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.

There’s a midterm coming up in my Philosophy and Computers class on the first three chapters of my Lifebox book. Here are my loyal students, few but fit.

If you need to study up, you can see the whole sequence of blackboards as a zoomable 1 Meg PDF file.

And you can hear the review lecture as a 60 Meg MP3 file.

Also on the web as of today is a podcast interview of me at small WORLD.

I first met Bruce Sterling in the early 80s, John Shirley and I went and stayed at his house for a Cyberpunk panel in Austin, Texas. In 1983, Bruce and William Gibson came to visit us in Lynchburg, Va, where I was being a free-lance writer, which is when I took this first picture.

Yesterday Bruce showed up again, on his way to a consulting gig in San Francisco. It’s always so nice to be with a fellow SF writer, especially one who’s so much on your wavelength.

Bruce and I have written three stories together, “Storming the Cosmos,” “Big Jelly,” and “Junk DNA.” Yesterday we started talking about a fourth, with working title “Hormiga Canyon.” It was great sitting around spinning ideas.

Bruce was traveling with his writer friend Jasmina Tesanovic. They were into using wireless that leaks down the hill from my neighbors. Bruce has a daily blog on Wired. They actually pay him to blog! What a deal. Well, Bruce is always fun to read, or to listen to. He has an engaging way of sounding both enthused and sarcastic.

We walked down to Sharper Image on Santa Cruz Ave. in Los Gatos and looked at some of the robots for sale. Bruce is into design these days, he's been a guest professor at Art Center in Pasadena, and has a book on Ubiquitous Computatoin coming out from MIT Press. This morning when I woke up he was gone, off to get some righteous bucks from the Global Business Network in SF. You gotta get up pretty dang early in the morning to keep up with my man Bruce!

By the way, Bruce blogged our meeting as well; and this is a picture he took.