[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Miracle of binary
The ultimate absurdity is now staring us in the face: a universal library of two volumes, one containing a single dot and the other a dash. Persistent repetition and alternation of the two is sufficient, we well know, for spelling out any and every truth. The miracle of the finite but universal library is a mere inflation of the miracle of binary notation: everything worth saying, and everything else as well, can be said with two characters. It is a letdown befitting the Wizard of Oz, but it has been a boon to computers.
– Willard van Orman Quine on the Universal Library
(via Borges’ Library of Babel indirectly found via Dan Connolly’s RDFization of the animals quote)
This somehow reminded me of a couple other links I found earlier on Turing Machines built in Conway’s game of Life: one from Paul Rendell, another from Paul Chapman. These machines also have a kind of strange beauty…
FOAF updates: Trust rankings are now exported, making the data available to other users and websites. An external FOAF URI has been added, allowing users to link to an additional FOAF file.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!