Rudy’s Blog

Elena told us the surf was up. My wife and I drove down to Cruz and went to a beach I call Magic Door beach, it’s about 6.3 miles north of the last traffic light in Cruz on, of course, Rt. 1. Parking area is on the left, high up, flat, long, like a waiter’s tray holding cars, rutted, muddy, you walk across the tracks and down some scree to an ampitheater beach.

Whoomp! I walked up behind the rock where the waves were booming. A peaceful tidepool there.

And in the pool, the aliens dreamed all unaware. Life is calm in La Hampa.

I got real close to the rock to shoot this veil of spray. There’s always a seagull or two just perched somewhere in the scene (not shown here) calmly diggin’ it, happy as a Big Sur cow.

And then we went to the Magic Door at the left end of the beach. And made it through.

There’s a whole ‘nother hidden beach on the other side, this is La Hampa as well. Gray and sandstone rock makes art heroine dreams.

It’s nice to have my dear wife here this time — instead of just my shadow.

I found the shrunken head of that third person you always see in your dreams.

We were reading T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to each other on Wednesday, wondering if it had something to do with the Grail Legend. And there’s this creepy passage about the third person you see in your dreams. I want to have this personage show up when, say, two of my characters are walking around in La Hampa.

“Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

— But who is that on the other side of you?”

And then a little dog came up and ran away with this particular kelp-bulb head.

Yesterday we had a little dinner party for our neighbors. It's always nice when the house is clean and everything is tidy. Poised for action.

We had our friend Elena and her husband Gunnar. Elena is quite a character.

The occasion was the visit of Elena's son Jerry with his new wife Anne and baby Lula.

I love babies. Anne is French, from Nancy, she says that back home doting fathers are called “Papa Poule,” the male version of “Mother Hen.”

I made a fish stew for the meal. But for me the high point was the chocolate cake.

When I'm full of sweets, things begin to look dreamy. Life's lovely computations all around. Oh, forget computation. Life all around.

All I did yesterday was work on The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. I drew a picture and wrote something to explain this certain idea I have about how we might get a deterministic universe despite the wifty, come-drink-the-Koolaid mystery-mongering of quantum mechanics. But what the bleep do I know?

***

I’d like to suggest that maybe there really is only our one sheet of spacetime, that this sheet obeys a deterministic reversible Physics Rule akin to a reversible CA. Let’s suppose for now that one can in fact slice our spacetime into spacelike sheets. In this case, we can use the Physics Rule to derive all of our spacetime, past and future, from any one spacelike sheet. So in order to “explain” our universe, we only need to explain one single spacelike sheet. The picture below shows where I’m heading with this.

Figure 2.23: A Physics and a Metaphysics to Explain All of Spacetime.

In this picture we think of there being two distinct CA rules, a Physics Rule and a Metaphysics Rule. The vertical plane represents our spacetime, and the line across its middle represents a spacelike “sheet.” The Physics Rule is a reversible CA that grows the spacelike sheet upwards and downwards to fill out the entire past and future of spacetime. And the Metaphysics Rule accounts for the contents of that spacelike sheet. The Metaphysics Rule is not reversible; it grows sideways across paratime, turning some simple seed into the pattern found in the singled-out spacelike sheet.

In order to explain one particular spacelike slice of spacetime, we invoke a Metaphysics Rule which is like a CA that grows the space pattern from some presumably simple seed. When I speak of this metaphysical growth as occurring in paratime, I need only mean that it’s logically prior to the existence of our spacetime. We don’t actually have to think of the growth as being something that’s experientially happening.

***

Got it? Good. Quiz on Monday.

I was in at SJSU yesterday. I saw my old student Gary Singh, I was his thesis adviser for a creative writing project about a pataphysical device called a Ridiculometer.

Gary wrote a nice article about me in the Metro newspaper last spring.

I went to the final demos of the game projects in Chris Pollett's CS 134 Game Programming class. They used my book, Software Engineering and Computer Games, and it was good to see my Pop framework software was working for them. (Sorry about the buggy wall-corner collisions, guys, maybe I'll fix them.)

I was impressed by this student's fashion sense, which is not a given among CS majors! She had cool running shoes too.

One of my best former students Leo Lee was there, checking the demos out. Leo just entered one of his games into the student contest held at the Independent Game Festival at the Game Developer's Conference in San Jose every March. I'm proud of him and I hope he can get a game programming job.

Leo's already finished Half-Life 2 twice, turning up the difficulty level for the second time through. Me, I'm still in the airboat.

Still raining, everything getting green, up in the morning it's lovely out the window, kitchen lamp reflected in the panes.

Robert Sheckley one wrote a story about a space explorer stranded on a world with no green. The only green color he could see came from the explosions of his blaster. He ran down its battery, firing it over and over to see the green. And then the yellow hyenas got him.

Closer in on the green leaves I remember the poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams.

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

Hail Gaia.

Speaking of refrigerator magnets, daughter Isabel has a fresh crop of Isabel's Copper Refrigerator Magnets ready for the holiday season.

We have quite a few of them ourselves. In fact last year, Isabel gave me a set of her magnets with one for each of my book titles; they're mixed in with the others. These little guys are holding up the plot diagram of Mathematicians in Love formerly known as Crazy Mathematicians.

I'll be getting back to my novel that soon, but meanwhile I'm revising my Lifebox tome. Actually, revising is somewhat dull and stressful, so I'm in fact blogging, and now the sun's coming out, so maybe I'll go for a bike ride. When you're revising, you're facing the gap between what you dreamed of doing and what you actually ended up with.

Great wind and rain last night. When we first moved to California, I was surprised to hear people call this kind of weather a “storm”. The temperature drops to 50 and you get half an inch of rain. Whoah! Not like the twister suckin' the steeple right offen a church like in this newspaper photo hyar. The woman's hair is nicely gnarly, no? You're seeing her from the back, and a stray vortex is pulling the loose hair up. If we could see air currents, we'd be so amazed.

That sideways picture on the fridge is an image of a canvas by our friend Ronna Schulkin Pearce.

And, as long as I'm pitching things, surely your holiday gift list should include a copy of Frek and the Elixir, my best book ever? Here's a typical satisfied reader…

Yesterday we went to a tea party given by some of Sylvia's co-workers and friends. I dressed up like a professor — I'm thinking Alan Turing in the faculty locker-room here.

And I drank a lot of tea. (Picture from a Celestial Seasonings refrigerator magnet — every object is bloggable!)

I switched from coffee to tea about a year ago, and have come to really enjoy it. Hard to get a good cup in a restaurant, obviously Lipton's has nothing to do with it, but even if you get the good bags, its tricky having the right amount and temperature of water. Making tea is a somewhat alchemical process. But when you get it right you can kind of taste the caffeine. It tastes like electricity.

I get that line from a scene in William J. Craddock's 1960s San Jose novel, Be Not Content, where they're eating brownies with LSD in them and one of the characters named Baxter says he can taste the acid, it tastes like electricity, and the narrator remarks, “We should haver realized this was a bad sign,” and then Baxter goes into a hideous freakout. I can't find the book right now, it's somewhere in my house, I paid a pretty penny to get a used copy last year. Well, when it turns up, I'll blog it.

And now back to revising The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.