what's the opposite of feeling sand slip through your fingers because I feel this poem more and more as time passes

This translation is by Dr. Eileen Chengyin Chow (and my favorite for sure!)

The fact that there’s an actually functional website for the library of Babel is one of those things that fucks me up more and more the more I think about the implications.

So, if anyone hasn’t encountered the concept of the library of Babel, the idea comes from a story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges, which is set inside a seemingly infinite library which contains every possible combination of letters, periods, commas and spaces that fits within 410 pages.

So like… It isn’t THAT out there that someone was able to make a digital version of it. Making an algorithm that randomly generates every possible combination of those 29 characters within that space and making a website that lets you explore those combinations are things that are pretty squarely within the scope of things you’d expect someone to be able to make a computer do.

But it begins to get pretty out there when you start thinking about all the things that are technically contained there (and that someone randomly browsing it could THEORETICALLY stumble upon) just by virtue of being one of those possible combinations of letters, spaces, commas, and periods.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that specifically mentions me by full name before giving an accurate, excruciatingly detailed, 410-page long physical description of me. There’ also many more books that SEEM to be that but are actually factually inaccurate. There’s also versions of all of those containing every possible combination of every possible typo, spelling mistake, and grammatical error.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s a perfectly accurate prediction of how and when I will die narrated in third person over the course of 410 pages. There’s also a book that contains the exact same events narrated in first person. Not only for me, but for every person in the world. There are many more that claim to be that but are actually inaccurate.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s completely blank except for the world’s funniest dick joke written right at the end of the very last page.

But chances are no one browsing that website is EVER going to see any of that because for every book we would consider useful, interesting, or even intelligible there are millions upon millions upon millions more that are just completely full of gibberish from cover to cover.

Every single thing I will ever write (barring punctuation marks that arent periods or commas and the letter ñ) is already contained somewhere on that website.

I have a volume from the Library of Babel! it’s one of my most treasured books.

on the second to last page, about halfway down it reads “OH TIME THY PYRAMIDS” a singular grain of order in the sea of chaos.

The library of babel contains every book to ever exist and moreover it contains all information that can be encoded in a finite string of characters from its alphabet.

I cannot overstate how much I love the Library of Babel. it’s wonderful, it is my heart and soul.

at last we created the perplexing nexus, from the novel “wouldnt it be weird if there was a perplexing nexus?”

The Library of Babel is one of my favorite science fiction concepts of all time! Especially because now that the digital version of the Library exists, we may be on the verge of resolving the Perplexing Nexus.

So in the book, the library of Babel consists of a bunch of hexagonical rooms, arranged more or less like a beehive. Two walls are doors connecting them to adjoining hexagons. One wall contains the supplies necessary for human life. the other three walls contain these 410-page books (it’s 410 pages because that’s how long Borges’ copy of Don Quixote was), most of which are gibberish.

The story is mostly focused on what life is like for the humans inside the Library- their only source of stimulation is the books, they have no idea why they’re here, and they can’t get out. It’s generally agreed that the answer to why they’re here and how to get out is somewhere in the library, but there are literally TRILLIONS of books, and as stated above, even if you find one that makes sense, there’s no way to know if it’s true. some people have devoted themselves to searching for the way out, some just collect anything that makes sense, and some are wholesale burning every book they find to try to break the library.

Borges wrote his story in the 1930’s well before the advent of databases, and the mechanics of the library weren’t the main focus- the effect on people when confronted with the dubiousness of The Truth was. We now live in an era where the Library is Real- or at least, a digital version of it is, and we may be able to do something none of Borges’ characters could:

Actually sort the damn thing.

Text AI is unfortunately being used for stupid purposes, but we’re getting close to machines that can read text and reasonably judge if the text is gibberish or Real Words, and do so at speed. There are Trillions of Books, but we crunch bigger datasets than that.

Imagine a sorting algorithm that moves through the library, room by room, reading every book in the room in a flash, and flagging it as “total gibberish” or “some comprehensible text”, highlighting any comprehensible text, and perhaps even searching for cryptographic clues in the nonsense. It’s going through the library much, much faster than any human can, and methodically, room-by-room, never returning to a room it’s already processed, a but like the old phone game of Snake.

Acutally, kind of literally. I imagine it would manifest in the database as a sort of enormous serpent, twisting through the labyrinthine library, devouring books whole. The Comprehensible ones are left standing on the shelves in its wake, survivors not of a force of nature, but a cataclysm of technology.

…But can you trust it?

Who created this monster? What parameters did they use? Why the hell did they make this thing? Can you trust the creator’s motives? and what about the serpent itself? Is it a mindless thing, following it’s creator’s orders, or is there a spark of self with in it? Has the consumption of this data changed it? Or are we talking to

So how about a sequel: The Serpent of Babel.

Toshi Yoshida, Mendocino, Sunrise, 1982.

Scene study#7, by Thomas Ngan.

I just want you all to know, that if and when this site does experience a real exodus and/or get sunsetted for good, even if we don't keep in touch I'll remember you so fondly. You're the online equivalent of the other kid on the beach where we built sandcastles together; the girl at the campsite where we explored the trees. You're the drunk person who shared kind words in the bathroom at the club, you're the talented artists at the life drawing class or the poetry night in a city where I don't live anymore. It makes me sad that maybe in the future our paths won't cross so easily, but even when we leave this little shared piece of cyberspace, carried away on our briefly intersecting trajectories, just know I still love you

made a teepublic!

you can get this without the watermark here

@highfemmesapphic

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

So, the thing about Don Quixote.

The thing about Don Quixote is that he tilts at windmills - tilts in the archaic sense of ‘charge at with a lance,’ because it’s the story of a guy who read so much chivalric romance that he lost his mind and started larping as a knight-errant. He was, if you’ll pardon the phrasing, chivalrybrained.

The thing about Don Quixote is, sometimes people take it as this story of whimsical and bravely misguided individualism or ‘being yourself’ or whatever, and they’re wrong. If it took place in the modern day, Don Quixote would absolutely be the story of a trust fund kid who blew his inheritance being a gacha whale until his internet got cut off so now he wanders around insisting that people refer to him as ‘Gudako.’

But the real thing about Don Quixote is that it was published in the early 1600s, and the thing about the 1600s is that Europe was one big tire fire. This is because 1600s Europe was still organized around feudalism (or ‘vassalage and manorialism’ if ya nasty), which assumed that land (and the peasants attached to it) were the only source of wealth. And that had worked just fine (well, ‘just fine,’ it was still feudalism) for a long time, because Europe had been a relative backwater with little in the way of urbanization or large-scale trade.

That was no longer true for Europe in the 1600s. The combination of urban development, technological advances, and brutal Spanish colonialism meant that land was no longer the sole source of wealth. Sudden there was a new class of business-savvy, investment-minded upwardly-mobile commoners, and another new class of downwardly-mobile gentry who simply couldn’t compete in this new fast-paced economy. Cervantes saw this process with his own eyes.

One of the symbols of this new age was the windmill, a complicated piece of engineering that was expensive to build but would then produce profits indefinitely - in other words, a windmill was capital.

The thing about Don Quixote is, when he tilts at windmills, he has correctly identified his nemesis.

I reblogged this earlier without comment as food for thought, and a lot of you liked it, so now I'm gonna argue against it. It's really good! And it would be 100% correct if Don Quixote's name was William Fitzgerald and he was from Lincolnshire. But his name is Alonso Quixano and he's from La Mancha.

We're not in England. We're in Spain.

And the thing with Spain in 1600 is it displays a distinct LACK of capital, despite the ludicrous amounts of money concentrated in the hands of the very very few. Ironically, Spain's brutal colonialism drained all the silver of Peru to NOT build windmills. The Hapsburgs and the aristocracy spent it all on pointless constant warfare, art and architecture which looked great and did fuck-all, and the consumption of imported goods. They invested nothing on production (except wool! they did invest in that for a while; too bad the sheep trampled the fields at every migration and ruined Castille's grain production, forcing everyone to import their staple food), nothing on infrastructure, left agriculture primitive if not ruined, fully abandoned local industry, and ended up horribly indebted. The Empire where the sun never sets strangled itself with all this wealth, for which millions of people had been summarily murdered or slowly worked to death in the silver mines of Potosí. And it did not convert that wealth to capital. Its creditors did, though.

The thing with Spain in 1600 is that it didn't have a new class of business-savvy, investment-minded upwardly-mobile commoners. (At best it had a few rich merchants in Seville and Cadiz, who made tons of money by selling to a market that was obliged to buy from them, and they didn't need to be business-savvy, just connected enough to secure the position.) It didn't have landowners finding new and efficient ways to exploit their land and the people who worked it. And it didn't have highborn nobles threatened by the upward mobility of their social inferiors.

Because the thing with Spain in 1600 is that there was no upward mobility. Only downward. This is where the picaresque novel was born (Don Quixote wouldn't exist without it), and the picaresque protagonist is a little guy who tries and tries to rise from the gutter, but the world won't let him. The game is fixed. He can cheat all he wants, the system will always cheat more.

The thing with Spain in 1600 is that it's not just rogues who fail to make it, it's everyone. Everyone tries to make a buck, and everyone fails. Everyone gets poorer and hungrier and more desperate. The population dwindles. (Exceptions: the upper echelons of the aristocracy in whose hands the silver directly flows, the aforementioned merchants who sell goods to Spanish America, a handful of artisans like silversmiths and painters who nevertheless remain precarious like all artists ever, various officials who enjoy big salaries and bribes, and of course, as always, the Church.)

Spain did have a class of downwardly-mobile gentry, because land started concentrating in the hands of fewer and fewer owners: the upper nobility and the Church. So everyone else, from self-governing peasants to moderately landed gentry, found themselves with less or with nothing. But Don Quixote was not one of the moderately landed gentry. Don Quixote was lower than that: he was a hidalgo, a knight of the battlefield.

Hidalgos had little or no land, no money, and no access to all that silver. All they had was a tax exemption (a useless privilege when you earn nothing that can be taxed anyway) and the right to bear arms, which they often couldn't afford. But here's the thing with hidalgos, they weren't impoverished because they were competing with capital. They were impoverished because they never had any wealth to begin with, and the last time their military services were needed and rewarded was back in the Reconquista. The Hapsburg wars were waged on credit, and no one made a fortune out of them (certainly not Cervantes!) except Spain's creditors.

Like so many others in Spain in 1600, hidalgos were poor already, and failed to move upward, and as food prices did exactly that, they went hungry. Spanish literature, from picaresque novels to Don Quixote, makes fun of hidalgos, portraying them as conceited and comically minor nobles who remain poor because they're too proud to work like normal people. And while that's a stock character, a caricature, there was definitely some truth behind it, and there were plenty of hidalgos with this worldview in real life.

So who is Don Quixote's nemesis? Capital? Industry? Windmills? Nah. A good answer would be honest work for honest pay. That's what the literary hidalgos dreaded most of all: they imagined quests and duels and fields of honour because they couldn't imagine getting a job. Another good answer is Hapsburg Spain itself, the empire where the sun never sets and pretty much everyone's the worse for it, including the overwhelming majority of Spaniards. I have a more poetic answer, though.

Don Quixote's nemesis is the mountain that eats men: the silver mines of Potosí, in today's Bolivia, where millions died for the glory of Spain, only for Spain to go bankrupt, and its own population to get impoverished. Potosí, from where a river of silver flowed through Spain, without enriching it, immediately passed to its creditors in the Low Countries, England, France, etc, and then these creditors turned it into capital, and thus were able to build modern Europe. Potosí, the mountain that ate 8 million people in 3 centuries, just so that Europe could get the funds to murder hundreds of millions more through colonialism and imperialism of unprecedented scale. Potosí, which made Spain's ruling class think they can afford all these wars (spoiler: they couldn't), and didn't spare a thought on how people could live. And the people lived badly.

If Don Quixote could tilt at that, how beautiful it would be! Still completely pointless (you can't deal with systemic problems by tilting at them, as the book eloquently shows), but how beautiful.

…And perhaps Sancho could take advantage of the hubbab and steal an ingot for himself. Poor sod deserves it.

“If I were to pay you, Sancho,” responded Don Quixote, “according to what the greatness and nobility of this remedy deserve, the treasure of Venice and the mines of Potosí would not be enough.”

endless night

Rayne Fisher-Quann, no good alone

“When people say that one ought to go to therapy to become a perfectly stable, functional, ‘healed’ individual before they dare try to experience love or community, they are imagining a world in which a fundamental purpose of human connection has been replaced with a capital exchange. Welcome to the ideal relationship: one between two perfectly realized individuals who would be totally fine alone but choose to hang out because they like splitting rent and watching Law and Order. No passion, no growth, no difficult conversations — that’s your therapist’s job.”

An c.1000-1200 CE example of Egyptian cotton knitted socks.

one of the best academic paper titles

for those who don't speak academia: "according to our MRI machine, dead fish can recognise human emotions. this suggests we probably should look at the results of our MRI machine a bit more carefully"

I hope everyone realises how incredibly important this dead fish study is. This was SO fucking important.

I still don’t understand

So basically, in the psych and social science fields, researchers would (I don't know if they still do this, I've been out of science for awhile) sling around MRIs like microbiolosts sling around metagenomic analyses. MRIs can measure a lot but people would use them to measure 'activity' in the brain which is like... it's basically the machine doing a fuckload of statistics on brain images of your blood vessels while you do or think about stuff. So you throw a dude in the machine and take a scan, then give him a piece of chocolate cake and throw him back in and the pleasure centres light up. Bam! Eating chocolate makes you happy, proven with MRI! Simple!

These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"

There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:

I cannot overstate just how many papers were completely fucking destroyed by this experiment. Entire careers of particularly lazy scientists were built on these sorts of experiments. A decent chunk of modern experimental neuropsychology was resting on it. Which shows that science is like everything else -- the best advances are motivated by spite.

labs that are also churches. to me

(1. annie dillard, teaching a stone to talk 2. the deep underground neutrino experiment, a.k.a. DUNE 3. the large hadron collider 4. the sudbury neutrino observatory)