So now it’s finally my actual birthday and I feel good about it. I’m going for a walk in the woods.

My college friend Don sent a copy of a letter I wrote/drew for him about forty years ago.

I’ve been having fun playing with the iPod I got from Georgia and young Rudy. I have about 300 of my songs on it already. Cool to walk around inside a soundtrack. Very Postsingular.

I copied all 1,200 of my blog images so far onto it, and can slide-show them in Shuffle mode with the music also in Shuffle mode, seeing and hearing all things that I like. Lifebox!

Last night I watched a great, gnarly David Cronenberg movie, eXistenZ that I’d previously overlooked. Very inspiring. I think I’ll visit the Game Developer’s Con in San Ho tomorrow as well. Thinking about what Thuy’s gonna put in her metanovel.

Still catching up on my party, here’s a piece by my mathematical logician friend Nathaniel Hellerstein (seen in the picture below to the right, having given Nick Herbert a Hellerstein Zero Dollar Bill).

Nathaniel Hellerstein, “ADJUSTING THE DOG” (For Rudy’s 60th)

I was visiting Rudy, just hanging out at his house, playing with fractals on his computer. I had mentioned the words “fuzzy chaos”, and the “Socrates-Plato fractal”, so of course Rudy had to see it for himself. I'd shown him what I'd gotten so far, on my Texas Instruments TI-83, but of course a hand calculator's screen isn't exactly hi-rez. Rudy fired up his home station, launched one of his research programs, sat me down, showed me how to input equations and to fiddle parameters, and the next thing you know I was surfing the mathesphere.

“That one's kinda boring,” he said. “A wiggly loop?”

I said, “Let's pump up the exponent. Make it third power.” I hit ENTER and watched points accumulate on the screen.

Rudy looked over my shoulder. “Better…” he said.

” 'Seek Ye The Gnarl', ” I said, quoting him, and I went back to parameters.

We heard Sylvia yell, “Rudy!” from far away and downstairs, so Rudy excused himself. Exponent 3.1 was a bit better, but still not quite it; so I input 3.2, I hit ENTER, and I sat back.

I was still sitting there, mouth slightly agape, when Rudy returned. He said, “Sylvia wants me to adjust the dog, she says she can tell — ” Then he saw what was blossoming on the computer screen. ” — hey, that's a really gnarly fractal, Nat!”

“I wouldn't have found it without you,” I said, still stunned. And it's true; it was my equation, but his program. I had to interact with the parameters in realtime to get them just right.

Rudy said, “Listen, we have to find the olfactory remote. Sylvia can tell where Arf is, even through the wall.”

So we rummaged through Rudy's office for the olfactory remote. I found in on the bookshelf, in front of six copies of the German edition of “White Light”. It was resting between the tesseract and the flying saucer. We took it outdoors to the main porch. We knew where Arf was because we too could detect him through the wall.

Once there, Rudy boldly leaned over and patted his old buddy. Arf dog-kissed him back. I stood back at a distance of six feet. Arf was a great old dog, and I liked him a lot, but his force field really was quite overpowering. What's more, it was set on Exponential, with a doubling-distance of two feet. I wasn't ready to approach those six feet and experience that eight-fold increase in the dog's olfactory force. But Rudy didn't seem to mind.

Greetings over, Rudy stood up and fiddled with the olfactory remote. “Let's see, I'll change the field from Exponential to Step Function. What radius?”

I said, “How short can you make it?”

He said, “I can scroll it down to zero, but then you get a Dirac delta function. Let's try a foot.” He punched some more buttons on the olfactory remote, pointed it at Arf, and clicked.

Right away I felt better. I thanked Rudy, then heaved a huge sigh, which I hadn't dared to do before. The air smelled of rain, and wind, and trees, and the neighbor's flower garden.

I went over to Arf to pat him. Like I said, he was a great old dog, if you didn't mind the olfactory force field. I hugged him, and I got a dog-kiss, and whoops, I got a little too close, and worse whoops, I inhaled through my nose.

“Whuff!” I said, for words do not describe.

Now, you may be thinking that I made this whole story up, but it really did happen, and I can prove it, too. Just input exponent 3.2 into the Socrates-Plato fractal, and let it run awhile. You will see for yourself that it truly is gnarly. Thank you, Rudy.

(*) [(Note by Rudy.) In one chapter of his book, Delta, A Paradox Logic (World Scientific, Singapore 1997), Nathaniel imagines a fuzzy-logic world in which a statement’s truth value can be any real number 0.0 and 1.0. And he has a converstation between Plato and Socrates, with the current truth values of what they say being P and S. Plato says “I am not extremely different from Socrates,” and Socrates says “I am not even slightly different from Plato’s opposite,” meaning (in Hellerstein-speak), respectively,

P = 1 – (S – P)^E, and

D = 1 – (1 – P – S)^F.

E and F are exponents expressing, respectively, “extremely different” and “ slightly different”. As these are dual notions, we let F = 1/E. E is the exponent that Nathaniel decided, upon further experimentation, to set equal to 3.221946. Hmmm…]

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