Confession… I’m eccentric. There we are, that’s it. Now that’s done. As odd as I am and now, as everyone knows, as oddly as I think – wherein the entire world is a wonderful puzzle full of incredible things that perpetually bring me such pleasure to contemplate – … oooh dear lost myself in that sentence. No matter. Today’s curiosity – for me is this:
0011 0000 is binary for 0 and of course 0011 0001 is binary for 1
I’ve been playing with binary for a week and today it hit me – what a delicious paradox – how wonderful. It is as fractal as GNU – gnu not unix – same stuff – enfolding on itself in perpetual motion. So when did people say that po mo emerged (‘post modernism’ for people who are not wankers)? Surely that was supposedly after binary. There’s a whole beautiful dimension isn’t there that reducing stuff to code produces the utterly non reductionist expansion of zero s and one s.
And just in case you thought that binary number systems (as opposed to computer stuff) arose in the 20th century – think again and look to India. I found one serious paper of historical interest in particular: B. van Nooten, “Binary numbers in Indian antiquity.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 21(1), 31-50, 1993, and I also found a quirky little piece of only a few pages with a few tasty morsels to be going on with – sure beats the disinterest of a click track in recording studio – in terms of contemplation of rhythm and drummers. Okay – so I dated a drummer once – yep – it’s true – just in case you were wondering. So much for this being a page of any scholastic merit… no worries… I’m having fun, even if no one else drops by. : )
In 1695, good ol’ Gotfried Leibniz dug up binary stuff but a long, long time after Pingala – 200BC if I recall….he was actually looking at different meters in Sanskrit sacred text and I think was looking at the short versus long kinda stuff – hence the binary development of various combinatorial investigations – i guess looking at various possible iterations et cetera.
Isn’t it truly superb that several centuries of thinking can exist side by side on a page – the first from a person more interested in the mathematics of the sacred and the second more interested in the pursuit in the perfection of the ultimate objectivist language – and in keeping with Hobbes – cogitatio est computatio.
so what is today’s aphorism? cogitato est blog? blog is soo very unlatin – there has to be a better saying than that surely… cogito ergo blog : )
