[I got a pig bowl for Father’s Day, too. It’s shy.]

Here’s a satirical passage that I wrote for Mathematicians in Love yesterday. Bela has just arrived at an alternate Earth and is riding in a car with Cammy, a friend of his, native to this alternate world. They turn on the radio. It’s the summer solstice, June 20, and a full moon is rising.

“Oh, this news is gonna be perfect for you, where your head’s at right now,” said Cammy, putting her hand back on the steering-wheel. “It’s gonna seem like you’ve ended up in a sick, weird, evil alternate reality. Feel it, bud, that’s the world we’re livin’ in.”

The show had switched to a tape of Joe Doakes at a recent rally. “In these perilous times, our nation deserves a hundred percent Heritagist government. We can afford no less. Now, I don’t mean to question the patriotism and honesty of each and every member of the Common Ground party. But — if you buy a dozen eggs and one or two or three of them is rotten — common sense says you get your money back and a fresh dozen from the store.” His voice was dry and humorless as a locust’s chirp.

[A moon near the horizon looks bigger to the naked eye than it does in a photo. So I changed it in this photo.]

“What I’m saying is simple common sense,” continued Doakes. “Over and over, the elected and appointed officials of the Common Ground Party have let our people down — in our Congress, in our courts, in our state legislatures, and in our governors’ mansions. I’m proposing a hundred-percent Heritagist victory this fall. We won’t settle for a majority again. We’ve endured the sorry parades of Common Ground filibusters, seen our dreams die in the power-brokered special-interest Common Ground committees, and tasted the lash of the willful, revisionist Common Ground courts.” Doakes was a madman. But each time he stopped, his audience burst into wild applause. Maybe it was a fake applause track?

[The end of the longest day of the year means the slow return of the dark…]

“With complete control of the Congress and the state legislatures, we can use the constitutional power of impeachment to remove the out-of-control Common Ground judges,” rasped the mean little voice. “This is what the balance of powers stands for. With complete control of the Congress and the state legislatures, we will propose and, with the people’s help, pass a constitutional amendment to remove the out-dated notions of Presidential and Congressional term limits. This is what a stable democracy deserves. The success of the hundred-percent campaign will bring lasting homeland security, an end to legislative grid-lock, and an end to the tyranny of the courts. Our great nation deserves no less than the hundred-percent freedom that a hundred-percent Heritagist victory will bring.” The applause crested like a thunderous wave, with the audience members cheering themselves hoarse.

We spent a peaceful Father’s Day in the back yard. Rudy, Penny and Slug came to visit. We ate out there, read the paper, played Scrabble. No machine noise.

Slug chased a cat up our tree.

After awhile, I felt sorry for the cat, she was scared and not all that agile. Her eyes were going back and forth like one of those cat clocks. Eventually she made her way down. Good thing the ground was slanting, and cushioned with lots of dead vines. She galloped off down the street.

For Father's Day, I got a pig cup and mosquito netting for my hat!

Becoming a father is the best thing I ever did.

A few years ago, John Walker moved out of a nice house in Muir Beach because all around him there were construction machines with beepers. You know those beepers, they kick in whenever the machine is in reverse. They're very piercing. I've been beeped all week by a chihuahua of a machine, a little Bobcat that's loading dirt from a neighbor's swimming-pool excavation into dump-trucks.

This neighbor has a Hummer, and he washes it on the weekend, taking about an hour, and it would be too quiet and perhaps wimpy to use a hose, so instead he uses a loud, gasoline-powered pump to shoot out a high-pressure stream worthy of his mighty Hornswoggle.

Noise pollution is a modern tragedy. Just as a random for instance, you may notice that these days how airplane flights from the Bay Area to NY are often routed so that the pilot can always say, “You can see Yosemite Park down there,” and everyone is “Oooh.” This means, however, that if you go hiking in Yosemite these days, there is a more-or-less steady stream of planes going by overhead.

And don't let me get started on leaf-blowers. Oh, well, why not. In Saucer Wisdom I had this idea for noise-attacking bees: Shush Bees. I find the noise begins to drive the rhythms of my thoughts, I begin in effect humming the sound to myself. I find myself waiting, waiting for it to stop. And then another noise polluter helps himself to a piece of the peace-pie. Sometimes I spend a whole Saturday waiting for a moment of calm.

***

Up the street is more construction; but a pleasant kind, there's just the irregular and human-scale beat of hammers. The electrican has a nice piece of old-timey clip-art on his sign; these kinds of images always remind me of the hallowed Pamphlet #1 of the Church of the SubGenius which is *wow* viewable in its entirety online, just keep pressing the little forward arrow at the bottom of the page that link takes you to. Or order the dang thing in paper . I'll never forget the impact this pamphlet had on me when I read it in, like, 1983. The world wasn't as noisy back then.

Monday I went to meet my friends Scott Aaronson and Chris Pollett, who were at the IEEE conference on Computational Complexity at a hotel in San Jose.

Gosh I miss academia — not.

Wednesday I went for a six hour walk in Big Basin park in the Santa Cruz mountains near Boulder Creek. Along the trails were tiny guardian bees.

They hang motionless in the air, each of them defending a few cubic meters of space, and now and then they charge at each other. They’d even charge me, which was cute.

My goal was the Timkins Creek Trail, which is relatively deserted and runs along a nice stream. I found a little stone waterfall and hung out there for an hour.

I love getting my natural-complexity fix. Talk about immersion, there was a newt walking along on the bottom of the stream. That guy’s got it together.

And I love the waterstriders whose hairy feet allow them to skate on the surface. The dimples they make in the surface shed lovely lensed shadows.

Today’s lesson on universal automatism is a 25 Meg movie with my thoughts on the concept, “I seem to be a fluttering leaf.” Click here to view movie. Consider this my off-site presentation for the IEEE Computational Complexity conference 🙂 !

Here’s a particularly nice flow chevron; I have a little 3 Meg movie of this as well(lecture-free). Click here to view movie.

After the woods, I went to visit Nick Herbert. Nick started as a physicist designing hard drives, but these days is more likely to be found holding forth on consciousness. He’s been a big influence on me; he introduced me to Esalen when I first came to California; inspired a character in my short-story about the Mandelbrot Set “As Above, So Below”; inspired the character Frank Shook in my novel Saucer Wisdom; and taught me a lot about quantum mechanics and consciousness. Here’s a picture of Nick and me at an April Fool’s parade in Boulder Creek while I was working on the Lifebox book, like in 2002.

And here’s a quote from a thought-provoking article by Nick called “Quantum Tantra”

“By the high standards of explanation we have come to demand in physics and other sciences, we do not even possess a bad theory of consciousness, let alone a good one.

“Speculations concerning the origin of inner experience in humans and other beings have been few, vague and superficial. They include the notion that mind is an ‘emergent property’ of active neuronal nets, or that mind is the ‘software’ that manages the brain’s unconscious ‘hardware’…

“Half-baked attempts to explain consciousness, such as mind-as-software or mind-as-emergent-property do not take themselves seriously enough to confront the experimental facts, our most intimate data base, namely how mind itself feels from the inside. “

I have a section on this idea in The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. Quoting from that: Nick proposes that we think of the human mind as a quantum system. Recall that quantum systems are said to change in two ways: when left alone, they undergo a continuous, deterministic transformation though a series of superposed states, but when observed, they undergo abrupt probabilistic transitions into pure, classical states. Nick suggests that we can notice these two kinds of processes in our own minds.

(Coherent) The continuous evolution of quantum superpositions corresponds to the transcendent sensation of being merged with the world, or, putting it less portentously, to the everyday activity of being alert without consciously thinking much of anything. In this mode you aren’t deliberately watching or evaluating your thoughts.

(Decoherent) The abrupt transition from mixed state to pure state can be seen as the act of adopting a specific opinion or plan. Each type of question or measurement of mental state enforces a choice among the question’s own implicit set of possible answers. Even beginning to consider a question initiates a delimiting process.

I got a nice picture of Nick yesterday. The wise old hermit. Note the ladder in the background.