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

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker
Scale-Free
A physical system is said to exhibit scale invariance, or to be scale free, if it remains
unchanged (in a statistical sense) under a coarse graining operation. Scale freedom can often
be seen directly by zooming in and out of a graph of some quantity or even a real image. One
of the dangers of flying over a desert is the scale freedom of dunes. Simply from looking
down on them, it is impossible to judge how far away they are. [Quote from a web page.]
Colloquial Meanings of Gnarly
Email from Ralph Dratman, 8/27/2004
Quoth Garrison Keillor, “Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican
Party. once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed
spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and
supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who
vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat
Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element.”
While I certainly agree with Keillor's political point, I'm wondering whether you
would approve of his use of the root “gnarly” as a (shudder) term of opprobrium! A
pejorative! Not-nice-meaning!
(Unless, I suppose, one believes that flat Earthers et al might be considered gnarly
from a purely abstract, say, "saucer" perspective.)
As I seem to understand your own use of gnarly, it lies somewhere near the apex of
all that is aesthetically positive. Surely Keillor's is an eldritch utterance, you wave?
My email answer:
I think Keillor's is a reasonable use of gnarly. I take it to mean complex, far out,
weird, innovative, intense, surprising. In that sense, the lunatic fringe of the Republikkkan
party is indeed the gnarly zone. In generally, one would probably rather not have gnarly
people running the country. Interesting to talk to them, hang out with, etc. But you don’t
want them to have control of our H-bombs. By the same token, one doesn't want to eat
gnarly food. Look at, sniff, taste, maybe consume a small portion. But not make it the main
staple of one’s diet.
The Web Mind Shtick from my Galaxy Columns
The architecture of the Web seems to be a good fit for describing human society:
many different processes, many internalized data sets, and the possibility of access to quite
distant individuals. In a society there are local networks as well, and these play a more
decisive role than in the Web. Family and neighbors affect you differently and more
powerfully than people far away.
Margaret Wertheim’s book, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace (W. W. Norton, 1999)
presents an interesting idea about the history of science. Wertheim’s idea is: the invention of
pictorial perspective paved the way for Newtonian physics. This happened because
perspective provides a tool for mapping unbounded three-dimensional space onto a finitely
large two-dimensional canvas: the whole world in a square meter of cloth! Each object of the
world gets assigned to one particular location upon the picture plane and, looking from the
picture back out at the world, we can then see that the individual objects are contained in an
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