Sunday November 14, 2021; 1:21 PM EST
- With apologies to Smullyan, this is not the post referenced in the title of this post. That one's going up in a few hours, and when you read what it's about, and what I'm really trying do with it, you are going to say to yourself, "Huh, so that's what full-blown delusion looks like." No joke.#
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- It'll be about names, among other things. I recently discovered the perfect name for something, its creator agreed, and now, forever, that thing will be called Drumkit. I spent five minutes thinking about it, and suddenly I have shaped human history, without even trying. I am not going to lie, that feels pretty good. I will probably chase that high for the rest of my days.#
- I spend a lot of time thinking about names, actually. I've been paid cash money to think up names, I have written software to help generate names, that's how much I think about names. I'm also lazy and stupidly literal-minded, so sometimes I will base an entire series of novels around chasing a goal which the characters actually call a "macguffin", and in fact, are being chased around by THINGs, and, well, there are some other names in there that I'm not quite ready to disclose yet, because I think they are both brilliant, and so, so, stupid, like most of the things I come up with.#
- That project, in particular, is pretty emblematic of everything else that goes into making up the blog part of what I'm doing. It's something I've been working on for years, since April, 1994, actually. There's a particular concept around which everything revolves, and I've spent countless hours thinking it over through the years. In particular, there are a couple key notions, and to work with them, identify them, use them, I've given them names. #
- None of this work is really public, yet, but I've talked it over with coworkers (ok, dropped into unrelated contexts for no good reason, but still), and awhile back, one of them suggested a name for something. And this name is perfect. It is obvious. It is so clearly the right name, that you cannot deny it. You will agree how blind I was not to see it. This name is so fucking perfect, I haven't even decided what it actually refers to yet! In a project I have thought about literally every day, in one form or another, for three decades, it was staring me in the face, and I never saw it.#
- I wonder how many other things there are like that.#
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- Anyway, I'm not ready to write about that project yet. Instead I'm going to turn to the Loaf Question. Which I'm also not ready to write about yet, so I'm going to keep it a mystery what that project actually is referring to. If you are curious, go read the forum thread. It is not long, it is presented as a puzzle, and if you know anything about the history of computing, you will absolutely recognize the project and the madmen I'm going on about. No joke.#
- But since I know you are one lazy motherfucker, I am going to paste in one little bit about names, because names are on my mind lately.#
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- Tumbling through the names#
- As I've mentioned before, the creators of the contraption were extravagant with the names they bestowed on the various parts of the beast. Snarf. Ent. Turtle. Flock. Bert. Orgl. Crum. Waldo. Enfilade. And, of course, Loaf, among many, many others. #
- These names got coined and evolved over four decades of development. When they built a new thing, they gave it a new name, partly to help solidify its literal uniqueness in the world. So, Fossils and Recorders and OTrees and HTrees and the Granfilade and the Poomfilade and the Bert Canopy and the Sensor Canopy and the DagWood.#
- By the time they began work on the version of the beast I'm currently exploring, I think they started wondering how well these names would resonate with those who they hoped would use their creation to build even more wonderful things. So they changed some of the names once again. Orgl became Edition, Bert became Work. #
- It's a little sad to see those names go by the wayside since they'd been used for so long, but I think saying you have an Edition of a Work is much clearer than saying you've got an Orgl of a Bert. And anyway, the names live on via the internal structures of the thing, so that's nice. (For example, we still have OrglRoots and the Bert Canopy.)#
- However, in at least one case, I'm thinking about turning back the clock. #
- This project has for decades had the concept of an infinitely expandable number space. Like 1.25.0.0.0.33333.92.42.2021.0.5. And the math to go with it—you can take two of these things and add them, subtract them, do all sorts of nifty things with them. They've long been used to carve out a way of addressing the smallest chunks of the secrets given to the contraption, even across multiple machines. #
- When I was much, much younger than I am now, I read about these mystical things and loved them. Part of the reason was what they were called: "tumblers." The name evokes many things, from acrobatics to the clicking of the inner workings of a lock (or a bank vault!) as the key is rotated into place. The idea that something so serious and powerful could have such a playful name appealed to me.#
- So what are they called today? "Sequence." Um. Yeah, sequence, whatever. Sure, the literature defines the term as "an infinite sequence of integers," so I suppose the name makes some sense.#
- But to me it's still a tumbler.#