Bassman Andy Warren sent me a picture of our glorious punk band, “The Dead Pigs,” in action in Lynchburg, VA, 1982, twenty-five years ago. We were playing at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, where most of us then worked—although very few of us were going to be working there much longer. Thus the punk assault.

I was the singer, and that’s Andy behind me, and our townie ringer Tom MacMillan on the left (he could actually play the guitar), and Mike Morris on drums—he was even more of a troublemaker than I was back then. On the right, from the rear, Roland Girling on tambourine and chain-saw, Jack Schewel on trombone, and Mike Gambone and Georgia Grove playing saxophones.

We did a killer version of Duke of Earl.

“Daddy sent me to Randy-Mac.
He bought me a horse and a Cadillac.
I sold the car and bought me a brain.
Now I’m half grown up and I’m goin’ insane.
Duke duke duke, Duke of Earl
duke duke, Duke of Earl,
duke duke, Duke of Earl.”

I have a VHS tape; maybe one of these days I’ll MPG it and post it. By the way, in later years, Mike Morris started a second Dead Pigs band in Florida, but I never got down that way to hear them or jam with them, but Andy did. I see that I blogged on the Dead Pigs once before.

I was at Andrew Molera State Park and Pfeiffer Beach in Big Sur the last couple of days. I put together some videos that I shot there this time plus some Big Sur video from two years ago to make an eight minute You Tube video,“What is Gnarl?” Windows Moviemaker is actually a pretty nice tool. I’d like to clean up the soundtrack, but, hey, it’s gnarly as is.

By way of footnote, the bit in “What is Gnarl?” about the seagulls shaking their tailfeathers relates both to Donald Duck in White Light, and to a detail of a drawing that Georgia Rucker did for the Swarthmore College freshman face book, the Cygnet, 1994.

I wrote an essay, “Our Synthetic Futures,” for Newsweek International and it’s online. It describes some possible (fun) outcomes of genomics and synthetic biology. Close students of my work will note that some of these ideas are prefigured in my futurological novel, Saucer Wisdom.

So, like I say, I was in Big Sur the last couple of days. Sitting on a hillock looking at the sea, I had a nice feeling of not thinking. Like what was going on outside didn’t need embellishment. It was exactly what I like. Usually I’m adding ideas, like the little robots watching the bad movies in Mystery Science Theater 3000, or the original Beavis and Butthead commenting on cheesy videos while they play. That’s consciousness, isn’t it, the little comment-bot. But the narrator takes a break when the show is fabulous.

Picture of a ginger root doing yoga from my bottle of Ginger Soother. Here’s a relevant (to not thinking) quote from Pynchon:

“…and now, in the Zone,…after a heavy rain he doesn’t recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow c*ck driven down out of the pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stand crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural… Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (Penguin 2000 edition), p. 638.

Now I’m trying to get going on Chapter Three again. I thought about the book a certain amount while at the beach. I remembered having a big insight about the story for Mathematicians in Love on Pfeiffer Beach two years ago, and drawing a diagram on the sand. So, for good luck, even though I didn’t have any big insight this time, I drew a diagram of the chapter sequence of POV (points of view) for Hylozoic, along with a picture of a Peng, the Magic Harp, and a Hrull, nicely framed by a kelp stalk. The letters stand for my characters, Jayjay, Thuy and Chu, and I use them to indicate whose point of view I use for the successive chapters. I see the book breaking into two parts, with the sequences J TCT and J CTC.

All these characters appear in my forthcoming novel Postsingular too, by the way. Speaking of Postsingular, I might mention that I got a copy of Word 2007 free from Microsoft for sending in the (apparantly) pirated Word 2003 disk that I’d bought at Fry’s. Word 2007 does a much better job of converting from DOC to PDF than Adobe Reader Professional ever did for me and, hooray, it fixed all the internal links in my three-hundrd page Postsingular Writing Notes PDF document now—you can find the PDF at the Postsingular site.

And then I drew the slogan that sparked Frek and the Elixir: “Eadem Mutata Resurgo.” The same, yet changed, I rearise. I wrote this on the beach in 2001. It became Professor Bumby the cuttlefish’s slogan.

Some people walking by decided I really was strange. But everyone expects to see weirdos in Big Sur.

Earlier I’d spent about half an hour rolling crossways on a log, face up, massaging my back in this fashion, groaning with pleasure. I chose the log to be a bit out of the way, in a little gully where I always like to go, the same gully where I filmed the eddy and the plant silp for “What Is Gnarl?”

When I was done rolling on the log, and sitting up a bit drunk with chi energy, a couple walked by. The woman said:

“I don’t have my glasses with me and at first when I saw you, I thought you were a mammal.”
“I am a mammal,” I replied.
“I mean like a bobcat or a bear,” she amplified.
“I was getting down to my mammal self,” I said.

Anyway, those were the two who then saw me drawing the Peng’n’Hrull with points-of-view diagram for Hylozoic with my cane.

“Val fisk,” I told them, by way of explanation. But, you know, sometimes it just gets too remote…

By the way, “val fisk” is Swedish for “whale fish,” as “discussed” in my film, “What is Gnarl?”

I just checked on Google, and there are some women actually named Val Fisk, like one is a teaching assistant in Suffolk, England. How great is that?

I’ll refer to the Peng who are emigrating to other worlds as ioneers, a word I made up in grad school and have wanted to use ever since. It’s a goof on pioneers, you understand. A cool word. Ioneer.

I used to visualize the ioneers as sturdy, fit, somewhat Nordic spacemen and women like on a Soviet socialist realism poster. Possibly in the throes of endless sexual stim. But now I’m just gonna have the raggedy-ass ostrich-legged kiwi-bodied Peng use that word for their emigrants. I can say that atomic tulpa computations have to do with dancing ions (charged atoms). And, hey, I can have a Soviet socialist etc. type poster with Peng on it, all gussied up to look more Nordic and less like dirty dust-mops.

How does Panpenga (the planetary oversoul of the Peng’s home world Pengö) reach out to program a Peng’s body code (which the marketeers call “an ioneer soul song”) onto the regions of matter on another world so that the atoms in this far-away matter will begin emanating paired fermion waves to generate a matter hologram or a tulpa of some Peng ioneer whom Panpenga has destructively decoded in order to send said ioneer’s soul song across the void?

So as to involve my character Jayjay, I’m supposing that Panpenga does this by telepathically entangling with a certain receptive individual on a distant world. A host. This person becomes a medium for Panpenga. Via the medium’s body, the ten tridecillion voices of the ioneer’s soul-song, (or the ten tridecillion Fourier terms, if you want to be mundane), are integrated into the ambient quantum computation of the world, fanning out to teach each atom in the full volume of a “Peng ranch” (which is a cubical volume 100 km on a side, in other words, several counties plus the air above them and the dirt below)—and thereby creating a tulpa emulation of the ioneer.

By the way, a “tulpa” is what I was earlier calling a “woogie“.

“Woogie” is a little too comical and lovable and cozy. Misleadingly close to—ugh—wookie. Tulpa sounds more sinister. And I like that it’s like “tulip,” as a tulpa is something that grows up. The origin of the word is that, in Tibetan Buddhism, a tulpa is, as I understand it, a material object or person that an enlightened adept can mentally create. A psychic projection. I think I first read the word in William J. Craddock’s Be Not Content, where the narrator is on a trip, and he imagines the people around him are tulpas of his own creation.

By the way, I updated my Be Not Content post today because I finally found my copy of the book, sitting on a shelf about ten feet from my desk in plain view, sly tulpa that it is.

Possibly I might have a Peng working as a control in the Warm Worlds interstellar Realty office which sends wealthy Peng ioneers out to become tulpas on Earth. She might be called Pekka, in honor of the First Bird Pekka, who miraculously (and paradoxically) laid the very egg that she hatched from.

When installing a tulpa across a Peng ranch, the medium gets into telepathic contact with each and every atom in the ranch. Into each atom, the medium sends a single piece of the ioneer’s soul music, that is, term of the tulpa Fourier series data, plus the Peng control algorithm directing the atom to send a matter-wave at the indicated rate towards the tulpa locator signal. Looked at in another way, the medium is like a conductor, getting a ten tridecillion instrument orchestra to play together.

This is a lot of info to display, and we might suppose that in order to absorb and then deploy the info, the medium needs a very large memory. So the Peng can only send ioneers to lazy eight worlds.

Why doesn’t Panpenga program the Peng ranch atoms directly?

That is, why screw around with an unreliable Earth-side medium? Well, you can’t get the fine tuning from that far away. You need a read-write head on the ground. Also the full info has to be sent in a single chirp. A chunk like a zipped install file. (Cf. Freeware and Saucer Wisdom.)

Why is Jayjay in particular a medium?

For instance, could Chu or Thuy be a medium?

For story purposes, I need for Jayjay’s mediumship to be unique or at least rare, so that the Peng will want to keep in him in a coma and carry him around for channeling more ioneers to Earth. What might make him special was how high he happened to be when he yoo-hooed Panpenga. He was so deeply merged into Gaia that he has become a green god, an earth king, and we can do a reveal of this later on. He doesn’t yet realize his full power. Let’s even say that only one person per planet can be a medium.

I can weave back some mumbo jumbo into his beanstalk trip. During this singular moment he became a divine avatar. He became like a Christ, if you will. What? Jayjay? Christ was a great ethical teacher, not some street kid chasing a high. (Cf. Secret of Life.) Well, maybe Jayjay can grow into his role. He becomes really noble and wise. That would be epic, a nice heavy move for the book. He could even offer up his life as a sacrifice for all mankind at the end. Maybe in this wise he would buy us free of ioneer-invasion forever.

Why can’t the tulpas themselves act as mediums?

Well, a tulpa is physically limited to the confines of his or her ranch, so a tulpa can’t go out into the virgin prairie and bring down the lightning of a new ioneer. But the tulpas can in fact program the atoms of their ranch, which gives them direct matter control. See the next post for more info on this…

I had a visit from the young theoretical computer scientist Scott Aaronson this weekend. He pointed me to what looks to be a terrific series of lecture notes by him, about quantum computation. I wish he’d get it published as a book so I don’t have to read it online.

Note the photo of the 2-D shadows on the wall of the Platonic N-D Ru-cave. I used to resist quantum computations, but as an SF writer, it makes more sense to let them into my heart. Quantum computations are as useful to us as radium was for SF writers of the 1930s, and as quarks were in the 1970s!

Speaking of quantum mechanics, Nick Herbert posted an interesting new paper that refutes Bell’s Non-Locality Theorem…for certain kinds of wack worlds.

I was going good on Hylozoic for a few weeks, but now I’m hung up on a bunch of little writing projects. I finished a story with Marc Laidlaw called “The Perfect Wave”, and sidebar article about SynBio biotech futures for the international edition of Newsweek.

And I still have to write an article about cellular automata for Make magazine, and an article about the far future for an anthology called Year Million.

Saturday, Sylvia and I had an all-Mexican day in San Jose. First we saw these great Aztec dancers.

Love the skull.

And then we saw a cool show at the SJ Art Museum by Camille Rose Garcia — not that the main thing about her work is being Latina, she’s totally a California artist from LA. It’s fun to listen to her talk.

To wind up the day we had tacos at Super Taqueria at Tenth and William Street in San Jose. I used to go there a lot when I taught at SJSU. They have the world’s best corn tortillas for their tacos. You get two toritillas, and you leave one in your basket and you can make a second taco out of all the stuff that falls out while you eat your first taco in the first tortilla. The carnitas…ah!

Sunday we went to the Maker Faire near the old racetrack at San Mateo. Rudy Jr.’s gang (he’s a member) Cyclecide was there as a Midway attraction. Jericho was putting up a bicycle driven automatic music tower that plays four electric geetars!

Rudy on a high bike. They had a bullfight and then they had an exciting event where they threw a lot of bicycle tires and pies.

Good, chaotic fun.

I saw my favorite digital sculptor Bathsheba, whom I’ve met before. That wavy cube shape in front really obsesses me, it’s called a gyroid, which is “explained” in a post by the incomparable popularizer of the impossible, John Baez.

Karen Marcelo showed me a robotic knife stabber she made for SRL (Survival Research Labs). She said one of friends had stuck his hand in while it was still moving and he got cut so bad the blood was spurting, poor guy. So then they put in a piece of steak instead. That’s Survival Research Labs for you: “Producing the most dangerous shows on Earth!”

In a kinder, gentler room I saw a giant squid made of Legos.

It was a brutally windy walk to the (wrong) Caltrain station, the world was broken into Lego dots by the wind screen.

Today I got a preview of the August Asimov’s SF cover, with a story by Bruce and me. Makes me feel like a real science fiction writer, which is very satisying, as being an SF writer was my main life ambition all along, starting at age 13.