Collected Essays
Page 29
Rudy Fat Bud
I keep finding more and more great stuff in the Rudy set.
The Rudy Hedgehog
Lots of little Mandelbrot sets turn up inside the Rudy set.
Rudy Sanskrit Bud
I put the Sanskrit Bud onto a T-shirt. Very yogic.
I recently found a really powerful region in the first Mandelbrot bud above the top of the Rudy set. There’s a yottawatt particle beam blasting out.
Rudy Particle Beam
And near the Particle Beam are some globs of paired twirly things like bugs you’d find under a log.
Rudy Isopod.
And down inside the very center of that gap at the core of the Rudy Isopod is a mini-Mandelbrot set, a variation on the Sanskrit Bud.
Rudy Mandel In Twirls
At this point you might want to jump into a web browser and look at my YouTube video playlist of five zooms, pans, and warps among higher-dimensional Mandelbrot sets and the Rudy set.
The Quartic and Quintic Fractals
I was puzzled about how to find the critical points for fourth degree and fifth degree polynomials. Googling for the answer, I found a series of articles by the Swedish fractalist, Ingvar Kullberg.
Kullberg is one of the only people who’s gotten into making images involving the Cubic Connectedness Map. Rather than going into full detail about how to compute the higher order Julia sets, Mandelbrot sets and Rudy sets, I’ll refer you to a web post of mine that has the full details.
I’m not going into the math at all here, but I’ll show you two nice pictures. Here’s a dreamy detail of the Quartic Rudy set
Rudy Quartic Sky Palace
And here’s something I found inside a quintic Mandelbrot—a nice quadratic Mandelbrot shape surrounding by leopard spots of quintic gnarl.
The Mandel Quintic Leopard.
You can find a video of this region in that playlist that I mentioned above. The video is 300 frames, and it took my 2010-maximum-speed computer thirteen hours to compute render. What fun.
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Note on “The Rudy Set Fractal”
Written in 1990 and 2010.
Appeared on Rudy's Blog, April 2, 2010.
I gave an early version of this essay as a talk at the Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium Stanford University on March 7, 1990, under the title, “Computing Sections of the Cubic Connectedness Map.” Some of this information also appeared in the manual I helped write for the Autodesk software package, James Gleick’s CHAOS. In 2010, I bought the commercial Ultra Fractal software, which allowed me to to delve much deeper into these new fractals than ever before. If you get a copy of Ultra Fractal, you can download the program definitions and parameter sets for recreating the images that appear in this article. There’s numerous links regarding these fractals in my blog post.
Part 4: FUTUROLOGY
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Tech Notes Towards a Cyberpunk Novel
ASICs, or Application Specific Integrated Circuits, comprise 95% of computer chips made today. Suppose that the ASICs have all been replaced by limpware. This is reasonable. For the people in 2053 to use chip-based computers would be like us now using gear-based computers. We used to have gears in a watch, and now we usually have a chip. A few watches still use gears simply out of nostalgia. But nobody would dream of starting out with a plan to use lots of little gears for the controls of microwave oven, or of a TV, or a traffic light…
In the same way, in 2053, nobody would dream of using a silicon chip for an app. In other words, a microwave oven, or an uvvy, or a car, or a clock—all of these have control circuits that are little smidgens of limpware, made of the special piezoplastic called “imipolex.” They are not all that smart. They are dim. They are so dim they will do something like sit in a toaster for seven years waiting for someone to push the toast button. DIM should stand for something, like ASIC. Designer IMipolex.
Chaos means that you can’t control; or that when you try to control, the results are not likely to be what you expected (sensitive dependence on initial conditions). As a cultural paradigm, it could mean accepting that the half-assed parallel-computed way in which social decisions arise is much more robust and adaptive than any kind of dictatorial guiding could be.
Chelated rare-earth polymers are what Andrea the moldie uses to get high. The rare-earth elements, also called lanthanides, are Lanthanum, Cerium, Praseodymium, Neodymium, Promethium, Samarium, Europium, Gadolinium, Terbium, Dysprosium, Holmium, Erbium, Thulium, Ytterbium, and Lutetium. Ytterbium was first found in a mineral called yttria in the 1878s. The mineral yttria was named for Ytterby, Sweden, in 1794.
Chipmold is the human-created plague which killed all of the boppers (who were conventional robots using existing tech: garbage cans on wheels with circuit boards and motors in them). But the soft plastic limpware flickercladding gets smarter. It likes the chipmold, it is veined by chipmold like a ripe bleu cheese. Jellyfish limpware eaten through with blue veins of chipmold.
Email in today’s ever-more-rude America means a person can just come up and start talking to you, as if this was like some endless global party.
The endless interplanetary party that everyone is involved with. It should be pleasant and life-enhancing, like you can always plug in with other stoned freaks like yourself in the country, they can see the crazy shit you are doing, like an endless easy guilt-free phone call.
Femtotechnology is the next big thing beneath nanotechnology. Femtotechnology means technology at the size scale of one quadrillionth of a meter, or at ten to the minus fifteenth power meters. Femto- comes from Danish for fifteen. (“I never met a Dane who wasn’t bone-dull.”—W. S. Burroughs). A atomic nucleus has a diameter of two times ten to the minus fourteenth meters, which can be expressed as twenty femtometers. Femtotechnology could be in charge of direct transmutation of elements, as well as, I would suppose, the conversion between mass and energy. I think quantum mechanics would start to play a role at this size scale.
Femtotechnology is the same as what Heinlein called direct matter control.
Flickercladding is soft imipolex plastic that acts as a giant parallel processor, it has an invisible cellular structure that is patterned in by chelated polymers; these fibers carry the messages. The first flickercladdings had actual wires in them, they used to be like coatings fused or glued onto the bodies of the robots called the boppers. But the coatings got thicker, and soon peeled off the boppers to become independent limpware creatures known as moldies.
Flying wings of moldie imipolex. Manta rays of flickercladding flying around in the thin upper atmosphere like supersonic airplanes, drenched in solar radiation. Thanks to the algae in their tissues, they eat light.
Headmounted displays are confining and unnatural. The way to get full Virtual Reality immersion without such a kludge is to place limpware scarves on the neural ganglia. So as not to violate the sanctity of the skin, let the limpware interact with the brain tissues via tight electromagnetic fields.
Lifeboxes are things like a hand-held tape recorder with a computer, you talk to it and tell it the story of your life. The lifebox asks you questions to fill in blank areas. It organizes the information into a hypertext. You make copies of it for your children and grandchildren. “What Grandpa (or Grandma) Was Like.” This is going to be a huge industry. Old duffers and ladies always want to write down their life story, but with a lifebox they won’t have to write. It’ll be like an automatic ghost-writer. The hypertext connection will be such that you can always interrupt and say something like, “Grandpa, you just mentioned cars. What was your first car like?”
Moldies are capable of a weird symbiotic fusions with humans. A moldie might form part of itself into a U-bight, clamp onto your perhaps willing neck, sink fine microprobes into your neural masses, and control you directly.
Moldies can in fact merge together, and often do this, when at home in the comfort of their nest. They form nests like the speedfreaks described in Andy Warhol’s book POPISM.
A moldie bus is like a hovercraft streetcar that is a single huge jellyfish-like robot. A giant flying jellyfish that flies at a level several inches above the street. They don’t actually hover, though, they kind of run like horses. But they have whole row of legs, each leg going across, the bottom is corrugated and the corrugations swing forward and backward in a wave-like motion.
Oil can be used for plastics such as flickercladding that makes up the moldies’ bodies. The moldies would like to absolutely forbid that oil be made into gasoline and burned. The stuff is too valuable for plastic. For a moldie, burning oil is considered on a par with using human blood to make blood-sausage.
Perpendicular time, with its other order of reality—the sensation that there are other creatures around, that they are the little fast flashes that you see out of the corner of your eye sometimes.
Pornography is always the first private use for any new media technology.
Robots who do well get something like a publishing contract. Lots of copies of them are made and sold. The more servile and agreeable robots are the ones who get copied. The more independent robots look down on them. “So why not?” says a servile robot. “At least I’m getting copied.”
Soccer—The joy of controlling a rolling sphere. Programming—the joy of controlling a machine. Could a soccer ball or a shoe sole be a computer? The object is computing as an elastic mass, and is probably programmable. But how? How to program limpware? You would convince it to do something? The limpware learns by sweatlodge-type techniques?
Strange quarkbags are something femtotechnology might be good for making. As described in “The Search for Strange Matter,” in the January, 1994, Scientific American, most matter is made of protons and neutrons, and these particles can in turn be thought of as little bags filled with quarks. There are (at least) three kinds of quark: up, down, and strange. A proton is a bag holding two up quarks and one down quark, while a neutron is a bag with two down quarks and one up quark. Ordinarily you can’t have more than three quarks in a bag together. But if one of the quarks is strange, it throws off the exclusion principle. Like a slight flaw in tiling a wall leads to a fault that runs through a big pattern before it can repeat. Quarkbags can have just about any mass.
So now suppose there are atoms with quarkbags at their center. And suppose there is a chemistry for these atoms. Chemistry would now be kind of chaotic, with different rules in different places.
I have an image of Toontown. Like an ashtray is zapped with strange quarks, you like spray a spraycan of strange quarks onto a boomerang-shaped white plastic ashtray and now it starts warping and flexing because it’s now made of strange quarkbag matter.
The technology for effecting these changes would be of course femtotechnology; given that a nucleus is about 20 femtometers, it seems likely that an individual quark might be about a femtometer in size.
Uvvies are universal viewers, devices which have wholly replaced the television, the telephone, and the personal computer. An uvvy is about the size of an old telephone handset, and like most of 2053s intelligent devices it is designed around a small limpware processing unit: a DIM.
Wormholes might be places where the scientific equations can’t work, or maybe even inside the sun, or inside strange quarkbag matter. There might be wormholes and quarkbags hiding inside the sun. In wormholes there are energy densities such that, say, a thousand decimal places are meaningful for the real numbers involved—Planck’s downer of like only thirty decimal places being meaningful is out of the picture here, provided that these wormholes are somehow inside Planck’s constant. In here, even the simplest of physical processes effects are using laws with nonlinear equations of, say, the fiftieth degree. And like changing the four-hundredth digit in the decimal expansion of the coefficient of the thirty-eighth-power term will throw your process into a wholly different basin of attraction leading to a wholly different strange attractor. And the guys are trying to hack this rule, and they can’t, so they use genetic algorithms to search the huge parameter space, and then…
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Note on “Tech Notes Towards a Cyberpunk Novel”
Written 1994.
Appeared as “18 Tech Notes Toward a Cyberpunk Novel” in Mondo 2000, Summer, 1994.
Whenever I’m working on a novel, I maintain a parallel “Notes” document where I write down, among other things, technology ideas. Most of the ideas in this excerpt were in my notes for Freeware, and many of them ended up in that novel. Others ended up in my novels Realware and Saucer Wisdom. But I felt these fragments took on a nice energy when sorted like this.
The formats of this piece and the next one were inspired by Bruce Sterling’s memorable “Twenty Evocations” of 1984.
Alien Contact (With Marc Laidlaw)
Rudy’s Part
What is an alien? In science-fiction, just about anything can be an alien. The man from the saucer, the woman from the cloud of light, the child from the pod, the ape, the saurian, the squid, the bug, the machine, the lava, and the vegetable—all of these have been science-fictionally imagined into alien beings.
The word “person” comes from the Latin per + son, meaning through + sound. A “person” was originally a mask through which an actor would speak, so by extension, a person is any entity through which a mind speaks. Each and every aspect of the world can be imaginatively regarded as a “person,” and any person can be imagined to be “alien.”
What exactly is it that makes a person an alien? I think the characteristic feature of our fictional aliens is that they are acting on plans and purposes wholly other than ours. The alien mythos is a dramatized restatement of this basic existential fact: others exist. A childish person is barely able to grasp that there is any consciousness other than his or hers. But one day, with a terrified snort of surprise, Birgit (say) realizes that Sylvester is actually a person. A conscious entity. A startled grazing cow snaps up her head. Snort?!?
In fiction we like to add a second, yet more alarmed snort of surprise—Birgit realizes that not only is Sylvester conscious, he is in fact interested in goals wholly other than she. Perhaps he is a flesh-eating zombie, or a cunning robot simulacrum. Snort! He has a mind. Double snort! His mind is unlike mine.
Snort! The lamp on my table has consciousness! Double snort! But it’s not human! Do I now flee from my lamp? Or shall I worship it?
Fear or worship of aliens are both false solutions. Fear of aliens stems out of a self-centeredness so strong as to produce a terror of the other. And worship of aliens is a self-abasing, masochistic response stemming from a desire for annihilation and a terror of the self.
The lampshade quivers gently. Sharing in the undivided Divinity operating within everything, my lamp is surely alive. It knows things. It knows how to turn on and off, and it knows how to fall off the table. It knows knows gravity and it knows electricity. Dear lamp, it’s nice to have you here. Thank you for existing.
If that sounds close to worship, I suppose its true that I do have a touch of the odd desire for annihilation, a yen for the mystical merge into the Cosmic One, a touch of self-loathing. It’s hard work being alive, and some days I’d be more than willing to have the aliens take me away. But wait! A small door in the base of my lamp is opening…
Alien contact stories are easy to think up. Let’s imagine a few of them:
Here comes a jabbering little green man with soft antennae on his bald head. His name is Xqzwjk and he’s wearing a gold diaper. His flying saucer is the size of a car, and it has a transparent dome on it. Screech, he lands on a beach and meets Birgit in a bikini. Earth women are beautiful! “Take me to your leader…later!” goes Xqzwjk, jumping into her arms and snuggling against her breasts. Oh, oh, here come a policeman! Xqzwjk draws a
raygun out of his diaper; the gun’s barrel is podshaped with radiator fins. Zing! The policeman’s clothes disappear; he runs off yelling. Birgit spreads out her blanket and unpacks her picnic-basket. Xqzwjk bites into an apple. Slobber, slobber. He can’t believe the wonder of it. Birgit shows Xqzwjk the apple’s seeds. All right! He gives Birgit a giant diamond and flies home to be a fruit-farmer.
Ricky roams a night meadow with his dog. Big light solarizes him; something like a giant chandelier is right overhead! A mothership! The dog barks like crazy while a magic beam draws Ricky up into the ship. He’s met by lipless big-eyed folks in silver overalls. One of them has long hair. His/her name is Symphony. S/he takes Ricky off into a little room with a bed and pulls down his trousers. Ricky’s face blurs in ecstasy as he delivers a semen sample into Symphony’s three-fingered hands. Later he wakes, alone at home in sticky sheets.
High in translunar orbit floats a supernally ancient craft. Klaatu and Tuulka, the craft’s sole inhabitants for lo these three thousand years, hang watchfully in the weightless cabin. They have hugely domed craniums and tiny little hands with no fingernails. Their cabin walls are lined with TV monitors, all showing scenes of everyday Earth life. Politicians, office-workers, lovers. “They are fools, Tuulka,” hisses baleful Klaatu. “Yes,” singsongs happy Tuulka, “but they are beautiful fools.” “I think it is time we put an end to these beautiful fools,” rasps Klaatu, AND PRESSES A BUTTON! The screens flare…
Professor Bradley and Pedro hack the last vines from the entrance-way to the lost temple. “Beware of the Great Old One,” say the hieroglyphs on the door, but Pedro smashes the door open with a boulder. The Prof throws in a flare to light the interior. Error. The Great Old One is a giant squid from another dimension, voraciously carnivorous and able to fly. The temple’s stones slide aside like grains of sand as the Great Old One rises. Hugely quivering, it hangs over Pedro and the Prof, who fire futile rounds from their puny pistols. Now the Great Old One’s tentacles snag Pedro and its pearly beak bites off Pedro’s head. The trans-dimensional squid drains every drop from Pedro’s bod. The Professor stumbles off in horror, while jungle parrots scream and flap away…