I had insomnia the other night after some clod (I think it was the automatic telemarketing machine of “Brian's Garden Services”) rang our phone at 1 AM and then I lay awake till 3 AM, and I started calculating how many seconds old I am, inspired by Charles Stross's computer-think gimmick of discussing periods of time in gigaseconds in Accelerando.

And I realized you have your gigasecond birthday — well really its billionth birthsecond — in your 31st year of life, and that before too many more years my two-billionth birthsecond will be rolling around.

Rudy, Jr., wrote a nice little web page that helps you compute your billionth birthsecond. If you're 30 or just turned 31, check this out so you don't let your gigabirthsecond slip by uncerebrated! This is a photo of Rudy taken precisely at his billionth birth second, by the way.

I recorded another lecture in my “Philosophy and Computers” class yesterday, about evolution and artificial life (a.k.a. alife). The picture above is from the amazing alife Galapagos program by the supernal Karl Sims.

The sound came out better than before, because reader Lisa Williams tipped me off about Audacity, which is free. This ware has a nice visual display so I can edit the files. And it has a very good feature “Equalization.” I'm loading the preset “Acoustic” equalization curve and applying it, which cleans up the sound a lot. And you can get a free plug-in so that Audacity saves WAV format into MP3.

I posted the link to it on Gigadial as usual.

The demos are mostly from “Boppers”, which you can get with the “Software Downloads” button on my page for The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul.

I went to have lunch at Apple yesterday. Their address is “1 Infinite Loop,” which seems cute, but the roadways by the entrance are set up so that if you make what looks like a natural turn for the parking lots, it whisks you onto northbound De Anza Boulevard and you have to make a difficult U-turn and two left turns to get back. Infinite loop indeed.

I got to have a special Apple badge. Somehow the high-voltage grills at the doors failed to detect that I’m a Windows programmer, and I escaped vaporization.

I was there to see my former students Leo Lee (right), and Alan Borecky (left). Alan works for Electronic Arts on the Tiger Woods golf games; he was just visiting like me. Leo recently started working at Apple on a project he wouldn’t tell me anything about. He’s enjoying himself.

On another note, computer visionary Rodney Berry tipped me off about this great new magazine, the International Journal of Unconventional Computing, about the generalized kinds of computations that I write about in my book The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul. What makes this journal site really great is that all the papers are readable online! You can, like, find out about using Zhabotinsky scrolls as a computer.

Meanwhile the hen-and-chicks cacti are processing data in the computational fog. Which leads to quantum computing, which leads to way-out-there theorist Scott Aaronson, who’s just started a blog with a link to a mind-breaking, incomprehensible but somehow very interesting list of ten problems for quantum computing. SF writers can strip-mine this page for buzzwords.

I’m proud to say that I’ll be on the air as guest reader on Ann Arbor's Unbedtime Stories for the next six Tuesdays,from 7:20 – 7:40 in the mornings (California time) on KFJC radio 89.7 FM. If you're not in the San Francicso Bay Area, you can hear the show on KFJC online. Unbedtime Stories is a weekly feature on Ann's show, “Dancin' in the Fast Lane”.

Each of the six Tuesdays, I'll be doing a bit of interview, and reading one of short-short SF stories which I used as “Thought Experiments” to introduce the six chapters of The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul.

I went in to tape the shows last week; it was interesting to be there. Like Kurt visiting the Wolfman's lair in American Graffiti. I’ve been listening to KFC for going on twenty years; I even wrote about it in The Hacker and the Ants. Here’s a quote interspersed with three pictures of the KFJC studios.

“Two blocks from the Vos' house, the map showed me something I didn't want to see: a detailed, stippled picture of an ant. A cunning dusting of dither pixels added informative shadings to the image. The scapes of this ant's antennae were tilted towards me, and her mandibles were wide open. Her body rocked back and forth in the sawing motions of stridulation. The map's tiny speaker began stringing fragments of Ann Arbot's voice into deep, demented chirps.

“The sound was scary, but also fun to listen to, in a sick kind of way. It was as good as the thrash I might hear on like 'Ted Bed's Skunk Bunk on the Rhythm Wave of the West, Radio KFJC, 89.7 on your FM dial, broadcasting from Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California,' a personal favorite. Ted Bed always sounded like he'd been up all night flying on candyflip in a cyberclub.

“Most kids couldn't afford their own cyberdecks, but there were plenty of clubs with wall-sized Abbott-wafer screens on three out of the four walls. Users in the club wore stereo-shutter flicker glasses. Cheap and dirty video technology would capture their dancing images and put them up into the big cube of shared cyberspace above the dance floor, and the deck would mix the dancers with daemons and simmies, and active tool icons: virtual buttons, dials and sliders the dancers could use to change the synthetic musical sounds, everyone inside the same rave deck, everyone inside the controls. It would be interesting if the ants showed up in those clubs. The Attack of the Giant Ants! It's Them!”

Anne Arbor kindly gave me CDs of what we’ll be airing, and I’ll post the six episodes as podcasts on my Gigadial station after they air.

This weekend we went up to SF to check out the free Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival. The high point for me was seeing 81-year-old Earl Scruggs and his band.

I was a big fan of Flatt and Scruggs when I was in high-school in Louisville. I didn’t know anyone else who liked bluegrass back then, other than my big brother Embry. But we felt that, as Kentuckians, we should appreciate our native sound, even be we citified Louisvillians.

It was a real San Francisco crowd there. Just like the Sixties. Heavy fog made it seem more surreal.

This energetic little drifter reminded me of The Wanderer by Hieronymus Bosch. Meanwhile Scruggs, Jr., was singing, “In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines.”

Might aliens resemble hand-tied balloon toys? To consider this notion is to immediately assent.

I posted another of my “Philosophy and Computers” lectures, this one is about the first part of Chapter 3 of my Lifebox book. I talk about self-reproduction, morphogenesis, and ecology in terms of computations.

I’m trying various MP3 compression settings, and so far I’m always ending up with about 1 Meg per minute, whether its mono or stereo, 128 kbps or 64 kbps, VBR off or on. One student suggested that if I ran it through a low-pass filter to remove high frequencies (hiss), I’d get smaller files. In any case, the sound is decent now, thanks to my clip-on microphone. I have quite a bit of computer demos in this lecture, by the way, so if you want to study it, you might want to get hold of CAPOW. You can download the new build of CAPOW by using the Download Software button on the Lifebox page.

I was out at Four Mile Beach on Route 1 four miles north of Santa Cruz earlier this week. The wild beaches of California are always even better than I remembered.

Every time it blows me away.

Escape from the machines.

But computation is everywhere. The paths of the birds.

I sat for awhile in this nice cove. Note the fog bank twenty meters offshore.

Now and then a wave would sweep up and a sheet of water would move around a rock and back into the ocean. After a few meters of motion, the edge of the sheet always develops a scalloped edge.

The scallops are always the same, yet always different. These pictures are of two different sheets of water. Unpredictable computations dancing on a strange attractor in phase space. Me too.