The Babelian algorithms

If you are reading this blog, chances are you have read Jorges Luis Borges' Library of Babel, which opens its shelves unto the infinite:

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one's fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances. In the hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite ... Light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant.

The idea of the story is persistently appropriated and repurposed, some even postulating a VHS version. But I suspect most take it as a given that the fantastic realm envisioned by this fiction is a logical impossibility, a metaphysical experiment that no earthly physic could realize, created by an author who viewed mathematics as a branch of fantastic literature. Now, an American math professor has released a tome which extrapolates the rules articulated into the story to provide an actual plan for the library. From Alberto Manguel's review in the New York Sun:

In 1939, employed in a small municipal library of Buenos Aires where the oafishness of his colleagues made him weep with daily frustration, the 40-year-old (and still largely unknown) Jorge Luis Borges collected a few of the reading notes he had made on the streetcar to and from work, and pieced together a short text which, under the title "The Total Library," he sent to the magazine Sur, where it appeared in the August issue. The essay, which links the names of Democritus, Lewis Carroll, Cicero, and the forgotten German fantasy writer Kurd Lasswitz, was developed a couple of years later into another, slightly longer one, "The Library of Babel," which Borges eventually included in his collection "The Garden of Forking Paths" (later expanded under the title of "Ficciones"). The end-paper pages of William Goldbloom Bloch's "The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel" (Oxford University Press, 192 pages, $19.95) reproduce the first and last pages of Borges's manuscript, showing that it was written (in what Borges called "the handwriting of a dwarf") on accounting sheets with the heading Haber, or "Credit," in Gothic letters that magically make the "H" look like a "B" and the "r" like an "l."



(I have always reveled in those images of Borges the branch librarian writing his ficciones on the streetcar, elucidating the mysterious epic wonder latent in the most mundande and tranquil everyday as the wheels slowly trundle through the leafy avenues. Perhaps an anachronism on my part, but I consider that commute to the fantastic the bookend to Che's motorcycle road trip.)

Manguel summarizes Bloch's approach to the problem:

In Borges's imagining, the Library of Babel itself is a building composed of an indefinite number of hexagonal galleries. A ventilation shaft in the center of each allows the visitor to see the floors above and below, in endless sequence. Each wall of each hexagon holds 32 books of identical size; each book has 410 pages; each page, 40 lines; each line, approximately 80 letters. All possible combinations of the 25 orthographic symbols make up the books; therefore, every conceivable book must exist in the monstrous library. In his story, Borges gives just a few examples of what might be found here: "the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of the true catalogue ..."

The numbers he chose for the shelves and books in his story, Borges later confessed, were simply those of the municipal library in which he worked — and which he himself found so horrible. "Learned critics," he noted later, with some evident pleasure, "studied these figures and generously lent them a mystical significance." Mr. Bloch, with similar generosity, and in an exercise he himself describes as "tedious, uninspired, but straightforward" if carried out in full, asks whether our entire universe could in fact contain this dizzying number of books. Even if it could (if the size of the library, as Borges suggests, coincided with that of the universe), the inconceivably vast space would make it impossible for a human librarian to even barely begin its exploration. Walking 60 miles a day for 100 years, notes Mr. Bloch, our vigorous librarian would only travel a distance slightly less than that which light covers in two minutes. "To cross our universe, which is incomprehensibly dwarfed by the Library, light would need to travel for a least 15 billion years." It would take a librarian, moving at the leisurely pace of a connoisseur, considerably longer — a mathematical certainty that mirrors the nightmarish vision Borges said he wished to convey.




That would make a hell of a next generation module of Myst.

A Universe of Books: Borges's 'Library of Babel', Alberto Manguel, The New York Sun, September 24, 2008

Amazon: The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel, by William Goldbloom Bloch

Chaos, Porsches, and speculative poetry

At Get Your War On, the last installment before the election, on the consequences of being imprisoned in a PF Chang's and the entertainment value of an unhinged prez.

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

For an antidote, check out some of the beautiful readings just online at the virtual home of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Science fiction poetry is a neglected intersection of genres, but the emergence of forums like Strange Horizons has provided an opportunity for reliable commercial markets that has helped promote the field in the past few years. I love the good stuff, which better than most contemporary prose SF shows how the science fictional sensibility is really about shining a flashlight inside the cavern of contemporary consciousness. Among my favorites from this selection are Karen Romanko's "The Biology Building," Deborah Kolodji's "A Canoe in Night Waters," and "The Quince Bedroom" by the consistently great David Kopaska-Merkel. And yes, I share your impression that the members of the SFPA make up those power names under which they write.




And in the economic news, a wonderful NYT analysis of how the Teutonic automotive engineers at Porsche (a private company) brilliantly out-cornered the hedge funds. Having run into one distressed hedge fund manager friend at lunch yesterday, I am assured the pain is very real. For some reason I found this story wonderfully riddled with cyberpunk shivers.



October 31, 2008
HIGH & LOW FINANCE
A Clever Move by Porsche on VW’s Stock

By FLOYD NORRIS
On Wall Street, a corner is not just an intersection of two streets. It is also a way to extract huge profits from speculators who had the temerity to sell a stock short.

Now the question is whether Porsche has pulled off a brilliant new-fashioned corner in Volkswagen stock, using derivatives in clever ways that no one had thought of before, or whether it was too clever for its own good.

In a corner, a buyer or group of buyers buys a lot of stock. As the price goes up, short-sellers appear. They borrow stock — perhaps from the very same group — and sell it, hoping to make a profit when the price declines.

Then comes the squeeze. The group, which now owns more shares than exist, demands the return of the borrowed stock. The only way the short-sellers can comply with that request is to purchase shares, and the only one who has shares to sell is the corner group. The group can set its own price, and make a fortune.

One reason you don’t see many corners these days is that they are illegal in most countries. But another is that almost everybody involved tends to lose in the end, with the exception of lucky investors who happened to own the stock before the fun started and can sell into the big run-up in prices.

Those who execute corners usually make lots of money from the short-sellers. But they end up owning a company for which they paid too much. The stock is delisted from the stock exchange, since there no longer are enough public shareholders, so there is no ready market for the stock. If the group that executed the corner used borrowed money, they may be in big trouble.

In the 1920s, the most famous corner in the United States was in stock in Piggly Wiggly, a grocery store chain. The corner was successful, but the man who executed it eventually went broke.

But there have been successful corners. Cornelius Vanderbilt once pulled one off, with members of the New York City Council as the victims. They had tried to profit by shorting a railroad company Vanderbilt controlled, and then revoking the company’s principal asset, a license to operate a street railway. Vanderbilt bought shares, and kept the price from falling. Owning more shares than there were outstanding, he offered to let the council members cover their short positions with only small losses, if they reinstated the license. They did.

The big loser in that corner was a legendary speculator, Daniel Drew, who had proposed the idea to the council members. He was forced to purchase shares at very high prices.

It is Drew who is credited with the saying “He who sells what isn’t his’n, must buy it back or go to pris’n.”

For the cornerer, there is also the risk that rules will change when powerful people get in trouble. That was one of the things that broke the Hunt brothers’ attempted corner in silver back in 1980. The authorities made it almost impossible to bet on silver prices rising, and the Hunts went broke.

Now, from Germany we have a new version of the corner, using derivatives in a way that may have removed much of the risk for the people planning the corner.

Briefly, here are the relevant facts: Porsche, for some reason, wants to control Volkswagen, and has been building up its stake, thereby driving up the price. Hedge funds, figuring the share price would fall as soon as Porsche got control and stopped buying, sold a lot of VW shares short.

Then last weekend, Porsche revealed that it owned 42.6 percent of the stock, and had acquired options for another 31.5 percent. It said it wanted to go to 75 percent.

The result: instant short-squeeze. The German state of Lower Saxony owns a 20 percent stake in VW, which it said it would not sell. That left precious few shares available for anyone else. The shorts scrambled to cover, and the price leaped from about 200 euros to a high of over 1,000 euros. VW became the world’s most valuable company, if you believed that market price.

It appears that Porsche put one over on whoever wrote that option, or options. The options are said to be cash-settled, although we do not know much more about them than that. That means Porsche does not have to buy the shares — which it might have a lot of trouble paying for. Instead, at settlement it merely has to accept the cash difference between the market price and the price it has agreed to pay. The result could be tens of billions of euros in profits, without the headache of owning shares no one else wants to buy.

There has been a lot of speculation about who is on the hook for those options. Of course, those people may have used other derivatives to lay off some of their risk on who-knows-who-else. That is one result of having opaque markets, which Wall Street used to love because it made for higher profit margins. Now it may be one more loss for some already reeling bank or banks.

After all this is done, the VW share price will fall to some more reasonable level. And there are rumors that Porsche has purchased put options, presumably with later exercise dates, to profit from that fall.

By Tuesday night, the establishment was fighting back. Germany’s premier stock index, the DAX, was changed to cut VW’s proportion in it. That allowed index funds to sell stock, adding to the supply of shares, and VW’s shares are back to about 500 euros.

In the United States, there are numerous laws and regulations to stop corners. But Porsche insists it broke no German laws, adding that “allegations of price manipulation by Porsche are therefore without any foundation whatsoever.” It placed the blame on — you guessed it — “speculative short sellers.”

If this works, Porsche will have made billions from a car company at a time when cars are not selling very well. It will not have done that by selling cars, but a profit is a profit.

Of course, rules can be changed, as Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt learned. The brothers angrily protested that it was unfair to change the rules in the middle of the game, but the rules were changed and the brothers went from billionaires to bankrupts.

If it comes to a question of whether regulators step in, Porsche has the advantage of facing off against short-selling hedge funds. There may not be a less popular group of investors, and their losses would provoke little sympathy.

But banks now have friends in high places. If Porsche’s option coup threatens a major bank, the bank might ask for help. Will governments step in to protect their investments? Stay tuned.

Vroom.

MEMORY: 28

First
Previous

Parric stiffened. “And you are contacting...?”

Djserka gave Parric a sour look. “And just when, exactly, have I had the luxury of free time to do such a thing? Between your special diet and Her Imperial Majesty’s menu changes-- Do you know how difficult it is to recruit enough Peq for a dinner harvest?”

Parric relaxed slightly. “May I be asking how you are to contacting Rapteer?”

“A trans-cosm beacon, of course,” Djserka said, as if Parric had asked the stupidest question imaginable. “I can show it to you, if you think it’s important.”

Parric nodded, and Djserka led him through the kitchens to the staff lockers. “Here it is,” Djserka said, retrieving it from a locker and passing it to Parric. “A low-end design, if you ask me. No provisions for using the beacon as a carrier signal for data. Just a dumb beacon.”

Parric examined it carefully. It was a translucent oblong box that impossibly seemed to spiral in on itself--a typical visual paradox of the multidimensional design. The transmitter hadn’t been activated. It had no dataport. As Djserka had indicated, it wasn’t very sophisticated.

“You and Rapteer aren’t on, shall we say, amicable terms, are you?”

“It is complicating. Actualling, we are never meeting yet,” Parric said. “But no, I’m not thinking we are amicable.”

“Then I feel, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I don’t believe this the only beacon he secreted within the palace,” Djserka said. “Although I am not inclined to spread rumors--as I’ve said, I myself am not privy to any of their discussions--talk about the palace has it that Rapteer departed shortly after His Imperial Majesty learned of his beacons and confronted him on the matter.”

Parric considered the information. “Is this when His Imperial Majesty is beginning collection of Nexial gaps?”

“Possibly. Access to the gaps was restricted the following day.”

Parric bowed his head and rubbed his wing fingers between his three sets of eyes. “I am fearing this is a trap I’m leading Flavius and myself right intoing.”


Djserka gave Parric a considering look. “You have one of the most peculiar speech patterns I’ve ever encountered.”

Parric nodded. “So I am hearing. My I be asking one more favoring of you?”

“That must certainly depend on the nature of the favor requested.”

“Where are the they holding the gaps? I’m fearing we must soon departing quickly, and finding them on my own will be taking much time.”

Djserka glanced to the kitchen then back at Parric. “Well, that would solve my difficulty of preparing your special meals...” Djserka shuffled over to the kitchen. “Em Kleemjun!”

One of the other Naga-ed-der snapped to attention. “Yes, em Djserka?”

“You are in charge until I return. The starlight swim isn’t until midnight, but I want the appetizers arranged and waterproofed by the time I get back.”

“You are having my thanks,” Parric said.

“Don’t thank me too quickly, Crafter. I’m only doing this to lighten my workload. We’re not merely understaffed and undersupplied, we’re grossly so.”

Parric followed Djserka through the kitchen and out a door on the far side. They entered an open shaft with a narrow, spiral stair winding along the circumference. Djserka looped a strand of silk from its spinnerettes to an anchor on the landing.

“Can you follow? Stairs are unpleasant for me.”

“Of coursing.”

Djserka lurched forward and vanished over the edge. Parric followed.

Parric’s wings blurred as he hovered in the center of the shaft. Already Djserka was several floors below, dropping in a controlled, tethered fall that was as much an aerial dance as anything. Parric slowed his wings and descended.

The shaft went on far longer than Parric expected. When Djserka stopped on a landing two levels from the bottom, Parric estimated they’d traversed nearly the entire height of the palace.

Djserka inclined its head as if it knew what Parric was thinking. “The petite dining hall is indeed in the central palace tower. The main banquet hall is six levels below it. Our stores are between the two. It’s not entirely convenient, but we make do.”

“Are we nearing to the gaps?”

“Yes, Crafter. We’re almost there,” Djserka said, leading Parric through a narrow corridor to a small door that blocked the way. “The doors from the central lifts are guarded, but nobody uses the open stairwells other than em Naga-ed-der bringing orders from the kitchen or collecting imported foodstuffs.” Djserka turned and gave Parric an almost conspiratorial look. “You’d never have gotten this far otherwise.”

“Then I’m thanking you again. And His Imperial Majesty will be thanking you, too, as it is his wishings that Flavius and I be departing,” Parric said.

“I’ll take your word on that, Crafter. I’ve learned to avoid direct contact with anyone with ‘Imperial’ in their title,” Djserka said, going through the door.

It opened into a shallow recess, shielded from the larger chamber by a wall. Unnatural, metallic groaning filled the air, setting Parric’s antennae alert. Djserka’s spines bristled. Voices shouted and barked orders unintelligibly. A foreboding energy crackled throughout the room.

“Something’s not right here,” Djserka said, pulling back. “We must go. Now.”

Parric ignored him, sliding forward to peek into the chamber.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of Nexial gaps pulsed in the center of the room, tethered in place by flickering anchor threads. Normally imperceptible to even Parric’s multiple eyes, the sheer concentration of gaps made them fleetingly visible even to more mundane senses. Four technicians with supplemental prosthetic arms manned control stations around the gaps, cursing freely as they rapidly worked. A dozen Eternal Militiamen in silver-streaked turquoise armor stood about the chamber, cuayabs held ready.

Parric pulled back. “This isn’t the terminal I’m arriving at on previous visitings.”

“That’s the public gap access. It’s been closed and that Nexial gap relocated here, with the others. This terminal is more cargo oriented... among other things. Can we please leave now?”

“Yes, I’m seeing all I need--”

“They’re coming through again!” an urgent voice shouted in the chamber.

Parric jerked back around. The collected gaps shuddered and twitched in disturbing ways.

“Steady now,” one of the techs said. “They’re trying a dispersed penetration this time, random across the grid.”

“I’m getting spikes from three of my gaps,” another said.

“Only three? That shouldn’t--”

A shape lunged through a gap, massive and grasping. The unnatural groan turned to a harsh shriek and alarms blared throughout the chamber. It slammed against the floor then rose again, tooth-filled mouth gaping. It was a foothead.

“Compensate! Compensate! Increase the feed to your containment six percent!”

As quickly as it’d broken through, the shape vanished back into the gap.

Parric retreated down the narrow corridor, featherscales ruffled and antennae twitching nervously.

“You know what that thing is?” Djserka asked, chasing along behind Parric.

“Yes. It is being a moironteau.”

“A moironteau? And what’s that?”

“It is proof,” Parric said without breaking stride, “that you are correcting in thinking Rapteer is leaving more beacons in the palace.”

Continued

SFWA statement on Google/Author’s Guild settlement

Wearing my other hat as SFWA PR flack, I thought interested parties might be interested in this:

CHESTERTOWN, Md. -- The announcement on Oct. 28, 2008, of a potential settlement between Google and the Author’s Guild is significant news for many authors, including no few members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). At this time, SFWA has no official standing as an organization in the suit, but it is critical to our mission that we advise our affected members and potential members to the best our ability until more information about the outcome of this suit is known.

The proposed settlement itself is a very detailed document, well over 300 pages. SFWA advises all holders of copyright protected material to visit http://books.google.com, and do a search to determine if their work has been made available via Google Books.

There are several potential problems in this proposed settlement, not the least of which is that copyright owners must “opt-out” of the class, rather than opt-in. Put another way, unless a copyright owner chooses not to participate in the class action suit settlement, they will be presumed as a participant. In addition, the notion that the onus of protecting copyrighted material should fall on those who haven’t made it available in an unauthorized form is outrageous. It should be Google’s responsibility to ensure that every text made available on Google Books is authorized prior to it being made available on the site.

The contract issues are not simple: many works assumed to be in the public domain may not be, additional works may have been made available without regard to whether or not a given publisher has obtained the proper rights from the authors, and even more works may have been put online without the author having been made aware of it.

SFWA’s advice to its members, and to others in the writing community, is to review the information online carefully and consult with an attorney prior to deciding what steps to take next. We will certainly be watching to see how the court responds to the proposed settlement. Be advised that nothing contained in this statement should be construed as legal advice.

Procedurally speaking, here is what affected parties can expect:

First, the most-important piece of information: The “official settlement website” is at http://books.google.com/booksrightsholders. The various parties have committed to keeping this up to date.

Second, there is no obligation to participate in the settlement, retain counsel or pay any filing fee (or any other kind of fee) to either participate in or “opt out” of the settlement. Only a party who chooses to actively oppose the settlement will be subject to any fees of any kind, and then only in certain procedural respects. DO NOT PAY ANY MONEY OR FEE TO ANYONE REGARDING THIS SETTLEMENT, UNLESS YOU HAVE SPECIFICALLY CHOSEN TO HIRE SOMEONE TO REPRESENT YOU.

Third, parties to the settlement will (or, at least, are supposed to) get a formal notice of the settlement and its basic terms. These notices are supposed to be sent between Jan. 5 and Feb. 27, 2009 (Settlement Agreement, Attachment H, paragraphs 16-18). After receipt of the notice, parties will have until May 5, 2009 to formally opt out of the settlement (id., paragraph 15), or as ordered by the court (but not earlier than that date) to formally object to the terms of the settlement while not opting out.

To “opt out” of the settlement means that a particular party agrees that he/she will not claim any benefits from the settlement; conversely, it also means he/she accepts no responsibilities imposed by the settlement, including any acknowledgement that the settlement might bind or prevent a party from suing independently (or taking any other action). Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a party CANNOT be charged any fee for either option. However, if a given individual is within the class definitions and does not explicitly and formally opt out by following the opt-out procedures in the Notice, that person WILL be included in the class and bound by the settlement.

One last note: This settlement is not set in stone. The judge must approve it as fair and appropriate. He may order modifications--sometimes quite substantial--or reject it entirely. His decision to do so will depend, at least in part, on what any objectors to the settlement have to say in their formal filings. This is NOT the time or place to send an outraged note. Objecting to a proposed class settlement is a highly technical matter and requires the advice of experienced counsel--please seek that advice prior to taking any action.

As noted above, SFWA will continue to monitor this matter and as additional information becomes available, we will share that with our membership.

Sincerely,

Russell Davis
President, Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. (SFWA)

Rock to fill the big white spaces

If you're in the Twin Cities (David Schwartz! Tom Kaczynski! Haddayr Copley-Woods!) and looking for a good excuse to bang the head of your Halloween costume, then you need to go check out Friday night's performance at the Turf Club in St. Paul by Zebulon Pike, Minneapolis' finest practitioners of post-metal.

Midwestern art rock!

In the pantheon of well-regarded American regional genres, you don't hear much about things Midwestern. You have your surf music, Southern writers, Tex-Mex, L.A. hardcore, Kansas City Jazz, New Orleans Dixieland, and so on. What about Omaha? As a native of the region, I have always felt this is an oversight. Critical analysis generally misses the things inherently Midwestern about the artistic expressions of those who live there, no doubt because Midwesterners are so good at avoiding drawing attention to themselves, which can be a handicap for rock stars and would-be bestsellers.

Midwesterners, I postulate, are the primary progenitors of the finest vintages of wry sarcasm infecting the American narrative (think David Letterman and his kin). They do irony with feeling — masters of being smart-ass funny and quiet cry poignant at the same time. The kind of people who could articulate a fresh take on the raw emotion of a teenager wistfully listening to an old Neil Young song while simultaneously ridiculing the treacly sentiment with all the biting edge that Germano-Scandinavian farm people reserve for the secret hazing rituals practiced on adolescents when the wind chill is just right.

When wielded by deft hands, the Midwestern emotional instrument is the sharpest scalpel available for flaying the layers of sensibility of contemporary American life. When The Bad Plus take a worn-out AM radio staple like Vangelis' (Theme From) Chariots of Fire, dig deep into its hollow center with the bare tools of a jazz piano trio, apply equal measures of deconstruction and earnestness, and see what happens, they manage to explode the piece from the inside into something insane and new and now, while at the same time rediscovering the emotional potency of the original that had otherwise been diluted with years of crass commercialization and degeneration into cliche.

What The Bad Plus does for pop, Zebulon Pike does for hard rock. Doing honor to their namesake, the early 19th century military explorer who mapped huge quantities of the upper Midwest when it was mostly white space on a map, Zebulon Pike plays big music, post-metal with a clandestine jazz sentimentality, deep shit with a wink, the sound of a mid-continental thunderstorm pounding away at the barren plain, the sound of the town of Albert Lea being leveled by a 1970s cinematic natural disaster, the sound of ice cracking under your snowmobile hauling ass at freeway speeds over the fathoms of a dark lake. Bartok meets Judas Priest in the northbound lane of I-35.

(Unsurprising when you learn that one of Zebulon Pike's frontmen is Erik Fratzke of the punk jazz geniuses Happy Apple (along with drummer Dave King of The Bad Plus and reedman Michael Lewis.)

Check it out, and learn what it feels like when the you can see the horizon across twenty flat miles of denuded farmland washed over in forty shades of dishwater beige, the weather is below zero, the clouds are really scary, and a song comes on the radio that simultaneously captures the awe you are too embarassed to express out loud and makes you smile like turning the channel to a mind-blowing rerun of Land of the Lost.

(Welk-punk? When Lemmy from Motorhead finally gets his chance to fill in for Garrison Keillor on Prairie Home Companion, this will be the musical portion of the program.)



See also, Chicago's Pelican.

Jack me out

Just what you need to hear in the swirling socio-political doom bath of an imminent presidential election: science is identifying the future pathways to feeding digital media directly into your brain:

Scientific American (Nov. 12 issue): Jacking into the Brain--Is the Brain the Ultimate Computer Interface?
How far can science advance brain-machine interface technology? Will we one day pipe the latest blog entry or NASCAR highlights directly into the human brain as if the organ were an outsize flash drive?

...Primitive means of jacking in already reside inside the skulls of thousands of people. Deaf or profoundly hearing-impaired individuals carry cochlear implants that stimulate the auditory nerve with sounds picked up by a microphone—a device that neuroscientist Michael S. Gaz zaniga of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has characterized as the first successful neuroprosthesis in humans. Arrays of electrodes that serve as artificial retinas are in the laboratory. If they work, they might be tweaked to give humans night vision.

The more ambitious goal of linking Amazon.com directly to the hippocampus, a neural structure involved with forming memories, requires technology that has yet to be invented. The bill of particulars would include ways of establishing reliable connections between neurons and the extracranial world—and a means to translate a digital version of War and Peace into the language that neurons use to communicate with one another. An inkling of how this might be done can be sought by examining leading work on brain-machine interfaces.

Your Brain on Text
Jacking text into the brain requires consideration of whether to insert electrodes directly into tissue, an impediment that might make neural implants impractical for anyone but the disabled. As has been known for nearly a century, the brain’s electrical activity can be detected without cracking bone. What looks like a swimming cap studded with electrodes can transmit signals from a paralyzed patient, thereby enabling typing of letters on a screen or actual surfing of the Web. Niels Birbaumer of the University of Tübingen in Germany, a leading developer of the technology, asserts that trial-and-error stimulation of the cortex using a magnetic signal from outside the skull, along with the electrode cap to record which neurons are activated, might be able to locate the words “see” or “run.” Once mapped, these areas could be fired up again to evoke those memories—at least in theory.

Some neurotechnologists think that if particular words reside in specific spots in the brain (which is debatable), finding those spots would probably require greater precision than is afforded by a wired swim cap. One of the ongoing experiments with invasive implants could possibly lead to the needed fine-level targeting. Philip R. Kennedy of Neural Signals and his colleagues designed a device that records the output of neurons. The hookup lets a stroke victim send a signal, through thought alone, to a computer that interprets it as, say, a vowel, which can then be vocalized by a speech synthesizer, a step toward forming whole words. This type of brain-machine interface might also eventually be used for activating individual neurons.

Still more precise hookups might be furnished by nanoscale fibers, measuring 100 nanometers or less in diameter, which could easily tap into single neurons because of their dimensions and their electrical and mechanical properties. Jun Li of Kansas State University and his colleagues have crafted a brushlike structure in which nano fiber bristles serve as electrodes for stimulating or receiving neural signals. Li foresees it as a way to stimulate neurons to allay Parkinson’s disease or depression, to control a prosthetic arm or even to flex astronauts’ muscles during long spaceflights to prevent the inevitable muscle wasting that occurs in zero gravity.

Learning the Language
Fulfilling the fantasy of inputting a calculus text—or even plugging in Traveler’s French before going on vacation—would require far deeper insight into the brain signals that encode language and other neural representations.

Unraveling the neural code is one of the most imposing challenges in neuroscience—and, to misappropriate Freud, would likely pave a royal road to an understanding of consciousness. Theorists have advanced many differing ideas to explain how the billions of neurons and trillions of synapses that connect them can ping meaningful messages to one another. The oldest is that the code corresponds to the rate of firing of the voltage spikes generated by a neuron.

Whereas the rate code may suffice for some stimuli, it might not be enough for booting a Marcel Proust or a Richard Feynman, supplying a mental screen capture of a madeleine cake or the conceptual abstraction of a textbook of differential equations. More recent work has focused on the precise timing of the intervals between each spike (temporal codes) and the constantly changing patterns of how neurons fire together (population codes).

Some help toward downloading to the brain might come from a decadelong endeavor to build an artificial hippocampus to help people with memory deficits, which may have the corollary benefit of helping researchers gain insights into the coding process. A collaboration between the University of Southern California and Wake Forest University has worked to fashion a replacement body part for this memory-forming brain structure. The hippocampus, seated deep within the brain’s temporal lobe, sustains damage in stroke or Alzheimer’s. An electronic bypass of a damaged hippocampus could restore the ability to create new memories. The project, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, might eventually go further, enhancing normal memory or helping to deduce the particular codes needed for high- level cognition.

The two groups—led by Theodore W. Berger at U.S.C. and Samuel Deadwyler at Wake Forest—are preparing a technical paper showing that an artificial hippocampus took over from the biological organ the task of consolidating a rat’s memory of pressing a lever to receive a drop of water. Normally the hippocampus emits signals that are relayed to cortical areas responsible for storing the long-term memory of an experience. For the experiment, a chemical temporarily incapacitated the hippocampus. When the rat pressed the correct bar, electrical input from sensory and other areas of the cortex were channeled through a microchip, which, the scientists say, dispatched the same signals the hippocampus would have sent. A demonstration that an artificial device mimicked hippocampal output would mark a step toward deducing the underlying code that could be used to create a memory in the motor cortex—and perhaps one day to unravel ciphers for even higher-level behaviors.

If the codes for the sentence “See Spot run”—or perhaps an entire technical manual—could be ascertained, it might, in theory, be possible to input them directly to an electrode array in the hippocampus (or cortical areas), evoking the scene in The Matrix in which instructions for flying a helicopter are downloaded by cell phone. Artificial hippocampus research postulates a scenario only slightly more prosaic. “The kinds of examples [the U.S. Department of Defense] likes to typically use are coded information for flying an F-15,” says Berger.

The seeming simplicity of the model of neural input envisaged by artificial hippocampus-related studies may raise more questions than it answers. Would such an implant overwrite existing memories? Would the code for the sentence “See Spot run” be the same for me as it is for you or, for that matter, a native Kurdish speaker? Would the hippocampal codes merge cleanly with other circuitry that provides the appropriate context, a semantic framework, for the sentence? Would “See Spot run” be misinterpreted as a laundry mishap instead of a trotting dog?

Unfortunately, I think the Drudge Report is already feeding directly into my brain. In anticipation of the upcoming digital conversion, I propose that the only media receiver in my home will be a vintage analog television cabinet, tuned to the nearest translator channel, which will display an ambient bath of that color the sky is turning.

MEMORY: 27

First
Previous

Sheepishly, Parric backed out of the way and found a corner beside the open doorway. Djserka stared him down until certain Parric was no longer a problem, then threw itself back into the food preparations.

Parric watched grudgingly as dish after dish made its way over the edge of the balcony, empty plates and stemware coming up on the return trip. Occasionally, he caught sight of a unique delicacy, some rare foodstuff prepared exclusively for the gastric inclinations of a Crafter of Onimik.

Parric’s stomach grumbled as he watched a fluttering swarm of fyrit--tethered to the serving tray by minuscule golden threads--taken down to his simulacrum. Such a waste. The three courses he’d sampled were flawlessly prepared, but they’d been comparatively small. Certainly not enough to constitute an entire meal.

The simulacrum would eat them all dutifully, of course. Then the intermingled mess would be unceremoniously dumped somewhere within the palace once the simulacrum dissipated.

Finally, after an interminably long time, dessert arrived in the form of gossamer-thin orbs filled with aromatic smoke of varying hues. Parric watched with a mixture of exasperation and impatience.

A passing peq caught Parric’s look and shook its head in sympathy. “Empty calories,” it grunted, then ambled on.

With sudden purpose, Djserka turned to Parric and loped forward. “What,” it demanded, “is so important that you feel compelled to barge into my kitchen, unannounced, uninvited, during the single most calamitous dinner of the entire cycle?”

“Now looking here--”

“Yes, yes. You’re a Crafter of Onimik and as such demand that one addresses you with proper respect and deference. I know all about that,” Djserka said with a mixture of contempt and boredom. “I can assure you that as one who’s served as head chef for the feuding Hauptfren Oligarchy for three cycles--three full cycles, not two and some balance of weeks mind you--there is nothing in this, yours or any other cosm that can properly strike fear into me. And I left their employ with uniformly excellent letters of recommendation. Quite a feat, considering the seventeen previous head chefs left their employ as compost.

“So if you have something to say to me, out with it. I haven’t got the time of the stomachs for your posturing.”

Parric opened his beak, thought better of it, then bowed forward in a gesture of supplication, folding his fore wings together before him. “Most skillfulling chef, please be forgiving my intruding manner, but I am somewhat pressing for time,” Parric began cautiously. “On my earlier visiting, we are not meeting, but you--I am assuming--are preparing for my eatings simple foods off your menu that I am not adversing to.”

Djserka grunted. “I remember. No proteins. No citric acids. The list goes on for at length.”

Parric nodded. “Yet this timing, you are very well prepared with not only consumables agreeable to me, but very, how am I saying... upscale entrees. I am wondering if you are preparing meals for other Crafters of Onimik?”

“You mean Rapteer?”

Parric’s antennae straightened despite himself. “Is this Rapteer red by any chance?”

Djserka’s nictating membranes slid over its eyes. “Just how many colors do your kind come in?”

“Mostlying green, out in the cosms,” Parric answered.

Djserka nodded, as if this made sense. “Rapteer is red. Arrived maybe a week after the excitement with your friend and Her Imperial Majesty. Stayed three days. His Imperial Majesty had several long conferences with him. Quite a picky eater, that Rapteer.”

“You are having much contact with Rapteer?”

“Too much. He was quite insistent on the types of food he was to be served. The trouble was, as I’m sure you’ll know, those items aren’t readily available in the easily accessible cosms for us. I had to dispatch half my staff at times to track down enough ingredients for a single meal. Since it appeared to me your kind would be making occasional appearances here, my intent was to build an extensive stock of ingredients so we wouldn’t be thrown into a panic each time one of you showed up to spend a week or so. But then Rapteer departed, and His Imperial Majesty gathered in all the Nexial gaps and sealed them.”

“Waiting a moment... His Imperial Majesty is sealing them after Rapteer is leaving?”

“My reaction exactly. How could I build our stock if my staff couldn’t enter the Nexus for procurement?” Djserka shook its head. “Then they started this urgent ‘Transfer to Eternal Prime’ exodus. Why they can open the gaps to transfer courtiers but not for official staff business is beyond me.”

“Are you knowing why His Imperial Majesty is sealing the gaps?” Parric asked, turning the information over in his mind. “Is Rapteer and the Emperor... hostiling toward each other?”

“No, they seemed cordial enough, but then again I never saw them up close,” Djserka answered. “If you must force me to hazard a guess, I’d say it was most likely because of you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. For some reason, Rapteer was as obsessed with you as you appear to be of him. Hounded me relentlessly with his questions, and as you know, I’d not even met you,” Djserka said with a sigh. “He went so far as to insist that I contact him if you returned to the palace.”

Continued