Believe it or not, the Detroit airport is beautiful.

I’m writing this at three a.m. in Amsterdam. Jet lag. I didn’t sleep at all last night, on the plane trip. That’s okay. I’ve read that if you have depression, going a night without sleep is a good way to jolt yourself out of it. I wasn’t even depressed to begin with, so I feel extra good. I slept yesterday afternoon for four hours, then I slept another three hours, and now I’m up again. It’s fine. It’s almost as wild and crazy as shrooming to be up and active at totally odd times. Fortunately I don’t have any particular duties for the next few days, so I don’t have to be anxious about “storing up sleep.” I’ll just sleep when I’m tired, whenever that is.

Bruegel view out my window. Dutch Market and the Waag building. I’m here to give a talk for the Waag Society; Waag is Dutch for “weigh,” and the Waag building used to be a customs house, it’s a massively turreted stone pile in a market square, the oldest secular building in Amsterdam. The Waag Society is a non-profit foundation that sponsors research and cultural events involving the electronic arts, health care, and cyberculture—I can’t think of a similar group in the U.S.

My trip is primarily sponsored by the internet provider XS4ALL , the first public Internet provider in the Netherlands, and by ABC, the American Book Center in Amsterdam. At the Waag, I’ll reminisce with R.U.Sirius about the 1980s cyber scene in San Francisco, I’ll talk about writing at XS4ALL, and do a reading with R. U. at ABC. I hope R. U. shows; last week he was still in the midst of a big hassle about getting his passport, he’s actually writing a story about this for the upcoming issue #3 of my webzine Flurb.

Having been sober for some years now, I’ve learned to walk past bars and liquor stores without a second thought. But, jeez, in Amsterdam, people are sitting in open-air “coffeeshop” cafes rolling joints and smoking pipes of pot, and I’m seeing “smart shops” windows displaying not only weed, but fresh-pack grocery-store-style boxes of shrooms: of Thai, Mexican, and Colombian breeds of the sacred mushroom. I’ll guess I’ll get used to it.

People here tell me that the authorities are thinking of somehow limiting the sale of shrooms, for last week a visiting young French woman freaked out on some shrooms she’d bought here and jumped to her death from a building. That’s such a classic psychedelic risk. Not stepping off a steep precipice is such a fundamental instinct. Even babies shy away from drop-offs. I’m imagining seeing the air so crowded with glowing three-dimensional Belousov-Zhabotinsky scrolls that it looks almost solid. The air like a gelatinous medium you can tread water in. Narrow-eyed angels hover just outside the window, beckoning, not nearly so friendly as they appear.

There’s more bicycles here than any city I’ve ever seen, I’m hoping to rent one for a few days, though people tell me you have to be on your toes lest you plow into a bombed backpacker or get run down by a tram.

All the skinny houses have gables with hooks that they use to lower stuff when they’re moving in and out. The stairs are way too narrow to fit furniture.

The Lowlanders have a distinct national look; I haven’t seen so many natural blondes in years. I liked this red baby wrapped up like a larva. Many of them have very vivid features, familiar to me from the armies of faces I’ve studied in Bruegel and Bosch paintings over the years. I love that they resemble those paintings from five hundred years ago. The one big thing I’ve learned from studying the history of art is that people haven’t changed all that much. Even in the year million, people won’t be the bland and humorless logicians that populate the worlds of bad SF.

I ended up sleeping till one in the afternoon, when I was awakened by Amsterdam impresario and man-about-town Luc Sala. He was connected to the old Mondo scene, and, hearing I was in town, he found me and brought me a cell phone and a bicycle to use. What a guy! He invited me to drive to a “fire dance” in Breda with him, where he and seventy friends were going to dance around a bonfire until the sun came up, savoring the clarity that extreme exhaustion brings. But I wanted to explore Amsterdam, now that I’m here. Luc gave me a beginners guide to shroom-tripping that he published. Just rub it in, all right?

I biked through town to the Van Gogh museum.

It was insanely crowded, but I wormed close to look at my favorite wall there, with the pictures he painted in 1890 right before he killed himself. There’s a popular story that the “Wheatfield” was his very last picture, but that’s not known to be true. Could the despondent and nearly-suicided van Gogh have imagined crowds like this wanting to see his work? Or maybe he did imagine it and it put him over the edge!

Another last picture is the “Tree Roots,” or “Boomwortels,” — what a great language Dutch is. My favorite of the “last” pictures is “Landscape with the Chateau of Auvers at Sunset” Here’s a link to a rather bad reproduction of it, on a really very good site that has all the pictures.

Another last one I like is “Wheat Field Under Clouded Sky.” In these pictures, he’s using so very few strokes to limn nature’s most complex forms: trees and clouds. I snuck the bad photo above, here’s a link to the better official version.

I was thinking that when the aliens start draining away Earth’s gnarl by siphoning off a lot of nature’s quantum computation, it might be cool if the world started looking like a van Gogh painting.

I mean, suppose the aliens have a little class, and they’re not just gonna turn us into modern design or into Hanna-Barbera Flintstones cartoons. Yes, a van Gogh tree is plenty gnarly, but still it’s a lot less gnarly than an actual tree.

I wrote in my journals about visiting this museum in July 25, 1994, with Sylvia and our daughter Isabel and, hmm, I can actually find the entry! And it turns out that I once before thought of using SF to turn the world into a van Gogh painting. I have a limited number of obsessions.
Here’s the 1994 notes about the van Gogh museum.

[Tulips, 50 of ‘em for 7 and a half Euros!]

“My favorite four pictures were from June/July 1890, right before he shot himself. If you could paint like that, how could you want to die? Maybe it was like unbearable to be that good? It’s tough being a great artist, yes it is. The Vincent I got into the most of the fave four was one of a mansion or castle at twilight. What he does with the brush work is to completely shape the strokes to the subject of that part of the picture. In the grass the strokes are quick parallel vertical lines. On the sunset horizon there is a stack of parallel orange strokes, a pile of light. And, ah, in the big trees the strokes are PERPLEXING POULTRY, they are like an M.C. Escher tessellation yes they are, with leaf, branch, sky, sun colors tiled in, light and dark leaves, man I have got to use this in FREEWARE, this is what the Perplexing Poultry Philtre is for, man, to make the world look like the mature work of Vincent Van Gogh.”

[I saw a big show of work by Max Beckmann in Amsterdam today too. Here’s his transreal take on an optician’s shop actually called Genius. He added the Jacob’s ladder and the menacing birds.] Back to the 1994 notes…

“As well as thinking of Vincent’s brushwork in terms of the Poultry, also, since my playful daughter Isabel was there with us to joke with, I thought of it in terms of a hyena tearing a piece of meat in half by whipping its head around in crazy-eights. This being a rap that Isabel and I got into watching a nature show once — how a hyena that’s bitten onto something big (possibly even an entire ruminant), will lash its head around in a kind of figure-eight pattern to tear loose a bite of flesh. And Isabel and I got into doing that to each other’s shoulders, or threatening to, and getting into the very wild and hyper motion of your head that goes with it. So looking at Vincent’s last pictures, I found my head moving around in those loops, imagining how it would be to tear into that kind of painting — if you could do it.”

I got a picture of myself in Max Beckmann’s personal mirror that he actually painted with his face a couple of times. Hi Max! It’s great being an exile on Hoogstraat.

In the morning I went to do a radio interview with a smart guy called Bob Smith for WXXI FM in Rochester. My friend and RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) John Roche took me. We looked at the High Falls of the Genesee River.

You didn’t used to be able to easily see the falls thirty years ago, but the city has fixed up the access, hoping to draw more people downtown, with the usual indifferent success of struggling old cities everywhere. This week poor Rochester had to sell off a fancy ferry they’d bought to run back and forth across Lake Ontario to Toronto.

John and I had lunch on the nice Park Ave in Rochester, a reasonably yup little street. This guy runs out of the Lakeshore Record Exchange store as we walk by, his name is Anthony, and he recognizes me from my blog! He’d noticed that I’m in Rochester. It works! Anthony let me pick out any record I wanted for free, I got an album of early Zappa rarities. I saw Zappa play twice in Rochester, thirty years ago.

The weather turned very Great Lakes on us. Driving wind, spitting snow, low gray clouds. The housing prices are quite reasonable here!

Two pleasant young men interviewed me for the RIT paper, Tristan and Brian.

The school had four guys give a colloquium talk on various aspects of my work. From left to right, Steve Jacobs talked about me being one of the first academics to dare use computer game projects to teach software engineering, John Roche talked about my transreal style and my literary relations to cyberpunk and Beat literature, Jeff Johannes spoke of me as an exponent of mathematics who brings people into the field and how much I’d done for math with my popular books, and Peter Lazarski talked about my influence on his work on his graphic novel Imaginary Monsters. As much fun as being at your own funeral to hear the euolgies!

What touched me the most was hearing Jeff talk math and me. Following on John Roche’s appreciation, it brought a tear to my eye. I’ve never gotten very much recognition or thanks from the mathematics community, and it was so good to hear that I was appreciated. He showed all my math books’ covers with an overhead opaque projector, and even projected the Geometry & 4D book and the two math papers I published while at SUNY Geneseo: “Undefinable Sets,” and “Truth and Infinity”. It was satisfying to hear him say, “Hard to believe Geneseo wouldn’t give him tenure!” He commented how in all the math work, I kept looking for the broadest possible perspective. And he noticed with the proper amusement my Lifebox book table of my fifty or so ever-changing year-by-year opnions about how to fill in the blank in “Everything is _______”

I gave my talk called “Life is a Gnarly Computation.” . I’ve given the talk before but each version is a little different. I keep simplifying it. And this time I put in a slide of advice about what the philosophy of gnarl says about writing.

* Writing is a gnarly computation; the outcome is somewhat unpredictable. Let it grow.
* Reality is gnarlier than anything you read or see. Go transreal.
* In the zone, the cosmos dances with you.

That last point was inspired by seeing the spiritualist monument yesterday, just when I’m thinking about woogie mediums. So then on the way out, I got another little friendly bump from the cosmos, noticing this cool graffiti on an electrical socket. Thank you, god.

Hello, Mr Chips!

I’m in Rochester, where I worked 30 years ago. I spent this afternoon with two old SUNY Geneseo students of mine: Leander Watts, goth-magic YA novelist extrordinaire, and Amylouise Donnelly, an inveterate scribbler as well.

Here is one of Leander’s favorite sites of Hidden Rochester, a memorial in honor of the Fox sisters who were the mediums who got the Spiritualist movement off the ground.

“[Erected by] Spiritualists of the world in commemoration of the advent of modern spiritualism at Hydesville, N.Y., March 31, 1848 [159 years and 3 days ago, hmmm!] and in tribute to mediumship, the rock upon which demonstrable spiritualism forever stands.
THERE IS NO DEATH. THERE ARE NO DEAD”

Amylouise led us to two cool coffee shops in Rochester: Java’s and Spot. Java’s is next to the Eastman Music school, with people coming in carrying cellows. Daffodils on the piano.

Leander took me into an abandoned subway over the Genesee River and under the Rochester Library where I used to go to Gurdjieff meetings thirty years ago. The subway is full of vibby graffiti.

It was nice to have my old students lead me around. They were both in a class I taught with Bill Edgar of Phil Dept on something like “Unknowability”. For me, this was seeds of my later book Infinity and the Mind.

The house where Rudy Rucker wrote White Light is still to be seen in nearby Geneseo.

You’ve been giveng me some good comments on the post before last, that is, “Missing Gnarl. Peng Parasims.” I ‘ve been editing and re-editing my notes on it. So I’m gonna post about the idea some more today. As synchronicity would have it, this morning before seeing Leander Watts I decided to call the (unwilling) Earthside Peng transmitter a “medium.” And I started calling the simulations “woogies” instead of “parasims.”

[Woogie? My old friend Bill Caren? Or “Fred” from Scanner Darkly? Camera trouble…]

So, okay, going over it again, the Peng have an emigration technology that they call woogiecasting. The planetary mind Panpenga is willing to disassemble a subject Peng’s body, extracting the full details of the quantum computation it contains, to clean up the data a bit, and then to transmit this pattern via quantum entanglement to a distant world. The patterns create matter-wave simulations on the distant worlds, and the simulations are physical and very real-seeming Peng called woogies.

The experience of becoming a woogie seems low-tech to the users—they just jump into a certain volcanic hole. And Panpenga does it for free, as she likes the notion of spreading woogies of her denizens across the cosmos. Access to the woogification treatment is, however, expensive. To become a woogie, the Peng in question slides into a certain fissure on planet Pengö. The fissure leads down to some lava. Some wealthy high priests own the hole, and they require all of a Peng’s resources as the price for the favor—and the resources have to be very high. The planetary overmind, Panpenga, converts the body into a vibration that goes out from her north pole. And then subject Peng appears in physical form, memory intact, body in perfect health on some distant world: a woogie.

In order to turn a body into a woogie, the planetary mind Panpenga decodes subject Peng’s wave function into very many terms of a Fourier series—I’ll specify the exact number of terms below. But let me already warn that the Fourier series representation is a very inefficient and computationally wasteful method to represent a body’s wave function. But Panpenga uses it as it’s a brute-force no-brainer approach that always works.

Once Panpenga has the Fourier series representing a subject Peng, she edits the terms of the Fourier series so as to remove any diseases that the subject Peng might have. (I take this notion from Charles Stross’s Glass House, where he describes a somewhat similar procedure being used—for security purposes!—in nanotechnological “assemblers” that arriving teleported immigrants have to pass through.)

And then the Fourier terms are transmitted to a 100 km by 100 km by 100 km volume of matter on another world. This block of slaved quantum-computing matter is called a Peng ranch. For dramatic effect I’m making the volume be big. Each individual atom in the Peng ranch carries out the emulation of one single component of the Fourier series.

The atoms hum together, and their beats converge onto a single vibration of matter waves that is a simulacrum of the woogified Peng. Keep in mind that woogies have mass and physical presence. They’re not just something like holograms or mental images. In imagining how a distributed quantum computation can cause a physical object to emerge, think of a parabolic mirror (or a lens) which focuses a bunch of light waves to a single burning point, or think of a bunch of lasers focusing light waves on a single spot to produce a tiny sun. And now suppose that it’s DeBroglie matter waves instead of light waves.

Let’s crunch some numbers.

Like most emulations, the woogie-generating computation is highly inefficient. A normal Peng’s cubic meter or so of matter computes the Peng in question, and that’s the end of it. But a Peng woogie requires all the mass in the 100 km by 100 km by 100 km volume of a Peng ranch. This is quadrillion cubic meters, so we’ve got a quadrillion-fold inefficiency here—in that we’re using a quadrillion cubic meters to emulate one cubic meter.

In visualizing how the initial woogie emulation can be so incredibly inefficient, think of an immense tangle of machinery that does something very simple like peeling an apple. Or an insanely complex cellular-automata-based construction that generates a tiny little regular pattern such as a binary counter or a listing of the primes. Or a Turing machine that flurbs and skitters up and down light-years of memory tape just too compute a few digits of pi.

I’ll allow one initial mitigation of the inefficiency. As Peng are, after all, somewhat similar to each other, you can piggyback the computations of a few Peng together into a single wave function, end have the Peng ranch support two or three Peng woogies—who are exceedingly tightly linked as they share a single wave function.

One of the threads of the story will involve the Peng trying to achieve greater efficiency in the woogie computation. Another thread involves way of trying to disable a Peng ranch, using a mind-virus called the love-bug. Jayjay knows the name, after all, of every one of those ten tridecillion atoms. (The names are each eight random English words, as I mentioned in the “octillion” post.)

I’ll be busy for the next two weeks, so there won’t be a fresh blog entry till after April 15. Part of the time I’ll be Amsterdam—check out the Upcoming Events notice in the sidebar. Any readers out there in the Netehrlands who want to get together with me while I”m in Amsterdam? Email me.

This week a friend sold me a cool old 1955 Leica IIIf camera for a good price. They’re not nearly in the stratospheric level of the M series. The pictures today and most of the pix on March 28 (not the opera house ones) were taken with it. I like pix—that Leica glass. Deep focus. Loading the film is a bitch, but I found this great site Cameraquest that loves this particular model (IIIf RD ST) and even tells how to load it. I think I’ll take it along on the trip.

For today’s topic, I’m gonna view telepathy is a new medium to exploit. So the invading Peng in Hylozoic will be using it to get us to let them move in.

Media Promote Worship: The media get us to worship certain people. These are “stars” and “leaders”. A superficial motive is to get the public to pay to hear more about the stars. A fundamental motive is to get the public to obey the leaders and give them their wealth and the resources of their land. The stars are the content, the leaders are the sponsors.

Media Spread Fear. The media press us to think about a few “issues” at a time, always disturbing ones. The motive is to make us afraid so that we want our leaders to protect us and are willing to cede our autonomy. Fear is the content, the leaders are the sponsors.

Peng Promote Worship. Peng present themselves as cute and interesting. They put a dazzle-aura around themselves. They trail memory sheets of happy family memories and colorful anecdotes. They engage in riveting soap-opera intrigues. They have a big singing contest coming up, and they do sing very well. People root for them like for sports teams. People don’t mind that all of, say, Oakland is de-energized so that the Oaktown Peng can warble and croon. There might as well be a tie-in between the Peng and the Founders reality show that my main characters are in.

Peng Spread Fear. They tell us horror stories about bad other aliens. They tell us about the Hrull starship-engines that are made of squashed humanoids. A whole list of scary aliens. Tentacle monsters. Pinchy beetles. The Wyrms. The Holothurians. The Hoarse Roar from the Dawn of Time. The Leicon—the seemingly innocent appliance that is in fact an alien robot who takes over your life, sending you on endless searches of EBay for more lenses and, drool, M series models…