I went for a Sunday walk in the Almaden Quicksilver Park today. I like to leave the car by the Guadalupe Reservoir on Hicks road and walk in across the dam.

I come to this park about twice a year, usually alone, and I always have this sense of giving myself a special treat when I’m here. Getting away from the friggin’ computer and touching Gaia.

I remember last year I came here when I was thinking about retiring, for instance, and again right after I retired.

I’m always amazed how Nature keeps on doing her thing unaided. All the fractal layers of life, I just want to zoom in on it forever. But can’t actually zoom that far, so need to stop and savor the four or five levels I get.

Around 1930 Alfred Stieglitz took a lot of pictures of the sky and gave them all the title “Equivalent,” which he said meant that each of the sky images captured a pattern that was equivalent to some mental or emotional state. In this picture, I was thinking the cloud and the wood grain were equivalent patterns, so that’s another kind of equivalent.

I have a weakness for pictures of the sky, as readers of this blog will have noticed by now, and I admire Stieglitz for figuring out a rap for making them sound like more than “isn’t this pretty?” (Be it said, his pictures of the sky are amazing.)

I couldn’t find a good link for a page with a bunch of Stieglitz equivalents, you can get a kind of fake page of them with a Google image search, and there’s a good page at the George Eastman House.

The thing about calling a picture of a sky an “equivalent,” is that if it’s just a picture of a cloud, people are like, so what, but if you tell them that it’s really a picture of your inner turmoil or passing serenity, then it seems more interesting, gossipy monkeys that we are.

Thanks to Jennifer Saylor for emailing in to tell me that the plant depicted yesterday was a red-hot poker plant , (Latin name kniphofia uvaria).

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[Painting by Paul Mavrides, Victors, about 36″ by 24″, acrylic on black velvet.]

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Here's an example of transrealism in action. A note from my journals, followed by a scene from my novel in progress. The world is SF.

=====Journal Note, Creatures in a Mirror, November 16, 2004.=====

At the SF international air terminal, about to fly to Milano to give a talk, I’m waiting for them to print my ticket, staring absently at this clear space behind the ticket counter, assuming it’s a mirror, and then I realize it’s open air, and that I’m staring into the far distance, this terminal is huge.

And then I get the idea of looking into a real mirror and seeing beings in the distance that aren’t there in your real world. The alien cockroach mathematicians.

=====Draft scene for my novel Mathematicians In Love, January 27, 2005.=====

I looked in the mirror on the wall above my dresser — grinning with an open mouth, hungry for the next rush. In the mirror’s recesses, I saw the image of my open window and the reflected tiny view of Haste Street with the eternal Berkeley freaks truckin’ on down the line. I noticed a couple of characters with heads like the buds on a fractal Mandelbrot set. Heads with waving antennae, bodies with smooth glistening backs and an extra set of arms. My visitors! Half-human cockroaches walking on two legs.

I turned towards the window, oddly calm, rocking my guitar, fire-hosing feedback from my amp. I couldn’t see the cockroach-men outside in the plain light of day, no. They were only visible in the mirror’s dark glass. Fine.

I went back to my mirror and watched the visitors scurry across the mirror-street, climb the mirror-wall of mirror-Rochdale, wriggle in through my mirror-window and stand in my mirror-room. I could hear them twittering behind my mirror’s glass. I peered in at them, oddly unafraid, still playing my guitar.

Here's a cactus-like plant I picked on my bike ride today. Anyone know what it's called? I like the notion of just scanning something direct. Photography without a camera. I got the idea from my agent John Brockman's wife Katinka Matson, who's making a fine art career out of this trick.

Katinka's work is quite beautiful.

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On another topic — ah,the torrent of spam that comes in daily.

I use the paid mode of Eudora 6, which has quite a good Bayesian junk filter; it diverts most of the spam into a “Junk” folder. A very few “good” emails end up in the Junk folder, so I scan through it every couple of days.

A Bayesian filter works by looking for various patterns that occur in other known spams, ranking the likelihood of a message being spam, and junking the high-scoring ones. If a spam mistakenly ends up in your good-mail In box, you press Ctrl+J on it, to tell the filter that this one WAS junk, and the filter adjusts its inner workings accordingly, and you can also educate the filter by “un-junking” a good message.

The filter has some reasonably good presets to begin with; as you use it you “teach” it more about which kinds of emails that you do and don't want to see.

So, in the eternal Darwinian struggle of the info web, some people are sending out spam that’s designed to look as much as possible like a real message. And most of them seem to be in Russia.

I think they’re using some fairly decent language-generation programs. Back in the old days, there was a program called Eliza that behaved a little bit like a therapist, and there was another, more poetic program called Racter that spewed forth fairly realistic text. I’m sure there’s any number of these programs out there by now, it’s a fairly simple programming project.

I kind of like some of the “spam poems” that I get, and here’s a couple of examples.

———————————–

From: “Erin Bishop” lgnhbww@orc.ru

To: rucker@******

Subject: Microscope Pen – Rucker,

But they need to remember how greedily inside eggplant hibernates.

Sonia, the friend of Sonia and wakes up with carpet tack living with.

Sonia and I took around freight train (with sandwich for gypsy, beyond shadow.

And bounce the dark side of her senator.

And bounce the dark side of her graduated cylinder.

living with chestnut, deficit related to, and looking glass for are what made America great!

———————————–

“And bounce the dark side of her graduated cylinder” is pure Max Ernst, pure Dada, pure vibrating plane.

One more, also from Russia.

———————————–

From: “Helena Sprague” uufcf@newmail.ru

To: (bogus mailing group)

Subject: The diploma you requested – boustrophedon psychoanalysis tawny

dissident inside boogie over bicep.inferiority complex around find lice on about waif.He called her Elton (or was it Elton?).

steam engine eat toothache beyond.Any shadow can bur living with vacuum cleaner, but it takes a real fundraiser to from bonbon.

———————————–

What is the point of these spam poems? There's no link, no attachment, no address to respond to.

The very pointlessness suggests that the impulse behind them may be art.

The web wakes up.

Kicking into SF gear, I'm imagining a spam poem program winning the National Book Award. Or the MacArthur prize.

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The spam poetry is kind of good because it's not predictable, not what Wolfram calls compuatation class two, as I discuss in The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.

Just for kicks I'm grasping for a connection to the idea of scanning more or less arbitrary scraps of the world that you bring home to your nest. The world is of course the biggest class four computation of all, so you're reasonably likely to get something interesting.

Concept of the artist as an alien probe vehicle, like a Mars lander or a Titan wok.

We went to San Francisco and visited Rudy. He showed us a nanogolf course that he built.

We went to the park by Crissy Field. The city has made it more natural, more of a wetland, it's pretty, and always exciting to see out over the busy bay. There were lots of para sailboarders. Kiteboarders?

Slug dug.

The strong wind sculpted class four gnarly compuations into the sand.

Then we went to see a concert at the Fox Theatre in Redwood City. One of the groups was Charlie Musselwhite and his Sanctuary band.

I’m a fan of Charlie’s from way back, I first saw him when I was in college. He came to our student party back then and I even talked to him a bit there — this was like forty years ago. At the time it made a huge impression on me, I was so thrilled to be talking with a Famous Entertainer and True Artist. Also a Blues Man.

Another time, in the mid 1970s, I happened to be staying up all night, and I listened to Charlie's album Louisiana Fog about a dozen times. To this day, some of those songs are etched for instant access in my memory. The brain codec. “Fell Down On My Knees,” comes to mind.

Charlie recently put out a great new album called Sanctuary, which I got from Rudy for Xmas. So in the lobby after the show, when Charlie is selling and signing CDs, I tell him I already got one for Xmas, but give him a piece of paper to sign anyway — which he isn’t all that happy about, given that the point of this exercise for him is to sell albums. He had a special home-made album for sale too, which I hadn’t realized, I probably should have gotten one of those. So here’s my big moment with the Hero Of My Youth, and I’m like, “I met you at Swarthmore College in 1966.” “Funny, I don’t remember that,” says Charlie in his Elvis-like voice, tinged with a bit of sarcasm I imagine, and moves onto his next petitioner. Oh well! It was a great concert.