A cartoonist named Jason Yungbluth has doctored My Little Golden Book about God to make a weird and very funny alien-invasion pamphlet called The Book of Zogg. Yungbluth hits all these great classic SF power-chords. (Thanks to Richard Kadrey for the link.)

I wrote something similar to Book of Zogg inside of Master of Space and Time, where I had some Heinlein's Puppet Master spine-riding parasitic leeches that have created a religion of sorts based on submitting to alien control. I ahd this detailed description of a tract about the religion's teachings. When I wrote that novel, I was living in Jerry Falwell's Lynchburg, VA, and reacting to that.

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I've always felt comfortable with the idea of the Cosmic One being God, and that you can somehow get strength from this notion, although the seeming response could be either a self-exciting circuit of the brain, or a social network, rather than some higher being responding to you.

I picked up a book of the ten Zen ox-herding pictures today in Cruz, from 1200 AD. God everywhere, God nowhere, what's the problem? After the guy finds the ox [God], the ox disappears, and then the guy disappears and the picture is blank.

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Picture of me and God in the form of Jon Pearce in Cruz today. “In his heart the fool hath said there is no Jon Pearce.” Mathcs 7.3.

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Here's an excerpt, kind of relevant, from The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.

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If I say that everything is a computation, I’m saying that everything is a deterministic process. And that means that reality is a weave of logical if-then statements, with each phenomenon linked to a cause.

As an extreme example of universal automatism, Wolfram suggests that if we trace the world’s computations all the way back, there may be some underlying supercomputation that generates not only the entire cosmos but also the underlying fabric of space and time.

But then, of course, we’d have to ask why that particular supercomputation exists.

This leads to what is sometimes called the superultimate why question, “Why is there anything?” The question is inherently unanswerable, for no proposed solution can be enough.

Given that the superultimate why question is impossible to answer, it’s in some sense meaningless — but such a criticism doesn’t remove the question’s sting. The question can never be answered, yet it is not emotionally meaningless.

Even if Wolfram were right, it doesn’t seem as if knowing the world to be the result of some supercomputation would be of much use to us. We still wouldn’t know where the supercomputation came from. And — perhaps even more importantly, we still wouldn’t know what it’s for.

And that, after all, is really what we’re after when we ask about the meaning of life. It’s not so much the cause that’s puzzles us as the purpose. Does a person’s life have a purpose?

Well, our studies of universal automatism do suggest one line of thought. Computationally rich class four behaviors are in an objective sense more interesting than those that die out, repeat, or have no discernible structure. So a universal automatist might say that the meaning and purpose of a human life is to produce gnarly or “class four” computation.

The notion of gnarly computation as the meaning of life fits in with the more humanistic world views.

The human artifacts we admire are computationally rich. An empty canvas is class one. Hack artwork is class two copying of existing artifacts. Ugly scuzz is class three. Great art is class four.

The nobler emotions are computationally rich as well. Murderous rage forces some victim’s computation into class one termination. Hatred throws the hater into a class two loop. Too needy a desire to please puts a person at the mercy of capricious class three inputs. Compassion is an ever-evolving class four process.

Get the picture?

The meaning of life is beauty and love.

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Back to God, there's a lot of force in the old saying, “God is Love.”

Isn't this a great cone shell? I took this picture today.

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A reader (r.s.) writes in that he sat at the same table as I photographed, in L. G. Coffee Roasting today. Cool. In my Silicon Valley SF novel Spaceland a hole in reality forms just a few feet from that table during a climactic scene!

We went to see the Firesign Theatre near San Jose last night — if you're wishing you could have seen them too, you're in luck, they're putting on a free webcast of their show tonight! You'll find the link on their home page.

I used to worship their records in the 60s and early 70s, listening to them on stereo earphones over and over. Many of their pieces, notably We're All Bozos On This Bus, are great science-fiction, and indeed the boys exerted quite a strong influence on my style, extending even to this day. I share their interest in being funny and serious at the same time. Satire.

Seeing them at this late date is a bit melancholy — the nostalgia thing — but they were in good voice, and seemed as cantankerously lively as ever. One funny bit, Phil Austin pretends to be a minister reading a passage out of the bible, gibberish about moss and “their hearts were not gay,” and he says, “What does this mean? [pause] Nothing.”

I noticed that they've toned down their political incorrectness a bit. They did go after the Chimp — yet somehow it seems harder to laugh about Iraq than it was to laugh about Nam. Well, I'm old now, and not draftable, and don't have that same giddy gallows humor.

Re. the audience, I've never seen so many former hippies in one place. All the same people that I used to see, like, at the Fillmore East thirty-five years ago. Dear friends.

To an external observor, it might look as if I'm rather idle. Just blogging, walking in the hills and hanging out in coffee shops. Wouldn't my energies be better spent in remodeling my house?

Naw, this is a high-volume content-production facility here! Check out the sample cover (may still be revised) for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.

I had fun working on the Vlogging entry yesterday, kept going back and editing it, also looking at more of the vlog entries I found online. I think they call an entry a “bite.” Many of them are true art.

Searching wider, I found that some people actually video themselves talking about the news like anchormen (it seems to be mostly men that do this)! Help!

When, like, Charlene Rule (link to a MOV) can do so much more just by waving her hands over the camera. Or Mica (link to a MOV) can capture the true pathos of being alive in a quick grab of a few minutes of an unappy friend's face in a bar.

Wonderfully skewed reflections of the world. Mind puddles. (In this photo below that I took yesterday, the water's on top, I have a mirroring theme in todays 3 pictures.)

You’d think that on a day when I blog so much, I wouldn’t get much “real” writing done. But somehow I did. I ran out to the Great Bear coffeeshop with my laptop (which, thank God, isn’t wirelessly connected) and sketched a scene of Bela spending a night in jail with Thuggee and Naz for the Washer Drop incident. And later Sylvia and I went for a walk.

I often think of the painting metaphor when writing. I mean first there’s the architectural thing of figuring out the arc of the novel. And then, faced with each chapter, figuring out the sequence of scenes. And when it’s time to write a scene, I tend to write something pretty rapidly, like a sketch or underpainting. Fast is good, since one is always anxious, faced with the blank page. And then I go over it, adding things, intensifying, fractalizing.

Trees have a ramifying structure underground just like they do above ground, I took a picture of the roots of this one big oak on a cliff near my house yesterday.

I imagine good videos are built up slow like paintings or stories, using the editing software. Most of the more interesting vlog bites are indeed edited. But now and then there’s a simple unedited reality take that’s perfect. The world does give us things for the taking.

Here’s where the other approach kicks in, the photographer’s eye thing of just seeing the artistic event and having the craft to capture it intact. Maybe here, it’s the seeing that’s the hard part. Seeing, and going back again and again to try and get the picture. The successive photos as drafts.

But even in photography, you do PhotoShop to make it look better. You can’t quite do the spontaneous grab with text, although, yeah, you can just natter on without editing. Oh, yeah, and you can collage in passages that you find in the world.

Still thinking about the autovideo thing that my character’s “vlog ring” does. There’s some smart software that breaks it into bites, aims the viewpoint at the loudest noise (like a dog hearing something), and speech-recognizes some words for the title.

But any automatic art pales, at least so far. Art is a class four fractal computation informed by emotion. We can always recognize it at a glance.

Thanks, dear readers, for all the comments!

As Marshall from Scandanavia says, “Myrff Myrff… The sound of a happy pig.”

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I’m writing about vlogging (video blogging) in my novel Mathematicians in Love. At first I half-thought I was making this word up, but I checked on Google and it’s real. Indeed, I spent a fair amount of time yesterday looking at vlogger sites. Three that I looked at are:

Hello by Mica

This is Vlog by Shannon Noble

Scratch Video by Charlene

And these sites have endlessly more links to further vlogs.

I watched a couple of vlogs made at VloggerCon, which was in NYC last week. A woman named Chris speaks of “database cinema.” Mica talks about the paradox of finally getting to meet the people you interact with online, but since you’re a vlogger, you’re still looking at them on a screen, to wit, the viewscreen of your videocam.

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Tech note: Most vloggers use the QuickTime *.MOV format for their videos as QuickTime is readily available and allows for a wide range of compression settings.

If you want to post vlogs, you pretty much want to pay Apple $30 to activate the editing feature of your QuickTime viewer, and then you can load a big MPEG and save it as a MOV using various compression options.]

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I keep updating this blog entry as I keep tyring to vlog something. I mpegged a scene with my little SONY Cybershot DSC-T1 pocket camera, as a 17 Meg MPG, and have been tyring to use QuickTime Pro to make it into a tiny MOV. This had turned into an endless nightmare with no happy ending in sight. I figured out how to to compress to a small MPEG 4 format less than a Meg, but then the audio gets lost, and I can't figure out how to get it back. Also, now my Monkeybrains memory is full, and I can't even upload the tiny-ass less than a meg MPEG 4 MOV file I mande. Oh, fuck it, time for my spring break (2/8/2005). Hats off to the vloggers.

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Regarding my fictional imaginings of vlogging, here’s a passage from the novel. Our hero Bela has spent the day with a woman named Alma, and now they’re having dinner with Bela’s crazy mathematician friend Paul and with Alma’s outspoken friend Leni. Leni runs a web channel with lots of vlog reports. The passage introduces a not-quite-here-yet notion I’d like to see: the vlog ring.

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“He really is cute,” said Leni, looking at me. “I wish you’d vlogged yourself surfing with him today, Alma. That camera’s shockproof and waterproof, you know. I want to get some people to start vlogging everything they do. Real reality TV. I’m getting these special wearable cameras called vlog rings.”

“Vlogging?” said Paul. “That means video blogging?”

…

“Tell me more about the vlog ring,” I said.

“Just like it sounds,” said Leni. “You wear it on your finger, and it has a bulgy little fisheye lens that pulls in this hemispherical field of view. Looks kind of like those tacky rings they try and make you buy when you’re a senior in high-school? My first girlfriend actually wanted to give me one. Ugh.”

“Doesn’t a fisheye image look warped on the screen?” I asked. “Like those acid-freak-out TV commercials of your parents pushing their faces up against you? Have you done your homework, honey? Did you take your meds?”

“The users download some software that flattens out the image,” said Leni. “And since there’s so much visual information coming from the vlog rings, the users can vary their point of view. Like you’re following a person around and deciding what to look at. It’s the latest tech. And today I found a way to get some vlog rings very cheap. For free, really.”

…

“Look at this,” said Danny, pointing to his computer screen. It showed a video window surrounded by buttons and controls. The video showed me looking at the screen, slightly lagged.

As Danny moved his mouse around, the viewpoint changed; he could effectively look in any direction from the viewpoint of my vlog ring.

The screen bore the caption “The Crazy Mathematician” in its title bar. On the left side were some links, a search bar, and a clickable calendar-and-clock interface for jumping to my accumulating vlog stream. Buzz had a automated system that bookmarked highlights of the vlog, using pattern and speech recognition to figure out names for the bookmarks. Database cinema. The lead link was labeled “Washer Drop.”

…

“How much do you remember?” Lulu asked me in a quiet tone.

Images and sounds blossomed from Lulu's question. Jen3 screaming into the night. A tumbling washing machine, growing smaller as it fell, thudding onto the roof of the neighbor's SUV, the front left corner of the roof. A sharp bang decaying into a slower crunch, followed by the sparkly tinkle of the shattered windshield. The startled car’s alarm hooting like its outraged owner. Thuggee standing on the parapet, guffawing, rolling back his foreskin, pissing down at him. The incredibly prompt arrival of the squad cars with their red-yellow-blue flashers. My stumbling, careening evasion down the back stairs. My hand grabbing a last pitcher of beer. Danny hustling me into his room. Oblivion.

“Oh oh. Did I vlog the washer drop?”

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Re. the anamorphic blog ring ware, there actually was some software like that a few years back, written by Eric Gullichsen and used for the home page of Tonga, but just now I can’t remember the name of it, or find a link to it, or raise Gullichsen who, last I heard, was working with a traveling circus ship in the South Pacific.