“Your jellyfish’s cable generates one after another of your parallel universes,” added Tanya. “And the series of universes is what we call a hyperverse. It’s like successive drafts of a novel.”

“She doesn’t generate universes,” objected Mulvane. “She indexes regions of space. The so-called parallel universes are simply different zones of one very, very, very large shared space. Occam’s Razor. There’s no need to multiply the realities, no need for mysto steam. One mammoth reality has room for all the monkeys on all the typewriters.”

“The word ‘indexing’ is misleadingly limp,” said Unger, eager to argue. “A divine jellyfish’s ever-evolving links to a series of worlds constitutes a creative realization. Like that of a human cinematographer who frames some ideally balanced sequence of images from the endless welter of visual input. Or like the output of a sculptor who finds successively lovelier images within a quarry’s stones: forms that approach the beauty of, ah, Alma.”

I was beginning to understand the meaning of the gnarled connector cord I’d seen running through the hypertunnel from Earth to La Hampa. Some god-like jellyfish was in physical contact with our universe. As Tanya had it, the jellyfish was feeding in series of information-seeds that defined successive versions of our world. Or, in Mulvane’s view, the jellyfish was continually altering an index-code that singled out a series of locations in a pre-existing, exhaustively complete universe. In either case, the jellyfish was in some sense contacting an ever-changing series of Earths, each of them somewhat similar to ours, and each of them supposedly a bit better than the ones before. My mind felt very clear as I formed these ideas.

“There’s a whole lot of Earths,” said Paul. “It doesn’t actually matter whether they’re in separate parallel universes or scattered across one big universe. The two models are in fact equivalent, but never mind. In any case, you can think of the Earths as drawings on a stack of papers, one Earth per sheet.”

[Today's notes are out-takes from Mathematicians In Love; the pictures are from earlier blog entries. For various reasons, I won't be blogging much more for about a week.]

I was in San Ho yesterday to teach my “Philosophy and Computers” class. We had a midterm. I should have mentioned on problem 1 that you can imagine there being more blank cells to the left and right of the table.

While I was in town, I went to the “Game On” videogame exhibit at the Tech museum. The place was, as so often happens in San Jose, utterly deserted, with nobody there but the Tech staff, me, and a couple of Japanese tourists. The upside was that I could play the games to my heart’s content. Ms. Pac-Man, what a game. And what a great marketing idea that was, in the newly feminist early 80s to have her be MS Pac-Man simply by the addition of a bow to the missing-pizza-slice icon. I got nostalgic for the days when my kids were at home, as going to play arcade games was something we often did together. There was a Pac-Man machine about a block from our house in Lynchburg, VA, at a bar called T. C. Trotters, it was never quite clear if the kids were allowed in there, but many’s the game we played.

In the back of my mind I’m still thinking about my projected ant story with Bruce Sterling. Here’s a petrified giant ant egg that he gave me.

But for now I’m working on the revisions of Mathematicians In Love. I get a little anxious when I’m revising. Like, will there ever stop being things that I need to fix? Is there a danger of buffing/elaborating this bas-relief until the figures disappear entirely? Is this going to be the final fatal time when my final-draft plot problems and character inconsictencies will prove truly unfixable? This said, it feels so good when I do fix something.

Yesterday my wife swatted a large autumn fly in our bathroom, and left its body on the floor. Not that our house is untidy; she had to rush off to work, and carrying out dead insects is more my bailiwick, also, being a man, I didn't notice the fly for a day.

And now the ants have arrived, and are moving the fly somewhere, and I don't want to clean it up as I want to see the outcome.

It’s taken them about a day to move the fly three or four feet.

I wonder when they plan to dismantle the fly?

I love these pictures, the ants are like cops and reporters at a crime scene. The images also make me think of Goya’s etchings of the firing squads.

Where are the ants taking the fly? Perhaps the Garden of Eden in San Francisco on Broadway near Columbus. This is an image of a painting by fanatic California artist Sandow Birk, courtesy of the Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. After the Tech yesterday, I went to the San Jose Museum of Art as well (even more deserted than the Tech), where there’s a show of Birk’s version of Dante’s Divine Comedy, that is, the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradisio.

Birk and friends made a fresh translation of Dante. Birk made lots of etchings to go with the book (the detail above is from his picture of the lost souls in Limbo), and he also worked a number of his drawings into full-scale color paintings like the one of the Garden of Eden. It’s a very cool show, and you can even buy Birk’s three volumes as paperbacks. I got Inferno at the museum, the text is done with Marcus Sanders. Birk and Sanders are going to be doing an event at the museum at 2 PM this Sunday by the way, intervied by Michail Krasny, tickets $8, check it out.

My artist friend Tony Robbin makes beautiful paintings based on 4D notions such as projections of hypercube tesselations.

A couple of years back, my SJSU student Wyley Dai realized a longterm dream of mine by creating a 4D Space Invaders style game for his Master’s Thesis project. Once I’d gotten students to do 4D Space Invaders, 3D Belousov-Zhabotinsky scrolls, and a surfing game based on a CA running the wave equation — it was time to retire.

Paul Mavrides sent me a link to a psychedelic article, in a seemingly legit physics journal called Symmetry, which shows quarks as cute twists.

I’m catching up on some links.

LA artist and hotrodder COOP sent me a link to a cool series of entries on his Positive Ape blog, relating to twenty-five stages in constructing the painting whose final version I show above. Well, actually the painting is so intensely erotic that I felt uneasy about posting it as-is on my “family blog” type site, harrumph, so I used the PhotoShop Pixelate:Crystallize filter on it.

Bill Meikle wrote about a mystical experience produced by looking at a hypercube drawing! The picture above is actually of a so-called 600-cell, which is a more complicated kind of 4D object, as shown in my favorite 4D visualization program, ”Hyperspace Polytope Slicer”, by Mark Newbold.

It seems like I get a lot of email about the fourth dimension. Hugh Reid posted a speculation about the fourth dimension and visual reorientation illusions. French physician Jean-Perre Jourdan posted a paper about the fourth dimension and near-death experiences. The picture above is from my notes on “Surfing An Einstein-Rosen Bridge” for my novel Mathematicians In Love which I am about to start revising, having gotten some good suggestions from my Tor editor David Hartwell.