messiestobjects

In Another Universe, This Post Is About This Universe. (Where This Post Is About Another Universe, Where This Post Is About This Universe...∞

I want to do a book report on Brian Greene's new publication in the worst way, but I'm not sure that I am capable of it. I used to read popular science books quite regularly, and I'd realized that it's been years since those days at about the same time that 'The Hidden Reality' caught my eye. As I was going through it I realized that reading, and keeping pace with, popular science texts is a skill which must be practiced, especially if one is not particularly well trained in physics.

That's not to say that he doesn't do a great job of explaining the concept behind 9 different types of multiple/parallel Universes quite engagingly; he does. It's more that, once I put the book down for a few minutes after every couple of pages to think about the implications of whatever mind-blowing concept he's introduced, the particulars begin to drain away because my poor little head is not lately used to holding on to the strange and complicated concepts behind Infinity, Relativity, Quantum physics, and String Theory.

However I'm going to try because I feel that my motive in writing about this book is more an effort to hang on as best as I am able to the understanding of a beautiful dream that fades quickly after waking than an attempt to convince anyone else to read it. Of course after completing that last sentence, I've sat and stared at the book cover for about ten minutes trying to figure out how to start. Sigh.

So here then; let's begin with the apology. Mr. Greene himself goes to great lengths in the book to make the reader understand that, at the moment, no versions of the multiverse which he posits are actually provable with hard data, and therefore may fall slightly outside the boundary of science. I say slightly, because though their detection may currently lie beyond our best detectors, they are in fact unavoidable outcomes of certain aspects of science which ARE scientifically sound, mathematically speaking.

As a comparison, when Einstein published his theory of General Relativity the technology available at the time was not capable of disproving his math. He came up with that theory using creative visualization, math and perspiration. And whatever other tools of genius he had at his disposal. But he himself did not go out and measure the Cosmic Background Radiation which ultimately helped to prove his theory correct. Now I'm not comparing Brian Greene or any other String Theorist to Einstein, (and neither was Greene in his book) merely the scientific process itself which is at work here. If you follow the math it leads to amazing places which, more often than you might think, describes the cosmos as it is in reality, even though it may also lead beyond all common sense. So this exploration of the side effects and the possibilities of infinity, string theory and math is extremely valid science, even if in the end it turns out that they've missed something and there are other things at work. You have to explore every avenue if you want to find out what's actually out there.

So why bother getting all excited over Parallel Universes if there's a chance it's inaccurate? Because it's exciting. And because, all things being equal, it's probably not inaccurate. It is currently science's best guess, much as Relativity and Evolution once were, and therefore worth a lengthy consideration.

So I'll start with the multiverse which I understand the most clearly, naturally. He calls it the Quilted Multiverse and here is how it works: There is some question in the cosmologist community whether the space that we inhabit is either very, very, very freaking large but ultimately finite, or whether it is in fact infinite. It all depends on the overall shape of the universe, which we don't yet know. (It's important to have a good grasp of the concept of infinity for this one, which I am lucky to have in some finite degree thanks to Rudy Rucker. His book 'White Light' is a rollicking exploration of infinity, and with extremely visual storytelling really helped me to glimpse what mathematicians actually mean when they use the term infinity. I highly recommend it.)

At any rate, If our Universe in fact turns out to be infinite (as the current trend of thought among cosmologists apparently believe is the likeliest scenario) then there is almost certainly another messiestobjects out there, writing up a book report about a publication by Brian Browne, (the last name of the author perhaps being the only difference between that Earth and this one) and positing some strange world where a version of himself is typing up a book report on a publication by a Brian Greene. In fact, there would be an infinite amount of Earths out there, that look just like ours. And there would be an infinite amount of other possible Earths as well. One, perhaps, that was solely inhabited by shrimp. Or one with no shrimp. Let your imagination go wild, like mine!

The reason why this would be so is simply statistical. Matter is evenly distributed throughout the visible Universe on very large scales. What that means is, you can take a really big box, say about 100 million light years cubed and chunk it down here, then weigh all of the matter in it. Then pick it up and chunk it down over there, again weighing all of the matter. Do this in several locations throughout the Universe and you will find that each box-full of matter will weigh in at about equal amounts, and it will be so all throughout the Universe. The idea here is that while matter may be evenly spread throughout an infinite Universe, there is a finite amount of forms that matter can take.

So the implication of this is that matter, as much of it as there is, can only arrange itself in so many ways. It's like a deck of cards; there are 52 cards in a deck, and 52 cards can be arranged in 10⁶⁷ unique ways. That number fully written out is 80,658,175,170,943, 878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000  which is obviously a really huge number. However, once you have arranged those 52 cards in that many unique ways, the cycle will repeat and you will start to get duplicate arrangements. Of course, some arrangements are more likely than others, so you will have odd random assortments of cards duplicate more often than you will see the deck fall out completely arranged from aces to Kings in all four suits, but as unlikely as that is, it will happen eventually.

The same is true for the arrangement of matter. In the entirety of our visible Universe, there are about 10¹⁰¹²² possible particle configurations. Which again, is a totally inconceivable number yet is definitely a finite number. Once you've reached every possible unique combination, the patterns will begin to repeat, and repeat infinitely. Thus, messyobjects is out there, messierobjects, and even an evenmoremessiestobjects, all trying to say hi to me right now. Since our brains and life experiences are nearly completely identical and in some cases absolutely identical, I can say hi to them and they've received the message! I know this because I've received their message, having sent one myself. We're totally braintext messaging across the infinite light years right now. They say hi back, and ask how's the wife and pets and I say oh, the same as yours, pretty much. ad infinitum. (Of course it's not a very interesting conversation, having identical thoughts and all, but there's always a downside.)

Whew. That was the first and easiest version of a multiverse in this book, and believe me they get far more difficult to grasp. The existence of the Quilted Multiverse depends only on discovering the shape of the Universe we currently reside in without calling any of the more unproven forms of science into the matter, but it is important here to note that Brian Greene and other String Theorists did not go out looking for multiverses. They did not read some ridiculous New Age drama and say "Oy, how can we finagle the math to come up with parallel dimensional portal-thingies in order to dazzle the public?" No, the attempt to understand actual observed phenomena through the framework of String Theory led them mathematically all on its own to many other different types of possible multiverses.

The Inflationary Multiverse, which better fits the definition of a multiverse in my extremely humble opinion, is one in which bits of our universe break off and inflate into bubble universes of their own, our Universe having broken off from another "larger" one at its own birth. There are also the Brane, Cyclic, Landscape, and Quantum types of multiverses. I like the Quantum Multiverse; it basically goes back to the Schrödinger's Cat thing, and Quantum uncertainty.

(jpeg of a print by Jie Qi) In case you are not familiar with Schrödinger's Cat, it is a Thought Experiment designed to help one visualize how Quantum Particles behave. The way it goes is, you put a cat in a box, close the lid, and have a radioactive atom timed to decay and open a flask of poison. In the quantum world, there is an equal possibility of the decay happening and causing the cat to be dead or alive when you open the lid. Until you open the lid, the cat is actually in an uncertain state, being both alive and dead at the same time which would be an unsettling thing to witness, I'm sure. The traditional outcome of this little game is that when you open the box, the probability wave collapses and the cat becomes one or the other. Thus the very act of observation determines the ultimate quantum state. (For a more accurate and less confused rundown of the thought experiment in mid-twentieth century science nerd jargon, visit the wikipedia page on the subject)

This is weird. But this type of behavior has been observed in quantum particle physics, hence the Quantum Uncertainty Principle and it does not apply to the world of things of our size, only to the realm of the very, very small. There is a gap between the quantum scale and ours where Quantum Theory breaks down and reality then becomes guided by Newtonian physics and Relativity. If you add String Theory math to this experiment, you can bridge the gap and in fact the cat is actually both alive and dead for realsies, in two different universes! Long, complex, nearly-incomprehensible-to-a-non-String-Theorist story short, the reason that Quantum particles behave so oddly is that we are seeing them play out every possible state of existence across a multiverse.

As an interesting aside, that particular multiverse explanation is where the idea comes from that every time one makes a choice, universes diverge and a separate reality for each choice carries on it's course. It may sound a bit hippie or New Age-ish, but if String Theory turns out to be correct, this in fact may actually be happening, right now, right next to you.

Another multiverse is the Holographic Multiverse, which is conceptually easy, but also very hard to explain the whys and wherefores of. This one is due to the nature of information and how it is stored in the universe, and when looked at closely begins to look a bit as though all matter as we see it is actually a projection of another type of matter on a distant quantum dimensional surface. In this multiverse all of our actions, in fact all interaction between all forms of matter everywhere is a shadow play. We're hand puppets. Don't ask me to explain the science though. It has something to do with Black Holes, very tall drinking straws, and math. Beyond that, I haven't retained a thing. Damn it.

The final multiverse of the book is the so-called Ultimate Multiverse, a distinction earned due to a new twist on the Anthropic Principle, which is the idea that asking the question "How is it possible that our planet, our very universe have the conditions necessary to bring forth life?" is meaningless because life evolves in the place to which it is suited. In other words, we are here both to ask the question and be the answer. I like this one for purely philosophical reasons, as it's an (yet another) answer of sorts in the debate between religion and science, at least for a certain set of debate points. The religious often like to point out that the Universe, Life, and Everything are far too complex to have "just happened" which is about as far as their understanding of the sciences of Cosmology and Evolution usually go. A very sad, limited viewpoint indeed.

At any rate, the Ultimate Multiverse answers the question of why the Physical Laws of our particular Universe are just right in order for galaxy, star, planet, and life formation to "just happen". Because in an infinite multiverse, where every possible Universe that can exist does exist, one with our physical laws and conditions for life merely becomes an inevitability, not a miracle. Therefore there is no "why" of existence, merely the statistical likelihood of it. You'll note that the Ultimate Multiverse differs from the Quilted Multiverse in the sense that, with the latter, there may be an infinite set of volumes with repeating particle configurations, allowing for infinite versions of themselves, however they are all still set in the same Universe as we are and subject to the same physical laws, merely separated by distances too large for any technology to ever cross. The Quilted version answers the question of why there is life on Earth, but does not answer the why of the overall conditions in our Goldilocks Universe and its particular laws of physics being just right in order to allow life to come about in the first place. The Ultimate Multiverse does, however. It states that while there are Universes like ours with just the right amount of density for galaxies, stars, and planets to form, there are also an infinite amount of stillborn ones. Our Universe is the Royal Flush that comes along once in a blue moon... or rather once in a Blue Iteration.

There are solid mathematical underpinnings to the Ultimate Multiverse, as well as for all of the others, but I'm not going there. If you want to try to understand them, or any of the other concepts, I suggest that you pick up a few popular science books and get cracking. 'The Hidden Reality' is wonderful, but unless you've already attempted to come to grips with the ideas behind Relativity, Infinity, or Quantum Physics, you might want to get a more basic picture of the Universe first. 'Cosmos' by Carl Sagan is an excellent place to start for basic Cosmology, that Rucker book I already pimped for Infinity, and Brian Greene's earlier work 'The Elegant Universe' is a great introduction to String Theory. So get busy with the head scratching, braniac!

Another great way to contemplate infinity, by the way, is to obsessively-compulsively watch fractal zoom videos. I've posted about fractals before, here and here. I don't know how, but I'm sure that fractal math figures in to multiverses somehow. This one magnifies the Mandelbrot set 10²⁷⁵ times, and ends up at a copy of itself. Apropos.

 

And Along Came A Transrealist

I picked up this book relatively randomly a few weeks ago. Stuff of this nature always piques my curiosity because I like both science fiction and popular science. (Also, I saw it sitting next to a new book of transcripts from some lectures that Carl Sagan gave in Scotland in 1985 which has recently been published by his wife, which is what originally caught my eye.) It's a book of essays by various pundits about what humanity could possibly look like if we were still around in, well, Year Million.

It's not overall a great book; I mean, I thoroughly enjoyed it but it's a bit stale in many ways. Naturally, it's difficult for anyone to guess what even the very near future is going to look like. For instance, go into a Starbucks on lunch hour in any major city, listen to a conversation that the nerdy computer types are having about the drudgery of their IT jobs, and try to imagine what that conversation would have sounded like to you back in say, 1985. I'm sure even Carl Sagan would have been like, "What the crap are you maniacs talking about?" Words that mean one thing back then have taken on whole new meanings in light of technological advances, so to a 1985er, the words might even sound familiar, but the ways in which they were being put together might remind him of a conversation in a particularly dire lunatic asylum. For instance: "I was trying to download some music files onto my cellphone, but Apple's damn proprietary iTunes system keeps messing me up. I've got to figure out a way to hack that shit." Think about what that sentence could possibly mean in a pre-home computing world. It's English, but it's nonsense.

Stanislaw Lem actually wrote a really excellent book on that subject called "Return From The Stars", which in a nutshell is about a Spaceman who returns to Earth after a 100 year mission only to find that he doesn't understand anything that is going on. Looking at the problem in reverse, I just re-watched that fabulous David Mamet movie, Glengarry Glen Ross, which is about the cutthroat business of real estate sales in, I assume, the late 80's early 90's. These salesmen kept having to make telephone calls to potential sales leads via pay phone, and in one Scene Jack Lemmon is calling his family and telling them he won't be able to be reached later and I kept thinking, what? Why are they bothering with pay phones? Can't he be reached by his cell? Major plot hole. It's amazing to me how anachronistic those pay phones seemed, and that it took me a beat or two to catch on to the time frame. I think it was the combination of familiarity and a decade of perspective... I've seen that movie before and all the actors in it are pertinent to my adolescent movie experience, yet give it ten years and whammo, weirdness.

So you can see, the idea of trying to look a million years into the future seems at first glance a bit useless. One major technological advance and wham, everything changes. But in a weird sort of way, looking a million years into the future might actually be easier than looking a decade into the future. You have to ask larger, less precise questions such as, Will we have colonized other planets, or entire galaxies by then? Will our energy source be entire suns, entire star clusters, or dark energy itself? Will we be human, something more evolved, or will our personalities be downloaded into huge programs in which our thought processes will be in effect immortal, and capable of computations greater than our current meat-brains can presently conceive? Well, all of these possibilities are addressed, of course. Some of the essays are more successful at getting the points across than others. But here's the reason I really loved this book:

There are about 14 essays in this book, and the first 10 are all asking questions along these lines. Futures are spun out for us that to a Borg seem like heaven. We have deconstructed entire planetary systems and turned them into so-called Dyson Spheres: technological monstrosities made of "computronium" which would make the Death Star run away with its tiny little tail between its legs. We turn ourselves into gigantic computer minds, more capable of exploring the infinite Universe than in our present, limited meat bodies of mortality. All of which are not necessarily impossible ideas, they just seem to us now as that airplane seemed to those people from the last of the uncontacted tribes in South America. Or perhaps they are impossible; it's a book of speculation, after all. But then, along comes chapter 11. And who is it written by? Why, none other than the greatest speculative mind of our time, Rudy Rucker. I haven't said it enough lately; I love that guy. He is the great-great-great-grandson of the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Not that that matters; his own body of work is genius. He's a well respected mathematician and philosopher in his own right. But I've written enough about him in the past, so I'll spare you.

Except that, his essay in this book is why I love the book and why I think he's the greatest, in a nutshell. All these impressive, impossible to fully comprehend, yet fundamentally bleak views of the future of humanity, and along comes a transrealist. His essay is about how all of that mechanical technology is a real downer and totally beak. It's a great book because it shows the real value of genius, standing him up next to the more mainstream and dull views of the status quo. I'm going to quote him now:

 "Ultrageek advocates of the computronium Dyson-shell scenario like to claim that nothing need be lost when Earth [or any other structure] is pulped into computer chips. Supposedly the resulting computronium can run a VR (virtual reality) simulation that's a perfect match for the old Earth. Call the new one Vearth. It's worth taking a moment to explain the problems with trying to replace real reality with virtual reality. We know that our present-day videogames and digital movies don't fully match the richness of the real world. What's not so well known is that no feasible VR can ever match nature, because there are no shortcuts for nature's computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the "principle of natural unpredictability," fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires using a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don't allow for drastic shortcuts."
Natural unpredictability means that if you build a computer-simulated world that's smaller than the physical world, the simulation cuts corners and makes compromises, such as using bitmapped wood-grain, linearized fluid dynamics, or cartoon-style repeating backgrounds. Smallish simulated worlds are doomed to be dippy Las Vegas/ Disneyland environments populated by simulated people as dull and predictable as characters in bad novels."

So basically what he's saying is, the physical matter of the Universe is already the most complicated calculation there is, and that any desire on our part to harness it for our own small needs is rather ugly and in the long run diminishing. Not that he doesn't predict amazing possibilities for our future. Due to the high calculation potential of every bit of matter, he predicts something he calls Hylozoism, from the Greek, hyle, matter, and zoe, life. He believes that, given a million years, we'll find a way to wake matter up. As in, making it conscious. So that we can communicate with it. You'll actually be able to talk to walls, and it will be more productive than talking to politicians. He even has a plan for it, involving bending certain spatial topologies utilizing the extra dimensions of space. The benefits of waking matter up are enormous, and too much to go into, but they involve the possibility of teleportation, matter duplication, etc. This is a book report, not the Cliff's Notes. Suffice it to say, Rudy paints a much more incredible, surreal, no, transreal, view of the future, and on top of it, shows how it's just as conceivably possible as the deader versions of the typical futurist. If I could buy stock in Rudy Rucker, I'd grab every share I could, because I have a feeling that his ideas are going to be around for a long long time.

"Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation."

"It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it's going to end."

"It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable."

"If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!"

"Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way."

"Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons."

  -Rudy Rucker

Seattle; City Of Science Fiction And Improper Diction

"When I die, I'm donating my body to science fiction."
-Steven Wright

"The future isn't what it used to be."
-Arthur C. Clarke

It's my 200th post! So in honor of this rather meaningless milestone, I traveled all the way out to Washington state just to get this photo of the Space Needle. Well ok, I was forced to be in Seattle for work, but I made the best of a bad situation and toured around the city a bit, and spent some time with Jordan and Alison, friends of mine who live in the area whom I'd known from Germany. Jordan is famous for his dance moves at the Bavarian Biker Fest (and has the neck-scars to prove it!) and Alison is famous for her drunken instigation of little Danish hot dog fights. Also I got to see Emily, another friend from Germany, who was in the area on rather suspicious business one afternoon and who is famous for breaking T-bars over fellow snowboarder's heads in fits of amazing pique. Ah good times, good times.

Anyway, Seattle is a very cool city, although I must say that I'm very disappointed to not have seen one single flannel the entire time I was there! Very sad. It's almost as if, collectively, it is a city ashamed of it's grungy flash in the pan. The absolute COOLEST part of the city, without a doubt, and I'm sure you already know what I'm going to say because it's the coolest thing in the universe (that we know of) and it's in Seattle so of course you know where I'm going; is the Science Fiction Museum.

I was soooooo happy when I realized this place existed, and that I was in Seattle to experience it. This museum kicked so much butt. You weren't allowed to take photos inside, which really really frustrated me. Here I was, in the coolest museum I'd ever been in... and I was impotent. The no photo rule didn't stop me from trying to be all surreptitious of course, but the few shots I managed to sneak wound up coming out rather blurry and not worth keeping, because I was too busy looking around for the mean kling-on security guard. I did keep one or two photos, blurry and badly composed as they are. But I'll get to those in a minute. They had a ton of first edition science fiction classics in there that I would steal in a second. (Uh, if I did that sort of thing, which I don't.) By authors I had been sure that only I knew about. James Blish. Fritz Leiber. Theodore Sturgeon. Stanislaw Lem. Pierre Boulle, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick. And... they were in places of honor. It was like heaven. They even had Iain M. Banks and Vernor Vinge, two of my more modern favorites, along with of course all the big easy ones. Asimov. Clarke. Niven. Anderson. A first edition of Childhood's End, (by Clarke) the first sci-fi novel to blow my mind and which made me ravenous for more. No Rudy Rucker though that I saw... a major oversight.

They had displays of movie items too, of course. Props from famous sci-fi movies and franchises; the dress that Sean Young wore in Blade Runner, a Storm Trooper armor suit, the original model of the Death Star used in Star Wars, (Where the no photo rule would have literally had me pulling out my hair, if I had any. As it was, I was in agony. The security ape would not leave! I think he was on to me.) the little talking bear from A.I., the Terminator robot, Robby the Robot. (Robby the freaking Robot!) Captain Kirk's command chair. Anybody recognize this?

Yes, that's right! It's the Pit Bull. Griff Tannen's anti-gravity skateboard from Back To The Future II. Totally. Sweet.

My favorite thing about the Sci-Fi Museum though is that, you know how in normal like, arty-farty museums, you'll see collections of snooty arty-farty junk, with little plaques next to them that say snooty stuff like "Kindly donated from the prestigious collection of Snooty McVandersnot"? Well, it's only at the Sci-Fi Museum that you'll find Star Wars action figures donated from the collection of Gus Lopez!

Yeah, it says "From the collection of Gus Lopez"... kind of hard to read, I know. But I had Had HAD to get this picture, and I was very nervous that that security clown was going to come around the corner before I got the chance. Plus the light was all dark and science fictiony. Oh well.

After the titillating thrill of the Science Fiction museum, the rest of Seattle rather paled. I re-visited Pike Place (I'd been there about 12 years ago on my way back from Alaska) and had a coffee at the original Starbuck's. I don't like Starbuck's coffee... too acidy. I like my coffee stronger and with the coffee machines having been cleaned out every once in a while. BUT, it's the very first Starbuck's coffee shop ever, it's a great success story, it was right there, and I am a traveling glory-hound, after all.

Oh sure, I did other stuff. I went up the Space Needle, rode a ferry from Bainbridge Island to Seattle, saw the world famous Giant Shoe Museum. Hell I even worked a little. But none of it is really as exciting as, well you know. That awesome genius science fiction museum, of course.

Jordan was kind enough to let me crash at his parent's house (they were on vacation) with him and Alison for a few nights, which saved me a few bucks on a hotel room. Very cool. Good to see them. When old Chiemseers get together, many tales of German hilarity along with German beer will inevitably flow. I flew out of Seattle on the 12th straight down to Fort Lauderdale Florida, where I am at the moment. Again for work. It's rather a hum-drum area... I've been here before, back in January. I just think it's neat I went from one corner of the continental US to the other. What a great job.

Oh, just in case not everybody has noticed, something else happened this past week which made me extreeeeemely happy: The military officer who arrested me in Iraq for being snotty to him found and commented on my blog! Specifically on the original post where I told that story. Nothing has made me that kind of happy for a really long time. You can read the post, his comment, and my response in the original spot, here. I really hope he comes back... unless he's going to arrest me for being snotty to him again of course. I won't be needing any more of that.

Shoes of Mystery? Sheesh.

Whirling Dervishes Eat Haunted Donuts

I'm in Atlanta Georgia and I'm bored. I haven't really had a chance to leave the hotel yet, and even when I get a chance I'm not particularly excited about it. I mean, it's Atlanta. Although, one cool thing, I'm about 3 blocks away from this sweet looking Haunted House, which was rated the #1 Haunted House in America by Hauntworld Magazine! So, I will definitely check that out soon.

Also, I finished reading both of those Rudy Rucker books.  Spacetime Donuts was the first book he ever wrote, but 2nd published after White Light. SD was fantastic. It's about the idea that the Universe is shaped like a donut, so that if you were to shrink infinitely, you'd eventually wind up coming back around to our size. In other words, our Universe is contained within itself, in every atom. The donut analogy as Rudy describes it is this:

Say you have this donut laying flat, and you place a piece of paper on top of it. The points where the paper actually touch the donut form a circle and is our size level. Staying on the surface of the donut but moving towards the center, the hole of the donut, the size of the circle you are on shrinks. That's you shrinking down to the size of molecules, atoms, quarks. Continue around and without going backwards, you wind up growing back up in size until you are back to where you started. It's very fractal. Good timing that I just read that book actually... everything is speaking to me through fractals these days. Rudy is often trying to describe the complex mathematical ideas of infinity through his gonzo transreal stories. My brain actually feels massaged every time I finish one of his books. He's very good at it.

I know I know. You're exhausted with my Rudy Rucker blogs by now. Sorry. Maybe you should get off your butt and read some already, so you'll know how awesome he is, too.

Moving on, I was holding off on this until it actually came to fruition, but it looks like it never will, so... I was contacted last February by someone who works in the Religion and Ethics department of the BBC website. He had stumbled across my video and pictures of the Whirling Dervish ceremony I'd attended in Turkey, and he wanted to use them in a piece he was putting together. I of course was flattered with a much enlarged ego. He'd written to me once or twice to say that he was still working on it, and that it could be a while before it came together, but it's been a really long time now and nothing. They did however put my name and website prematurely on their photo credits page, so I've got that going for me! See here! Scroll down to the M's. Very exciting, very nothing.

On Buying Used Books, or, Revisiting Tired Old Refrains

I haven't actually read this book yet, but I've started it and I'm very excited about it. It's an old Rudy Rucker novel that I picked up used from Amazon. I love this guy.

But my point isn't about Rudy this time. My point is that you should always buy used books when you can. Because they're cheaper. And because they need a home. And because they've already got that nice older book smell, no waiting!

And also because, old books are like a box of chocolates... never mind. I got Spacetime Donuts in the mail a couple of weeks ago, and I never got around to reading it until last night. I'd brought it with me on the last couple of trips I've been on for work, including a two-day trip to Virginia I just got back from, (Traffic was hell on the way back; other than that I have little to report on that one.) but I never got the chance to get to it until now, and when I opened it, a snapshot fell out which I assume was being used as a bookmark. I love when that happens. I mean, it probably sucks to be the guy that sold his old books and then can't figure out what happened to his picture, but bonus for me! So here's the snapshot: (Of course I've scanned it already. All pictures must be scanned. I'm like the photo police.)

Crazy right?! It was someone's personal snapshot of the Dalai Lama! Looks like he took a couple of shots to the arm there. Fight Club Dalai Lama?

I wonder where this was taken? Everybody is Asian, except for the cops... so it could be some American Chinatown somewhere, or it could actually be in Asia, because of the pagoda and the Asians, and maybe the Dalai Lama likes to cart Western-lookin' cops around with him? There's no date stamp on it unfortunately, but it looks at least relatively recent, because he's all old. Still, that dude travels a lot, so there's no knowing.

So what, you really think I'm going to let this post pass without gushing about how awesome Rudy Rucker is? Fat chance! I mean really, he's so cool that even the Dalai Lama hangs around his books all the time, trying to be half as cool. His newest book was recently released, and I'll be bringing it with me to gorge on on my next job, which is likely to be in Atlanta Georgia. A good place for reading, I think. God I love this guy. Seriously, if you still haven't visited Mr. Rucker's work, get 'White Light' now. Right now.

Aw hell, while I'm at it, Gun Club rules the most too. Still.

Buy One, Get One Free; One For The Missus And One For You And Me. Or, Books I Read This Summer.

That's right, two fer a dollar. I just thought I'd go on to prove even further how dreary life on vacation on a tropical isle can be by not only posting twice in two days, but by quickly sharing with you the three books I've read this week because there was nothing better to do than sit on the beach and read. Ho hum. If you're as bored as I am, read on, because obviously neither one of us has anything better to do.
The first one was a pleasant surprise; who knew that Nick Cave could write? 'And The Ass Saw The Angel' is a pretty gritty southern gothic (of course it is) novel, and for those of us who love bashing on fundies, it's a tasty treat. I swear I didn't know that when I picked it up. I just thought, Nick Cave wrote a book now? Huh. I want one. And it's really good, too. I'm a little confused about the ending, so perhaps I will have to re-read it one day, or better yet have a conversation with someone who has read it and does understand it. I also read Thomas Pynchon's 'The Crying of Lot 49', because ever since I read 'Infinite Jest' by David Foster Wallace, I've been dying to read 'Gravity's Rainbow' by Pynchon to which it gets alot of comparisons. But 'Gravity's Rainbow' is hugeongous, although not as big as 'Infinite Jest', granted. But I wanted to read something slightly smaller by Pynchon first, just to test the water. And so after reading 'Lot 49', I am definitely queueing up 'Gravity's Rainbow'. Pynchon is hilarious, labrynthine, and ingenious.
I saved my most eagerly anticipated read for last: 'Mathematicians In Love' by Rudy Rucker. Have I said how much I love Rucker? I'm sure I have. Actually it's funny; if I had read Pynchon before I posted about Rucker a few back, I'd have said something inane like: Rucker is a mix of Thomas Pynchon, Douglas Adams, a hyper-perpindiculate writer to Philip K. Dick, and something else all his own because no one else has ever done that. All that being said, 'Mathematicians' isn't his best, I think. So carry on and start with 'White Light', but eventually 'Mathematicians' is still totally worth it. It's about what happens when two friendly competeing mathematicians love the same girl, and then discover a proof having something to do with wave functions and predictive systems or something that allows them to put their talents where their other brains are. Fantastic.
So you see, I've got lots of time on my hands. Today I did a little bit of spelunking; there's a really big cave in the middle of the jungle and I got a guided tour. I saw a HUGE cave spider. I got this picture, of course:

Bigger than my hand but not Shelob-size. Also bats, and those stalagmite and stalacite thingies. It took about two hours to crawl through the whole thing. Nifty, but no eye surgery. Then I went on a longtail boat tour of the mangrove mudflats they have on the island here... saw a bunch of fiddler crabs and monkeys. Fiddler crabs are pretty.

I even saw a mudskipper, which I think I got a little too excited about, because I got a lot of funny looks. But you know, Muddy Mudskipper! From Ren & Stimpy!... Right?
Anyway, out of sheer ennui, tomorrow I'm going scuba diving again. Ho hum hum drum.

"Rucker On Acid And Infinite Numbers, Bright Copper Kettles And Warm Woolen Mittens..."

... these are a few of my favorite things. Rudy Rucker is all nines, baby. If you are the type that often stays awake in bed far too late at night trying to wrap your head around infinity, but then get sidetracked and start thinking about who your favorite muppet is (DR. Teeth), (or wait, Zoot.) (No no, Beaker, definitely Beaker.) then Rudy Rucker is your future favorite author, I guarantee it. (Damn it! I forgot about Animal. This is hard.) Start with White Light. While waiting for it to arrive, go to Rudy's site and try to wrap your head around whatever the hell he's talking about. Other awesome mind-exploding books by him are Frek & The Elixir, and he also wrote a sort of sequel to Edwin A. Abbott's classic Flatland, called Spaceland: A Novel of the Fourth Dimension, which was my first experience with Rudy. He is a mathematics professor and he writes this weird sort of mathematical/mescalin induced sci-fi, which, because it's not like any other sci-fi anywhere, has been given the label of Transreal. I just received his latest book in the mail and I can't wait to devour it. I swear, he may be my favorite author ever... actually my favorites kind of go on swing shift. Next time I start thinking about John Steinbeck, he'll be my favorite. And then Herman Hesse. And then Vernor Vinge.
As for music, for those of you who don't know about The Gun Club, go find a copy of Fire of Love. Honestly, I love it more than anything (today), but the first time I heard it, I got really, really, really angry. They sound aLOT like the Pixies, or a certain very distinctive aspect of them, anyway. Then I found out that The Gun Club was around way before the Pixies, realized that Francis apparently didn't totally come up with that sound all on his own, and I got even angrier... I'm over it now. But damn. Getting older is all about having your deepest illusions shattered. But it's probably becoming one of my favorite albums ever, so at least I've got that going for me.
My Dad plays the dulcimer, and is all into the Pocono Dulcimer Club. They put on a concert earlier tonight and I got to see Don Pedi, a master of the Mountain Dulcimer from North Carolina, play. He apparently was in that movie 'Songcatcher' with Aidan Quinn, which I've never seen, as the white-bearded Appalacian dude playing the dulcimer, which is appropriate because that seems to be exactly who he is. But the dulcimer is a really pretty instrument, and it was actually really fun. Tomorrow, I'm going to Philly with Creepy and her boyfriend's band, who are opening for Murphy's Law. So I'm getting the whole spectrum this week. Hoo-ray for spectrum.
It looks as though I won't be going to D.C. to give my deposition, after all of that nonsense... I'm not really sure why. I got paid, and emailed GBG to tell them I got it and that I was ready to go... but then they never got back to me! So, I don't know what's going on there, but I'm leaving for Thailand this friday, so it sucks for them!

(Wait, of course! Statler & Waldorf!!!)