Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

Now let us propose that everyone out of some psychosis suddenly tetrated for “mouse,” but chose results pertaining only to “device for menu traversal and interface,” or if everyone tetrated for “rat,” but chose results pertaining only to “snitching to the authorities.” Auxiliary metonymic or synecdochic meanings would become primary, while the displaced primaries might have their meanings reinvested in alternative terms.

It took approx millions of speakers and thousands of writers over hundreds of years in tens of countries to semantically switch “invest” from its original sense, which was “to confer power on a person through clothing.” Now online it would take something as like one hundred thousand nonacademic and even nonpartisan people in pajamas approx four centiseconds each between checking their stocks to switch it back.

The connection is basically the point. Or the motion between two points is the connection. Basically nothing exists except in motion. Nothing exists unless transitive, transactional. Unless it joins. Unless its function is its bridging.

This is what we meant by mentioning the blankspots on the recordings, the empties. The gaps, the missing gaps. What is omitted from our recordings is all that links. Relations.

The algy itself was base 4, though not in the normative sense but in the way it expanded, the way it optimized by expansion, extending, stretching, from describing the world to prescribing the world, from connotative to denotative, mapping to manifest becoming. We had four criteria. Or better four questions. Four basic foundational questions the answers to which were transfinite to infinite.

Is what is being searched for a prescription, as like a name or title? “Vishnu,” say, or “Carbon Capital”? Or is what is being searched for a description ? As like “an engineer,” or “someone who can build our systems,” a “venture capital firm,” or “some entity that can finance us”? Could this description and/or prescription instead be linguistically proximal, to a most perfect result? Which is to say is the name transliterated scifi style, as like “vYshnOO,” or are we dealing with a typo, as like “caBRon capitOl,” “n gineer,” or “fin anceus”? Finally, and this is arduous, could the searchterms be in any way conceptually proximal, to a most perfect result? “Not Krishna but other god but Indian human,” “person whose job it is to build things,” “entity whose job it is to roll bank/bankroll,” and so on into subquestions pertaining to whose concept of “god” or “job” are we using? What is the sample size by which, and what is the scale by which, proximity is being defined? Our ideas of “job/god,” and/or your ideas of “god/job”—how to make them, how to make anything, mergeable?

We searched among the numbers for a name. Not among the numerals but the integers, which name the distances between.

A quadratic is a square or pertaining to squares, to both the object to be squared and the subject of squaring. Quadratic algys output in a duration proportional to the square of the size of their input. Applicable to algys simple, not complex. Used for kinding and sorting. The relationship of any 2D curve to any curved 3D form, whether spheroid, ellipsoid, cylinder, or cone, is quadric. The same as like the relationship between the value fluctuations of our respective portfolios. The Babylonians squared all shapes with quadratic equations, the Hindus and Buddhists with cubic equations, because they understood the worth of negatives. Angling with quartics had to wait for Europe, polynomials.

The deadline we had set for a name decision was our birthday, 1996. The day approached and we still had no storms in the brain, only in the algy, and Qui and Cull would not even respond to their own names let alone to suggestions.

The names Cubic, Cubics, Cubix, Cubiks, Cubicks, and even Q-bics were all already taken, both as like company names and dotcoms. All registered to a military contractor who bounced our emails.

The name Quartical did not test well with father and stepstepmother de Groeve who kept dangling a watchmaking future in front of Cull as like a hypnotizing pendulum and neither did Quadration impress the parents O’Quinn who kept reminding Qui he could always get back in touch with Microsoft while his brothers insisted that brogrammers genius as like he was should be getting paid by the codeline or even by the character.

Salvatrice Trapezzi would read the news, each new incorporation filing, for Affine, for Infdex, but if they had $10 million in capital we had 120 million documents identified. The narrative plot of online is that as like the number of sites that made the web increased, the number of hosts or domains that made the net did not, and it was just at this point in time that their stasis or even decrease was being felt, with capitalism and so democracy too in thrall to just a handful of corporations. We had to be one of that handful. The forefinger, which starts words, the pinky, which ends them. The ringfinger, which is bound to shift and second functions, as like in programming to code parentheses and brackets. The middle finger, we would be the middles if lucky. Not the first, not the last, but the strongest.

Raffaella proposed Etude, and Perspective.

We were partial to E-tude, with a hyphen, or Perspektiv, with a k. Also, Indagator.

Salvatrice: 2gether, GathR.

Heather: FrisB, Boomerang, Poprank, Rankpop, Demogz, Dmogz, Yoyo, JoCo, Juggle, Buggle.

Cull was suggesting CoCull (which is Latin or Greek for a cowl), or CullCo (bastard Latin or Greek, “to inculcate”). Qui went for CoQui (which is a frog or toad native to Puerto Rico), and QuiCo (bastard Spanish, “to glut”).

Nobody could spell Diatessaron. But even if they could and we used that there was still the fear, but an unsubstantiated fear, of Stanford suing us.

But by trying to think words all we were thinking were numbers. As like language was a problem and we were solving for name. We were always returning to math. Operations. All the ways two numbers can be manipulated are essentially the same. They are just depths, or nests, recursions. Addition, a quantity that has been followed, or succeeded, by another, is contained within multiplication, a quantity that has been added to itself × number of times, while multiplication is contained in exponentiation, a quantity that has been multiplied by itself × number of times. Practically, all computers can do is just add and comptrast, though theoretically, the number of potential operations is illimitable, and the sums generated grow too large for a human to compute, even too long for a human to write.

The operation after exponentiation is called tetration, the fourth order of magnitude, a quantity exponentiated by itself. Also called iterated exponentiation, hyper-4. By the time we got to Stanford this question of what to call the operation had been answered, not so the question of how to calculate and notate its results. The mathpeople were all cur about Cs, or complex numbers, which are numbers represented by × + iy, where × and y are real numbers and i the imaginary unit equal to the square root of negative one. Essentially this number does not exist. But its speciousness enables the modeling of chaos. The systematizing of chaos and the differencing of that from the random and arbitrary, which given even an infinite or eternal timescale or space might never evince determination or design. Applies to morphogenesis, phyllotaxis, biochirality, and fractalization, how leaves and shells are proportioned, how the human face is proportioned, econometrics, oscillating chemical reactions, dynamics of liquids and gas. This is a ridiculous explanation but. Encryption techniques. Quantum mechanics. Ridiculous but.