v21’s avatarv21’s Twitter Archive—№ 32,164

                1. Thinking more about searching the Library of Babel. It transforms the problem, while leaving it the same.
              1. …in reply to @v21
                Previously, you had to go on a weary trudge through the shelves, hunting out a gleam of intelligibility within the volumes.
            1. …in reply to @v21
              Now intelligible words are easily found. But all you find is what you look for - English text stops meaning and just becomes more entropy.
          1. …in reply to @v21
            Now there enters a mapping between shelfmark& page number and text. Each holds as much information as the other.
        1. …in reply to @v21
          Who is to say which one has more meaning? Maybe the text is merely a way of compressing the address, representing it more compactly.
      1. …in reply to @v21
        It makes explicit that the true form of the library is a mapping.
    1. …in reply to @v21
      The search function allows you to see the map. But a map as big as the territory is not a useful map.
  1. …in reply to @v21
    (The process of making a useful map is the process of making sense of the landscape, semantically chunking it. The Library has no semantics)