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.

So I’m going on about cellular automata all the time and you’re thinking, “Yes, but can CAs get me high?” I’ll say! Stephen Wolfram’s mascot is the textile coneshell, famous for having a one-dimensional CA wrapped around its shell.

Now as it happens, these little guys are fierce carnivore predators, prowling around in search of small fish to harpoon. See the Cyber Diver News Network for details.

The harpoon is a tiny barb laden with a venom called a conotoxin!

(These two pictures are from a conotoxins interest group.)

And today an article in the Washington Post [registration required to view] reports that a new conotoxin-derived pain-killing drug named Prialt has been approved. And we know all about “pain-killers,” right? Prialt is said to be a thousand times as strong as morphine. It’s so powerful that if its injected into your muscles or blood stream, it stops your heart — the only way to take Prialt is to inject it into your spinal cord so that it goes straight to the brain. And, natch, a relatively common side-effect is hallucinations.

The world broke into cellular automata, at first in patches and then in chunks. A pair of gliders scuttled by, unweildy as crabs on stilts. As I spoke, the sounds from my mouth became long strings of oscillators. And then a Zhabotinsky jellyfish engulfed me.