Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

He with a handful of his remotype Amoti had squatted secret above his cubicle in a corner of the dropceiling, its panel browned from leaky HVAC.

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Now we are about, 1997. Skip ahead. Tetration was through with academia, or else academia was through with Tetration, our domain needed hosting and everything, as like our posture, needed support. Based on reviews, our own reviews, we chose Grupo Escudo, Santa Clara. This was how it went before we groundbroke on our own DCents. Datacenters.

We took their least expensive barbedwire enclosure and stuffed it with our production serverack, the Ultra and Pentium IIs, a cruft of external driveage. Basically it was a maximum security humane society in heat. Locks were not provided. Next on one side was the cage for eBay, next on the other the cage for Hotmail, all of us were still just unprofitable toddlers in hefty mental diapers, but only we were not growing to scale.

That was why, in fugly winter, Cull and Qui were in Las Vegas for the consumer electronics show. The CESS. The notion was to go and license our algy, or corner someone to buy it flatout. Preferably one of the portal boys, some pitboss of the winners circle. We would have granted sublicensable transferable interminably renewable rights in every territory, we would have swallowed any nuggety lump sum. Our combined assets were then approx $8K: $4K from Professor Winhrad as like to say a faretheewell from Stanford, the rest what was left of the Diatessaron profits, along with the Christmas windfalls, the $800 courtesy of the de Groeve parents, still less, always less, than the $60 the O’Quinn parents had scraped.

We had decided not to go along out of thrift, or so we had told Cull and Qui, but the truth was that perfecting our algy had to take precedence over any bachelor industry spree spent parsing the activities of Datum Millennium from the activities of Millennium Data, Datamex, Datamax, Datatec, Datatek, Datatron, Datatronic, Datary, Dataria, whichever it was that had paid women to stalk the tradeshow floor wrapped head to foot as like mummy zombies in wires urging attendees, on average 92.4 % men, to Go Wireless, and then stripping down to nipples, no pubes.

It was in Vegas, baby, that Cull and Qui met with Microsoft, Netscape, OmniWeb, Mozilla, Captoraptor, Peruser, and Moe, a guy whose name had not always been Muwekma Ohlone.

He had a crappy berth beyond reception, where even the newest Motorola demophones had no service. Where typically the coordinators stuck lunatics and hobos. Not businessmen. We have been there since at least once and this was what we encountered.

Sad fat bald Kompfy dinkaround tinkerers peddling their chemtrail detectors, subaqueous treasure wands. Redates, a company specializing in putting the innards of newer and better products into the skins of older and worser products, and in making the innards and skins compatible. They rotarized touchtones, and remediated a VHS cassette with a lid that lifted not to tape but to a DVD player, the customer inserted the disc, depressed the lid, inserted the cassette into the VCR, everything converted. Marketed to senior centers, retirement communities. E-fterlife, a company marketing a gravemarker embedded with a screen, which looped clips with optional audio from the life of the departed. A keyboard below the screen let visitors type msgs, for public display or privately protected by PIN.

A somber zone. Basically a cemetery.

Moe had not been told to bring his own décor, or else the coordinators were fresh out of foldingtables. No chair. Just a poncho laid on the floor as like in a silk road Levantine antique and spice bazaar. Moe sat on the poncho and presented. A bulky creditcard he was hoping Visa/Mastercard would pick up with a graphic window that showed the balance owed on the account. It was the same size as like the beeper he was flogging, which featured a bloaty red button for 911.

Another of his offerings had some elegance, some grace. It was an attempt to redress the greatest undiscussed blight of globalization, namely that not all computers around the world can recognize or even detect all attached devices. An auxiliary keyboard made in Russia or Ukraine and so completely in Cyrillics might not be compatible with a Taiwanese PC clone whose OS was a pirated Farsi edition of Windows 95. To remedy this, Moe had designed a box, a small white apparatus cubed as like a craps die at bottom, rounded as like a roulette pill at top, to dongle between whatever periphs and plugnplays, Chilean lasergun, Brazilian joypaddle, and the computer itself, and that would render the devices usable on it.

Software configs and coalescing manufacturing parameters would make all this hardware obsolete by 1999, but still it was admirable. Few devices get even a year between usable and admirable.

But the one ware Moe had brought to the show that alone entitled him to Valhalla was just a proposal, and is fundamentally too involved to explain to a rec, given that even for a tech, even now, it is still too unicorn dreamy. Especially given the physics. Engineers tend to change their arch levels and switch their packets if ever confronted by timewarps and wormholes. The only way they can face the quantum is with the munchies.

Basically our lives are not reversible and yet physics is, the laws of physics holding true whether time moves forward, as like we perceive it to move, or backward, as like can only be observed through equation. The only exception to this reversibility is courtesy of mechanics, thermodynamics. Ice can be turned to water, which can be turned to gas, but every change of state requires a transfer of energy. The energy that does not or cannot effect each change is dispersed. But where and when is the problem. Or else it is lost. But energy cannot be lost is the problem. The solution to both is entropy.

Yawn.

FYI: Yawning, as like laughing and crying, is only socially contagious.

Now physical entropy is the measurement of that available but unutilized energy. If with more time comes more change, and if with more change comes more entropy, it follows that entropy is perpetually increasing. Booley. This makes entropy a statistical property. Measuring change and waste, change and scatter. Information accrues with each transaction, because each transaction itself becomes information. Order increases but only as like disorder. The universe tends toward chaos.

Computationally, statistical entropy can be reduced with an increase in parity, the more input equals output, the more output equals input. In principle every operation can be done and undone, executed and unexecuted, with the same booley, the same algys, circuits and gates, nothing different regardless of direction.

Physically, though, is the difference. Computers work on electricity, on battery. Each bit processed dissipates energy, kT In 2. Even just trashing a.doc creates corresponding entropy or drag somewhere or somewhen on the system.

That was what Moe was up against. His pig flying to the end of the rainbow goal was reversibility, specifically to perfect a type of inverter gate that allowed any operation passing forward through it to pass backward again, as like a one lane but two way freeway, along with the charge recovery circuits that would serve as like a tollbooth but a freeway tollbooth that instead of charging the input to go through, converted it to output, to charge, turned it around as like input again. To put it more directly, he was trying for a computer capable of turning all the work that was ever done on it, as like typing, or just clicking around online, into energy, with 1:1 transmission, without any entropy, no loss. To put it most directly, he was trying for a totally reversible computing, to be powered not merely with human effort, but with the absolute minimum of human effort, solely by its processing.