Still in NYC. In a disturbing development, they’re auctioning off the contents of our hotel. Came and took the pictures off the walls yesterday.

But we’ve got a nice view, while it lasts. Sunny for the first time today. The view outside was so New York, so forever 1930s, like a beloved childen’s book.

I made the dialy bagel and Starbuck's run. Amazing to look down an avenue and see the most beautiful skycraper in the world, the Chrysler Building.

We walked through Central Park, and Georgia took my picture sitting where my hero Martin Gardner sat for the cover photo on his Annotated Alice in Wonderland about fifty years ago.

Also on view, the Angel Bethesda, as seen in Angels in America, the best movie I saw on DVD last year. Maybe angels have a time dimension perpendicular to ours.

There's an interesting idea first proposed by the science fiction writer and computer science professor Vernor Vinge in a 1993 talk. Vinge pointed out that if we can make technological devices as intelligent as ourselves, then there seems to be no reason that these devices couldn't readily be made to run a bit faster and have a bit more memory so as to become more intelligent than people. And then — the real kicker — these superhuman machines might set to work designing still better machines, setting off a chain reaction of ever-more-powerful devices.

[Ceiling at the Metropolitan Opera. Transcendence.]

Contrarian that I am, I have some doubts about this. You need to get over two hurdles to make an AI Singularity of this kind. (a) Get programmable matter that thinks like we do, (b) Be able to speed up the computation. Usually people attack (a), but it occurs to me now that attacking (b) might be fun instead. In opposition to (b) is my new Wolframite belief that you can't actually speed up the computations that ordinary matter is doing. Nature is always and ever jamming at the max flop.

[Hiphoppers, 34th St. Subway stop. Friendly aliens.]

But suppose I get around this as follows: Imagine some new matter, doughy stuff in a super-entangled quantum synch with itself, some Silly Putty that “computes” much faster than at the standard rate.

[The secret machinery of the world, seen at a Pre-Dada art show in the Neu Galerie on Fifth Ave. at 86th.]

It's matter that “runs faster” than regular matter; it's, like, wattaflop matter as opposed to our normal petaflop matter.

[Veselka Ukranian restaurant 2nd Ave and ~9th St. Food lab.]

The other approach to singularitizing the mind is to wake up the hive-mind. Bring yourself into quantum synch by watching an opera together.

[Opera-goers: hive mind #17]

A related line of thought is is Seth Lloyd's article about black hole computers in the November, 2004, Scientific American, there's a similar article online. Throw some input in the form of physical garbage into a little black hole and watch the radiation come out — here's your encrypted output, mofo. Dzeent. “Ack, a hard rain of cosmic rays!”

Matter is computing itself at a very high rate. Is all of that going into “being intelligent”? Could we shift over some idle computation to be a thousand times smarter?

[Stop making sense.]

Tonight we saw our old friend Eddie Marritz. Eddie and us go way back, he helped inspire some of my stories and essays, see “Eddie” in, e.g. “Tales of Houdini,” “Drugs and Live Sex, NYC 1982” and Master of Space and Time.

Not that Eddie in real life is similar to the louche characters I depicted. It's more that I was hanging around with him when I had the ideas, and drew upon his physiognomy to help imagine the characters.

We’re in NYC for a few days, visiting Georgia and seeing my editors. I had an odd moment in the airport; there were un-turn-offable ceiling-mounted TVs irradiating every single seat in the waiting lounge with a Presidential Address. It reminded me so much of Half Life 2 where you keep passing these screens with the same talking face, endlessly lying, devoid of any compassion or information. Or like Big Brother in 1984. Odd that we actally live in a world as weirdly skewed as a videogame. And that we're passively letting it happen.

Anyway, today we went to the new MOMA NY to check it out. Lots of lines. I did a Lynndie.

Incredible all the modern masterpieces hanging around in the museum. Dali’s The Persistence of Memory is tiny, like a Robert Williams painting, very clear and reproducible — I was being jostled by a crowd of fellow worshippers. I’d like La Hampa to look like this. That jellyfish thing on the ground always reminds me of a line in William Burroughs The Soft Machine: “You win something rike jellyfish, mister. Or it win you.”

Then a bit of shopping. The Macy's store here has more clothes than most cities.

Aren't these beautiful boots?

So I got John Brockman to enshrine one of my science raps among the 177 answers to his EDGE Annual Question – 2005 , “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”

Here's a graphical image of what I said.

I’m still looking through the other answers; there’s some good stuff.