Alright alright alright, settle down, settle down. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Your eyes aren't deceiving you. This is indeed my first blog in over a year. In fact, I’m breaking from my cardinal rule of blogging: never apologise for tardy blogging regularity. But this needs addressing because frankly what the fuck Malcolm. So I apologise. Especially to my fans, Nick, Nick, and Rob.
Why the delay? I’ve got excuses, loads of ‘em actually.
I write for a living now. I spend seven hours a day (minus ping pong time, minus coffee time, minus poo time…so like.......three hours a day) tip tap tapping away at the same laptop I’m using now, writing about companies. The content is interesting, and I’m given scope to put a sprinkling of flair into my writing too, so I don’t particularly have the inclination to do more writing when I get home. At least, that’s an excuse I’ve been using. I don’t particularly buy it to be honest -- it’s an excuse, not a reason.
Or perhaps it’s that I haven’t been feeling inspired by much recently. Last year was not a great year, maybe the worst one yet. I haven’t been reading much, gone to the cinema much, or otherwise sought out much intellectual stimulation. For a while my life has been a whole lot of work, gym, beer, PASSIVE CONSUMPTION OF SOCIAL MEDIA, sleep, work… This one feels more like a reason to me.
But I found something this week that put a spark back into my imagination.
*
Please go to libraryofbabel.info and have a look around.
In 1941, the Argentinian writer Borges wrote a short story called The Library of Babel. The story imagines a vast library of hexagonal rooms, with each wall having five shelves, each shelf housing thirty-two books, each book having 410 pages, and each page forty lines of eighty random letters or spaces. Each book therefore contains 1,312,000 characters.
The books collected in the library contain every possible combination of those 1,312,000 characters with no repeats. The number of books is thus unimaginably large, and in that epic library you can somewhere find the complete works of Shakespeare...backwards. Or the complete works of Shakespeare where all the characters are called “Buttface”. Or everything you’ve ever said out loud in chronological order. Literally…everything that has ever been written or ever will be written. Of course, given the unimaginable size of the library, all the good stuff is swallowed by infinite reams of absolute nonsense. The chance of picking a book at random and looking for even half a sentence of coherent text is a Planck length above zero.
Kind of a weird but neat idea right?
The website I linked a couple of paragraphs up is one man’s – Jonathan Basile’s -- attempt to recreate Borges’ Library of Babel. There's some clever maths and computing behind it that I don't understand, but it doesn't simply create a page every time someone searches. Every page has a consistent location. Basile has created Borges' library.
Go to the Search page and stick something into the box. Mash the keyboard. Tell it your heart’s desires. Insult your friends. Put in Romeo & Juliet but with the fated lovers both called Buttface. And marvel at how each time it returns your exact input. From each page of white noise your phrase emerges eerily.
*
It took me a while to get my head around it. That website has everything on it. It has a description of my entire life on there, and yours, and everyone’s. It has every book, song, poem, scientific paper…all of it. There’s a sense of touching pure, raw information. It evokes the strongest feelings of curiosity in me, as everything I could ever want to know is in there somewhere.
But that curiosity is a melancholic one because everything useful is out of reach. You realise it's a massive, impenetrable wall of noise. It can only repeat, never speak of its own accord.
And as you get accustomed to that idea, the maths of the thing starts to overtake the poetry of it. The library starts to feel mundane. It’s a pure experiment in mathematics, an exercise in tedious number crunching. It’s irritatingly logical, a frustrating rush of uncontrolled, indigestible information.
There’s also something smirking about the way it’s one step ahead of you, it already knows everything you want but deigns not to reach out a guiding hand.
I mean, why did I even bother writing this blog post? You can find the whole damn thing on that website already. On Browse, put in these details
Hex (I made the text really small so doesn’t look ridiculous on the page, just copy all of it):
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
Wall 2
Shelf 2
Volume 3
Page 118
And there it is. Isn’t it glorious.
Your eyes aren't deceiving you. This is indeed my first blog in over a year. In fact, I’m breaking from my cardinal rule of blogging: never apologise for tardy blogging regularity. But this needs addressing because frankly what the fuck Malcolm. So I apologise. Especially to my fans, Nick, Nick, and Rob.
Why the delay? I’ve got excuses, loads of ‘em actually.
I write for a living now. I spend seven hours a day (minus ping pong time, minus coffee time, minus poo time…so like.......three hours a day) tip tap tapping away at the same laptop I’m using now, writing about companies. The content is interesting, and I’m given scope to put a sprinkling of flair into my writing too, so I don’t particularly have the inclination to do more writing when I get home. At least, that’s an excuse I’ve been using. I don’t particularly buy it to be honest -- it’s an excuse, not a reason.
Or perhaps it’s that I haven’t been feeling inspired by much recently. Last year was not a great year, maybe the worst one yet. I haven’t been reading much, gone to the cinema much, or otherwise sought out much intellectual stimulation. For a while my life has been a whole lot of work, gym, beer, PASSIVE CONSUMPTION OF SOCIAL MEDIA, sleep, work… This one feels more like a reason to me.
But I found something this week that put a spark back into my imagination.
*
Please go to libraryofbabel.info and have a look around.
In 1941, the Argentinian writer Borges wrote a short story called The Library of Babel. The story imagines a vast library of hexagonal rooms, with each wall having five shelves, each shelf housing thirty-two books, each book having 410 pages, and each page forty lines of eighty random letters or spaces. Each book therefore contains 1,312,000 characters.
The books collected in the library contain every possible combination of those 1,312,000 characters with no repeats. The number of books is thus unimaginably large, and in that epic library you can somewhere find the complete works of Shakespeare...backwards. Or the complete works of Shakespeare where all the characters are called “Buttface”. Or everything you’ve ever said out loud in chronological order. Literally…everything that has ever been written or ever will be written. Of course, given the unimaginable size of the library, all the good stuff is swallowed by infinite reams of absolute nonsense. The chance of picking a book at random and looking for even half a sentence of coherent text is a Planck length above zero.
Kind of a weird but neat idea right?
The website I linked a couple of paragraphs up is one man’s – Jonathan Basile’s -- attempt to recreate Borges’ Library of Babel. There's some clever maths and computing behind it that I don't understand, but it doesn't simply create a page every time someone searches. Every page has a consistent location. Basile has created Borges' library.
Go to the Search page and stick something into the box. Mash the keyboard. Tell it your heart’s desires. Insult your friends. Put in Romeo & Juliet but with the fated lovers both called Buttface. And marvel at how each time it returns your exact input. From each page of white noise your phrase emerges eerily.
*
It took me a while to get my head around it. That website has everything on it. It has a description of my entire life on there, and yours, and everyone’s. It has every book, song, poem, scientific paper…all of it. There’s a sense of touching pure, raw information. It evokes the strongest feelings of curiosity in me, as everything I could ever want to know is in there somewhere.
But that curiosity is a melancholic one because everything useful is out of reach. You realise it's a massive, impenetrable wall of noise. It can only repeat, never speak of its own accord.
And as you get accustomed to that idea, the maths of the thing starts to overtake the poetry of it. The library starts to feel mundane. It’s a pure experiment in mathematics, an exercise in tedious number crunching. It’s irritatingly logical, a frustrating rush of uncontrolled, indigestible information.
There’s also something smirking about the way it’s one step ahead of you, it already knows everything you want but deigns not to reach out a guiding hand.
I mean, why did I even bother writing this blog post? You can find the whole damn thing on that website already. On Browse, put in these details
Hex (I made the text really small so doesn’t look ridiculous on the page, just copy all of it):
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
Wall 2
Shelf 2
Volume 3
Page 118
And there it is. Isn’t it glorious.
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