Big Jellies, Shells, 4D, Mathematicians in Love, Local Panpsychism
Thursday, January 26th, 2006
Some really big jellyfish are cropping up in Japan.
These guys are known as Nomura’s jellyfish.
It’s of course no coincidence that I recently finished Mathematicians in Love, an SF novel featuring a divine giant jellyfish — I mentioned this earlier in the blog.
Rupert Rawnsley alerted me to John Hedley’s cool Evolution and Form applets, including cellular automata and shells. No cone shells as yet, though.
My artist friend Tony Robbins has a new book on the fourth dimension, Shadows of Reality.
Speaking of cone shells and jellyfish and higher dimensions, I put up a web page for Mathematicians in Love, featuring some really nice blurb quotes from no less a roster of fellow SF writers than William Gibson, Ian Watson, Charles Stross, Michael Bishop, Gregory Benford, Walter John Williams, and Spider Robinson. The book will be out in Fall, 2006, I believe.
Meanwhile I’m getting started on the next SF novel, Postsingular, which will involve some of the themes I’ve been discussing for the past four or five months.
Last week I made a 15 Meg movie of an intelligent-looking site shown above.
The relevance of this film here is that one notion I’m presently interested in is a local form of panpsychism which holds that, just as the ancients believed, a certain spot can have a “genius” or “spirit” that inhabits it. Perhaps this resident, localized mind is an ongoing computation carried out by the gnarly flow of fire, water, or air. The being’s memory at present is limited to the traces it leaves upon the world, e.g. the rocks in the stream-bed, but to have an air spirit with a memory it would be nice to allow it to have a faster and more accessible RAM that is perhaps hidden beneath the physical world — I’m thinking of some Higgs-field trickery from our friends in the Mirrorbrane.