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

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker
unobserved quality. Hacking and light.
Maybe both could fit in Chapter Seven: Waking Up. An example of not being awake
could be the blood-lust hacking frenzy, an example of beginning to wake up is noticing lights
in a new way, and the best is to go outside on the rain-washed hills like I did today. There’s
one spot on the path near the former nunnery at St. Joseph’s hill, it’s so bosky and closed in,
the oaks so tumble-down and gnarly, a real little Eden, I’m always so thrilled to be there, and
at the same time filled with a kind of anguish that I’m not there all the time.
The last few days I’ve been cranking to get good Zhabotinsky scroll images. Partly
for the book, particularly the sections on morphogenesis and ecology, but also because
Wolfram is planning to phone me on Tuesday and try and do some experiments together over
the phone. By way of getting me ready, he’s mailing me a new copy of Mathematica, and
having one of his techs phone me to give me a half-hour primer on how to use WebEx, which
seems to be some kind of enhanced internet communication method, daily messages from his
secretary concerning my current state of preparation for mind-meld. So that drove me into
orgies of Zhabotinsky cellular automata hacking, as that’s to be, I think, the main theme of
our talk.
The process is kind of science-fictional, fits in nicely with my background
preparations for Memoirs of a Crazy Mathematician, which is what I’m leaning towards
calling the novel I plan to start when The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul is done. Or call
it Crazy Mathematicians or possibly Craxy Mathematicians.
I had a flash of a three-act structure for the novel the other day. Act 1: Rutgers in
New Jersey, 1972. Narrated by a guy like part of me but dumber. He has a weird friend,
who’s like another part of me, but smarter. The weird friend meets Gödel and learns
something. I could even use my dream of Gödel’s death. Act 2: The weird friend gets in a
spacetime warp and pulls in the narrator. They land at the rim of Galaxy Z in the year 79982.
It’s the extra ‘2’ that really bothers me. They hang out with aliens who are also
mathematicians of a kind. And eventually they get themselves transmitted back to Earth.
Act 3: They’re computer hackers in Silicon Valley, or no, better and more transreal, Huba
Kis the narrator is a CS professor at SJSU and Paul Bridge his smart friend is running a
software company.
March 4, 2004. Wolfram’s Call, Frek Arrives.
Wolfram called on Tuesday, it was great. He had two assistants join the conference
too, the four of us linked by WebEx and by MessageCenter. This meant that we could share
computer desktops ⎯ like I’d be watching Wolfram’s computer screen, him writing in
Mathematica code and his assistants making suggestions. I had my phone on speaker mode
and all four of us were on the phone as well as on the computer.
He did some quick Mathematica experiments on the Hodgepodge rule, testing if it’s
class 4. Mathematica has this great ability to generate textbook like illustrations in seconds.
We switched over to my desktop after awhile and then they could see my screen. I
showed them some Zhabo scrolls of course. This was one spot where WebEx bogged down
a little, with what they were seeing lagging a minute behind what I was seeing ⎯ Wolfram
explained it was because the WebEx realtime compression algorithm was bogging down on
the CAs, as these are completely different images many times a second. It was so futuristic.
Eventually Stephen started gently chiding me like he always does, about why do I
look at CAs with such complicated rules as, e.g., the Double Logistic CA, with two real
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