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.

Blog the Gnarl #6

John Walker recently helped me run a little computer experiment with me to quantify the word linkiness distribution. Rather than wrestling with the vague notion of which words suggest which other words, we took an electronic dictionary file and decreed that any two words are linked if either of the words appears in the dictionary definition of the other word. The dictionary has some 130,600 words. Then if a word has L links, then L will be some number between one and 130,600, and we can think of L as characterizing the "linkiness" of the word.

Walker computed the linkiness L of every word in the dictionary, and for each level of linkiness, he counted how many words N of that kind there were. N can in principle range between the smallest and largest possible number of words, that is between 0 and 130,600. And we found that in this case N is indeed usually equal to a constant divided by L raised to some power D. The law we came with, using some Mathematica curve-fitting, has this form.

N = 1,000,000 / L^2.4

This is an inverse power law, akin to the one for the linkiness of the web in Albert-László Barabási and Réka Albert, "Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks," Science, Vol 286, 1999. Links to this and many more of Barabási's papers. The particular picture above shows a power law population distribution based on the Zeldovich rule as described in Damián Zanette and Susanna Manrubia, "Role of Intermittancy in Urban Development," Physical Review Letters 79, pp. 523-526, 1997. I want to go to Zeldovichgrad! Plan to log some time there soon. What cyberspace really looks like. Some of those peaks go up a thousand miles, a hundred thousand miles, to the mouth of God. I think my next novel will be called Crazy Mathematicians.

How do rumors, fads, opinions, crazes spread? A bit like forest fires. I like the generalized NLUKY rule that I defined for Cellab. This is the Rainzha NLUKY rule, named after Rainbow, the brain-eating Little Kidder in my novel Software.

A better scrolly rule is this guy, known as the Hodgepodge rule. A silent explosion in deep space. "I have an idea!"

Not all ideas are good ones. This is a display in the Museum of the Mountain Man in Pinedale, Wyoming. The label says "BUFFALO CHIP: Donated by Bartley Skinner."

Time for weekend fun. Shakespeare Santa Cruz, the beach, maybe the Santa Clara County Fair. I fade into the sunset --- calme, luxe et volupte.

posted by Rudy Rucker at 9:27:55 AM | permalink

Blog the Gnarl #5

I've been blogging too hard, I'm not gonna do much for a couple of days. Meanwhile there's always my first four entries, the info is still fresh. Blog the Gnarl in a single file.

The day I took this picture of myself, I'd hiked up to a spot called Petite Croisse Boulet (1900 m), which was a thousand meters higher than our hotel. Great views of the Mont Blanc.

I picked up an ant because I knew he would nip at me with his mandibles, and I wanted the feedback from this humble mountain denizen. He gave me a good nip, and I wrote a haiku.

Halfway up the mountain,/ As far as I can go./ An ant bites me.

In the afternoon as I hiked back down, some eight hours after starting, it clouded up and eventually started raining. I passed through a meadow with a low, tin-roofed barn, and with pines around the meadow. I heard a loud noise from the barn --- a spring inside? A camouflaged machine? No, the sound was the rain on the barn roof, a lovely sound, and now in the meadow I heard cow bells, a herd of a dozen cows making their way in a line to the shelter of the trees. Nobody there but me, scattered raindrops cooling my hot head, the rain on the tin, the cow bells, a moment of perfect beauty, a moment to live for.

Further down, the edges of the village, I saw another vignette. Loose chickens scratching in the wet dark green grass. Their bodies such canonical chicken shapes. A gray-haired peasant and his wife are trying to push a wagon of hay bales into their barn. Their son (grandson?) on a tractor is maneuvering to help push. I wave and smile, they wave back. We're in the same rain.

posted by Rudy Rucker at 8:04:19 AM | permalink

Blog the Gnarl #4

For the top of today's entry, I want to plug my daughter Isabel's drawing and cartoon site again. www.goodidrawing.com, featuring some of her drawings and comics, my favorite for now being San Francisco Rock and Roll. She needs illustration gigs! Just talked to her on the phone; at a County fair in Wyoming, she and three of her woman friends entered a contest where they tried to wrestle a pig into a fifty gallon drum. The pig squealed a lot, and fought them to a standstill. I hope she draws a picture of it.

This picture above was taken in a square called Bourg de Four in Geneva, where Sylvia and I spent most of July. I like how the gnarly clouds mirror the gnarly roofs. I recall that at the Digital Biota 2 conference in 1998, I heard a-life visionary Chris Langton give a talk in which he pointed out that we shouldn't think of cities as unnatural. We are part of nature, and cities are our hives. There's no border between man and nature.

I'm always trying to get good pictures of water. This is a bit of lake Geneva, near the Museum of Science. By the way, I got a corrective email about Charles Boyle, who was Earl of Orrery, not Count as I reported, and Orrery is not a place in Haute Savoie. Whatev. Earl of Duke, meet the Duke of Earl. Re. this picture, I love it when people paint water showing the shapes of light and dark. One thing about Lake Geneva, if you swim near ducks in hot shallow water, you get these parasites called puces de canard, which literally means "duck flea," but these things are sicker than that. They're transparent worm-like critters called in French "cercaires," and judging from the picture halfway down the page I linked here, they're, double-sick, split at one end, they spend their larval youth in snails, then come out into the water and look for ducks, get into the ducks and systematically infect them, sending their eggs out in the duck poop to infect the snails on the bottom of the lake. One hot day we swam in shallow ducky water in Crans, and error, didn't shower and towel off, and the next day we had, like chigger bites. My in-laws had warned me, but I didn't listen. Live and learn. If I'd told customs I'd had duck fleas, who knows, I'd still be on Ellis Island.

Still in Switzerland, here's a picture of former-titan-of-industry, retired-but-still-working-his-ass-off computer hacker pal, John Walker, co-founder of Autodesk, one-time employer of mine, one of the smartest guys I've ever met, and transreal inspiration for The Hacker and the Ants. (N.b., the way cool cover for Release 2.0 of the novel is by daughter Georgia Rucker. Sell it, Rudy.) John invariably wears the same outfit, the short-sleeved white shirt and black pants. Antarctica, Egypt, inside the Sun, at the Ascot Races, fixing a car, in the Antland of Fnoor --- always with the white shirt and pants. He says it simplifies his life by pruning the choice tree. We hiked to this nice place above Lake Neuchatel called Creux du Van. An amazing cirque (horseshoe shaped cliff) and lots of Swiss cows.

Near the end of The Hacker and the Ants, the hero Jerzy Rugby is attacked by killer robotic ants and is nearly bitten to death beside a primitive indoor swimming pool found in the house of his not-so-innocent and in fact downright nefarious former boss Roger Coolidge. Here's a picture of the pool at Walker's house. He has the largest website I've ever seen, including (under "Science Fiction, Original Stories") his own last chapter for The Hacker and the Ants, as he wasn't quite satisfied with my ending. In John's ending, Roger Coolidge wasn't killed after all, and he comes back to patiently tell Jerzy Rugby what a lamer he is.

This is the "Money Shot" that the California Cheese ads on TV never quite deliver --- one of the cows near Creux du Van. My Swiss step-mother-in-law Adele saw this picture and said, "Oh, it must have been about four o'clock." Going from the size of the udder. Like a sundial. I'd like to come back as a Big Sur cow if I get reincarnated. Standing on those steep hills staring at the ocean all day. Or a crow. Bruegel loved crows.

When we got back to the States we stopped in NYC for a couple of days to visit Georgia and her husband Courtney. We were over in Astoria (Queens) one day and we hit this really great little museum for the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi. This image kind of matches the cow udder, right?

posted by Rudy Rucker at 10:08:06 AM | permalink

Let's start today with a duck painting I call "Da Nha Duc," who is also a minor character in Frek and the Elixir. It was Sylvia's idea to give him a Vietnamese name. We both have (had, in my case, retiree that I am,) a lot of Vietnamese students at our teaching jobs, and we've grown to enjoy all things Vietnamese. I got the inspiration for my Duck from, of course, the Good Artist, the Duck Man, Carl Barks. [Google for your own Barks link here.] I do a couple of paintings a year, I got into the habit while I was writing my Bruegel book. Apropos of linking to my stuff, I remember a great line in David Foster Wallace story where some stoners are watching TV and the ubiquitous 80s pitchman Ed McMahon comes on, and one of the slackers says, "Sell it, Ed." I love Wallace's fractality, the eidetic flat spoken language style, the drive to dig beneath the surface.

This is an orrery that I saw in the Museum of the History of Science in Geneva, Switzerland in July. An orrery, by the way, is a tabletop model of the solar system, with a crank you can turn to move all the planets and moons around. The name stems from the owner of one of the first these devices, one Charles Boyle, Comte d'Orrery in Haute Savoie, which is the Alpine part of France south of Lake Geneva.

It's a small museum, maybe eight small rooms on the two stories of a house, parquet floors and enchanting prospects from every window, most of the windows open to catch the breezes from the lake. Glass cases hold brass scientific instruments: microscopes, telescopes, barometers, Leyden jars, spectroscopes, orreries and the like. Stands to reason these instruments would be found here, in the nation of watchmakers, indeed quite a few of them are of Swiss manufacture. The item above is a little car that poots along under steam power. An artificial bug.

Here's two real Swiss bugs --- harrumph --- reproducing. Is that a great picture, or what? My SONY Cybershot rules. This reminds me of a drawing R. Crumb did of a farmer and his wife doing something not to be described on a family web page. "Havin' a Good Time and Still Gettin' the Plowin' Done!" I love the eye on the guy on top. Once in a Boing Boing print interview, I asked SubGenius Ivan Stang how he could support himself and he said, "I have a wife and a color television and they both work."

I should be working on my book instead of blogging. And I should let the main boingboing page catch up with my sidebar. I thought it was great the way John Shirley was just pasting in whole articles last week, and I may do that too, eventually. Thanks, John, for the great introduction. Once I made John go to Esalen with me, and he didn't like it, and afterwards he said, "Rudy, how can you expect me to fit in there! I used to break beer bottles on my head and dive off the stage." My work in progress is, as I mentioned before, but who really scrolls that far back into a blog post anymore than they look at surveillance videotapes of their conversations, my w.i.p. is The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, the fruit of my twenty years in the Dark Satanic Mills of Silicon Valley. Today I'm trying to analyze why some books sell so many more copies than others. Trying to find the handle on society.

The orrery was turned by this little crank on the side. The secret of life! A valuable and universal metaphor for thinking about social movements is the sandpile model, first presented in a paper by physicists Per Bak, Chao Tang and Kurt Weisenfeld. Also see the really terrific book Ubiquity by Mark Buchanan. The idea is to imagine dropping grains of sand down onto a table and looking at the sizes of the avalanches you see. Think of a sand grain as a book you publish. Think of the size of the avalanche as the number of copies the book sells. Or think of a sand grain as a blog post and the avalanche as the number of links to the post. Or think of the sand grain as a blog post (or book) that you read, and the avalanche is the number of neurons in your brain that fire. To make a long story short, after sand's been dropping on the pile for awhile, the pile is in a "critical" state, which means that avalanches of all sizes can occur and theire's no predicting the result. At this point you ought to look at a great Java sandpile applet showing the sandpile, by a nice-looking young physicist called Sergei Maslov.

To use Sergei's sandpile applet you have to have Java 1.4 installed on your machine --- note that Microsoft no longer ships its operating systems with Java enabled. So if the applet looks blank, you need to go to Sun's page and click Download J2SE JRE. Now that you can see the sandpile applet, click CONTINUE to bring it to life. Keep feeding it for awhile by clicking on it. All the green cells have three grains of sand stacked on them, and when you click you are stacking. You're seeing avalanches. When they hit the edges the sand falls off (unless you click one of the BC Open buttons, which make the sand "wrap around"). Now after you've clicked for awhile the sandpile is in the "critical" state and you'll notice that some clicks of additional sand have big effects and some don't. Clicks are books being published, moving fronts are the readers.

The distributions of sizes of things in critical states obey what's called power laws, meaning roughly that your popularity is the reciprocal of your rank, or of your rank squared or cubed some such. It makes for a curve that's real high at the left and then tails off towards the horizontal. The tails are fat, though. (A statistician sent me an Xmas card last year saying, "May all your tails be fat.") The number of links that a given blog has seems to obey a power law, see this graph by blogger Chris Gulker. Speaking of links to bloggers, I'll mention Kathryn Cramer's blog. Kathryn was long interested in alternative literature forms, like the branching text things you can do with Hypercard. The blog is the new medium. Her site has some links to interesting essays by her father John Cramer, regarding his Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, which I much like as an alternative to the Copenhagen and Many Worlds interpretations. Also (what power the blogger imagines he or she wields!) Scott Drave's site, he's made a gnarly DVD called Spotworks. And hi Susie, and Mom, and Dad, and ...

Sell it, Rudy.

posted by Rudy Rucker at 12:16:13 PM | permalink

Blog the Gnarl #2

I've always loved fractals, too, speaking of computer graphics. Doesn't this one look like Ronald Wilson Reagan? I did some work at Autodesk in the late 80s and early 90s, and helped make a software package called James Gleick's Chaos, the Software. We had some great Mandelbrot sets in there. These days, there's actually a faster Mandelbrot set program called Fractal Extreme.

And then I made it into a painting. I also had a story on this theme called "As Above, So Below," which you can find in my story anthology Gnarl!, not to be confused with my historical novel As Above, So Below, about Peter Bruegel. I picked up that phrase from a book by P. D. Ouspensky, who ascribes it to Hermes Trismegistus.

Sylvia and I took another trip out West this June to visit our daughter Isabel. This picture shows some mountains in Northern Wyoming, maybe a hundred miles east of that big park, what's it called, Yellowstone. I love how the trees mirror the jagged line of the peaks. Isabel has just put up a really great web site www.goodidrawing.com, featuring some of her drawings and comics, e.g. a giant squid attacking a ship, and a totally stuzzy excerpt from her giant comic scroll-in-progress showing some aspects of San Francisco Rock and Roll. She's looking for gigs as an illustrator, so check it out.

When we dipped down into Colorado, we happened to drive on a back road through a big ranch, and I saw a cow nursing a calf with a dead cow lying on the ground in the background. Is that gnarly, or what?

Another thing we did out West in June was that I taught a workshop at Naropa University, where the Beats used to congregate. My old poet pal/mentor Anselm Hollo is there, here's one of his poems online. My workshop was on Transreal Fiction, and at the end of one session, my students and I did an exercise where we pretended to be aliens, speaking in tongues, fanning out across the campus. It was fun. I wrote a gnarly story about Edgar Allan Poe for a proposed anthology called Poe's Lighthouse.

You don't necessarily have to travel a long way to see gnarl. Like here's an amazing dew drop in my back yard. It's in black and white because I'm using the image in my work in progress, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, to appear from Thunder's Mouth Press in Fall, 2005.

Really, the gnarl is all in your head, as illustrated in this brain slice. I drew this picture as an illustration for my novel about the fourth dimension, Spaceland. One thing you'll notice when you go to my websites for my novels is that I usually include a monster PDF file with a copy of all the working notes I made while I was writing the book. It's a lifebox kind of thing, you wave. My publisher Tor Books had an excellent fan artist named Taral Wayne redraw my illos for this book, so it would look more polished and less like my previous illustrated book, Saucer Wisdom.

Here's one of the gnarly pictures that I drew for Saucer Wisdom. The website for this novel was made by my son Rudy, Jr. He runs a bitchin' ISP in San Francisco called www.monkeybrains.net. Rudy and I wrote a way gnarly story about Jenna Bush and the saucer aliens, "Jenna and Me." None of the print mags would touch it, but good old Infinite Matrix came through. Anyway, Saucer Wisdom was conceived as a Whitley Streiber kind of Millennial hoax, it was supposed to be notes and drawings made by a nut who's abducted by UFOs. In this case, Tor felt they might as well use my drawings as is, for verisimilitude. The picture shows what I call a "shuggoth," using a word coined by the Supreme Gibbering Master of Gnarl himself, H. P. Lovecraft. My idea for a shuggoth was that it would be a kind of random assemblage of body parts, possibly lacking a DNA blueprint.

Sometimes I'll carry a particularly gnarly idea form one book to the next. I have a big (Attack of) "The Shuggoths" chapter in Frek and the Elixir. I love how the one and only thing that SF monsters want to do is to ATTACK. Frek is the longest novel, I've ever written, by the way, and it came out well. I was going for a kind of Tolkien and Harry Potter thing, an epic myth with lots of eyeball kicks and a good vibe.

Apropos of nothing, here's two pictures of my college friends drinking beer in my dorm room in 1965. On the top, that's Gregory Gibson, Don Marritz, and Rob Lewine left to right. Those were the days. Lewine art-directed the photo shoot; he was in love with A Hard Day's Night. This would be in the Mary Lyons dorm at Swarthmore College, where my oldest daughter Georgia went as well. Georgia and her friend Margo Mooney ran a company called Pink Design, Inc., for the last few years. These days Georgia is still in New York designing and illustrating books, websites, and logos. Her company is now called Georgia Rucker Design.

Gregory Gibson, by the way, has been a huge influence on me as an author. (He's not the same person as William Gibson, also an influence.) Greg was my roommate, senior year in college 66-67, and in later years we corresponded a lot. He once remarked to me, "It would be nice to write science fiction, but to have it be about real life," which was, in a nutshell, the idea for the Transreal style of science fiction that I often use. I don't always write Transreal, though, so don't jump to any conclusions about what you read in my books. I gave a talk at ReaderCon in Summer of 2003 that discusses some of the other styles I like to use. In college, Greg's nickname was Dog, and mine was Pig, chosen by me in literary homage to Pynchon's Pig Bodine, and acceded to with insulting alacrity by my peers. Greg and I always liked to laugh about dogs, about how we read so much into their expressions, when their faces are just three black dots. Once in college Greg walked around wearing a big paper mache dog head mask for a couple of days. It's possible that we were celebrating Lincoln's Birthday. Those were the days.

Back to the theme of gnarl, here's another picture of that same dog, whose name is Pitch, and who lives with my brother-in-law Henry near Lake Geneva in Switzerland. "Isn't that a beautiful spot!" exclaimed Henry's daughter Stella when I showed her this picture. That spot on Pitch's back, it's computed by gnarly cellular automata in the embryo. Alan Turing figured this out in his seminal paper "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" [Be sure and look at page 25, where Turing, after a huge amount of computation produces a spot like that on Pitch's back.] When I moved to Silicon Valley in 1986, Greg Gibson said, "That's great. It'll be as if Keats went to work in a textile factory in Manchester! The dark Satanic mills!"

The sun's going down. Did I mention how exciting I think clouds are? These are in Denver, right before Sylvia and I flew back to sunny Californee. I just pissed away a whole day working on my blog. Am I a blogger yet?

posted by Rudy Rucker at 4:39:27 PM | permalink

Blog the Gnarl #1

My favorite kinds of computer programs are gnarly. This is a cellular automaton image made with my Capow Software. I learned about gnarly CAs from Stephen Wolfram, see NKS-SJSU: Home Page, which is a site that I made some of my students at SJSU.

posted by Rudy Rucker at 11:03:47 AM | permalink

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