The bar is small and rather empty, out of place amid the swirling holographs of the Green Line. I glance again at the entranceway, searching for whatever had caught my attention - whatever had made me crane my neck outward instead of sitting as still as I have for the past couple of days - but the unidentifiable something is gone.

The bench softens. I lean back and close my eyes and it molds itself against me, glows with synthetic warmth, massages until the tensions have worn themselves out of my neck and shoulders, and drains my credit account of $27.50; not that it matters. A few teenagers glance in my direction, eyes and minds half-focused on their VR sims; I ignore them and they fade into the crowd.

People trickle past.

The ceiling digiplane is moving: patterns play formlessly about the narrow enclosure, spinning in leisurely circles beneath the apex of the domed roof - and, I realize with a start, there is a darkness visible behind them, a projection of the actual night sky above. I jerk my eyes away, calming the tremor that has appeared in my stomach, smoothing my shirt as I push the thoughts from my mind.

Reality.

The pain evaporates. I pull myself to my feet and stroll nonchalantly into the bar, a false spring and swiftness in my step, and I order a drink and a private booth and sit, remembering.

18th August 2042, 8:48 PM

The Berrintgon Institute for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence is a firefly in the darkness. Its holograph hovers tastefully, designed to imitate a 20th-century theater facade, but a cool glow (too expensive to engineer out, apparently) belies its true nature, flickering with an intensity that speaks of unrepaired circuitry, casting green and orange shadows away in steadily dimmer circles of pattern. The clouds are glowing, faintly underlit. I shut my eyes and the afterimage lingers on my retinas.

Several deep breaths later, I am scampering up the staircase, through the great plastic doors, into the phosphorescent inner lobby. A lone secretary glares at me from behind her monitor. I wait, sitting, standing, leaning against the wall, in full lotus position, singing classical music in my head, until she rises, an hour later, and I straighten my nonexistent trenchcoat and follow her, the floor cool and soft and faintly glowing with each footfall.

With each dot representing a black hole and each o representing an empty space, two hundred and fifteen (or 11010111) would look like this: ..o.o… — two black holes, then a space, then a black hole, then a space, then three black holes.

Gates

Every computer can be thought of as built from 3 simple elements: OR gates, AND gates, and NOT gates.

OR

Our OR gate will take 2 binary numbers as its input, comparing them with each other digit by digit, and will spew out a 1 in a particular place if either digit is a 1 and a 0 if neither is: for example, if provided with 1100101 and 0101001, it will output 1101101.

Construction is fairly simple — create a gravitational well or field of force that channels the 2 streams of black holes toward each other, until they are side by side and parallel, like so: =, ensuring that the digits line up. Once the corresponding digits of the two streams become much closer to each other than they are to the preceding and following black holes in their own streams, gravity takes over:

• If both corresponding digits have black holes in them, the holes will merge into a new hole — 1 and 1 combine to output 1.
• If only 1 of the corresponding digits has a black hole in it, that black hole will still be there, filling the space. 0 and 1 combine to output 1.
• If neither of the corresponding digits has a black hole in it, there will still be an empty space. 0 and 0 make 0.

(If your mental picture isn’t working properly, if you’re concerned the speed and direction of each black hole changing or about black holes gobbling up holes they’re not meant to, keep in mind that the spaces between the black holes dwarf the size of each hole by many, many orders of magnitude.)

NOT

Our NOT gate will take a single binary number and convert it to its opposite — every 0 becomes a 1, every 1 a 0. 1100101 turns into 0011010.

For this we need a reference string of arbitrary length — which is to say, a countinuous parade of evenly spaced black holes (think of it as infinitely long if you think that’s cool). Perpindicular to this we will place our input, again calibrating the speed and placement of each stream such that the black holes line up. The output will be what was formerly the reference stream, after it has passed through the binary number input: if the input is a 1 (a black hole), the two will merge and their combined momentum will carry them away in another direction, leaving a space (a 0); if the input is a 0 (an empty space), the reference black hole will continue along its path, becoming a 1.

.  _______the rest of the input, not yet passed through the gate

.
.
..... . . _________0s have become 1s
|   .
|    . ________1s are carried away, leaving 0s
|
|      .
|
Reference stream

AND

Our AND gate will take 2 binary numbers as its input, comparing them with each other digit by digit, and will spew out a 1 in a particular place if both digits are 1 and a 0 either of them is a 0: for example, if provided with 1100101 and 0101001, it will output 0100001.

Implementation is simple: the two numbers are simply passed through the OR gate, one having first been through the NOT gate (if I have a coat or no hat, I have both a coat and a hat, or neither).

These three gates are all we need — from them alone, it is possible to assemble a fully functioning computer. It will be very slow, of course, but will have a tremendous time frame within which to operate: the Black Hole era will last almost 10¹⁰⁰ years.

Okay, what the fuck are you smoking?

Excellent question. This whole system is taken from Chapter 4 of the cool and informative The Five Ages of the Universe, by physicists Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin. Their reasoning:

Currently, our universe is interesting: there are many types of particles interacting in complex ways, giving rise to interesting things like people, who posses interesting things like minds. This state of affairs is not eternal, however: in 10⁴⁰ years, almost all protons will have died; there will be no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no specks of dust, no atoms; the only objects to survive will be those protected by an event horizon, and there won’t be much interaction there — black holes have no hair.

The question, therefore, becomes “Can interacting black holes create complexity sufficient for intelligence, as interacting atoms do today?” In designing their hypothetical computer, Adams and Laughlin haven’t answered that, but they have created a compelling proof of concept, shown that though engineering is a challenge (so to speak), there are no fundamental conceptual difficulties. From the chapter’s fictional introduction:

Although Bob’s concerns tended to be of a flatly practical nature, there were members of his species who were trying to understand the properties of the universe during its first 10⁴⁰ years, “those almost unimaginably brief moments after the big bang.” Particularly fashionable was a wild conjecture that highly complex structures might have been based on the interaction of electrons with protons and neutrons. The existence of protons and neutrons, exotic short-lived particles that had long since decayed away, was enthusiastically embraced by the more adventurous physicists of the time, and simultaneously denounced as “rampant speculation” by those cut from a more conservative cloth.

Tiny.

Tiny.

How tiny? On the order of 1.6160 x 10^-35 meters, the Planck length. If a hydrogen atom were the size of the known universe (close to 30 billion light years across), the Plank Length would be a couple dozen feet.

This poses problems.

Generally, when dealing with the microscopic, the smaller the area that you wish to probe (and probing is necessary, by whatever method, be it jabbing your finger at something or bouncing a photon off it), the greater the energy requried; that’s why the superconducting super collider (good name for a superhero) would have been so much better than your average cyclotron. To probe into the Planck length by brute force, you’d need about 10²⁸ electron volts — you’d need a particle accellerator the size of the solar system.

And now the monster of scientific criticism rears its party-pooping head. If a theory makes no testable predictions, it asks, why does it exist at all? Sure, superstring theory is cool. So is the idea that there’s an invisible, noisless, hand-dodging hamster sitting on top of my monitor. The question science needs to ask is, is superstring theory right, or just mathematical masturbation? An important question, because superstring theory is a theory of everything. And thus, whether the universe has granularity is important (doubly so, because it probably would have been anyway).

Fortunately, nature may have probed its own depths and left the results plastered across the cosmos. Shortly after the big bang, the universe was itself tiny — if pixellated, then only pixels across*; accordingly, the energy would have varied (and still vary) from point to point jaggedly, not in a smooth sweep. When the fabric of spacetime began to expand inflationally, with ludicrous speed, those pixel-caused jags would have expanded, themselves, and if there wasn’t quite time for the energy to diffuse completely before leaving its imprint, for it to reorient to the new, spacious 1024×768 resolution, an echo of that low-res image should be dimly visible, tremendously magnified by inflation, each pixel light years and light years across.

For this reason, a new, more intensive survey of the microwave background radiation is scheduled to begin some months from now. Let’s hope it reveals a faint, pixellated overlay. That would be so damn cool.

Whoever Put Together Past Masters Volume Two will Die a Horrible Death

To fully appreciate my burning hatred for the person who ordered the tracks on this CD (yes, I know it’s chronological by date of recording; that’s no excuse), you must know a few things:

• Past Masters Volume Two is a compendium of Beatles singles uncollected on Beatles albums (at least, uncollected on the UK versions, which are the only ones that matter, and the only ones sold today on CD). Because the Beatles didn’t like putting their singles on their albums (they considered it ripping off their fans), the Past Masters discs have a lot of good songs on them.
• A lot of good songs. Tracks 11-14, for example, are as follows:
  1. The Ballad of John and Yoko
  2. Old Brown Shoe
  3. Across the Universe
  4. Let It Be (a different version from the one on the album of the same name)
• The next track, the final track, track 15, is You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).
• Most people who buy the CD will be Beatles fans. Anyone else can get the hits on the blue and red Best Of collections.
• Let It Be is a really, really good song. Really. Go download it.

So, 9th grade Beatles fan that you are, you slip the disc into the player and listen to it all the way through. Everything builds up wonderfully, like a good mix tape, and by the end of Let It Be you’re feeling profound in an “oh, isn’t everything just so bittersweetly beautiful?” type of way, a way that (as is evidenced by this sentance) cannot be communicated in plain text. As the last, ultrasatasfying, uberevocative chords of the song fade out, you realize there is one more track to go, and wonder what it will be.

The LCD switches to 15. The accompaniment starts up, piano and nice round percussion, playing a I-iii-IV-V sequence, and it’s perfect, just perfect — this is shaping up to be a feel-good song like California Girls, a perfect album-ender. Now that you’ve felt profound, watched the grey light stream through the windows, wondered about the mysteries of Life, the Universe and Everything, you can come out of hypnosis and get up off the carpet feeling happy. The perfect yin and yang, that elusive mix of feeling every album should aim for.

Then the vocal comes in. It is indescribably horrific.

YOU KNOW MY NAME!!! it is shrieking. LOOK UP THE NUMBER!!!

It continues, inexorably, segueing into horrific-lounge-singing then horrific-jazz-esque-something then horrific-incatagorizable. This is not the song you are looking for. It is a joke song, you slowly realize, a gimmick. An extraordinarily elegant and well-executed gimmick — these are, after all, the Beatles — but a gimmick nonetheless.

There is no resolution. There’s no happy profundity. There’s only John Lennon making fun of gay cabaret singers in a quavering british voice.

And you can’t just stop the CD at 14 — oh, no. All the buildup, all the expectation that would normally accompany listening, is ruined, just like Mostly Harmless ruined So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, just like Back to the Future was ruined by Back to the Future II. From now on, you can never listen to Past Masters Volume Two front-to-back, like you listen to everything else; you have to cut it into chunks, listen to a single solitary song here and there, sandwiched between other single solitary songs from other albums, to prevent it from feeling like a piece of a narrative.

Someday — maybe it will be tomorrow, maybe it will be next week, next month, maybe 5 decades in the future — but someday, somehow, I will hunt down and kill whoever is responsible for this, whatever lowly Apple Records beaurocrat made that track-ordering decision. You can’t hide from me. And if you’re already dead, then so help me God, I will find your corpse, exhume it in the dead of night, reanimate it, and fucking kill it again. I’ll have you hung. And boiled. And drawn and quartered. And when I’ve finished with that, I’ll take all the little pieces, and I will stomp on them.

Seriously. I mean, it’s like having Spiderman get hit by a bus on the way to his final confrontation with the Green Goblin.

It was late summer at the time, high summer, in those weeks just before the first brush of fall air finds its way in, and we were on the patio drinking, watching the trees. Scotch for me; blue kool-aid and vodka for him. He’d had a lot of it. His face was red.

“Albert,” he said, smiling roundly and leaning into his chair, hands clasped around the back of his head, “did I ever tell you about my cat?”

“About your cat, Erwin?” There was a bit of kool-aid on his chin; I brushed at my own in an attempt at tactful notification but he paid no heed.

“Rumsfeld.” He seemed to draw the word across his tongue. “Rummy. Did I ever tell you about him?”

“I don’t believe you did, Er.”

“Well,” he said. “Well.” And seemed to leave it at that. I went inside to get some Oreos.

By the time I came back out with the package he was scribbling furiously, tiny equations scrawled across almost an entire page (he was using his sippy cup for a paperweight) ignoring me as I sat. The sun had finished setting and the western sky was an airy prism, dividing white into orange and purple and blue. I leaned back for awhile, watching, scraping the Oreo centers off with my front teeth, as the prism shifted across the face of the globe and orange turned purple and purple turned blue and blue turned black.

“Done!” Shouted Erwin. I managed not to jump.

“So? What have you got?”

He slid the page across at me, smirking.

It was a proof. I had to stare for awhile. Oh, I got it immediately, but I had to stare.

It was great stuff, great stuff. Physics, but melded seamlessly with biology in a way I’d never seen done — in particular, that area of the brain (what was it called, again?) that collapses the wave function (he’d found it serendipitously, in neurophysiological study a decade and a half earlier at Johns Hopkins, hadn’t he?).

I traced the lingering tendrils of the equations a few seconds more, then looked at him. “You’ve done it. You’ve really done it.”

Faint smile. “I have, Alby, I have.”

“So why don’t you bloody publish? This is Nobel Prize material, at the least! How long have you been keeping this stuff to yourself, Er?”

Lower lip trembling. “F-fifteen years.”

I stared at him.

“Oh, it was stupid, Alby, it was so fucking stupid. We were graduate students, and we were stoned, and…” He broke off, staring at the tabletop, sniffing. “We took Rummy, and we put him in this box, you know? This airtight box? And we put a little vial of, I dunno, something — something, you know, in with him? And there was a geiger counter and a tiny tiny bit of uranium, just a tiny bit, and…oh, Alby, I meant to collapse the wave function in the right direction!” Tears were streaming from his eyes now, down his cheeks and mixing with the blue on his chin. “But Bob had this glow stick and it shone a tiny bit green when, you know, at just the wrong time, and I lost my concentration, I lost, I lost…”

Chocking sobs. His head was on the table. His tears were running into the Oreos. “Oh, Er,” I said, patting his shoulder. “Come on, now.” I couldn’t quite bring myself to say, “it was a long time ago”; I didn’t think it would help.

“Alby?” he said after awhile, sniffing.

“Yes?”

“You won’t let this get out, will you? You won’t tell anyone? At least, not ’till I’m dead or something.” He managed a laugh.

“No, Er. I won’t tell.”

“And Alby?”

“Yeah?”

“You’ve got some oreo on your lip.”

Miles Davis and Kenny fucking G.

There is a crisis afoot in America today.

• To impress your elitist friends. Or rather, to decrease the chance of them surreptitiously bashing your head in with something or other after hearing you say “this is some wonderful jazz” of a Kenny G² recording played for irony.
• To flirt effectively with foreign exchange students (and Europeans in general). (Note: any Europeans reading this guide are assumed to be here for kicks. They’re European. At the very least, they know how to identify jazz; they probably appreciate it.)
• To not feel stupid. How can you, who rarely if ever heard jazz, compete for intellect points with people who were played Thelonious Monk in the womb and cite Coltrane in metahistorical analogies? Why, by having the ability to identify jazz, of course.
• To avoid karmic unhappiness and ruptures in the fabric of spacetime. If you find yourself in a non-Starbucks coffeeshop reading a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and sipping an Espresso while listening to a CD player containing Kenny G’s Greatest Hits², you are dangerously upsetting the balance of the universe. Be prepared to get struck by lightning, or fall into a black hole, or spontaneously combust, or something.

In short, though this guide won’t impart much deep, real information on the workings of jazz (which would, of course, take effort to absorb) it will help you in social situations. Call it “Jazz Appreciation for CEOs”.

Okay, let’s get on with it. Here’s what to look for:³

• Instrumentation Traditionally, most small jazz ensembles (combos) consist of a lead player (a trumpet, for example, or a saxophone) backed by a rhythm section consisting of a piano player, a bass player, and a drummer. If it has a guitar player, or if there are synthesizers and Riverdance-esqe drums in the background, be suspicious. (This isn’t a hard and fast rule — there are some great jazz bands with non-traditional instrumentation. That said, almost all lead-piano-bass-drums ensembles are real jazz (this is doubly true for ensembles with an upright bass, and triply true for those without a lead instrument).
• Structure The typical format for real jazz is this: A tune at the beginning, weird stuff in the middle (long solos by each player), the same tune at the end. (The tune at the beginning and end is called the head section, incidentally, and the weird stuff in the middle is called improvisation. If it doesn’t have improvisation, it’s almost certainly not jazz.)
• Length. Since the ’50s, jazz recordings have generally been several minutes long, to allow for more freedom and creativity. (There’s an interesting story behind this that I should look up sometime.) If a song only lasts 2 or 3 minutes, be a little suspicious (though be warned: some of the greatest of the greats created short recordings in the 1940s and before).
• Dissonance. Remember that scene in Jerry Maguire where the weird guy gives Tom Cruise a jazz mix tape (”John Coltrane, Copenhagen, 1966 — the apex of the only truly american art form!”) for use during sex with the female lead whose name for the moment escapes me? Remember how they’re going at it and Cruise turns off the tape and says something to the effect of “what the hell is this music?” You guessed it — that there’s some great jazz. (Incidentally, it’s not actually Coltrane; it’s Charles Mingus and his band, playing Haitian Fight Song.)Jazz, as mentioned, is (to varying degrees) a different language from pop. If you don’t understand a language, it can sound like gibberish. Most jazz is not actually very dissonant, but to unfamiliar ears it can seem positively corrosive; if you hear strange chords, if you hear long, unpleasant flights of ugly clashes, it’s not Kenny G². (Keep in mind that some jazz, like Dave Brubeck, is quite accessible even to the uninitiated.)
• Corniness (or lack thereof). You’re smart enough to use the internet and be interested in this site; you must have some sort of corniness filter. Set it to maximum. Doing something new and creative has been a top priority for jazz musicians for a half century, sometimes to a fault. If it sounds cliché or forced or overdramatic, if it’s even remotely corny, it’s probably not jazz.
• Artists Some players come up again and again. If memorization is your thing, these musicians (among many, many others, of course) played real jazz and little else:
  • Charlie Parker
  • John Coltrane
  • Dizzy Gillespie
  • Louis Armstrong
  • Clifford Brown
  • Duke Ellington
  • Sonny Rollins
  • Dave Brubeck

  These players do not play real jazz, and suck:

  • Kenny G²
  • Yanni (Actually, I’ve never listened to Yanni (to my knowledge) but he often seems to be mentioned in the same breath as Kenny. Correct me if I’m wrong here.)

  These players do not play real jazz, but do not suck:

  • Glenn Miller (Stealth Munchkin informs me that he actually played some passable jazz in the 1920s with people like Benny Goodman; his famous works are really 1930s pop, though.)
  • Sade (no, not that Sade)
  • Steely Dan
  • Sting
  • Ben Folds (Who soflinked Ben Folds to bad jazz? You’re insane.)

There you have it. Have fun with your newfound ability. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.

That’s not to say jazz is completely alien, of course, that it’s nothing whatsoever like pop, that you can’t dance to it. Bop is not anti-dance; Coltrane is not anti-dance. Download a copy of Dizzy Gillespie’s Manteca and if it doesn’t at least get your foot tapping you’re comatose. (And it’s worth remembering that the Monk himself used to get up and dance in the middle of sets.)