Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker
pulse at my call, and always the new associations. Class 4.
I think it’s very rare we have Class 3 thought patterns. A chaotic storm. Like maybe
when I took acid it was like that? Not even. That was more like Class 4 very dense and fast.
Though maybe the White Light, or any milder type rush is class 3, with all the neurons firing
there’s no real content, simply a sense of stimulation. Any connection here to why stupid
people (athletes, businessmen) like coke?
February 8, 2004. Iced In.
The start of the school semester always reminds me of the analogy I thought of when
I was working on The Hollow Earth: A ship expedition headed for the Antarctic getting
frozen into the ice, has to wait a season till it can move forward. Well hopefully it won’t be a
whole season, but I haven’t made much progress on the book this month. I did reorganize it;
Chapter One was getting so long that I broke it into five (!) chapters. I’d thought initially of
going over everything fast in Chapter One as warm-up, then doing the more technical
Wolfram stuff, then going over some examples in detail. But I’m hitting the Wolfie stuff
stronger earlier on and doing the example stuff right away, and after that I’ll do the more
technical stuff. Idea being that it’s never a good idea to hold back from the reader, go ahead
and show your best stuff as soon as you can.
I’ve been reading some interesting books. Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines is
terrific; it has so much good stuff on the Mind to use that I want to go over it and type notes
into this “Notes” file. Stephen Johnson, Emergence, has some usable ideas as well, but the
guy is really an English-major type and doesn’t actually get a lot of what he’s talking about.
I’ll make notes on this one as well, I think. He has useful stuff on Society in particular.
Before tackling the somewhat daunting section (now become a chapter) on the Mind,
I wanted to go over all the earlier stuff and smooth it out, and I’m still in the throes of that.
February 25, 2004. Zhabotinsky Scrolls.
I’m still pretty much iced-in, haven’t really done jack on the actual writing of yon
tome (i.e. The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.) I’ve been in mega-hacker mode, revising
my Pop computer game framework for CS 240: Graduate Software Project and writing some
demos of lighting and textures for my CS 116B: Computer Graphics II. Papers to grade as
well, but mainly its the hacking that sucks up all my time. Once my colleague Michael
Beeson said, “Hacking is like drug-addiction. It uses up so much of your time that you never
get around to doing the normal maintenance things like eating, washing, answering your
mail.” The other day Sylvia came home at 6 PM and I was still in my PJs, hadn’t eaten all
day. Debugging the Pop framework. Told my students about it, and they seemed to
appreciate it. The kind of thing they’d do too.
I wonder if I can talk about what hacking is like in my book. And I’d like to get into
how teaching OpenGL lighting has enhanced my appreciation of the specular highlights on
things (staring and staring at Sylvia’s dully opalescent toroidal silver brooch in church on
Sunday), the diffuse and ambient lighting, the emissivity, the radiosity. Not sure if I can
work any of this into the book. Actually today, I really was kind of having fun with the
hacking, though at some point there’s always a bug that takes way too long to fix, and your
butt begins to get numb on the chair. Nobody can ever really know how much fun I do have.
When I’m just doing stuff and not writing in my journal or anything, my life has this pure,
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