Songs for Saturday: The magic in "Daddy's World"

[mdlbear]

Around the end of 2018 I wrote a Songs for Saturday post about my song "The World Inside the Crystal", which is about my -- I'm not sure what to call it: contention? belief? fantasy? -- that inside of computers is a world where magic works. I wrote the song itself in 1985, about the time my first kid was born. (I don't remember which came first.) Anyway, about four years later I wrote another: "Daddy's World". I sang it for my music teacher last Monday and she had some questions that made me realize that there are a lot of people, some of them no doubt on my reading list, who have no idea what it's referring to. Unless you had a Mac in your house before 1990 or thereabouts, have the definition of the Mandelbrot set memorized, and know a little about complex numbers, four-dimensional geometry, and integrated circuits, that may include you.

Daddy's World

Hey, girl, are you weeping 'Cause it's too rainy for playing outside? Let's turn on the magic carpet And go for an afternoon ride... I know a couple of games to play And some places¹ you haven't yet seen; Come visit your daddy's world on the other side of the screen. I can't bring you the silver moon To hold in the palm of your hand; But I can take you to a world I've made Out of dreams and a few grains of sand²; I can't buy you the stars to wear Like gems in your bonny brown hair; All I have is a magic mirror³ And castles in the air.⁴ Say hello to the creatures here:⁵ The walrus, the elephant too; Go visit the dragon's lair, He's waiting there for you... Play cards with a magical deck;⁶ Learn the names of the planets and stars; Take a ride on a toy balloon, Or a rocket ship to Mars. (chorus) Come look through the window While I type in a magical rhyme.⁷ I'll show you where the hypercubes⁸ dance On the edges of space and time. See the curliqued Mandelbrot set⁹ Way down in the complex plane¹⁰... We'll forget about the world outside, The thunder and the rain. (chorus) Do you wonder where your daddy goes When he's out of the house for the day? I walk through my magic mirror And travel far away To my world where with numbers and words I create things out of thin air;¹¹ There's magic in Daddy's world And I can take you there. (chorus) There's magic in Daddy's world And I can take you there.

1. See above about a world where magic works. It's a place (that links to my song about the alt.callahans newsgroup)
2. Integrated circuits -- commonly called "chips", are largely made of silicon. Sand is mostly quartz, which is silicon dioxide.
3. The second verse of "The World Inside the Crystal" is "Like a magic crystal mirror,/ My computer lets me know/Of the other world within it / Where my body cannot go."
4. One of my father's favorite quotes was "There are no rules of architecture for castles in the air" -- slightly misquoted from G. K. Chesterton's 'There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds'.
5. The walrus, elephant, and dragon are all characters in The Manhole, a whimsical game built in HyperCard by the same people who later made the better-known game Myst.
6. The magical deck belonged to a solitaire game on the Mac called Seahaven Towers. The toy balloon and rocket ship were something I made up.
7. Our Mac II wasn't the only computer in the house -- about a year before I (or rather HyperSpace Express) had acquired a PC clone. It ran DOS, not Windows (3.1 was the first usable version, and it didn't come out until 1992), so you ran a program by typing its name at a command line.
8. One of the programs I wrote on the PC (I later ported it to Unix and MacOS) was a little demo program that displayed wireframe objects rotating in 2<=N<=9 dimensions. (There's a more recent version here that runs in your browser.) A hypercube, also called a tesseract, is the four-dimensional extension of a cube, the way a cube is the three-dimensional extension of a square. "Edges of space and time" refers, with a generous helping of poetic license, to our 4-dimensional spacetime. Unfortunately one can't construct hypercubes in it.
9. The Mandelbrot set probably needs no introduction; there was a program on the Mac that displayed it. Rather slowly.
10. The Mandelbrot set is a set of complex numbers. A complex number is the sum of two parts -- a real number, and a real number multiplied by i, the square root of -1. The second part is called the "imaginary" part. They correspond to points on a plane, where the real and imaginary parts are the X and Y coordinates respectively.
11. This, of course, is what programmers do.

The recording of "Daddy's World" on YouTube comes from my CD, Coffee, Computers, and Song, and has my kids joining in on the chorus. Neither of them could sing all that well, but I really wanted them there. I don't seem to have it on any concert recordings -- sorry about that.

Comments

[spiffyvoxel]

I have a copy of that CD in my collection. :)

[madfilkentist]

I once wrote a program in PostScript to plot the Mandelbrot Set. PostScript is a general-purpose programming language, after all. It took all night to run on a Mac SE/30.

[mdlbear]

I wrote mine in C -- ought to track it down and put it on GitHub.

Sun built a windowing system based on 'display postscript'. One of the things that killed it was security, or rather the lack of it.

[kellan_the_tabby]

*delight*

[chaoswolf]

Actually in 2015 I think I was a better singer than E was, but that's partially because I spent my nights at the filk circles and joining in on your music practices while you weren't working on the albums. But, technicalities.

[mdlbear]

I think so too -- E's track needed quite a lot of correction. The album came out in 2007, though.