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.

I thought I'd dedicate my last post to the great Orrin Hatch, a complete sleazeball in my book. He's the one largely responsible for the fact that you can't send a bottle of wine from California to NY. This is all to protect Florida liquor interests and the distribution system. Since most of his weird dealings have more to do with interests that are out of the state of Utah the people in Utah don't seem to care. This is the weird part about modern politics. You see this in all the states. Hollings in South Carolina looking after the interests of Hollywood, for example. Now Hatch comes up with this recent nonsense about having peoples machines destroyed if they download a song. According to Wired, Hatch's website is using unlicensed software and should be destroyed too. This guy really stinks. Anyway, this is my last guest blog entry. Thanks to all. And remember: neuter your pets.

posted by JohnC Dvorak at 9:29:58 AM | permalink

Most interesting person at CeBIT. This is Theodore Rezvoy and the boat he's going to row across the Atlantic beginning tomorrow. Wow. What are you doing over the weekend? He says it will take him 80 days. This is part of the photo essay I'll be running on my PCMag.com column next week -- check it out since these are my last blog entries.. I want to thank everyone at Boingboing for giving me a chance to take up space on their system. Also if you want to find out what I'm going to be up to blogwise send me a note here

posted by JohnC Dvorak at 9:56:10 AM | permalink

NYC Bound. I'm headed to NYC to visit the CeBIT America show. I want any blogger or BoingBoing reader who sees me to say hi. And I've got a pretty good set of NYC links on my site. Use with caution! Hopefully I can capture a few pics and post them here. There will be a complete slideshow on next week's PCMag online column. And yes, I fly JetBlue.

posted by JohnC Dvorak at 11:56:29 PM | permalink

Just an afterthought.

posted by JohnC Dvorak at 4:26:56 PM | permalink

These are real men's breasts. Not augmented. It's a condition called Gynecomastia. It's also called "bitch tits." Let me start at the beginning of a strange tale.

A few years back my son ran into a news item where some researcher had determined that soy shrunk the brain, making it physically smaller. I grabbed the link but within weeks it had disappeared. This got the whole family into checking up on both soybean and canola oils as nutritionally dubious and promoted by huge consortiums . Any search of the web finds hundreds of crackpots who think that both are poison. In fact there are too many crackpots making the claim. Credibility was at risk. But I was finding too much unwanted soy in my food, in general. It's in bread. You find soy protein in canned tuna for gods sake. Why? My favorite is finding peanut butter with the peanut oil removed and replaced with soy oil. Apparently it's cheaper to remove and resell the peanut oil and replace it with soy oil than it is to simply leave the original oil intact. What does that tell you? And even more interesting is finding the exact same PR pap regurgitated word-for-word by media lackeys. Both the Canola oil (rapeseed, actually - Canola means Canadian Oil with Low Acidity) and Soy oil producers send out propaganda that gets repeated over and over by writers who love to quote from press releases. I can almost guarantee you'll see some of this propaganda in the discussion below.

Now back to Gynecomastia. Here's where I veer off a little into the crackpot world myself; You tell me. One of the sometimes discussed aspects of soybeans, in particular, is their action as a pseudo-estrogen. In recent pro-soy literature you find this promoted as beneficial But I wonder if anyone thinks that it's a mere coincidence that Americans are fatter than ever just as soybeans and soybean oil is booming in popularity as a "health" food. More frightening is the emerging phenomenon of so-called "bitch tits" on men in this country. It seems to be an epidemic. Some people associate this with hormones in beef, but that practice was stopped. 20 years ago you could find steers growing udders because of the practice. But that's over and there needs to be an explanation for this new trend. Could it be soybean oil? Tofu? Soy protein? Here's a website that explores the need for the man-bra. LINK Discuss

Anyway, think about all this while you munch on that tofu burger.

posted by JohnC Dvorak at 4:16:09 PM | permalink

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