My artist friend Tony Robbin makes beautiful paintings based on 4D notions such as projections of hypercube tesselations.

A couple of years back, my SJSU student Wyley Dai realized a longterm dream of mine by creating a 4D Space Invaders style game for his Master’s Thesis project. Once I’d gotten students to do 4D Space Invaders, 3D Belousov-Zhabotinsky scrolls, and a surfing game based on a CA running the wave equation — it was time to retire.

Paul Mavrides sent me a link to a psychedelic article, in a seemingly legit physics journal called Symmetry, which shows quarks as cute twists.

I’m catching up on some links.

LA artist and hotrodder COOP sent me a link to a cool series of entries on his Positive Ape blog, relating to twenty-five stages in constructing the painting whose final version I show above. Well, actually the painting is so intensely erotic that I felt uneasy about posting it as-is on my “family blog” type site, harrumph, so I used the PhotoShop Pixelate:Crystallize filter on it.

Bill Meikle wrote about a mystical experience produced by looking at a hypercube drawing! The picture above is actually of a so-called 600-cell, which is a more complicated kind of 4D object, as shown in my favorite 4D visualization program, ”Hyperspace Polytope Slicer”, by Mark Newbold.

It seems like I get a lot of email about the fourth dimension. Hugh Reid posted a speculation about the fourth dimension and visual reorientation illusions. French physician Jean-Perre Jourdan posted a paper about the fourth dimension and near-death experiences. The picture above is from my notes on “Surfing An Einstein-Rosen Bridge” for my novel Mathematicians In Love which I am about to start revising, having gotten some good suggestions from my Tor editor David Hartwell.

I've been preoccupied by this story with working title “Hormiga Canyon” that I'm trying to start writing with Bruce Sterling. We always have a lot of back and forth, trying to take control. Like these two Pomeranians flowing back and forth as a living yin yang. Click to see 1.5 Meg movie of yinyang poms.

By way of getting my hand into the dip first, today I worked up a couple of nice “powers of ten” tables about the spacetime scales that might be involved in our story. Speaking of bug stories, here's a Bruce's recent “Luciferase”.

Math runs in the family! Really I should be working on revising Mathematicians in Love and on my novelette “Postsingular.” I'm always most attracted to the project that feels most like I'm totally wasting my time and just having fun.

Sighting sunset saucers in Oakland.