teleportation and writing. And I’m thinking that if all I had were positive pleasant emotions, I probably wouldn’t be taking the trouble to write. It’s the negatives that get me moving.

A completely different positive emotional complex that I’m bringing into play here involves compassion, empathy, pity and love, all of which involve imagining the minds of other beings in the present. I may yet use these emotions in the book, but for some other superpower. Maybe I’ll use love to enable people to jump out of cosmos and into the land of the actual infinites, possibly to be featured in a PS3 called Transfinite.

Just for the sake of systemizing completeness, what might be the lower-order animal versions of the paired human past-present-future complexes of (Human negative) regret-doubt-fear or (Human positive) gratitude-curiosity-hope?

(Animal regret/gratitude.) Negative and positive versions of this that animals might share could simply be discontentment and contentment.

(Animal doubt/curiosity). With animal doubt, I’m thinking of an animal compulsively looking out of the burrow to see if an enemy is coming. And animal curiosity is inquisitiveness, like in restless foraging behavior and searching for mates.

(Animal fear/hope). I think maybe this is where greed fits in. Greed is a low-level desire relating to the future. Greed is a both a positive and negative, I think, depending on hard you push it. Greed bores me, it’s so first chakra, so, so … Wall Street.

Today’s pictures are mostly from a Big Basin hike, with a few from Stanford campus, where I was happy to see my first book for sale. Good old Dover Books. Usually they just publish dead people who are in the public domain, so when I wrote this first book, I used a somewhat old-timey-sounding form of my full name, “Rudolf v. B. Rucker.” A Dover editor stopped by our house in Geneseo, in upstate New York to have a look at me — imagine her surprise to find a twenty-nine-year-old hippie with hair down to his shoulders!

One more link, just for fun: psychic Ellie Crystal’s “Crystalinks” site advises how to develop telekinesis, that is, the ability to move objects other than yourself!

RU Sirius posted a transcript of his interviews with me at his Ten Zen Monkeys site.

Paul DiFilippo’s cool new story “Wikiworld” is online.

Rick Kleffel reviewed Mathematicians in Love on his Trashotron site.

Owen Maresh has some nice-looking gnarly mathematical movies.

On online zine about Philip K. Dick called PKD Otaku

A wiki about Thomas Pynchon!

A hi-brow ranter with the screen name Gaspaheangea is posting some nice, demented stuff.

SFRevu writes about my story collection Mad Professor.

From Marc Powell, a link to a PDF with a lot of old paintings showing UFOs.

Trey Ratcliff sends a link to his blog with High Dynamic Range photos, also a link to his HDR tutorial about how to make HDR photos using Photoshop and Photomatix on a Mac. I myself would like to start making these kinds of pix in the coming year; if you have Photoshop CS2 you don’t need Photomatix, as mentioned in another tutorial, which in fact puts down Photomatix a bit.

It would be cool if these pictures of mine were in fact HDR instead of simply Phtoshop de-shadowed. But I also think I’d need a better camera. It’s kind of discouraging, really, to look at HDR pix, they make my photos look weak. On the other hand, I take a lot of them.

As I understand it, for HDR you take the same picture at a fixed aperture (so as to have same depth of field) but at five different speeds (I’m guessing that using a tripod is pretty much essential)—or at a fixed speed and five different apertures (so as to avoid motion blur) —and then you let your software munge that into a single image in which the highlighted and shadowed regions are all perfectly exposed. I imagine that in five years, we’ll have digital cameras that do this automatically. Trey argues that we natively do see the world in HDR; my eye is always twitching, getting a little bit of the picture here, a little bit there, and it’s quilted together in my brain into an image of the scene as a whole. My retina opens and closes adaptively as I look from dark to light to dark.

I’m thinking a way to do HDR on the fly would be to have the individual pixel elements each do something like that.

Most of today’s pictures are from a hike I took in Big Basin Redwoods State Park this week with my friend Emilio. A few of them are from a Sunday visit to the Stanford campus as well.

A few (well, one or two) readers asked if it might be possible to buy prints of my paintings. So I decided to go for it. I used my old Leica with a wide-angle lens and a great (cheap at $39) 1000-watt halogen lamp from Ace Hardware. The photo shop scanned my negatives at 2000 dpi to give me some fairly hefty files.

And I uploaded them to Imagekind.com; they gave me a free account as rudy.imagekind.com — with no www, how modern, how Web 2.0. And now you can order nice big prints of my paintings, fairly reasonably priced, on fancier paper if you like, or even with a frame.

What does this picture mean? Well, I wrote a little comment on each painting on the Imagekind site, and you can read my notes on my paintingsall together in my gallery feed, which is kind of nice.

Not to go all commercial on you, I also revamped my personal paintings page with bigger and better images than before with one of those cute thumbnail scrollbars that Photoshop can make. I like how colorful this page is.

Buddha says check it out. Tomorrow I’m sending off my negatives for a 4000 dpi scan to make even bigger image files in case anyone wants to print a really big poster of one of my paintings—I should have the bigger files on Imagekind in a couple of weeks.