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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.


Po-mo 1, Physics 1

Remember the Alan Sokal hoax paper, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", which the physicist managed to get a nonsense essay into a refereed journal of cultural studies? Well, according to the kids on Usenet, two French hoaxers have managed to get one back for the cult.studs. The brothers Bogdanov have succeeded in publishing at least three hoax papers in published physics journals, with titles like "Topological field theory of the initial singularity of spacetime". They're all nonsense, it turns out - and rumour has it they even managed to get a couple of Ph.D's out of it. I'm a bit wary of being hoaxed by a hoax, but something funny is going on here. (via Robot Wisdom)


posted by Danny O'Brien at 12:03:47 AM | permalink


body count

It's London's turn to host Body Worlds - the exhibition that displays the plasticinated, see-through bodies of real dead humans for all to see. Ah yes, all very seasonally ghoulish. But check out the excellent front-page to the show. It includes a constantly-updated tally of how long the current queue is, with number-crunched stats on the best time to enter the exhibit. In fact, the whole show is pretty data-heavy. There's even a University study on the supposed beneficial effects of staring at corpses. It's almost as if they're trying a bit too hard to be scientific. (Thanks, fish!)


posted by Danny O'Brien at 12:50:06 AM | permalink


the internet in feel-a-round

mit and ucl have worked out a networked haptic interface for manipulating a cube. in the mit media lab tradition they haven't worked out any applications yet, but they are presumably endless. all porn jokes aside, i suppose the next generation of massive multiplayers could have fascinatingly aerobic aspects. haptic interfaces are just neato sci-fi.

posted by quinn norton at 11:48:58 PM | permalink


you don't need NASA to develop dumb writing implement technology

You discover things about yourself doing the BB guestblog, and what I've learnt is that I know a bit too much about stupid upcoming consumer devices. Introducing the Papermate® Ingenuity™ Liquid Pencil. "Real graphite is suspended in a clear liquid so it works just like a pen!" And there was I, just yesterday, bemoaning how insufficiently pen-like my all-too-solid pencil was looking. You can send off for a free sample from Office Depot Supplies. Link thanks to the best site in the world for vicarious bargain-hunting, Nifty News, Decent Deals.


posted by Danny O'Brien at 8:08:30 PM | permalink


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