TPM, or The Philosophers' Magazine has an interesting page of interactive philosophical games.

[This is a picture of Rudy Jr. beating me at Go. He's been able to beat me at every known board game since he was five or six. Up till then he was a good chess partner for me!]

The idea is that you answer a series of questions, and the game chides you if your answers aren't consistent with each other, and praises you if they are. I tried “Staying Alive” and “Battleground God.”

I've started looking at protozoa in my microscope again. There's a nice pond of them at the top of this hill.

My novel Master of Space and Time is back in print from Thunder’s Mouth Press, an imprint of Avalon Publishing being edited by John Oakes, formerly of Four Walls Eight Windows.

This is the book that Michel Gondry is interested in filming with Jack Black in a starring role. At least that was the news in Variety in May, 2004. I haven’t heard anything new on this front, other than that Midi Minuit recently renewed the option with me, which is of course a favorable sign.

Yesterday I went into San Jose and saw Ishmael Reed give a presentation at the King Library (the new joint library of San Jose State University and the city of San Jose). It’s always exciting to meet a legend of literature. Lately he’s mostly been writing non-fiction, the latest being Blues City, a book about Oakland. I picked up a reprint copy of his funny, wild Mumbo Jumbo of 1974, which I haven’t reread in a long time.

I was talking to him and he said he’d been reading about parallel universes and “spring theory,” which is a great twist on the usual term. I told him he should write a science-fiction story. He was a little concerned about getting the science right. I was like, “Just pick up some buzz words and use mumbo jumbo!” By the way, Mumbo Jumbo explains that this phrase comes from the African language Mandingo (ma-ma + gyo + mbo) = (grandmother + trouble + depart) = magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away.

Things have settled down and I'm working on MATHEMATICIANS IN LOVE. Here's a piece of a scene I wrote yesterday that I like. The point of view is the mathematician and rock-singer Bela Kis, he's fronting a memorial concert for his bass player Cammy, who was murdered by a guy named Sandoval, who nearly cut her head off. The German metal rock star bassist Jutta Schreck of AntiCrystal is sitting in for Cammy.

***

To get some energy, I led the band into our AntiCrystal cover, and that finally picked Jutta up. She bared her sharp teeth in a smile, left the smile in place, and growled the words of “Crying Chainsaw Clown,” her bass playing a funeral dirge that accelerated into a rocket launch, with Jen3 wailing and Naz sprinkling fireworks of percussion. It was very German, very metal, deeply good. Jutta plowed on past the final chorus, and we stretched out, turning the song into a jam, getting into a groove for the first time tonight, the music meshing like the wheels and levers of a locomotive, and winding up with multiple repetitions of the psychotic chorus.

Crying chainsaw clown �- her head is on the ground.

Crying chainsaw clown �- my head is on the ground.

Crying chainsaw clown �- your head is on the ground.

Crying chainsaw clown! Crying chainsaw clown! Crying chainsaw clown!

The crude, English-as-a-second-language lyrics seemed uncannily powerful to me tonight, and for the first time ever I was able to break my voice into the heavy-metal falsetto register, screaming my aching heart out. I even began to feel some compassion for Sandoval in his jail cell.

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Every post needs a picture, so here's a vaguely relevant painting by Robert Williams, a self-portrait with a starving clown in the upper right-hand corner.

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For the next scene, I get to blow up the Tang Fat Hotel in Chinatown with a prediction machine that violates the Margolus-Levitin computational density limit! (See also the slightly more readable paper.) Jabbering tenants scattering like chickens from a cherrybombed henhouse! Louche sex workers popping through soft meat walls into each others beds!

Searching for “hallucinogen + conotoxin”, I found a book called Neuroscience , with too many authors to list here, published by Sinauer Associates of Sunderland, MA. Synchronistically enough, the book points out a connection between cone shell envenomation and betel nut intoxication! They both block the nicotinic ACh receptors. It all fits! Quoting from the book and lifting two of the illos:

“Another interesting class of animal toxins that selectively block nicotinic ACh and other receptors includes the peptides produced by fish-hunting marine cone snails (figure above). These colorful snails kill small fish by “shooting” venomous darts into them. The venom contains hundreds of peptides, known as the conotoxins, many of which target proteins that are important in synaptic transmission. … The array of physiological responses produced by these peptides all serve to immobilize any prey unfortunate enough to encounter the cone snail.”

“Another postsynaptic neurotoxin that, like nicotine, is used as a social drug is found in the seeds from the betel nut, Areca catechu (figure above). Betel nut chewing, although unknown in the United States, is practiced by up to 25% of the population in India, Bangladesh, Ceylon, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Chewing these nuts produces a euphoria caused by arecoline, an alkaloid agonist of nicotinic ACh receptors. Like nicotine, arecoline is an addictive central nervous system stimulant.”

Still more synchronicity. I quite smoking three weeks ago and still want a cigarette often. According to an interesting article on the poisonous geography cone shell,, [where I got the picture above] this Philipino mollusc is also known as the “cigarette snail” because if he stings you, you have enough time left to smoke a cigarette, and that’s it.

[Picture above from the Scientific American. You gotta love how long that geography cone shell can reach.]

Queen Mu of the old Mondo 2000 would love the idea of conotoxins; she used to like to go on about tarantula venom. How strong is the experience? Well, according to Gary Stix, “A Toxin Against Pain”, Scientific American, April, 2005,pp. 88-93, “In some cases, the side effects diminished. But not always. A patient’s delerium, in one instance, ended only after electroconvulsive therapy.”

Now that’s a bad trip, when it takes shock treatment to bring you down!

Question, if the neurotoxin blocks the nicotinic ACh receptors, does that mean that being hit with it is in some way like having a cigarette? Would it remove your desire to smoke?