The Babel of Blogging

Sure, I'm running on no sleep. Still, that doesn't mean I am making no sense. Borges' "The Library of Babel" is my favorite short story, and I see reflections of it everywhere. The internet is a wonderful reflection of it in some ways, but blogging does it better. Follow me on this.

In Borges' fictional library (I should note here that the concept behind the story is not entirely original to Borges, though his version of it is perhaps the most compelling in all of literature) the universe is a library. That library is composed of connected hexagonal galleries with shelves along four walls of each and exits in the other two. Stairs go up and down, and sleep and lavatory arrangements are handled in little alcoves between (horizontally) adjacent galleries. OK, enough of that.

In the library are books of uniform format: 410 pages of 40 lines of 80 characters. The characters within the pages are limited to 25: 22 letters (startlingly like the Kabbalah's take on the Hebrew alphabet, but I have seen other numbers of letters from various sources), the period, the space, and the comma. Every combination of letters exists, but each combination is unique. Now, here's where blogs beat the internet as a whole.

While blogs are a subset of internet content, and thus they compose less of the possible universe of Borges' story, they are, unlike the complete internet, unique. People can link to one another's blogs, that is true, but the blogs are not duplicated wholesale in the way that many other things on the internet are. Does it matter that some people insert blog entries, in whole or in part, into their own in order to comment on them? No. In fact, it is expected by the Library. After a set number of combinations, patterns must repeat. The smaller the grouping of characters, the sooner a repetition will occur. If it is one character, the repetition will occur no later than the 26th character. If it is two, the repetition will finish no later than the 1,252nd character ((2*(25*25))+2). Obviously, this number gets pretty large pretty quickly, though. If you are interested, the general formula looks like this: ((n*(s*s))+n) where "n" is the number of characters in a string and "s" is the number of characters in the set of characters (letters in the alphabet being used +3).

Sure, the library also has tons of gibberish in it, but so do blogs (see preceding paragraphs or other entries here for examples, though many others exist). I really need to get my ISP to come clean about FTP and my webspace. You'd think that with more than 500 MB of space, I could put something up other than the crappy template stuff, but not a single person seems to know how to do it. Ah well. When I do, I will link to a Library page generator I wrote. It's really quite simple code, but the numbers are insane since the English alphabet has four letters more than the one in the story. I'll work out something with Hebrew characters, perhaps, in the future.