Tag: Tony Tulathimutte

Reading 2016: February

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  1. This Census-Taker by China Miéville – The first of his books that I’ve read since Embassytown, this short novel is a bit of a departure. It’s a study in voice and character that resists plot resolution in favor of mounting tonal stresses. Somewhat similar to Jeff VanderMeer’s Adaptation in that regard. And like that book, one I found pleasant enough while reading, but didn’t overly impress. I liked seeing a stylistic departure, though, even if it wasn’t my favorite thing of his I’ve read.
  2. Beasts & Children by Amy Parker – Amy is a friend from grad school, and her debut is a collection of linked short stories that look at caretaking as understood by children from their parents, parents toward their children, and humans toward animals. Each of these stories is strong on it’s own, but there’s a delightful momentum as you watch the main characters grow into adults, meet each other, face old problems from new angles with the weight of personal history behind them. The book gets better and better as it goes along.
  3. Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte – Another debut from a grad school friend. Tony’s novel has been getting deservedly glowing reviews all over the place, for its hyperliterate prose, its blistering satirical edge, and its photorealistic capturing of a familiar millennial mood. I read this straight through in less than a day, and then went back and re-read chapters that had lodged especially deeply.
  4. Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman, J. H. Williams III, Dave Stewart – Probably my favorite thing I’ve read by Neil Gaiman since The Graveyard Book, with typically astonishing art from J. H. Williams III. Made me want to go back and reread all of Sandman.
  5. Odd John by Olaf Stapeldon – I’m continually impressed with the breadth of Stapledon’s imagination, and how many of his ideas have since been reinvented and made cliche in ways he could never have anticipated. Odd John is the story of the birth, rearing, and death of a superhuman, perhaps an early member of one of the species of humanity described in Last and First Men. I found this book completely enjoyable right up until chapter 16, where there’s a huge knot of anthropological racism: a superhuman from Africa is characterized in ways that read to the modern eye as buffoonish stereotypes. The volume on such caricatures is turned down thereafter, but never quite goes to zero. It’s a shame, because the book is otherwise wonderful.

My Friends Write Things: Hurricanes and Hauntings

Fiction

  • Kingdom by the Sea” by Amy Parker – I was lucky enough to see an early draft of this story, a glorious, intense reimagining of Lolita. It’s like a literary vivisection, using scalpels historical, critical, fictional to slice away twitching layers of Humbert Humbert and extract a personal narrative for Dorothy Haze.
  • The Invention of Separate People” by Kevin Brockmeier – Kevin is one of our greatest living fantasists, and if you’ve never read him before it’s time to start. This story was originally published in Unstuck, and is about a world where people are themselves, yes, but also everyone else. Everyone is one person, until someone (everyone) begins to learn how to be separate.
  • Skin Suit” by Janalyn Guo – The main character is a lump of dark, amorphous matter that must wear taxidermied suits to appear human, but its parents are two planes of brilliant light, and it’s time for a family reunion.
  • Horror Story” by Carmen Machado – This time Carmen’s penned a creepy tale of crumbling relationships and haunted houses. Read it in the dark.
  • The Game of Smash and Recovery” by Kelly Link – It’s a Kelly Link story. That should be all you need to know, but I’ll add that this story is Kelly’s take on space opera, and dedicated to Iain M. Banks.

Nonfiction

Poetry

My Friends Write Things: Many friends, many things

We need a word for the feeling of being unable to keep up with the art output of all one’s clever friends. Here’s a start. More to come.

Fiction

  • Inscape by Yaa Gyasi – Gifty, a middle-aged literary scholar, must start caring for her Ghanaian mother, who believes she has been tasked by god with writing the next books of the bible. An immigrant and person of lost faith, Gifty revisits a lifetime of identity struggles as she learns her mother anew.
  • Tobacconist by Anna Noyes – a short short about a family man who fantasizes about, and then fantasizes about not fantasizing about, the affections of a stranger.
  • Woman at Exhibition by E. Lily Yu – I heard Lily read this at ICFA. A woman becomes part of an ambiguous history when she is moved by compulsion to eat an Edward Hopper painting on display at the Whitney. A story about gender politics and relationships between artists.
  • Subduction by Paul M. Berger – Oliver has a memory that only goes back four weeks and a compulsion to visit areas of geological instability. The engraved wristwatch he was wearing said he was a hero, but he can’t remember why, so he pawned it. And littering the edges of his incomprehensible life are small things with big teeth that no one else seems to notice.
  • The Fisher Queen by Alyssa Wong – Lily is fifteen, a deckhand on a trawler, and too old to believe anymore the family legend that her mother was a fish. A beautifully written story of disillusionment.

Nonfiction

  • Unmasking the Glow by Alea Adigwame –Swirling and imagistic rumination on sex work and self regard. “I think, or, at least, like to think, that, at the substratum of my allure, rests an exhaustive knowledge of the contours of shame that permits me, ever increasingly, to revel in the lavishness of my imperfections, instead mincing them into everythingness with an analytical santoku. Self-compassion, I have learned, is communicable.”

The Bookbinder’s Guide to Destroying the Universe: three views of the magnitude of the Library of Babel

Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Library of Babel” has long been an obsession of mine. The 1941 short story1 posits a library that contains every possible book-length2 combination of words. It’s probably my second-favorite short story; I think about it all the time and teach it whenever I can. I once even wrote a program to output the digits of 251,312,000, the number of distinct books the Library of Babel contains, which produced a 2Mb text file of mostly zeros. So when my friend Tony Tulathimutte (about whom I’ve written before) asked me to consult on a “Library of Babel”-inspired essay he is writing on the algorithmic generation of literature, I was happy to help. Tony asked:

Even if 251,312,000 is beyond astronomically large, I’m interested in getting as close as possible to a non-theoretical implementation of the Library. Can we work on a Fermi estimate of what it would take to assemble the library? Like, if we distributed the workload to every computer on Earth, or used the world’s fastest supercomputer (China’s Tianhe-2, 33.86 petaflops), or even assembled a Douglas-Adams-style Deep Thought Computational Matrix made of human brains (the human brain runs at an estimated 36.8 petaflops)? Or if Moore’s law holds, at what point would the processing power on Earth suffice to create the Library within the lifespan of the universe.

This is a completely reasonable question, but one that illustrates just how unnatural it is to think about numbers that are “beyond astronomically large.” The number of books in the Library of Babel is so big, no set of adjectives can meaningfully capture its hugeness. After all, things like petaflops or the computational capacity of the human brain are also too big to really conceptualize. So it makes sense that one might treat them all as members in equal standing of the Numbers Too Big To Think About club. But they aren’t. Here are three illustrations of the absurd magnitude of the Library of Babel.

1. Time

First we’ll look at the initial question, how long would it take to generate the Library of Babel? Instead of addressing it the way Tony suggests, though, let’s approach the problem from the opposite direction: what is the fastest it’s possible to imagine generating the Library of Babel?

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle implies that there is a smallest possible size something can be, and a shortest possible time in which something can happen. These minimum quantities are built in to the basic workings of the universe, and are called the Planck units. The Planck time is equal to about 5.391 x 10-44 seconds. It isn’t physically possible for an event to occur in less time than that. Let’s imagine that we have computers capable of generating one Library of Babel Book (LoBB) per unit of Planck time. How many of these computers? Let’s be ambitious: through some impossible alchemy, we will now turn every single atom in the observable universe into a computer capable of generating one LoBB per unit of Planck time.

There are on the order of 1080 atoms in the observable universe. So let’s say we have that many computers… what’s that? Oh, you’re asking, “but what about dark matter?” It’s true. Scientists think there might be five times as much dark matter in the universe as there are atoms. So let’s be generous and bump it up ten times. We’ll say with have 1081 computers, each of which generates one LoBB per unit of Planck time. So, if we have 1081 computers generating about 1043 LoBBs per second, that means we generate 10124 LoBBs every second, 10131 LoBBs per year.

There are 251,312,000 possible LoBBs, which is on the order of 101,834,097. At a rate of 10131 LoBBs per year, it will take 101,833,966 years to finish making the whole Library, or on the order of 10106. Take a quick look at Wikipedia’s timeline of the far future. You’ll notice that the time when we finish making the Library at the fastest imaginable rate would be one of the last items on the list, coming well after the entire universe is a cold, dead, iron cinder.

So the answer to Tony’s question is: never.

2. World Enough

But maybe you noticed that I cheated a little. I said I would consider the fastest it’s possible to imagine generating LoBBs, but calculated based on the fastest it would be physically possible to make them. We can imagine things faster than that, though. We can imagine just snapping our fingers and–poof!–a complete Library of Babel made in an instant. So, why not? Let’s consider that case. We now have the power to instantly assemble a Library of Babel.

Assemble it… out of what? I mean, what are we going to make the literal books out of? Not out of atoms; we already said that there are, generously, 1081 atoms worth of matter in the observable universe. Even if we could somehow encode a LoBB in every atom, we wouldn’t come close to making 10106 of them. Not even if we could make a LoBB out of every subatomic particle.

The universe just doesn’t have enough stuff in it to make the Library of Babel.

3. Vaster Than Empires

So let’s add more stuff. We’ve already given ourselves the power to instantly reconfigure every atom in the universe. Why not give ourself the power to make new matter out of nothing while we’re at it? What happens then?

Turns out, even if we could conjure enough new matter to make the Library of Babel, the universe itself would be too small to hold it.

There’s a weird and fascinating result from black hole physics called the holographic principle, which says that all the information needed to describe a volume of space, down to the minutest quantum detail, only ever takes as much space to encode as the surface area of the volume.3 That is, if you wanted to write down all the information necessary to perfectly describe every detail of what’s inside a room, you would always be able to fit all the information on just the walls. In this way, the entire universe can be thought of as a three dimensional projection of what is, on the level of information, a strictly two dimensional system. Sort of like a hologram, which is 2D but looks 3D, a metaphor from which the principle gets its name.

In any normal region of the universe, the amount of information in a given volume will actually be much less than what you could encode on its surface area. For reasons having to do with thermodynamics that are too complicated to go into here, when you max out the amount of information a volume of space can contain, what you have is a black hole.4 Now, remember those Planck units from the beginning? Length was one of them; there’s a smallest possible size that the laws of nature will let something be, and we can use that length to define a new unit, the Planck area. The most efficient possible encoding of information, per the holographic principle, is one bit per unit of Planck area, which is on the order of 10-70 square meters.

The observable universe has a radius of around 4.4 x 1026 meters. That gives it a surface area on the order of 1053 square meters, which means it can hold 10123 bits of information. That’s just the observable universe though; the whole universe is much, much bigger. We aren’t sure exactly how much bigger, it isn’t observable. But inflationary universe theory, which just got some strong confirming evidence, provides an estimate that the whole universe is 3 x 1023 times larger than the part of the universe we can see. Carry out the same calculations, and the estimated size of the whole universe means that it can contain 10170 bits of information. As for the Library, if you assume that it takes a string of at least six bits to encode one of a set of 25 characters, then the whole Library of Babel would require a number of bits on the order, once again, of 10106. Even if we demiurgic librarians do violate the law of conservation of energy to bring the Library into being, the entire universe would collapse into a black hole long before we finished our project.

So: the Library of Babel is so large that the universe isn’t going to be around long enough to make it. And even if it was, there isn’t enough matter and energy to do it. And even if there was, before that point all of reality as we know it would be destroyed. That is how extreme things can get when you start dealing with “beyond astronomically large” numbers.


  1. There is a version of the story online, but I much prefer the translation by Andrew Hurley in Collected Fictions. 

  2. As described by Borges: 25 symbols, 40 symbols per line, 80 lines per page, 410 pages. 

  3. I’ve previously posted a video to an excellent introduction to the holographic principle. You can find that here

  4. This is because, physically speaking, information is the same thing as entropy. 

Tabclosing

  • You Are What You Tweet” – Tony Tulathimutte writes for The New Yorker about the pernicious culture of personal branding with his characteristic intelligence and cutting irony. Mark Zuckerberg, Paula Deen, and Jean Baudrillard all get name-checks.
  • 9 Questions About Britain You Were Too Embarrassed to Ask” – Overview of Teju Cole’s twitter parody of the current rhetoric around US intervention in the Syrian civil war.
  • A petition to name the San Francisco Bay Bridge after Emperor Norton. Come on, San Francisco. If anyplace is cool enough to get this done, it’s you. This particular opportunity is made all the more perfect by Norton himself having called for the construction of that very bridge. Let’s win one for whimsy.
  • The Ecuadorian Library” – Bruce Sterling on Snowden, Assange, and the NSA.
  • Mused: A Day at the Park” – A lovely little comic by Kostas Kiriakakis.
  • Three Gray Fandoms” – Ursula Vernon writes, in the aftermath of WorldCon, about fandoms other than SF that skew old, and how they don’t actively drive away young people as SF does.