http://www.sffworld.com/forums/blog.php?24175-Caspar-Riga en Thu, 23 May 2013 18:38:23 GMT vBulletin 25 http://www.sffworld.com/forums/images/misc/rss.jpg http://www.sffworld.com/forums/blog.php?24175-Caspar-Riga http://www.sffworld.com/forums/entry.php?5038-Indexical-Zero-Theory Sun, 10 Jun 2012 12:30:45 GMT Here's a glimpse of what I am about to publish to this week:

“So what about the two buttons on the right?” asked Dion, “do they also have an up, a down, and a still position?”
“Up, down, and normal. By normal we mean that it only reacts to what we do with the five other buttons. In the up position we go up the Pascal Triangle, line by line, toward the first simplex, until there is no line left, just the number 1, the only degree of remoteness known to the primitives. When an order or a grid reaches this top of the triangle, the magnitude or the formula space becomes one with the magnitude or formula space that is symmetrically the closest to it. In the down position we go down the lines of the Pascal Triangle. The oven is a limited universe and ours can only go up or down three-hundred-and-sixty-thousand-three-hundred-and-sixty lines, but it is still the best product on the market. We need so many, because sometimes…” Yusuf said, as he raised an eyebrow at the smile Dion pulled, “…when we bring a formula space to zero, some of the magnitudes flip to infinite dimensions and we have to catch them before they get there. What are you laughing at?”
“I was thinking that I will never get to hear about the set position,” the chief sighed. He emptied his cup. Yusuf thought he earned it.
“Okay. We use it to set a domain,” the born Iraqi said. “There’s three kinds: those with only powers of mass, or only powers of length or of time, those that are a combination of two, and of course we can set a domain that is a combination of the three. The point is that we create them from zero, and they push up whatever domains are already in the oven. So if we create a domain of two mass dimensions, all the others will have gone up two dimensions of mass, but they have kept their own dimensions. So a zero dimensional formula space is still zero dimensional, but this zero is now two dimensions up. We call it an indexical zero because we can point at the second dimension of mass with our index finger and say a zero resides there. Anyway, the created domain is below this zero, and this has as a great advantage that both ranked and filed magnitudes can drop below zero. You see, intersections cannot grow bigger than domains, nor can they get smaller, but they can go below zero and domains can’t because they are absolute.”
“Yes, Benjamin said so,” the chief knew. “The domain is the span between the lowest negative and the highest positive, and the two are added to get the span, not subtracted.”
“Right. So, in short, we have jacked up a zero dimensional formula space with, say, a combination of mass and time, and then we use the intersection button to make separations so as to let the magnitudes sink into our new domain. But because length is missing, not every magnitude can sink into the domain and these exceptions will stay zero. That is basically how we single out a magnitude. We may be looking for a magnitude that makes it inside our domain or one that stays outside, but basically, we can single out every magnitude in no more than seven or eight steps.”
“So you put a bucket under the horse and see what drops?”
“Basically,” Yusuf chuckled. “We actually make a whole stack of domains beneath the formula spaces, each filtering what comes out of the one before it.”
“Like a distillation plant?” figured Dion.
“Sort of.” ]]> Caspar Riga http://www.sffworld.com/forums/entry.php?5038-Indexical-Zero-Theory http://www.sffworld.com/forums/entry.php?4864-Making-up-my-mind Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:57:37 GMT So I am blending the books. In the one book, the devil is the bad guy, in the other he plays no part. The plot of the latter revolves the rising and sinking of Atlantis and Mu, which in this story is due to artificial scarcity. That's where the taxes came in, but I don't want the cause to be the taxes. If you look back at the previous post, the cause is to be found with those " whose payment took place here." Those will be the Ancients, so now they must have made contact with El Dhja'athangh, who also brings God to the scene, of course. My God is a plain European God, so it's not Jesus, but the Boss of Him. In this sense, the devil relates to creation, since I am going to hold that he was taken from the garden (an older garden than Andai's) and recreated by the angels, in a period lasting 71421 years during which God only survives as 24 drops of water in the cosmos, up to the day the drops are recollected in Andai's hand and the man recognizes the Law in it. Anyway, the devil is going to be tossed and turned between these issues. I think I know what his role will become in light of the other ( bigger ) book, for he might be the only one who knows what payment was so akward that those people would still hear from him. ]]> Caspar Riga http://www.sffworld.com/forums/entry.php?4864-Making-up-my-mind http://www.sffworld.com/forums/entry.php?4850-today-less-science-more-god Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:32:35 GMT I'm rewriting two old books into one unmarketably big volume. Here's a paragraph:

Tehuti wanted to chase the hound away, he smelled of death, but Atlas had said he had to be welcome somehow, or he would not have shown up inside the fence, so the elf just circled him once or twice. At one point his jaguar tail touched the hound, who had a suit and upright build, and the elf could sense something he had never sensed before. The hound belonged to someone. Not like a love or a slave, but like something that truly belonged. What he sensed was that the devil belonged to God, whom he had never heard of, since the children of man did not share that kind of information. Intuitively he said:
“You belong in a garden, but not in Andai’s garden,” and as he said it, he knew whom he was circling. This was also an inventor. “Are you the inventor of death?” he asked the hound straight out. El Djha’athangh, as he was called in this respect, ‘the angel who occupies himself with death,’ had to laugh a bit and his mind shot through the sedation, which had kind of worn off when he had chased the elf earlier. He was careful. Either the elephant or the jaguar had experienced some deep insight into the numbers, one he could not afford to miss, but the creature probably wasn’t aware of it yet. Yet he was on Earth, so one wrong word, and God would show.

As I wrote this, I realized that it was all from the second book; in fact it appears, now that I've been blending them for a week, that I am keeping most of the first book, and rewriting most of the second. But that will change halfway through the roadworks, when I am going to paste a whole chapter in. Anyway, as a new property to both the stories, the devil now actually has something to say. Tehuti (the hero of the story) finds out he laid this claim on Andai's garden (the devil being stolen from a garden himself) :

‘I pay a fool’s price. With the stirring of the stars, when the green comes up, I state the taxes according to the ground level. Given this term, I calculate the tax demand in March, at which point I brush through my hair and state the top sum. Do not worry; I have equal rights. Whose name it will fall on, says little to me. What concerns me is a simplicity in the matter of rights. Whose payment occurred here, will yet hear from me. I folded back from my rights, but I already have everything taken care of.’

Point being that the devil taxes the future. Will there be enough future left in my story? Enough for me to wonder. ]]> Caspar Riga http://www.sffworld.com/forums/entry.php?4850-today-less-science-more-god http://www.sffworld.com/forums/entry.php?4829-from-Carmine-Vermilion-(an-underground-train-of-thought) Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:55:46 GMT “I met Yusuf the second time I went to Israel. He had also been selected for the motor pool. We were introduced to the colonel and he showed us the strangest things he could make an engine do. Made us build engine parts from scratch with materials he had prepared. We built tanks that could run for... “I met Yusuf the second time I went to Israel. He had also been selected for the motor pool. We were introduced to the colonel and he showed us the strangest things he could make an engine do. Made us build engine parts from scratch with materials he had prepared. We built tanks that could run for two days without stopping for fuel, without really knowing what we were doing. Slowly he explained it to us. Every magnitude has a dimension, more correctly: a compound dimensionality, expressed as mass, length and time, given in various powers. For instance, the magnitude called ‘action’ has one dimension of mass, two of length and one of time. And ‘energy’ also has one dimension of mass and two of length, but it has two of time. Magnitudes may have half dimensions, like the magnetic and the electric magnitudes have, or any other fraction, he taught us, not telling us this last bit of knowledge was new.”
“The half dimensions?” asked Deborah. She still seemed really interested. And she was. She only had some trouble understanding him because she thought there were only four dimensions; three of space and one of time. Carmine told her:
“No, not the half dimensions. Those have been a given ever since Maxwell listed them almost…or over…a hundred-and-fifty years ago. No, the other fractions were new. One eighth of a dimension and five sixteenths. The colonel taught us that what we had been doing in the motor pool was recreating the engines until the magnitudes had the dimensions we wanted. Maybe that is not odd to you but to me, who had some basic training, it sounded like nonsense. Magnitudes had set dimensions, and these were listed, like those magnitudes that Maxwell listed. He listed the electromagnetic magnitudes, did I say that? Those are the halves, or as we say: the roots. So we learned that in fact these dimensions could be shifted and that energy could have the same dimensions as force, and force the same as energy. A whole new world opened up. We listened with different ears. Yusuf was interested in the colonel’s quantum mechanics, I liked the classical approach. He taught us that for every principle detected, certain other principles, due to the way they are derived, must always appear on neighboring dimensions.”
“On neighboring dimension? Not in?” Deborah asked. Her tone was not very serious.
“No, you should see it as a table or a grid, we call it a formula space, that numbers the dimensions. We say we number them by their powers. So we rate something at or on a certain number of dimensions. And once we have rated one kind of principle, we know the other cannot be far off. ”
“Alright. And the dimensions are mass and length and time?”
“Yes, love. So a so-called least action principle was to be found one dimension away from a principle of the conservation of energy. He also taught me how to make it appear at a fraction, or a manifold of that one dimension. And then he showed us the method we had actually been using. He called it Indexical Zero Theory.”
“You lost me.”
“I know. It argues that if any magnitude may become any other, it may also become dimensionless, which was the basis of transposing forces, which is what I do.” ]]> Caspar Riga http://www.sffworld.com/forums/entry.php?4829-from-Carmine-Vermilion-(an-underground-train-of-thought) http://www.sffworld.com/forums/entry.php?4828-Mu-and-Atlantis Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:11:35 GMT In an earlier work I ran into the same thicket. There were dwarfs and elves and they could travel through space and time and do all sorts of magic, to the point that I, as an author, could no longer get them in trouble. Yet I found an element in the tale, which held that you could follow someone... In an earlier work I ran into the same thicket. There were dwarfs and elves and they could travel through space and time and do all sorts of magic, to the point that I, as an author, could no longer get them in trouble. Yet I found an element in the tale, which held that you could follow someone back to their time, but if you were not welcome, you could only get as close as the garden fence. In other words, magic was limitend by conventional law. Conventional? How does magic know when someone is welcome or not? It was not the sort of book to address this, but I settled for handcuffs that did not hold, except for those cuffs that were put on by the one official that was within his right. ]]> Caspar Riga http://www.sffworld.com/forums/entry.php?4828-Mu-and-Atlantis