My writer pal John Shirley sent me a link to an article about mathematical physicist, A. Garrett Lisi, who’s written an exciting paper called, “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything”. Some physicists are attacking the paper—and I’m not enough of physicist to judge who’s right. But as a mathematician, I like the idea of finding a simple mathy pattern underlying the messy heap that the physicists have made of their theories.

According to Lisi, all the known particles and forces can be regarded as nodes within a complex mathematical object called E8, a symmetric higher-dimensional polyhedron consisting of 248 vertices in eight-dimensional space, first discovered in 1887. I’ll show three different views of E8 taken from Lisi’s paper.

Since E8 is an eight-dimensional object, you can rotate in various ways to pop out new symmetries.

Lovely, huh?

Although E8 has been around for 130 years, it was just in March, 2007, that these funky mathematicians depicted above figured out the full details of it. They were funded by none other than Silicon Valley’s leading retail purveyor of computer hardware and software, Fry’s Electronics, who’ve founded AIM, the American Institute for Mathematics, which has a very nice E8 page.

Something cool about Garrett Lisi is that he spends a lot of time in Hawaii surfing.

This image is by Jeremy Bennett of New Zealand, and will appear on the cover of the January issue of Asimov’s SF for “The Perfect Wave” by Marc Laidlaw and me. The surf looks weird because it’s running a non-linear wave equation, just like CAPOW.

This seems to be Renaissance Man week in Ruckerland.

On Friday night (tomorrow), I’m doing a never-to-be-repeated real-time live computer graphics Capow light show for a Bach concert by the the Galax Quartet, with triple harp by Cheryl Ann Fulton, featuring a new Bach-based composition by Roy Whelden, “Loose Canons.”

I’m renting a honkin’ big 3000 lumen projector.

Time: Friday, November 16, 7:30 pm.

Place (with map link): College Avenue Presbyterian Church, 5951 College Avenue at Claremont Avenue, Oakland, CA.

(Note that this is not the same as the Presbyterian Church up the street in Berkeley!)

Our church is right down the block from one of my favorite restaurants, Noodle Theory, at Claremont and College.

I’d like to be able to put some video of this event online, so if you have a digital video camera and plan to attend and film it, please let me have a copy of the mpg.

Years ago I did some spoken word for a great album by Roy Whelden, “Like a Passing River.” You can buy it in CD or MP3 online, like at Amazon.

I was listening to it again the other day, in particular a piece called “Rucker Songs,” with Roy playing and Karen Clark singing words from my memoir, All the Visions. I’m going to temporarily post this song as a free sample.

Click to hear Roy Whelden and Karen Clark, “Rucker Songs.”

Yes, she’s really saying, “Oh man, we are in heaven. For sure, for sure.” And then, a little later, “Give us this daily rush, on the nod as thou art in heaven.”

I love this fusion of slangy beat prose with high classical music form…

Yesterday I gave a reading from Postsingular at the Booksmith. A small audience, I guess we didn’t promote it enough. I recorded about 35 minutes of me reading from Chapter 3, followed by 20 minutes of me discussing the book. Click the button below to access the MP3 audio file podcast.

On the way into the Haight, where the Booksmith is, I stopped at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate park. It’s kind of a touristy spot, and I hadn’t been there in years. But I’m missing Kyoto just a little bit, and I wanted to check the place out.

It’s really quite lovely. And, yes, it’s a little crowded—but so are most of the places like this in Japan!

I even found a little Zen garden behind the miniature pagoda. I love these setups. The gravel, the rocks, the dwarf trees and—why not?—a bit of lawn. The manicured shrub in back molding herself around the rock.

I spent an hour writing on Hylozoic in their little tea pavilion. Drinking oolong. The waitress was just like in Japan, she wore a kimono and didn’t speak English. It felt like coming home.

Today I whiled away a couple of hours making up this chart in Microsoft Excel, plotting how many new books I published each year (I’m not counting reprints, although I am counting story anthologies).

I guess I made this graph to reassure myself about the likelihood that I won’t finish Hylozoic until Feburary or March, 2008, which may be too late for it to still come out in Fall, 2008. For the graph, I’m assuming Hylozoic comes out in 2009.

In this case, my “linear trend line” (the nearly level line across the lower part graph) will still be slanting up! The wiggly dotted line is a 6th-order polinomial approximation to the curve, and is a different kind of “trend line.” The polinomial trend line looks somewhat different for different order polinomial approximations.

Interesting chart—at least to me. A big burst in the early years; that’s when I was freelancing in downtown Lynchburg; I had two books a year for three years in a row. Things slid back when I started teaching at SJSU in 1986, and I was in a trough in the mid-nineties, spending most of my energy on programming. After 1996, I got a second wind. And since then I’ve been going strong, helped by my retirement from teaching in 2004. It could be that I’ll taper off before long. That might be fine. Then I can paint more.