Stanislaw Lem, 1921-2006

From the deep plambeck.org archives (ca 1990 or so, "Explaining Twin Peaks")

It's risky to introduce the supernatural and UFO-ial because these are essentially proletarian concepts that when explored to any depth are revealed to be very stupid. I once read a book called by Stanislaw Lem called His Master's Voice—which the scifi-heads amongst us may have also read, and let me be perfectly clear, I HATE science fiction—but the point was this: a man, selling recorded extra-T transmissions as random numbers, is confronted by a customer who points out that these bits, put forward as random, in fact repeat themselves after some large number of gigabytes.

A Los Alamos-type effort is struck up to determine what the hell these bits are and the mathematician-narrator and indeed none of the most-qualified scientific personnel described in the book are ever able to figure out what the bits mean, although they are able to interpret some homomorphism of the bits as chemical formulas and they synthesize some sort of slime out of it that has odd properties.

Now one's interest in this story may indicate nerd tendencies but I for one found it at least mildly compelling, particularly because the right note—that of never really figuring out what the bits mean—is struck.

These outerspace phenomena, if explained, lose much of their force so that the narrative motive force eventually causes them to become, as I have already said, very stupid.

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Klarner was a big Lem fan. In fact, he was the person who originally drew my attention to that Lem passage in His Master's Voice, about twenty years ago!

Twenty year college reunion

Two photos that Gloria dug up for the Stanford "Classmates" book (her 20th reunion is coming up):

With Kim Muth: