There’s a midterm coming up in my Philosophy and Computers class on the first three chapters of my Lifebox book. Here are my loyal students, few but fit.

If you need to study up, you can see the whole sequence of blackboards as a zoomable 1 Meg PDF file.

And you can hear the review lecture as a 60 Meg MP3 file.

Also on the web as of today is a podcast interview of me at small WORLD.

I first met Bruce Sterling in the early 80s, John Shirley and I went and stayed at his house for a Cyberpunk panel in Austin, Texas. In 1983, Bruce and William Gibson came to visit us in Lynchburg, Va, where I was being a free-lance writer, which is when I took this first picture.

Yesterday Bruce showed up again, on his way to a consulting gig in San Francisco. It’s always so nice to be with a fellow SF writer, especially one who’s so much on your wavelength.

Bruce and I have written three stories together, “Storming the Cosmos,” “Big Jelly,” and “Junk DNA.” Yesterday we started talking about a fourth, with working title “Hormiga Canyon.” It was great sitting around spinning ideas.

Bruce was traveling with his writer friend Jasmina Tesanovic. They were into using wireless that leaks down the hill from my neighbors. Bruce has a daily blog on Wired. They actually pay him to blog! What a deal. Well, Bruce is always fun to read, or to listen to. He has an engaging way of sounding both enthused and sarcastic.

We walked down to Sharper Image on Santa Cruz Ave. in Los Gatos and looked at some of the robots for sale. Bruce is into design these days, he's been a guest professor at Art Center in Pasadena, and has a book on Ubiquitous Computatoin coming out from MIT Press. This morning when I woke up he was gone, off to get some righteous bucks from the Global Business Network in SF. You gotta get up pretty dang early in the morning to keep up with my man Bruce!

By the way, Bruce blogged our meeting as well; and this is a picture he took.

Hey, I'll be reading a story on KFJC bright and early Tuesday morning again.

Yesterday I mentioned using a koan in an SF story as a way of jumping between the material and aethereal layers of reality. Shuzan's koan of the shippe (short bamboo staff) seems like a good one to use. I looked for it online and first found this form.

(Form 1) Shuzan held out his short staff and said, “If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now what do you wish to call this?” [Text found in an online koan collection.]

Note that in traditional Zen teaching, the penalty for a poor answer was a hard whack on the head with a short bamboo staff like Shuzan held.

The commentary on this koan says, “It cannot be expressed with words and it cannot be expressed without words. Now say quickly what it is.”

All the other online refs quote the same text — a weakness of online info. So I went the dead-tree route. D. T. Suzuki describes some variations on this koan in Essays in Zen Buddhism (1961 Grove Press, NY) which sits on my bookcase.

[The Suzuki picture is from a cool Neobuddhism site.]

(Form 2) The masters generally go about with a kind of short [bamboo] stick known as a shippe, or at least they did so in old China. It does not matter whether it is a shippe or not; anything, in fact will answer our purpose. Shuzan, a noted Zen master of the tenth century, held out his stick and said to a group of his disciples: “Call it not a shippe; if you do, you assert. Nor do you deny its being a shippe; if you do, you negate. Apart from affirmation and negation, speak, speak!” Suzuki, p, 275.

(Form 3) Ummon expressed the same idea with his staff, which he held up, saying: “What is this? If you say it is a staff, you go right to hell; but it is not a staff, what is it?” Suzuki, p. 276.

(Form 4) Ummon once lifted his staff before a congregation and remarked: “In the scriptures we read that the ignorant take this for a real thing, the Hinayanists resolve it into a nonentity, the Pratyekabuddhas regard it as a hallucination, while the Bodhisattvas admit its apparent reality, which is, however, essentially empty. But, monks, you simply call it a staff when you see one. Walk or sit as you will, but do not stand irresolute.” Suzuki, p. 34.

[This somewhat disturbing picture is from an ad for the Chukchansi gambling resort in today's San Jose Sunday paper. The rest of today's pix are recycled from the blog image bank. If you're really curious about a picture, right click on it to get a context menu and select Properties to get a window containing the name of the file. In some browsers, the Properties window will be too small to show the whole file name, in that case, you can click inside the filename and arrow-key to the right. Once you have the name of the *.JPG file, copy the name. It's likely to work better if you don't include the path, and you don't need the “.jpg,” you can just double click on the name itelf to select it. And then you paste the name into the blog Search box in the sidebar on my blog page. In Windows, of course, you can use Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V for copy and paste, with the Mac you use the Apple key instead of Ctrl. Once you copy the picture name into the Search box and press the Go button by the Search box, you get a page with clickable titles of all the entries where the photo in question appears — normally you want to click the last and oldest entry to discover the picture's origin. It would be nice to have PHP code to do this automatically, that is, find previous appearances of a given picture. I'm inching towards the Complete Lifebox Platform, here.]

I got intrigued by this thing Charles Stross mentions in my favorite recent SF novel Accelerando. He talks about an “…alien superpower – maybe a collective of Kardashev Type Three galaxy-spanning civilizations – running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of spacetime itself, trying to break through to whatever's underneath … [yes,] something vast – a timing channel attack on the virtual machine that's running the universe, perhaps, or an embedded simulation of an entirely different universe.”

What the f*ck is a timing channel attack? It sounds great, Charlie just says it, and we feel like it means something even before we know any details.

Searching the web, I find that a timing channel attack is a type of side channel attack, which is any attack that uses something other than purely abstract software analysis, it gets actual physical data about the encryption process, like it measures how long the machine takes to encrypt something, or listens to its sound, or watches its power consumption or RAM use. The idea is that, e.g. if I eavesdrop and see a lot of y get coded into y^x MOD n, and n is known as well, then I can guess the bits of x one by one from the timing info because the “0” bits of the exponent use less computing time than “1” bits.

So in my story, some people are doing a side channel attack to figure out the ultimate reality program. Or they use the channel attack info to go to the deeper reality. Or both. They’re called reality hackers, natch, just like the old Mondoid phrase.

Suppose some diaphanous alien spirit-creatures have to check in and out to travel back and forth between here and the other, realer, subworld — call it the subfab.

Suppose I am able to monitor the — call them silfs — going from here over to the subfab. I can time, let us say, the interval between the silf saying “Go” and the silf wavering and disappearing. The silfs are being encrypted and I can see how long the encryption time takes. Problem here is that the data in a silf is so big and gnarly, so it’s hard to write it in binary and get the timing per 0/1 bit tested. Of course with the arphidnet mind, this would in fact be feasible.

Encryption isn’t an obviously relevant notion for exploring the computational ultrastructure of spacetime, and still less does it open an obvious travel route to the world’s deeper levels. How could the side channel attack give you information about the structure of the subfab? How could it help you get there?

Suppose you slavishly encrypt your body just like a silf does and then hope that it simply happens that you’ll then trickle down into some cracky-crack of spacetime. We won’t do this so crudely, though, we won’t turn ourselves into, like, radio waves as they did in The Fly. What we’re gonna to is quantum-tunnel from a material body to an aethereal body.

Suitably encrypted data slides through the grill between worlds on its own. Like a beetle walking over a grating in such a way that it doesn’t step on any of the separators. A thin man dropping between the bars of a curbside sewer drain. Yes.

Transforming or encrypting yourself with the silfs’ process gives you an “aethereal body” which is, let us say, a congeries of subtle dark energy vortices. Catch: due to the quantum mechanical no-cloning theorem, you can have a material body or an aethereal body, but not both at the same time. So the first person who encrypts into aethereal form is taking a big chance.

A key element in the process is the quantum mechanical notion that if nobody is watching something then it smears out into a superposed state. Let’s suppose that for a silf to travel between our universe to the subfab (1) she superposes herself, turns off self-observation and spreads out into an indeterminate state, and then (2) observes herself in such a way so as to collapse into the aethereal or material form.

The observation method is the encryption method. A certain quantum-mechanical operator. It takes the form of a koan-style question. “A flag is flapping. What is moving: wind or flag?”

As well as the koan, the material/aethereal transformation routine embodies a mantra, an information pattern which is, in effect, a code number.

Quantum meditation.

Our universe and the subfab are overlaid upon each other in the same space, separated by a tiny distance in the fourth dimension. In the aethereal form, this is the subfab; in the material form, this is the universe. You perceive the one that matches your body.