{"id":5031,"date":"2013-11-30T09:33:09","date_gmt":"2013-11-30T17:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=5031"},"modified":"2013-11-30T10:28:03","modified_gmt":"2013-11-30T18:28:03","slug":"beauty-in-chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2013\/11\/30\/beauty-in-chaos\/","title":{"rendered":"Beauty in Chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"

I took a walk up on St. Joseph\u2019s Hill in Los Gatos yesterday, bringing my camera along. The camera is always good company on a walk. You show things to it, and it helps you see.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been going up in the Los Gatos hills maybe once a week for the whole twenty-seven years since we moved here in August, 1986. So I\u2019ve taken this walk about a thousand times. It\u2019s always new. That\u2019s the thing about nature. <\/p>\n

Nature is a fractal, that is she has endless layers of detail, which bloom out faster than a mere linear rate. That is, if you look twice as close, you see three times as much.<\/p>\n

Also Nature is alive, and always changing. As is the sky. Always the same, always different. Chaos.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The perennial Dover Books company reissued my 1987 popular science book Mind Tools <\/a> last week. I\u2019m happy to have good old Dover keeping one of my titles alive. When I was a boy in Louisville, I used to send off for Dover books on science.<\/p>\n

I wrote Mind Tools <\/em>in Lynchburg, Virginia, right before I moved to San Jose and became a computer scientist. I was gearing up for the transition from math to CS. In Mind Tools<\/em>, I looked at the four main areas of math from the viewpoint that \u201ceverything is information.\u201d\u009d The areas? Number, Space, Logic, and Infinity.<\/p>\n

I drew a lot of illos for the book. While I was working on it, my little rented office in decaying downtown L\u2019burg was like a mad scientist\u2019s lab, with all these little models I was building. I had this idea of finding dot-diagrams to illustrate the \u201cshapes\u201d\u009d of most of the numbers less than a hundred or so. I wanted to have a supply of these images at my hand for drawing on friends\u2019 and relatives\u2019 birthday cards. You can find these particular \u201cMind Tools <\/em>birthday dot\u201d\u009d drawings of mine online here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a phone pole near my house. I like the natural collages that we humans put together. You can look at cities or human development as being natural artifacts like anthills or beaver colonies or wasp nests or seashells\u2014we\u2019re living organisms, and we assemble this stuff. We\u2019re part of nature.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

There\u2019s this one ancient shed that I often walk past in the hills of Los Gatos. I love its peeling pale green paint, and I hope the owners never fix it up. Beautiful branching crack here, and to make it lovelier, the paint is arched up into mathematically rich concave surfaces.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I always love looking at treelines along mountain ridges. The nice thing about natural curves and surfaces is that they don\u2019t accord with any really simple algebraic formulae. They emerge as processes, not as graphs of simple equations. But the processes themselves do have mathematical qualities, but the details of the end results are unpredictable.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s chaos, in a good way. In a chaotic process, you can have simple natural laws that are producing results that are even in principle unpredictable. Why unpredictable? Because there are multiple systems involved (rocks, geology, trees, wind, rain) and because the systems are interacting over extended periods of time. As a rule, the only way to \u201cpredict\u201d\u009d a natural process it to watch it run, and when it\u2019s done, that\u2019s your \u201cprediction.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

We travel into the future at a rate of one second per second. No shortcuts.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

More human colony-organism type activity here. Apparently the humans cap their \u201crebar\u201d\u009d metal rods so that they don\u2019t poke out their own eyes. Faint strands of symbiotic spider silk augment the \u201cwarning\u201d\u009d tape. (See this higher-resolution image<\/a> of the photo for the spider silk.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Back to that weathered old pale green shed I love. Dig the hinge, isn\u2019t it perfect? A semiotic heft to it. Hello, god.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A eucalyptus branch lying on the ground. Blown down by the wind. The plants don\u2019t mind. They\u2019ll rot into the ground, be eaten by ants, whatever. The endlessly cycling fountain of life. We\u2019re part of it too. Your body will cycle, but your life is an “eternal” pattern in spacetime.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Hazy light on this winter day. Already looks like sunset in the mid-afternoon. The laurel trees grow in clumps.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Selfie shot for the day. Weird thing about iPhone camera: If you\u2019re taking a horizontal shot of something in front of you, you have to have the \u201cvolume\u201d\u009d buttons down<\/em>, but if you are taking a selfie shot you have to have the \u201cvolume\u201d\u009d buttons up<\/em>. Otherwise the image appears upside-down on many (but not all) viewer apps. No use raging at these kind of things\u2014you just learn about them and deal with them. Like an insect gathering seeds. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

My self-deprecating \u201cself-portrait,\u201d\u009d called Louisville Artist<\/em>, used as a chapter illo in my new novel The Big Aha <\/em>, which features a new psychedelic era\u2026only this time the drug is quantum mechanics. Jam your internal One\/Many oscillator all the way over into the mystic mode! Check out the book for free (or buy it rather cheaply) online<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I took a walk up on St. Joseph\u2019s Hill in Los Gatos yesterday, bringing my camera along. The camera is always good company on a walk. You show things to it, and it helps you see. I\u2019ve been going up in the Los Gatos hills maybe once a week for the whole twenty-seven years since […]<\/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-5031","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\/5031","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=5031"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5036,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5031\/revisions\/5036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}