I had insomnia the other night after some clod (I think it was the automatic telemarketing machine of “Brian's Garden Services”) rang our phone at 1 AM and then I lay awake till 3 AM, and I started calculating how many seconds old I am, inspired by Charles Stross's computer-think gimmick of discussing periods of time in gigaseconds in Accelerando.

And I realized you have your gigasecond birthday — well really its billionth birthsecond — in your 31st year of life, and that before too many more years my two-billionth birthsecond will be rolling around.

Rudy, Jr., wrote a nice little web page that helps you compute your billionth birthsecond. If you're 30 or just turned 31, check this out so you don't let your gigabirthsecond slip by uncerebrated! This is a photo of Rudy taken precisely at his billionth birth second, by the way.

I recorded another lecture in my “Philosophy and Computers” class yesterday, about evolution and artificial life (a.k.a. alife). The picture above is from the amazing alife Galapagos program by the supernal Karl Sims.

The sound came out better than before, because reader Lisa Williams tipped me off about Audacity, which is free. This ware has a nice visual display so I can edit the files. And it has a very good feature “Equalization.” I'm loading the preset “Acoustic” equalization curve and applying it, which cleans up the sound a lot. And you can get a free plug-in so that Audacity saves WAV format into MP3.

I posted the link to it on Gigadial as usual.

The demos are mostly from “Boppers”, which you can get with the “Software Downloads” button on my page for The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul.

I went to have lunch at Apple yesterday. Their address is “1 Infinite Loop,” which seems cute, but the roadways by the entrance are set up so that if you make what looks like a natural turn for the parking lots, it whisks you onto northbound De Anza Boulevard and you have to make a difficult U-turn and two left turns to get back. Infinite loop indeed.

I got to have a special Apple badge. Somehow the high-voltage grills at the doors failed to detect that I’m a Windows programmer, and I escaped vaporization.

I was there to see my former students Leo Lee (right), and Alan Borecky (left). Alan works for Electronic Arts on the Tiger Woods golf games; he was just visiting like me. Leo recently started working at Apple on a project he wouldn’t tell me anything about. He’s enjoying himself.

On another note, computer visionary Rodney Berry tipped me off about this great new magazine, the International Journal of Unconventional Computing, about the generalized kinds of computations that I write about in my book The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul. What makes this journal site really great is that all the papers are readable online! You can, like, find out about using Zhabotinsky scrolls as a computer.

Meanwhile the hen-and-chicks cacti are processing data in the computational fog. Which leads to quantum computing, which leads to way-out-there theorist Scott Aaronson, who’s just started a blog with a link to a mind-breaking, incomprehensible but somehow very interesting list of ten problems for quantum computing. SF writers can strip-mine this page for buzzwords.