{"id":192,"date":"2005-07-27T11:14:02","date_gmt":"2005-07-27T19:14:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/wordpress\/?p=192"},"modified":"2005-07-27T11:14:02","modified_gmt":"2005-07-27T19:14:02","slug":"break-godel-jimbo-aliens-my-course-books-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2005\/07\/27\/break-godel-jimbo-aliens-my-course-books-online\/","title":{"rendered":"Break, Godel, Jimbo Aliens, My Course, Books Online"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m going to be on the road for a few weeks, so won&#8217;t be blogging again till end of August, at which time I&#8217;ll have a buttload of new images and journal notes to post.  Like when I went to Micronesia, not that this outing is likely to be so spectacular.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re new to the blog and need summer reading, you can always enter Micronesia into the blog search bar to find the listings, starting with the <a href=\".\/?m=20050304\" target=\"_blank\">Micronesia 1<\/a> to <a href=\".\/?m=20050406\" target=\"_blank\">Micronesia 20<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Awkward thing about blogs: if you want to read a series of entries in correct time-order, you have to keep using the &#8220;Back&#8221; link at the page bottoms instead of &#8220;Next&#8221; and you have to read the page entries from the bottom entry up.  Or you can just read backwards.  Maybe blogs are helping us develop a looser sense of time.<\/p>\n<p>        ==========<\/p>\n<p>I found a nice picture of Albert Einstein with young logic king Kurt Godel on John Brockman&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edge.org\/documents\/archive\/edge164.html\" target=\"_blank\">Edge<\/a> ezine.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images\/godeleinstein.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>        ==========<br \/>\n<br \/>This week I&#8217;ve been working on <i>Mathematicians in Love<\/i>.  As I mentioned earlier, I&#8217;m basing some aliens on <a href=\".\/?m=20050715\" target=\"_blank\">mosaics<\/a> I saw in a subway station in NYC.<\/p>\n<p>        Here&#8217;s two excerpts about these aliens, whom Bela encounters upon his second trip to La Hampa.<\/p>\n<p>        ***<\/p>\n<p>        As I emerged, something bright and fast flew low over my head &#8212; a butterfly, a hummingbird?  No, it was bigger than that, a meter long.  It circled back towards me, a cartoony humanoid form with two bell-bottom legs, a lumpy ovoid bottom, a tapering torso chest with tear-drop arms, and a translucent bulb-head with a pair of antennae.  Another alien.<\/p>\n<p>        The figure hovered above me, glowing in rich neon colors: seaweed-green legs, carroty-red bottom and arms, cobalt torso, robins-egg-blue head-bulb, and lilac antennae.  I saw the alien as a female, like the cone shells.  The more I looked at her, the brighter she shone.  There was a smell of ozone, as near an electrical generator.  I hoped she wasn&#8217;t about to sting me.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images\/dwell2.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>        &#8220;So say something,&#8221; I said, treading water in the warm, clear sea.  &#8220;I&#8217;m a human named Bela.  What are you?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>        The alien tweeted a word so fast that I couldn&#8217;t make it out.<\/p>\n<p>        &#8220;Come again?&#8221; I said.<\/p>\n<p>        &#8220;Jimbo,&#8221; chirped the little figure.  &#8220;Jimbo, Jimbo, Jimbo.&#8221;  She pooted four short-lived cannonballs of light from the funnel-bottoms of her legs, each with an image inside.  It was a crystal-ball comic-strip explaining the origin of the Jimbos.  Glowing magnetic tornados lifted free from a speckled Sun to float across space.  The space-eddies touched down on a nearby planet&#8217;s atmosphere &#8212; hey, that was Earth.  The magnetohydrodynamic swirls came alive with neon colors and took on playful forms: Jimbos.  The Jimbos tagged after people like pet balloons, one per person.  But I didn&#8217;t see the point.<\/p>\n<p>        &#8220;Jimbo, Jimbo, Jimbo!&#8221; said the alien again.<\/p>\n<p>        &#8220;Fine,&#8221; I said.  &#8220;You can be my Jimbo, if you like.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>        Vibrating with enthusiasm, the Jimbo flew right through my head; I grunted in fear, but all I felt was a brief tingle.  Perhaps she&#8217;d harvested some thought patterns?  Fine.  I stopped worrying about the Jimbo for now.<\/p>\n<p>***<\/p>\n<p>        Sensing my discomfort, the blonde woman kindly interrupted.  &#8220;I&#8217;m Duxie,&#8221; she said, holding out her hand.  She was so beautiful that it was hard for me to look directly at her.  &#8220;Pips, other-Bela,&#8221; she continued.  &#8220;I&#8217;m from a future Earth, your timeline, year 2204.  Three friends and I hypertunneled to La Hampa using our Jimbos.  The Jimbos have replaced what you called a Gobubble?&#8221;  She extended a graceful hand and her Jimbo perched upon it, a two-legged figure with a pleated skirt, a taffy-twisted torso and a ball-head with a short, cylindrical nose.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images\/dwell1.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>          &#8220;They&#8217;re symbiotes,&#8221; put in Paul.  &#8220;The real deal.  The Jimbos feed on our thought patterns, and in return they act as computers and cell phones.  They like to gossip.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>        Duxie&#8217;s Jimbo gave Paul&#8217;s a little kiss &#8212; for all the world as if the Jimbos were autonomous thought-balloons.<\/p>\n<p>        ==========<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images\/lifeboxcover2.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>One last thing. Keep in mind that this fall I&#8217;ll be teaching a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/oldhomepage\/philosophy115.htm\" target=\"_blank\">philosophy<\/a> course late Thursday afternoons at SJSU this fall &#8212; based on my new <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/lifebox\" target=\"_blank\"> book<\/a>.  If you&#8217;re interested in the course, you might want to make some plans now.  The more the merrier.  I do have hopes of putting some of the lectures online as video as well, though I&#039;m not sure yet if that&#039;ll work out.<\/p>\n<p>        ==========<\/p>\n<p>Oh, one last thing, thanks, dear readers, for all the useful comments about reading books online.  We accumulated quite a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/comments.php?y=05&#038;m=07&#038;entry=entry050717-085119\" target=\"_blank\"> thread<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m going to be on the road for a few weeks, so won&#8217;t be blogging again till end of August, at which time I&#8217;ll have a buttload of new images and journal notes to post. Like when I went to Micronesia, not that this outing is likely to be so spectacular. If you&#8217;re new to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}