So now it’s finally my actual birthday and I feel good about it. I’m going for a walk in the woods.

My college friend Don sent a copy of a letter I wrote/drew for him about forty years ago.

I’ve been having fun playing with the iPod I got from Georgia and young Rudy. I have about 300 of my songs on it already. Cool to walk around inside a soundtrack. Very Postsingular.

I copied all 1,200 of my blog images so far onto it, and can slide-show them in Shuffle mode with the music also in Shuffle mode, seeing and hearing all things that I like. Lifebox!

Last night I watched a great, gnarly David Cronenberg movie, eXistenZ that I’d previously overlooked. Very inspiring. I think I’ll visit the Game Developer’s Con in San Ho tomorrow as well. Thinking about what Thuy’s gonna put in her metanovel.

Still catching up on my party, here’s a piece by my mathematical logician friend Nathaniel Hellerstein (seen in the picture below to the right, having given Nick Herbert a Hellerstein Zero Dollar Bill).

Nathaniel Hellerstein, “ADJUSTING THE DOG” (For Rudy’s 60th)

I was visiting Rudy, just hanging out at his house, playing with fractals on his computer. I had mentioned the words “fuzzy chaos”, and the “Socrates-Plato fractal”, so of course Rudy had to see it for himself. I'd shown him what I'd gotten so far, on my Texas Instruments TI-83, but of course a hand calculator's screen isn't exactly hi-rez. Rudy fired up his home station, launched one of his research programs, sat me down, showed me how to input equations and to fiddle parameters, and the next thing you know I was surfing the mathesphere.

“That one's kinda boring,” he said. “A wiggly loop?”

I said, “Let's pump up the exponent. Make it third power.” I hit ENTER and watched points accumulate on the screen.

Rudy looked over my shoulder. “Better…” he said.

” 'Seek Ye The Gnarl', ” I said, quoting him, and I went back to parameters.

We heard Sylvia yell, “Rudy!” from far away and downstairs, so Rudy excused himself. Exponent 3.1 was a bit better, but still not quite it; so I input 3.2, I hit ENTER, and I sat back.

I was still sitting there, mouth slightly agape, when Rudy returned. He said, “Sylvia wants me to adjust the dog, she says she can tell — ” Then he saw what was blossoming on the computer screen. ” — hey, that's a really gnarly fractal, Nat!”

“I wouldn't have found it without you,” I said, still stunned. And it's true; it was my equation, but his program. I had to interact with the parameters in realtime to get them just right.

Rudy said, “Listen, we have to find the olfactory remote. Sylvia can tell where Arf is, even through the wall.”

So we rummaged through Rudy's office for the olfactory remote. I found in on the bookshelf, in front of six copies of the German edition of “White Light”. It was resting between the tesseract and the flying saucer. We took it outdoors to the main porch. We knew where Arf was because we too could detect him through the wall.

Once there, Rudy boldly leaned over and patted his old buddy. Arf dog-kissed him back. I stood back at a distance of six feet. Arf was a great old dog, and I liked him a lot, but his force field really was quite overpowering. What's more, it was set on Exponential, with a doubling-distance of two feet. I wasn't ready to approach those six feet and experience that eight-fold increase in the dog's olfactory force. But Rudy didn't seem to mind.

Greetings over, Rudy stood up and fiddled with the olfactory remote. “Let's see, I'll change the field from Exponential to Step Function. What radius?”

I said, “How short can you make it?”

He said, “I can scroll it down to zero, but then you get a Dirac delta function. Let's try a foot.” He punched some more buttons on the olfactory remote, pointed it at Arf, and clicked.

Right away I felt better. I thanked Rudy, then heaved a huge sigh, which I hadn't dared to do before. The air smelled of rain, and wind, and trees, and the neighbor's flower garden.

I went over to Arf to pat him. Like I said, he was a great old dog, if you didn't mind the olfactory force field. I hugged him, and I got a dog-kiss, and whoops, I got a little too close, and worse whoops, I inhaled through my nose.

“Whuff!” I said, for words do not describe.

Now, you may be thinking that I made this whole story up, but it really did happen, and I can prove it, too. Just input exponent 3.2 into the Socrates-Plato fractal, and let it run awhile. You will see for yourself that it truly is gnarly. Thank you, Rudy.

(*) [(Note by Rudy.) In one chapter of his book, Delta, A Paradox Logic (World Scientific, Singapore 1997), Nathaniel imagines a fuzzy-logic world in which a statement’s truth value can be any real number 0.0 and 1.0. And he has a converstation between Plato and Socrates, with the current truth values of what they say being P and S. Plato says “I am not extremely different from Socrates,” and Socrates says “I am not even slightly different from Plato’s opposite,” meaning (in Hellerstein-speak), respectively,

P = 1 – (S – P)^E, and

D = 1 – (1 – P – S)^F.

E and F are exponents expressing, respectively, “extremely different” and “ slightly different”. As these are dual notions, we let F = 1/E. E is the exponent that Nathaniel decided, upon further experimentation, to set equal to 3.221946. Hmmm…]

Here’s another party story, this one by Marc Laidlaw; he wasn't there in person, but he emailed this in.

Marc Laidlaw, “660” (For Rudy on his 60th Birthday)

Midnight in the Museum of Primordial Science and Early Technological Wonders.

Moonlight pours down through a skylight of warped antique glass, illuminating a small cube of worn wood and tarnished metal resting on a polished pedestal.

A shadow briefly darkens the cube, followed by the rasp of painted hinges, a fall of dust. The skylight set aside, a figure wrapped in blackness descends spiderlike along a silken strand.

Soundlessly, the intruder almost but not quite touches ground. A thin cushion of air separates shoe-soles from marble tile floor. Hovering, the intruder extends a gloved hand above the wooden cube, makes several passes.

The cube makes a soft sound, as if clearing its throat.

“Hello?” it says. “Who’s there?”

“It’s me again,” the interloper whispers.

“You…the same one from last night? And the night before?”

“That was not last night. That was ten years ago. And ten years before that, it was my father visiting. Which is to say, your great great great great grandson.”

“How strange,” says the box. “How old now?”

“Six hundred and sixty.”

The box chuckles. “I still feel sixty. I still…remember…have I told you? It all began then. At my sixtieth birthday…I remember someone told the story of my lifebox…how it had survived six hundred years…”

“That was when it began. You were the first and, still, one of the best.”

“…that story…I remember now…the lifebox was just turning six hundred and…”

“The age you are now. Yes.”

“But it feels like…I am…”

“Exactly,” said the interloper. “You are that story. Still are, I mean.”

The lifebox sat very quiet for a long time. Then a gentler sound, resuming: “This is the story they told.”

“Yes. And now it is told. And after tonight…”

“It will be a new story.”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. I love stories. I guess it’s right that I became one.”

“We think so.”

The interloper moves quietly in the shadows, and suddenly there is a flicker of light. A single star, suspended in the air above the box, sheds light like a candlessless flame.

“Happy Birthday, Great Great Great Great Great Grandfather.”

Then the shadowy form takes hold of the nearly invisible thread, and slides upward, out, briefly blotting the moon that has nearly moved on. Rasping of hinges, skylight restored.

The flame burns through the rest of the night, warming the lifebox, which keeps its thoughts to itself, drifting in and out of what is not quite sleep, until somewhere near morning when the room fills with daylight and the flame fades away, leaving the new day blank as a new page.

Finally, thinks the lifebox.

And, clearing what passes for its throat, it begins to fill that page with words.

[Today I’m using my new Mind Tool to write a story with Paul Di Filippo, involving aliens, fractals and higher dimensions, so I have those three tools out.]

We had a birthday party for me on Saturday. I had been worried I might not be able to have fun — I’m such a geezer. But it was great.

My wife got helium balloons, which were fun and bouncy.

My artist friend Paul Mavrides was there, he recalled that we’d met thanks to our common “cult leader” Ivan Stang of the Church of the SubGenius who put us in contact when I moved out West twenty years ago.

Also my mad scientist friend Nick Herbert with fellow researcher Beverly Rubik. I got my ideas in Frek and the Elixir about quantum decoherence from Nick, not to mention much of the inspiration for Frank Shook in Saucer Wisdom.

And fellow freestyle SF writer Michael Blumlein(in the center), his wife Hilary Valentine, and Jon Pearce (about whom see below).

My daughter Isabel made me a great “Swiss knife” with symbols of seven of the things I’m interested in: A Zhabotinsky scroll (for cellular automata), the Mandelbrot set (for fractals), a robot, A Square (for the fourth dimension), Infinity, a UFO, a Cone Shell (for diving, cellular automata, universal automatism, and SF). It’s gold-colored metal and the little “blades” swing in and out, with the icons in silver-colored metal riveted on. It's called, naturally, a Mind Tool!

The morning after the party, my wife, the kids and I let the balloons go up into the sky one by one, taking all cares away.

For the entertainment, my wife suggested the guests bring reminiscences about me (not necessarily true and, if possible, science-fictional) to read. I was very touched.

I feel a lot better now about turning sixty. I always love it when I have a birthday party and its time for the cake. The room lit by the warm glow of the candles, a sea of faces smiling and singing to me, my loved ones close. The highpoint of a year. My life’s turned out a lot better than I expected.

Here’s the piece that Jon Pearce wrote; Jon is in the CS department at SJSU and was my office mate for about twelve of the twenty years I was teaching there. The software he’s talking about is the Pop framework, available for free from me online.

Computers Trembled at his Approach (for Rudy on his 60th birthday) by Jon Pearce.

“Most people know Rudy Rucker the science fiction writer. I also know Rudy in his roles as educator and Computer Scientist. I shared an office with Rudy during the period of his career when he molded the jumble of functions and classes that make up the programmer's view of the Windows platform into a virtual world populated by digital predators and their flocks of prey. Rudy delighted in the God-like satisfaction his students experienced as they embellished his world with new landscapes and new species of creatures: sharks with laser beam eyes, bulletproof sheep, invisible pterodactyls.”

“Rudy was especially proud of those gifted students who assiduously pushed his framework to its limits, discovering new possibilities not envisioned by the master. Rudy was even grateful for those rare occasions when the limits of his world were exceeded, revealing an un-initialized pointer, an uncaught exception, or some other minor oversight. Within minutes Rudy would deftly locate and repair the problem in front of the awe-struck student.”

“On one such occasion, after the awe wore off a bit, the young man sitting next to Rudy pointed out that the artful patch Rudy installed to repair a virtual volcano that was erupting spaghetti instead of lava was causing fractal cuttlefish in a nearby sea to eat their young. Not a problem, Rudy assured the anxious student. Within minutes the cuttlefish were model parents, but now buildings in a distant city were melting like cheese on a hot plate.”

“Like a worn out beach ball, repairing a leak in one place only seemed to cause a blow out in another. The cascade of errors continued: self-aware televisions were torturing telepathic toasters, horny pan-dimensional kangaroos were humping hyper-intelligent hippos, left-leaning Vulcans were reaming reactionary Romulens. Esoteric error messages flowed across Rudy's screen like water from a burst dam: Compiler error #23, Linker error #48, Error reporting error #19, ‘Please contact Microsoft immediately.’ I watched as the back of Rudy's neck began to glow red. Slowly Rudy rose to his feet. His eyes were glazed. His hands trembled with rage. ‘F*ck!’ he bellowed, then plowed his boot into the face of the computer again and again and again. Microchips sprayed across the room like shrapnel. Sparks sprung from the motherboard. Smoke billowed from the hard drive. As Rudy's world went black we heard the last pathetic death cry of a mutant man-eating muppet.”

“Rudy sternly said to both of us: ‘This didn't happen.’ The student quickly gathered his books and scurried out of the office. Rudy turned to me and asked, ‘Do you think we should kill him?’”

[Qualifiers: It wasn't my program's fault the machine was crashing, it had a defective graphics board and/or motherboard. And I only kicked the box once.]

============

A word from our sponsor:

“Thanks to The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul I’m a big winner!“/

============

Okay, in six more days, that is, on March 22, 2006, I will be sixty years old.

Turning sixty is twice as bad as turning thirty. Not only are you really old, you’re about to die.

One way to compensate has been car-shopping to replace my old Acura. I decided to go for a dark green BMW 325i with automatic, and leather seats. I test-drove a bunch of other cars, but the BMW was the most exciting. I went up to 95 without noticing. And when I almost passed the exit to get back to the dealership while still in the left lane, I was able to skitter through tiny holes in traffic to the exit, nimble as a hockey puck on ice.

Now I realize why BMW drivers act that way. It’s not so much that they’re intrinsically bad people. It’s just that the car makes it possible to move through traffic in a different kind of way. Reminds me of the old joke: “Why do dogs lick their balls?” “Because they can.”

The other thing I did in preparation for my birthday was to go to a hospital emergency room, thinking I might be having a heart attack. Now, my back always aches, but in the last month or two I’ve had a kind of ache in the middle of my chest. It doesn’t hurt more when I exercise — I still go out mountain biking, for instance. But I was wondering if it might be angina, or heart-pain. I wanted to go see my regular doctor or a cardiologist, but it’s always so hard to get in to see these guys. And the other day I woke up and its seemed like the pain in my chest was stronger than before. So I Google “angina” and it seems to suggest that it’s actually more dangerous if your chest doesn’t hurt more when you exercise, and suggests that I “call 911 immediately”!

Sadly I packed my overnight toiletry kit, put it in my knapsack with some papers and books, and drove to the hospital. They were very nice to me. They hooked up wires to me, took blood samples, X-rayed me. I got wheeled down a hospital corridor in a bed — there’s a classic first-person-viewpoint for you. A trip to the underworld. Everyone kind and considerate.

Turns out there’s nothing at all wrong with my heart! In other words I have some slight muscle ache or stomach distress and I’m totally freaking out about turning sixty. It was kind of cozy waiting for the test results lying in the emergency room bed doing a crossword puzzle and revising my novel. Man did I feel safe. Would be great to move in there full time… Though of course I feel a bit guilty for taking up the space unnecessarily. This isn't something I've many times before; the unnecessary panic-trip to the doctor/hospital. Well, at least now I know the way there.

Oddly enough, during this little ordeal it didn’t cross my mind to pray. I was on autopilot, too anxious to think very hard. Though when I got home to my nice little grassy backyard, I was very happy and grateful. And I remembered to thank God I had some more time. Ah, the clouds.

The sky these days reminds me of the two years we spent in Heidelberg, 1978-1980. The mild blue and the puffy cartoony clouds. Spring. The start and end of the zodiac, the singular point where the world-snake bites its tail. The entrance to the underworld.

I’ll be glad when this birthday’s over. I feels a bit like how I felt right before Jan 1, 2000. As if the world is totally going to come apart into pieces. It’s just a number, Ru, just a number.