Three-way dance: Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair. A short snippet:

Michael Moorcock says “I invented the multiverse!”

Michael Moorcock says he invented the multiverse as a reassurance against the second law of thermodynamics and heat death of the universe.

...

Alan Moore says that “Jerusalem” disproves the existence of death from a scientific standpoint...

Via Bookslut.

Scientific proof of another universe?

More information is coming out about the alternate universe Michele Bachmann comes from: it turns out that in Bachmann's timeline it was FDR's Hoot-Smalley tariffs that turned an otherwise run-of-the-mill recession into the Great Depression.

Now, of course, in our universe this was called the Smoot-Hawley Act and it was signed into law in 1929 by Republican President Herbert Hoover. Moreover, here on Earth-1 FDR didn't even take office until 1933, at which time the Depression was almost four years old.

We've got to find some way to send Bachmann back home.

Wednesday is the day I historically post links.

* It all finally makes sense; Michele Bachmann says the crazy things she says because she comes from an alternate universe where Jimmy Carter was president in 1976.

* Also in alternate-universe news: South Korean scientists claim to have cloned glowing dogs.

* Tough times in the mother country.

* They're turning Margaret Atwood's (very good) Payback into a full-length documentary about debt.

* "Crazy" Joe Biden was a key figure in the Arlen Specter party switch. Now who's laughing?

* The headline reads: "Student, 11, steps up to lead school band when budget constraints leave PS 37 without band teacher." Get this kid a scholarship anywhere he wants to go, and pour some real money into public schools already.

* The eleven most endangered historic places.

* Classic science fiction film on the Internet.

* The Bush-Obama position on state secrets takes a much-needed hit.

* The Fight Club Theory of Ferris Bueller.

* An entity passes the Hofstadter-Turing Test if it first creates a virtual reality, then creates a computer program within that reality which must finally recognise itself as an entity within this virtual environment by passing the Hofstadter-Turing Test. So now we just need to get Skynet self-aware.

Just a pair of painfully funny Daily Show / Colbert clips from last night.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Baracknophobia - Obey
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Better Know a District - New York's 25th - Dan Maffei
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

Miscellany.

* Republicans have successfully transitioned from passively rooting for Obama to fail to actively sabotaging the economy. Well done, fellows.

* Views from the other universe: Ricky Gervais v. Elmo.

* Lots of people are linking to "the fifteen strangest college courses in America." Maybe this just demonstrates how far out of the mainstream Duke Lit is, but most of these seem perfectly cromulent to me.

* The economics of March Madness: how excessive spending on sports is a money-loser for nearly every Division I school. Marc Bousquet was right!

Reports from the other universe: imagining Russian cultural hegemony. Via Cynical-C.

Monday!

* Almost as if they all receive their talking points from a single, central location, the entire right-wing spin machine has spontaneously decided to start talking about how the New Deal didn't actually work. Uh, sure.

* The first link doesn't make the absurdity clear, but Karl Rove is Twittering.

* Also in alternate-universe news: George Bush: Greatest President.

To prove his point, Barnes points to Bush's "ten great achievements":

1. Bush stood up to "global warming hysteria," and helped undermine the agenda of "alarmists."
2. He endorsed "enhanced interrogation," "secret prisons," and "wireless eavesdropping."
3. He seized unprecedented executive authority, and ignored congressional attempts at oversight.
4. He offered "unswerving support for Israel."
5. He signed the No Child Left Behind initiative.
6. He delivered his second inaugural address.
7. He signed the Medicare prescription drug benefit.
8. He pushed the Supreme Court even further to the right.
9. He improved U.S. relations with Japan, South Korea, and Australia.
10. He created a "fragile but functioning democracy" in Iraq.

You'll note Barnes is padding his list just a bit—delivering a second inaugural address is sort of light for a "top ten accomplishments" list, as is "improved relations with Australia."

* Also via Washington Monthly, Jon Swift has your retort.

* Not capturing Osama bin Laden isn't on Barnes's list, but Cheney tells us that doesn't matter.

Today on CNN’s Late Edition, host Wolf Blitzer asked Vice President Cheney, “How frustrating is this to you personally, knowing he’s [bin Laden] still at large?” Cheney hesitated, then simply replied that he would “obviously…like to solve that problem.” He added that it’s more “important” to “keep…this country safe,” indicating that bin Laden is inconsequential.

* North Carolina in the news! The Brunswick school district wants to teach creationism to kids. In 2008.

"I wasn't here 2 million years ago," Fanti said. "If evolution is so slow, why don't we see anything evolving now?"

There's your evidence.

* Eight reasons why we are in a depression.

* Half of world’s population could face climate-driven food crisis by 2100.

* After ten days of not sleeping, Randy Gardner was able to hold a press conference and beat a journalist at pinball. Note: this happened forty-four years ago, but I just found out about it yesterday.

This post is for your eyes.

* Andy Kehoe's "Psycho World," a slightly more surreal Where the Wild Things Are (and I can only imagine he's completely sick of hearing that).



* Future worlds and alternascapes from James Paick.





* And WebUrbanist builds off my infamous Statue of Liberty post with 25 Post-Apocalyptic Visions.

Jon Stewart glimpses into one of the other universes and asks what we might we think of Bush if he hadn't, you know, completely trashed the country.

Or does the whole doing-that-while-Rome-is-burning aspect of his presidency sour us on his exuberance?

World News:

* Tim goes soft on the Latin American menace.

* Via Vu, the new Indiana Jones movie has angered some of our Russian comrades.

* This "We Are the World" parody from Japanese TV is like a three-minute glimpse into the next universe over. The original is a pretty classic cultural document of the '80s, as well, if it's been a few years since you've seen it...

They say time is the fire in which we burn: Scientific American looks at time, entropy, and the immortal question: Does time run backwards in other universes?

I don't like showing up this late on the blog, but due to factors including

* class;
* getting what must be my fourth cold in two months;
* what can only be described as the Unfortunate Incident of the Apple Juice in the Nighttime, which has rendered my space bar completely inoperable;

I'm only getting around to blogging now.

Sorry.

Here's some stuff to look at it:

* Lord of the Rings as Property Law.

* Alternate universe baseball.

* Alan Kirby on the death of postmodernism and the birth of pseudomodernism.

Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or the cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product. Pseudo-modernism includes all television or radio programmes or parts of programmes, all ‘texts’, whose content and dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer or listener (although these latter terms, with their passivity and emphasis on reception, are obsolete: whatever a telephoning Big Brother voter or a telephoning 6-0-6 football fan are doing, they are not simply viewing or listening).

* The Valve, re: Deadwood, The Wire, and The Sopranos: What interests me is that, whatever their differences, all three of these shows elicit our sympathy and concern for brutal and violent people, mostly male, operating outside the law. What’s that about?

* Infinite Thought announces a new competition: "Down with Existing Society!" These are the terms:

Each and every one should express in a succinct manner his or her rationally hostile feeling about the current state of affairs.

I'm not sure I have the wherewithal to put together an entry right now, but if I did I'm certain it would probably have a lot to do with our sympathy for brutal and violent people, mostly male, operating outside the law.

Or else, you know, this:

I've linked to a version of "Wings for Wheels," the proto-"Thunder Road," before, but I think this one from Brynn Mawr on 2/5/1975 is even more striking. (UPDATE: I've just found out that this is actually the first time the song was ever performed.) It's not only a truly great performance in its own right, but its marriage of familiarity and difference is also as close as anyone who loves Bruce is ever likely to come to the experience of visiting an alternate universe to attend an alternate-universe Springsteen concert.



Thanks for Justin for giving me the whole bootleg on CD—there's also a really nice version of "Incident on 57th Street" with a serendipitous police siren passing by the venue at exactly the right moment, right at the end of the song. Don't take my word for it—you can find it for yourself out there in the series of tubes.

I've been blogging for a few years now, and over that time I've linked to Philip K. Dick related material a whole lot of times. Here, in honor of reading Dr. Bloodmoney this week, are just a few PKD highlights, all to the glory of the man Fredric Jameson once called "the Shakespeare of science fiction":

* "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later." In some ways this is the definitive PKD essay, and it's the one referenced somewhat famously at the end of Waking Life. [+/-]

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

Of course, I would say this, because I live near Disneyland, and they are always adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an evolving organism. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum, like Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is true of each of us, like it or not.

* Another great essay at Grey Lodge Occult Review: "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others."

We are accustomed to supposing that all change takes place along the linear time axis: from past to present to future. The present is an accrual of the past and is different from it. The future will accrue from the present on and be different yet. That an orthogonal or right-angle time axis could exist, a lateral domain in which change takes place -- processes occuring sideways in reality, so to speak -- this is almost impossible to imagine. How would we perceive such lateral changes? What would we experience? What clues -- if we are trying to test out this bizarre theory -- should we be on the alert for? In other words, how can change take place outside of linear time at all, in any sense, to any degree?

* R. Crumb's comic, "The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick."

* The first law of kipple is that kipple drives out nonkipple.

* Philip K. Dick and drugs.

* Philip K. Dick on Kurt Vonnegut. [+/-]

Interviewer: What did you think of Vonnegut’s attitude towards his characters (in Breakfast of Champions)?

PKD: Disgusting and an abomination. I think that that book is an incredible drying up of the liquid sap of life in the veins of a person like a dead tree…that’s what I think. I also love Kurt Vonnegut.

* Philip K. Dick and the Kennedy Assassination. (Warning: spoilers for the last book we're going to read this semester, also a Dick novel, Dr. Futurity.)

* Profiles of Philip K. Dick from The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and the Times. Interviews with Philip K. Dick. Lethem on Philip K. Dick. Again. Stanislaw Lem on PKD.

* Jameson on Dr. Bloodmoney.

(cross-posted at culturemonkey)

Survival tips for a parallel universe:

1) The Food Chain Rule. If it can eat you, you can eat it.

2) The Venom Rule. If a creature's venom is rapidly fatal, you can eat the creature.

3) The Bait and Spike Rule. Biological compatibility also increases the odds that some Earthly toxin, like bug spray or rat poison, will kill the alien creatures if you use it correctly.

4) The Dandelion Rule. Chances are, our ecology is as pernicious to theirs as theirs is to ours.

Click the link for full details...and be careful out there.

Quantum physics, multiple universes, and solving the "scandal" of probability, in the Telegraph. Ignore the lead's focus on time travel; the real meat is towards the end:

According to quantum mechanics, unobserved particles are described by "wave functions" representing a set of multiple "probable" states. When an observer makes a measurement, the particle then settles down into one of these multiple options.

But the many worlds idea offers an alternative view. Dr Deutsch showed mathematically that the bush-like branching structure created by the universe splitting into parallel versions of itself can explain the probabilistic nature of quantum outcomes. This work was attacked but it has now had rigorous confirmation by David Wallace and Simon Saunders, also at Oxford.

Dr Saunders, who presented the work with Wallace at the Many Worlds at 50 conference at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, told New Scientist: "We've cleared up the obscurities and come up with a pretty clear verdict that Everett works. It's a dramatic turnaround and it means that people now have to discuss Everett seriously."

Dr Deutsch added that the work addresses a three-century-old problem with the idea of probability itself, described by one philosopher, Prof David Papineau, as a scandal. "We didn't really know what probability means," said Dr Deutsch.

There's a convention that it's rational to treat it for most purposes as if we knew it was going to happen even though we actually know it need not. But this does not capture the reality, not least the 0.1 per cent chance something will not happen.

"So," said Dr Deutsch, "the problems of probability, which were until recently considered the principal objection to the otherwise extremely elegant theory of Everett (which removes every element of mysticism and double-talk that have crept into quantum theory over the decades) have now turned into its principal selling point."

Quantum immortality, please.

Mathematicians claim proof of "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum theory. GeekPress already gets in the best possible line about this—Personally, I am [very excited]|[deeply skeptical] about this development— so I'll just point out that this brings me one step closer to my long-held dream of quantum immortality.