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Family Reunion. Lifebits and the Lifebox.

Our granddaughter was visiting this weekend, also our two daughters, and our son and daughter-in-law. A great family time. We went to the beach a couple of times, once in SF and once in Cruz. The baby liked it a lot. “Wawa!” spells “Mama!” upside down. She was dragging some seaweed. She’s quite lively. I showed her my seashell collection every morning. Especially the cone shells!

The seaweed she was dragging is a funny kind of seaweed with little leaves just along one side of a band. Like a fancy ribbon. Hail Gaia, rich in gnarl.

Being with the family at Ocean Beach in SF, I was thinking about nature’s rhythms. The wheel of life, me on the downward swing, and the baby coming up, balancing. Our heartbeats. The cycle of a pregnancy. The breath and the heartbeat.

The rhythm of the surf. The wheel of the seasons. Spring’s just about here in CA.

The rhythms not quite repeating. All nesting together.

Isabel stood on a rock to see the anemones; a flock of seabirds flew by.

We visited the SF zoo as well, my first time there, I’d been waiting for a grandchild to take. We saw a nice flock of Magellan penguins, circling a rock, flying beneath the water. Imagine an animal that “flies” through the soil. It would have very thin wings.

We walked in the hills too. The wild cucumbers are out, springing their helical tendrils. Boing.

I’m grateful to be in this world.

I sometimes write about the “Lifebox,” this being my word for a near-future technology for recording all your experiences. Kind of like a blog with a very good search engine. There’s an article by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, “ A Digital Life ” in this month’s Scientific American, about Gordon Bell’s Lifebits project, see also Jim Gemmell’s CARPE page.

These notions call for a rigorous and thorough investigation via scientifictional thought experiments! As a public service—and in hopes of catching the rising wave of lifebox buzz—I’m posting “Three Stories About the Lifebox,” a PDF containing three tales of mine about the lifebox: “Soft Death” from 1986, a relevant excerpt from Saucer Wisdom of 1999, and “Terry’s Talker” from 2005.

7 Responses to “Family Reunion. Lifebits and the Lifebox.”

  1. Al Says:

    Those tendrils made me think of the Fibonacci Sequence, which of course led to thoughts of… pheasants?

    Well, why not?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkg1Gngpdog

  2. Dr. Quackenbush Says:

    Professor:

    Although every day in the lab for me is essentially a “bad hair day,” I am presently working on speculative research linking possible teleportation and sneezing…. I am somehow convinced that sniffing certain detergents can be a profound and dramatic window to the observation of this possible “link.” Can you offer any suggestions? —- Dr. Quackenbush [aka linus]

  3. Rudy Says:

    What kind of seaweed is that in my picture? Any marine botanists out there?

    Sunny Seaweed

  4. Rudy Says:

    Robert Anton Wilson’s funeral celebration was this weekend in Santa Cruz. I wasn’t able to make it, but Doctor Jabbir has posted some good pictures of the event at http://quantumtantra.com/wilsonfest.html

  5. rs Says:

    First, when you changed your format google reader stopped getting the updates. When I have time I will look into this. Too bad as google reader is nice why to stay on top of blogs. I’m a month behind.

    I think you need a good physics reason for limiting teleportation — higgs particle interaction, is somehow different based on some quality of memory. It should be related to what stops teleportation now. Perhaps Houdini knew this secret.

  6. Rudy Says:

    Problems with RSS feed? Two people have mentioned that their RSS subscription to this blog stopped working when I changed to the WordPress blogware.

    Solution: resubscribe. Go to my RSS Feed link:
    http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/?feed=rss2

    If you’re using Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7, or any other modern browser, you’ll see a dialog that asks if you want to subscribe to the feed, and you’ll have a choice of which reader to use.

  7. rs Says:

    yeah, i did that already and it worked.

    Now that I have caught up, right I should be working but I was reading you blog instead, I see that you ideas about how teleportation already takes care of my concerns. in your model it would seem that ordinary objects would seldom or never teleport just because they were not “interested.” It might be interesting to have ordinary objects occasionally get side tracked from “here and now” and wind up somewhere else. Random teleportation. A person might cause an apple to teleport by planting the idea of another place. It would work most of the time, but sometimes the objects would wind up some place unexpected.


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