Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician and a computer scientist. Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned 40. Rucker has published twenty-five books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. He was an early cyberpunk and an editor at Mondo 2000. He often writes SF in a style is characterized as transreal. His most recent novels were Frek and the Elixir, a far-future epic about a boy's galactic quest to restore Earth's ecology and As Above So Below, a historical novel based on the life of the sixteenth century painter Peter Bruegel.  Rucker is a professor emeritus of computer science at San Jose State University, where he created a number of freeware programs relating to chaos, artificial life, cellular automata, higher dimensions, and computer games. He is presently working on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, a nonfiction book about computers and the nature of reality. Rucker's website can be found at www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker or at www.rudyrucker.com.

Blog the Gnarl # 10

Whoah! Brian Bruxvoort writes "It was indeed Dr. Suess' Oh, The Thinks You Can Think! that you quoted, and I've scanned and attached the proof. I had the wonderful surprise of reading it to my daughter a couple weeks after reading it in White Light last year." Brian kindly encourages me to keep on blogging, and maybe later this fall I will. If and when I do, I'll announce it on Boing. Oh, and mathematician and SF writer Jonathan Post asked me to blog the math page on his huge site. Jonathan used to drive the moderators crazy at the big Santa Fe Artificial Life conferences when they'd ask for questions from the audience after a panel, and he'd be first in line down on the floor, ready to unleash a five minute minilecture disguised as a multi-part question.

The picture above shows a wall inside Faler's General Store in Pinedale, Wyoming where Isabel lives. She'll have her jewelry biz back online soon. One last thing to plug. I'm going to be giving a workshop on Friday Oct 1 to Sunday Oct 3 called "Chaotic Mind" with demon chaotician Ralph Abraham at the Esalen Institute.

One last link tumbles in, this one to the merchandising page of ascended-master-of-the-devil-girl-toon, Chris Cooper, known as COOP in the hallowed pages of the great art magazine Juxtapoz.

This picture of me was taken by my student Alvin Cho during my very last Computer Graphics class at San Jose State. Goodbye, Mr. Blog. Till the next guest blogger kicks in, here's last week's Rudy blog and this week's Rudy blog. Adios, mischief-makers.

posted by Rudy Rucker at 10:14:32 AM | permalink

Blog the Gnarl #9

Mailbox: You readers have been really helpful. If this blog was all I ever did, I could see getting into a nice feedback loop, which makes me think of Martin Gardner telling me that at some point his Scientific American column "Mathematical Games" became self-activating, in that he got enough info from readers to keep it going. So thanks to Jeremy Hulette, for pointing me to this GIF of R. Crumb's drawing, "When Monica Delivers the Pizza," found on a page selling a konky kollection kof King Krumb's killustrations. The letter "k" was considered intrinsically hip and funny in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Kind of like "x" was in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For kicks, I had the letter "g" be the fashionable letter in the year 3003 in which I set Frek and the Elixir.

Some readers have been asking me where I saw the Dr. Seuss quote about "bloogs" that I mentioned in Blog the Gnarl #1. Well, I don't remember the precise book. My wife and I read, like, all the Dr. Seuss books to our kids. It was a kind of low-level book, maybe it was The Thinks You Can Think. Where I actually found the quote for my blog is in a second-hand source, to wit, my transreal novel White Light, which is set in the period when Sylvia and I were reading a lot of Dr. Seuss books to the etc. The lifebox replacing the life. Two relevant quotes from this lively tome:

(White Light Quote 1) But that was not all. I began noticing things that didn't fit into any theory of physics I'd ever heard of. There were blobs of…of stuff drifting around everywhere. Little pin-point bubbles and big dopey-looking balloons were filtering through the objects around me. With their dark wrinkles and foolish nodding, the big ones made me think of a drawing in one of Iris's Dr. Seuss books. I decided to call them bloogs like the good doctor had.

(White Light Quote 2) "As you know from my paper, I'm working on a hyper-matter theory," said Nick. "My idea is that there's a different type of matter…gobs of invisible jelly floating around. That net of laserbeams is supposed to herd the globs into the vat, and the little engine at the bottom is to condense them. The rest of the stuff is just to detect the condensed globs of hyper-matter." "Bloogs," I said. "What?" "Think of black water, think of white sky. Think of an island with bloogs blowing by," I recited. "That's from Dr. Seuss. You're looking for bloogs!"

Synchronistically enough, twenty years after writing White Light with a character named Nick, I befriended far-out physicist Nick Herbert. This is me and Nick at an April Fool's Day Parade in Boulder Creek. Yes, I'm wearing lipstick.

Jeff Beene reports that the Molotov cocktail painting is by is Alexander Kosolapov. This picture here is an early CA that I made; it's called Maxine Headroom, and it ran on a low end 1980s PC in text mode; you turned the monitor on the side to get this nice aspect ratio. Would be nice to set up a room of them.

Speaking of computer art, here's an image by Casey Reas who's doing nice gnarly art with machines. I met him at conference at UCLA this spring involving art and computers.

"Woof! und hallo bei den Swiss Bears!" In Geneva, Sylvia and I saw a gay pride parade featuring a float of the Swiss Bears. The picture is a condom ad that was all over town for the parade. They lit up Geneva's enormous jet d'eau fountain with pink light. The Swiss pretty much do whatever they like.

Jacob Davies, programmer at a web software company wrote a note posing a key question about lifeboxes and blogs. "I am kind of fascinated by the whole lifebox thing but I do wonder who has the time to watch real-time video of someone elses life. Isn't it just going to wind up being like those endless hours of videotaped vacation that sit on peoples shelves? At least with the written version you get the edited highlights all wrapped up. Photos & edited audio & video, that I can see being interesting though, but most people suck at editing which is kind of the problem. I guess if the box was smart enough to edit for you it wouldn't be so bad."

Relevant quote from my current draft of The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul: "One imperfect feature of human language is that our rate of information exchange is limited to very low rates. Yes, you can send a multi megabyte-book manuscript by email in a matter of seconds, but the human listener at the other end will take hours or even days to read it. We're stuck with low bounds on both the speed at which we can listen to someone talk and on the speed at which we can read with full comprehension. // The problem of finding time and patience to take in other people's outputs is an obstacle to wider-ranging empathy. Many power struggles in human societies center around determining whose voices get heard. To be heard is to be understood and, to some extent, sympathized with. // To be a great artist is to have the ability to compress your lifebox down to an appetizing and digestible snack that people readily wolf down. And then your information blooms inside them."

Dan Mushrush sent me the ultimate Beavis & Butthead quote r.e. futurology. "The future sucks." I like that as much as what the boys would say whenever they'd see a video with writing in it. "Words suck." So writing about the future sucks doubly. And somehow that makes me think of the Godlike Howard Stern, King of all Media and last-ditch freedom fighter, who has a nice picture of my fellow-novelist Pam Anderson on his site today. Also great rants against that - nameless - asshole - who - stole - the - last - election - and - plans - to - maintain - a - drumbeat - of - terrorism - alerts - to - make - us - too - scared - to - vote - this - time. But don't get me started on that topic. Better to stick with Pammie.

posted by Rudy Rucker at 10:40:36 AM | permalink

Blog the Gnarl # 8

[Cool Russian Pop Art painting I saw in a gallery window in Denver near the train station. Anyone know the artist's name?] A reader alerted me to a recent news story about a "Soul Catcher" chip, described by scientist Chris Winter at British Television laboratories. The idea would be to put a chip in your brain that records all of your sensory experiences so that you, or others, can play it back. A lifebox implant, in other words. But the scientists admit this was just a Moore's Law game, and that they have no idea how to make the software.

In order to talk about Moore's Law, it's useful to brush up on scientific prefixes. At present it goes up to yotta (like lotta) for 10^24, and I suggest that after that we have xenna for 10^27 and watta for 10^30. Suppose we measure the power of a chip in flops, that is, in the number of (floating point) operations it can do in a second. This is a little more general than hertz (clock cycle per second), a little less general than IPS (instruction per second).

This clickable graphic from my work in progress, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul (Thunder's Mouth Press, projected for Fall, 1995) shows a little semi log Moore's law graph showing when we might expect to get machines with an exaflop and wattaflop capacity. I'm estimating that you need an exaflop machine in order to have the hardware to simulate a human brain. But you would need a wattaflop machine in order to evolve the necessary neural net (?) software to simulate a human brain. You need so much power because finding some human-like brain software is a huge search problem, to be done by basically simulating three billion years of evolution.

Really the way to go is, of course, to turn to biology. But we're already doing that when we fuck. Who needs more machines anyway? The Wares: soft, wet, free, and real. Dept. of Bitter Wheenking: Avon has let my second ware novel Wetware go out of print. Speaking of brain recording, wasn't Strange Days a great film? Wow, I just found the script online. If only they hadn't gone off into that downer sex-murder thing. There's so many more interesting things you could do with a brain taper. See the political cartoon, "When Monica delivers the pizza," by R. Crumb, Rolling Stone, November 28, 1998. Sadly not online. Links anyone? Scan it and post it for me?

I have a movie option out on Freeware; to an outfit called Directed Evolution Networks in Seattle. As reported in Boing, there was recently a Variety story about some interest in Master of Space and Time. I'm still hoping for more news on that. Some people don't realize there's four of my Ware novels, so might as well put the fourth cover in as well, Realware.

Sell it, Ed.

posted by Rudy Rucker at 9:06:50 AM | permalink

Blog the Gnarl # 7

I just checked Bruce Sterling's blog. He gets paid for it! Gotta get up pretty early in the morning to get ahead of this ole boy. He sent me a link to a blog mentioning the Nokia Lifeblog.

The seashell I'm talking about is one of these cone shells, which Stephen Wolfram is so daffy about, see this page in his online version of A New Kind of Science. In a nutshell, a cone shell is a naturally occurring example of a gnarly pattern that's probably generated by a rather simple cellular automaton rule like Rule 110.

Now the lifebox is something I've been talking about ever since Saucer Wisdom or, come to think of it, even earlier, it goes back to my short story "Soft Death". This picture shows some children talking to their dead grandfather's lifebox. The hovering saucer has Saucer Wisdom narrator Frank Shook inside it.

[Here's a picture of Frank Shook in my garage in Los Gatos.] In my science-fiction tales, a lifebox is a small interactive device to which you tell your life story. It prompts you with questions and organizes the information you give it. As well as words, you can feed in digital images, videos, sound recordings and the like.

[Here's my mother.] Once you get enough information into your lifebox, it becomes something like a simulation of you. Your audience can interact with the stories in the lifebox, interrupting and asking questions. The lifebox begins by automating the retiree's common dream of creating a memoir, and ends by creating a simulation of its owner.

[And here's my father. I miss them every day.] Why would you want to make a lifebox? Immortality, ubiquity, omnipotence. You might leave a lifebox behind so your grandchildren and great-grandchildren can know what you were like, you might use your lifebox as a way to introduce yourself to large numbers of people, or you might let your lifebox take over some of your less interesting duties in your daily routine, such as answering routine phone calls and email.

Here's a picture of Bruce Sterling from, like, 1983, when I was freelancing as a pre-cyberpunk SF writer in (one of God's jokes) Jerry Falwell's Lynchburg, Virginia.

William Gibson came to see me that day, too. Twenty-one years ago. I was driving a 1956 Buick. T. w. t. d.

Here's a recent picture of John Shirley and wife Mickey, taken at the San Jose BayCon a couple of months ago. There were like only three or four people at BayCon who had read any of my books Ain't it awful?

Doddering back down memory lane, here's a picture of me getting the Philip K. Dick Award for Software in 1982. I lifted this and Bruce's picture from my files for my essay collection, Seek! Ransacking my hard drive to find more shovelware for the furnaces of the blog.

This is a really startling graffito I saw in Rimini, Italy, when I was there to get the Medal of the Italian Senate a couple of years ago. It's so gnarly that I put the big image up so you can click on the little one to see --- harrumph --- the details. I don't think an image like this would stay on a wall very long in America. It's kind of scary to think that Nokia Lifeblog is already happening. The scary part is, I mean, that I'm not gonna make any money off it. Like Ted Nelson and the web. The lifebox is coming true.

[Reflections in a Denver office building, in search of Neal Cassady.] I hadn't originally realized how essential images, videos, and sound clips would be for the lifebox, but, duh, that's obv, isn't it, especially since writing is, like, hard. The linking issue is the biggie that makes the Lifeblog, or the regular blog, still not quite like a lifebox. Well, do a first pass by some automated linker, tweak it a little, and then let it loose. Shovelware your lifebox data onto the web and let people wiki up the links themselves. I'd like to make the website for The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul be wiki style, as I don't want to have to maintain it. Also would make it a McLuhan-cooler medium. But what about control? I don't quite get why a wiki page doesn't get attacked by bots who replace all its links by links to commercial sites. Seven Lucky Overseas Welcomes You to Triple Happiness Rudy Rucker Lifebox, No Prescription Needed!

posted by Rudy Rucker at 12:18:21 PM | permalink

Guestbar Archives