Stephen Wolfram sent me a reference to a nice picture of cone shell in action. This little mollusc looks “greased and ready to kick ass,” as the doo-wop band Sha-Na-Na used to describe themselves. I had never realized how sinister these little guys are.

The picture is from Chuan Fong Lim and Victor T.H. Wee Southeast Asian Conus: a seashells book. (Singapore: Seaconus, Pte, Ltd. 1992).

I've been thinking about the tidal wave that hit Indonesia and Sri Lanka. And how after the first wave the ocean drew way way back, and people could see all these fish flopping around on the bottom — a few people making the classic mistake of walking out to collect the fish.

Imagine a science-fiction version. Due to some disruption, say a quantum supernova, reality is drawn away. Everything disappears in a certain zone, exposing the creepers and scuttlers that live “under” reality. Those flashes you see out of the corner of your eye, they're real. And now they're exposed, hanging there, flopping and twitching. They look like — cone shells! You step forward into the reality-drained zone, filling your collecting-bag with the specimens, but then — what's that rumble?

I think I'll use this image in Mathematicians in Love. Reality disruption when the lovers return from La Hampa.

We’ve only been getting about an hour of sun a day, lately, first thing in the morning. So I went out for a bike ride. I’ve always liked getting outside first thing on New Year’s Day. In touch with Gaia.

My neighbor Gunnar came along, but we made Slug the dog stay home.

I like the patterns that rain water makes flowing down the street. I’ve always wanted to program this as a cellular automaton. I think you’d need a 2D rule, with each cell holding a water-depth variable and two flowspeed variables, one for downhill, one for across to the next cell. Possibly one speed would do.

You get these nice moving fronts, with hints of Zhabotinsky scrolls. Would be a good thesis project for someone.

Here’s a live “Christmas” tree we passed.

I love California. On to the new year.

Rudy just showed up and told me about a funny site called Doing a Lynndie. It has pictures of people posing like the notorious soldier Lynndie England.

You have to grin, have a cigarette in your mouth, point with one hand and make a thumbs-up gesture with the other.

Laughter is the best medecine, as they used to say in Readers Digest — both for the individual and for the hive-mind.

[Warning: Rudy Rucker is a fictional character. Do not try injecting conotoxins into your own brain on New Year's Eve.]

As I keep saying, for the last couple of years I’ve been working on a long book with a long title, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning Of Life, and How To Be Happy.

Here's another excerpted idea. I'd wanted John Brockman to put this on his annual Edge Question of the Year page, but he thought it was too complicated. Like, the regular Godfather makes you an offer you can't refuse; but the Mathematician Godfather makes you an offer you can’t understand…

Here we go.

Think of a computation as an ongoing process, for example your life, or society, or a plant growing, or the weather. Relative to a given computation we can formulate the notion of a target state as being some special status or behavior that the computation might eventually reach. The halting problem in this context is the problem of deciding whether a given input will eventually send your computation into one of the target states. And a halting problem is unsolvable if there's no computation, algorithm, or rule-of-thumb to detect which inputs won't ever produce a target state.

By way of getting a more defendable form of Wolfram's Principle of Computational Equivalence [registration required], I've formulated the following Natural Unsolvability Hypothesis (NUH):

Most naturally occurring complex computations have unsolvable halting problems relative to some notion of a target state.

The table lists a variety of real world computations to which the NUH might apply. In each row, I suggest a computation, a notion of “target state”, and a relevant question that has the form of wanting to detect initial states that fail to produce a target state.

Assuming that the NUH applies to these computations with these particular definitions of target state, we’re faced with unsolvability, which means that none of the questions in the third column can be answered by a finding a simple way to detect which inputs will set off a process that never leads to one of the target states.

In such cases, all you can do is watch and wait, maybe forever. In a way, it's no surprise.