Brian Silverman sends a link to Mark Owen's amazing pages on the Wireworld cellular automaton .

Christmas gaining momentum here. I went skating in San Ho again with one of the kids. The PA system was playing “Octopus's Garden” from Abbey Road and I was happy.

The other day some of us hiked up onto Saint Joseph's Hill behind the Jesuit residence. We call the hill in this picture Donkey Hill, as usually there's a pair of donkeys living there. I'm always happily amazed at finding such a rural-looking corner within walking distance of my home, here on the banks of Route 17.

This is part of a really big eucalyptus tree. I love when trees have wrinkles as if they were soft flesh.

I had a line about this in my novel White Light :

“I stood under a big twisting tree, a beech with smooth gray hide made smoother by the rain running down it, tucks and puckers in the flesh, doughy on its own time-scale.”

There's a nice article about my artist friend Dick Termes in Science News

As I understand it, Termes's painting method consists of getting a spherical canvas, standing in front of it, and painting onto the canvas what you see on the other side of the sphere, in front of you. Termes does not work by painting what is behind him onto the sphere, all the while looking over his shoulder. He paints what is in front of him. Once he has finished a patch corresponding to what is in front of him, how does he add what is, say, to the left of the patch in front of him? He moves around the sphere to the right a little so that he is now looking directly at the area that was formerly to the left. And he rotates the sphere to the right so as to expose the blank part of the sphere canvas to the left of what he already painted.

Mathematically, this is equivalent to central projection of the world onto the inner surface of the sphere, followed by eversion. By eversion I mean this: turn the sphere inside out. This way the correctly projected image which was visible from the inside is now visible from the outside.

I went to visit Dick when I was working on Saucer Wisdom in 1997. The painting of mine shown above depicts Frank Shook, Rudy, and an alien. Recalling this, I just posted my Saucer Wisdom notes, a cool 50,000 words of PDF for your reading pleasure.

Here's a picture of my friend Greg Gibson “being” my Saucer Wisdom hero Frank Shook.

Down into Los Gatos for a spot of Xmas shopping. Lots of lines, as in the P. O., but it’s somehow soothing to be part of the hive mind, to be sharing common activity.

When I first moved to California and walked around Los Gatos in December, I was amazed. I still am, kind of. The first year I was here my father-in-law bought me a surfboard!

The ultra-commercial artist Thomas Kinkade lives near here and has painted a couple of Los Gatos scenes, one near this spot. Kind of a nice picture, actually. Available in spime form, in small and large sizes, signed and unsigned, with a variety of frames.

One store had a kind of terrifying Santa Claus robot who sings and dances if you get close to him. “Ho ho ho, spare change?” Is this the 21st Century, or what? Like Bender from Futurama.

My head is warped by the shop windows.

Yesterday I found a link on boingboing.net to a video of Bruce Sterling giving a talk in Munich.

So I pissed away a rather enjoyable hour watching it.

It's kind of hard to sit in your computer chair and not do anything for an hour, so I got my yoga mat and lay on the floor for most of it. I ate some cereal out of a dish on the floor like a dog. At the feet of the Ascended Master of Industrial Design.

He's talking about what he calls spimes, he spoke on this at SIGGRAPH as well. BoingBoing has the text of this speech online.

The flash is that every object CAN have an URL address. The realworld tech for this is something called an RFID (pronounced Arfid] a little chip that sings out an ID number when scanned by an RFID reader within about ten meters. No more lost glasses.

[My addition: The scifi way to do it would be to have an intrinsic ID based on an object's measurements and quantum state. If the scifi case, a spimeID reader would be something you'd have to pick up outta the universal wave fuction.]

A big practical nearterm downside of RFID Bruce mentions is if Americans have to put them in their passports, as has been proposed. Duh? Another downside Bruce mentions is the the Beagle Boys skimming data to find where the expensive loot is.

He ends the talk with what he's been know to call “the standard SF move of transcendence.” Now each object has a life history, like a person. And therefore a soul? Dear objects!

Of course objects always did have a spacetime trajectory that God/the cosmos can see. But now it's a humanized soul. I think of the story of Byron the Bulb in Gravity's Rainbow.

Might one write a story from the point of view of two objects? A two-cans story instead of a two-guys story. In this context, forget not Phil Dick's “The Short Happy LIfe of the Brown Oxford.”

Or a hive mind could emerge from the objects? Stealthy scuttling of an empty sardine tin.

Or we discover what I've always suspected, that objects ARE regularly disappearing into the fourth dimension, and now it becomes known. Big Act One reveal for that.

It was a good show, always a pleasure to see Bruce in action. His delivery is such that he continually sounds like he's making fun of what he's saying, mocking it, wrapping it in irony, and by thus throwing the listener off balance, he keeps the upper hand. A rhetoritician sublime.