{"id":7387,"date":"2017-04-12T12:23:29","date_gmt":"2017-04-12T19:23:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=7387"},"modified":"2021-12-17T14:41:24","modified_gmt":"2021-12-17T22:41:24","slug":"cas-gibsons-peripheral-lovecraft-sequel-gleicks-chaos-paintings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2017\/04\/12\/cas-gibsons-peripheral-lovecraft-sequel-gleicks-chaos-paintings\/","title":{"rendered":"CAs, Gibson’s Time Travel, Lovecraft, Gleick’s Chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been busy with various projects this month.<\/p>\n

As I mentioned before, I put a version of the code for my continuous-valued cellular automata (CA) program Capow<\/a> on the ultrageek GitHub site.<\/p>\n

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Here\u2019s a really nice image I made with a CA based on a so-called \u201cactivator-inhibitor rule with saturation.\u201d\u009d You can see the detailed code <\/a>for this rule online. And then I made a painting of this image, with things changing, as they do, along the way.<\/p>\n

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\u201cSoft Zhabo\u201d\u009d acrylic on canvas, March, 2017, 40\u201d\u009d x 30\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

That guy near the top\u2026is that kangaroo, or maybe a turtle with a lumpy head?<\/p>\n

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And I reread William Gibson\u2019s wonderful novel, The Peripheral<\/em>. One aspect I particularly admire about the work is how Bill sidesteps the perennial problem of how to have time travel without getting into such nasty paradoxes as these two chestnuts:<\/p>\n

Yes and No<\/em>: You go back in time and kill your past self as a teen. If you die, you don\u2019t, and if you don\u2019t you do.<\/p>\n

Closed Causal Loop<\/em>. You go back in time and give the blueprints of your time machine to your past self, who then builds the time machine that you’re using. So the time machine \u201cinvents itself.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

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\n[“Death of the Hippie”, anonymous poster from Haight-Ashbury, 1967, now in “Summer of Love” show at De Young.]<\/p>\n

In The Peripheral<\/em>, someone has a device that sends and receives information, to and from the past. The act of making a connection produces a fork in causality, and the new branch no longer leads to the future that you are living in. The people in that now-forked-off past branch can <\/em>affect your present, by doing things via the info link that you\u2019ve set up. But they can\u2019t change your branch\u2019s past.<\/p>\n

What gives this a nice time-travel aspect is that some of the characters have access to remotely operated \u201cperipherals,\u201d\u009d that is, android-like stand-ins. They\u2019re not just emailing or videophoning to the future, they\u2019re operating a robot that they\u2019re (virtually) in. The heroine, Flynn, is from a down-at-the-heels country town in our time\u2014it’s a Hillbilly Elegy <\/em>type hamlet\u2014and she gets a future peripheral which is very high-tech and well-equipped.<\/p>\n

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\n[Crab-like graffito on Ocean Beach.]<\/p>\n

Conversely, the reluctant hero, an alkie named Netherton, and from a future version of London, gets a past peripheral which is a low-tech toy called a \u201cWheelie Boy.\u201d\u009d The Wheelie Boy is like the push-toy a toddler might have, remotely operated, with a crude gyro to keep the handle erect, and a camera and a display screen atop the handle. Netherton can roll the Wheelie Boy around and look through the camera. And Flynne and her friends can see Netherton\u2019s expressions on the Wheelie Boy\u2019s display screen. Just one step up from a Face Time iPhone. But Gibson wonderfully conjures up what it would be like to be telepresent in the past.<\/p>\n

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Here\u2019s a wonderfully touching scene of Netherton in Flynne\u2019s room via Wheelie Boy.<\/p>\n

Gloriously pre-posthuman. In a state of nature. … Her room, [with Netherton] rotating the cam as far as he could, was like the interior of some nomadic yurt. Nondescript furniture, tumuli of clothing, printed matter. This actual moment in the past, decades before his birth. A world he\u2019d imagined, but now, somehow, in its reality, unimaginable. … He turned the camera, studying the shabby, shadowy tableau of lost domestic calm.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

By the way, speaking of Bill\u2019s \u201cWheelie Boy,\u201d\u009d in the 70s, I drew cartoons about a character called \u201cWheelie Willie.\u201d\u009d Sometimes when I read Gibson, I find odd little synchronicities. Chaotic eddies on the strange attractor that is cyberpunk. I have a old page of my Willie Willie cartoons <\/a>on my blog.<\/p>\n

One more touching line from The Peripheral<\/em>, Flynne, wearing a high-tech peripheral in the future, sees some images in an antiques store. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt was like the pictures in a box at a yard sale, nobody remembering who those people were, or even whose family, let alone how they came to be there. It gave her a sense of things falling, down some hole that had no bottom. Whole worlds falling, and maybe hers too.\u201d\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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How deep a chord that strikes. If you’re of a certain age, you may have had this experience in sorting through a dead parent’s old photos and papers. Their past like decaying leaves on a forest floor.<\/p>\n

Anyway, as I think I\u2019ve mentioned, I\u2019ve been working on a novella called \u201cIn the Lost City of Leng,\u201d\u009d writing it with my old comrade Paul Di Filippo, who is in fact Rhodinsular (that is, from Rhode Island), as was our man H. P. L. We finished writing what is (one hopes) the final version of the story this week and sent it off to an SF magazine. Oh, and did I mention that I turned 71 this month? <\/p>\n

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Back to Lovecraft. I\u2019ve been going through some of the stories in his collected works. \u201cThe Whisperer in Darkness\u201d\u009d is a good one. Dig this condensed quote:<\/p>\n

Tales of buzzing voices in imitation of human speech which made surprising offers to lone travelers on roads and cart-paths in the deep woods. They whispered at night in the forest with voices like a bee\u2019s that tried to be like the voices of men\u2014a morbid echo winging its way across unimaginable abysses from unimaginable outer hells. I can still hear that feeble, fiendish buzzing as it reached me for the first time. It was like the drone of some loathsome, gigantic insect ponderously shaped into the articulate speech of an alien species, and I am perfectly certain that the organs producing it can have no resemblance to the vocal organs of man, or indeed to those of any of the mammalia.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Cover<\/p>\n

Back in the computer-hacking mode, riding the momentum of having restored CAPOW, I went ahead an posted a new free GitHub<\/a> release of the source, manual, and executables of a 1991 Autodesk DOS program that was called “James Gleick’s CHAOS: The Software,” inspired by James Gleick and his brilliant book, Chaos: Making a New Science<\/i> <\/a>. The software was written by Josh Gordon, John Walker, and me. I wrote most of the algorithms, Walker did some fractal landscapes algorithms, and Josh Gordon did the interface, and much of the implementation of the algorithm code. The CHAOS program had six modules.<\/p>\n

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One of my favorites was a Mandelbrot Set<\/i> program, incorporating: quadratic and cubic Julia sets, quadratic and cubic Mandelbrot sets, and a gnarly cubic connectedness map that I went ahead and named the Rudy set<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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My other favorite CHAOS module was a Strange Attractors<\/i> program showing the Lorenz Attractor, the Logistic Map, the Yorke Attractors, and the Henon Attractors.<\/p>\n

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The notion of strange attractors lies at the heart of chaos theory. Even now, nearly forty years later, the public at large still doesn\u2019t get what chaos is about. You might try and summarize the main ideas like this:<\/p>\n

* Although many natural and mathematical systems evolve according to clear mathematical equations, these systems tend not to be predictable<\/b>.<\/p>\n

* One reason for unpredictability is that any slight perturbation of the system is amplified into big changes later on. This is called sensitive dependence <\/b>on initial conditions or the butterfly effect\u2014stemming from the folkloric notion that our global weather is so sensitive that, say, the flap of a butterfly\u2019s wing in the Amazon might be linked to a thunderstorm in Detroit a week later.<\/p>\n

* A less obvious\u2014and more fundamental\u2014point is that many natural systems are inherently chaotic<\/b>. The system never settles down. It dances among a wide gamut of values. When a natural system seems to wobble about, there often is not any \u201cexplanation.\u201d\u009d It\u2019s just being chaotic. That\u2019s how the math happens to work.<\/p>\n

* Another non-obvious but even more important point is that, even when a system is behaving chaotically, it\u2019s values aren\u2019t fully random. The unpredictable gamut of values tend to cluster into certain patterns. And these patterns are called strange attractors.<\/b>The Mandelbrot set itself is a strange attractor for a certain simple process, and the images above are strange attractors as well.<\/p>\n