Once again it’s time for the Los Gatos Christmas Parade. I blogged it last year come to think of it.

This year was more fun than last year; we came early and saw the whole thing. Unlike last year, I don’t think there was a single float pushing evangelical religion which was nice. Let’s keep the X in Xmas, folks!

Near the head of the parade we had the standard classic cars bearing our native royalty. That reminds me, I watched “The OC” this week.

Ah, the dear twirlers, long may they wave.

The most exciting float for the last few years has been one sponsored by Jiffy Mart, where I imagine teens to hang out a lot. The float is a truck with two ramps, and kids do huge flip-in-the-air jumps over the truck.

There were blonde girls slowly circling around the Jiffy Truck on low-rider bikes. So California.

I’m thinking about going to Tahiti and Easter Island. Anyone got advice?

It's always a thrill to see the insanely hyperactive Stanford band. I've never gotten to see enough of them.

I posted a new podcast today, my second-to-last lecture to my Philosophy class. I’ll miss that gig.

Still rooting in the basement (Magic Pig that I am) I found the first-ever fan-letter that I got, mailed to me in 1981 care of Ace Books who had just published White Light with a somewhat misleading cover.

The letter was from a guy in the penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. In response to my careful melding of literature, philosophy, and the mathematics of the infinite, he’d smeared ink on his foot and stepped on a piece of paper — to show me a star-shaped wrinkle. He wanted me to fund university research on the wrinkle and to write a book on the results with him.

“Thing we could go 50 50 on Writing Book on Star and on what university Researchs Writes out on Research part.”

My welcome by the class of people who read science fiction!

Actually I was pleased. It used to be that carnivals would come to the small towns we lived in and, say, the Ferris wheel operator would have a pulp paperback tucked into the hip pocket of his jeans, and he'd periodically read a page or two while letting the Wheel do its alloted cycles. I'd begun to dream of being the author of that book.

About two weeks ago, I had an entry called “It From Bit” or “It From Qubit”? Part 1.. Today I want come back to that topic and finish it off.

[Today's pictures are from Belgium, this particular one shows some strangers in a cafe. I like the expression on the woman's face. “It from bit?” she's thinking.]

David Deutsch argues that quantum computation is going to better at modeling the universe than classical computation. Quantum computation is built up from so-called qubits instead of bits. A qubit can be 0, 1, or some mixture of the two. The big win, says Deutsch, is that our world is already made of quantum mechanics, so a quantum computer can not only emulate any physical system, it can in some sense be a copy of any physical system. With digital classical computer simulations, there’s always the worry that you’re only running a simplified version of the world.

What does a quantum computer look like? Well, they barely exist, so far, and it’s not clear that they’ll ever be usable. In the current laboratory experiments, a half dozen supercooled atoms might be held suspended in a line in a so-called ion trap. And the experimenter shines pulses of laser light onto the ions, and eventually one of the ions might spit out a photon or flip over, and that’s your output.

What seems to me like a kind of flaw is that, at least for this style of quantum computer, the thing isn’t self-contained. The program isn’t stored inside the system. The pulses of laser light are both the program and the data. Of course I have to load programs into my desktop computer or my walk-around robot. But once those programs are in there, the system can go off on its own and function autonomously. I don’t see that happening in at least the current descriptions of quantum computation.

In some sense it’s easier to say the universe is a quantum computation instead of a classical computation with sharp-valued digital bits. For the universe as we know it seems to be made of quanta. But as Wolfram remarked to me recently, this doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a digital substrate. He says that trying to smuggle quantum mechanics into the lowest level of reality is a bit like the heliocentrists’ desperate attempts to preserve their unwieldy system by tacking on epicycles to the planets’ motions. Maybe at the lowest level we can just let go of the quantum system and get something really clean and crystalline.

I’m still rooting around in my basement, moving my old papers from cardboard boxes into plastic boxes. I came across a manila envelope containing all the items that were on the bulletin board over my utility-room desk when we emigrated from Geneseo, NY, in 1978 — to Heidelberg, Germany, where I wrote White Light and Software in the next two years. I was primed for ignition.

In parsing this first image, you have to realize that, growing up in Kentucky, I saw that particular pair of phrases very frequently posted near narrow turns on our two-lane highways. So my drawing is what you might call satire. The mouse's neck is infinitely long, you understand, reaching clear up to heaven, and that's the null-and-void behind him/her.

For awhile there I was printing my own photos and then coloring on them with pencils. This is none other than Eddie Marritz.

This little collage goes back to my grad-school days, maybe 1970, when I was 24. That’s a photo of Albert Einstein looking very hip with his inventor pal Steinmetz. As for the caption — hey, surely by now, nearly 35 years later, the statute of limitations for crime-think has kicked in.

I loved drawing with Rapidograph pens, drawing pretty much at random, simply making gnarly curved lines that pleased me by their forms. And then I’d turn them into pictures of surreal scenes, adding extra lines, coloring and so on.

This picture came with an ad for a set of encyclopedias, I think. I always relished the vapidity of the people’s expressions. Like this is the first book they’ve ever seen in their life, and maybe the last one they’ll ever look at. Gosh!

And here’s a nice curvy-line picture of two dancers, a bit like La Goulue and Valentin le Desosse. In the upper left corner it says, “Do the Funky Chiken. It’s Seventies! Inter-Dimensional! Decadent! CUT HERE.”

Ah, the glorious 70s! A time before Reagan, even! And the whole wonderful world right “Outside My Window.”