{"id":2444,"date":"2010-07-31T11:31:41","date_gmt":"2010-07-31T19:31:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=2444"},"modified":"2010-07-31T11:31:41","modified_gmt":"2010-07-31T19:31:41","slug":"on-the-beach-with-sylvia-and-turing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2010\/07\/31\/on-the-beach-with-sylvia-and-turing\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Beach with Sylvia and Turing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just back from hike-in camping with my wife, Sylvia, at the Point Reyes National Seashore Coast Camp<\/a>. It\u2019s a two mile hike in, not too bad, and you end up in a site right by the Limantour Beach. I never manage reserve campsites in advance\u2014it\u2019s just too big a hassle and too much thinking ahead\u2014but if you show up at the Bear Valley Visitor center shortly after 9 a.m. on a weekday, you can normally get a site. Not that managing this is easy, but every couple of years I can.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When I visit these wild, deserted beaches, I sometimes think of the publicity photo of Raquel Welch for the 1966 film, One Million Years B.C. <\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It was foggy in the morning, but got sunny around noon on one day and 2 p.m. on the other.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019m always so impressed with how intricately and beautifully nature arranges things when humans more or less leave her alone. The little rectangles of park and yard that we have in cities aren\u2019t really the same kind of thing.<\/p>\n


\n[On \u201cSculptured Beach\u201d\u009d a mile south of the Coast Camp.]<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m still thinking about this Alan Turing story I want to write, possibly with an eye to getting up enough momentum to charge ahead with a novel that has the title Turing & Burroughs<\/em>.<\/p>\n


\n[Protosentient pre-fetal green goo.]<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been reading this very long Turing biography from 1983, Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma<\/em>. The book really rounds out Turing\u2019s character, and I\u2019m internalizing some of this stuff. There\u2019s always a danger, when writing about historical figures, to settle for a cartoon version of them.<\/p>\n


\n[In the hamlet of Pt. Reyes Station. The Bovine Bakery is a must.]<\/em><\/p>\n

I feel like in some ways I was like Turing myself as a boy and young man. Like Turing, I always had huge problems with my writing pen, often got ink on myself, and tended to get low grades simply because my papers were so messy. And, like Alan, when filling out official forms, I\u2019d pondered every answer, thiking about the optimal strategy. It was always clear that the authorities were my enemies.<\/p>\n


\n[My friend Bill explains his method of luring a swarm of bees from their lair by building a fake hive outside their entrance.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Turing had an odd way of speaking. His voice was somewhat high-pitched, he had a grating laugh, and he emphasized words by raising his pitch still higher on them. Hodges has a quote from an American scientist who remembers Alan telling him a dream as follows: \u201cI had a dream <\/em>last night. I dreamt I was walking up your Broadway carrying a flag, a Confederate <\/em>flag. One of your bobbies <\/em>came up to me and said, \u201d\u02dcSee here! You can\u2019t do that,\u2019 and I said, \u201d\u02dcWhy not<\/em>? I fought in the War between the States<\/em>.\u2019\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Turing did a lot after his 1936 paper, \u201cOn Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem<\/a>\u201d\u009d written when he was 24, and the source of his seminal formulation of an abstract computer as a \u201cTuring machine.\u201d\u009d <\/p>\n

In World War II, he was in the thick of the British efforts to break the German army\u2019s Enigma and Fish codes. He was said to be the top cryptanalyst in the United Kingdom, and Turing\u2019s group made a key difference in the war\u2019s outcome.<\/p>\n

As the war died down, Turing got hold of \u201ca twenty-five cent handbook on electronics, the RCA Radio Tube Manual<\/em>, and invented a new way of enciphering speech.\u201d\u009d The cipher was called Delilah, basically you needed a box of electronics at the sender\u2019s phone and matchinb box at the receiver\u2019s phone. The cipher worked by overlaying random noise on phone message. A cool, modernistic and Wolframesque feature of this is that Turing used a deterministic but chaotic circuit in order to generate the \u201cnoise.\u201d\u009d The sender\u2019s and receiver\u2019s boxes could be set to generate exactly the same pseudorandom patterns. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Listening to a Delilah message was maybe like listening to Turing himself. It was overlaid by a noisy background buzz and a 4000 Hz whistle. Talk to me, Alan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just back from hike-in camping with my wife, Sylvia, at the Point Reyes National Seashore Coast Camp. It\u2019s a two mile hike in, not too bad, and you end up in a site right by the Limantour Beach. I never manage reserve campsites in advance\u2014it\u2019s just too big a hassle and too much thinking ahead\u2014but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2444","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\/2444","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=2444"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2449,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2444\/revisions\/2449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}