Page 85 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Hitler’s Ghost

“Call me Bob. Well, I must admit the subject is fascinating. Go
ahead.”
Roy Ludwig warmed to his topic; I suppose he had to heat up a
few degrees to generate the blast of hot air to which I was about to
be exposed.
“Okay, let’s say you are a lay person reading my opus. Let’s give it
a working title; say, History’s an Open Book, by yours truly. After a
couple of autobiographical sections into which I’d work the
development of advanced mathematical tools for very large data sets,
I’d show how the current torrent of digitization provides a challenge
and an opportunity for access and analysis. Search technology has led
the way through the development of sieving formulae. I have taken
this further, treating the chaotic flow of trillions of subdivisible
linguistic units in the same way that lasers process incoherent light
into a single beam of controllable wavelength. I CURSE them—that
stands for ‘Cascading Units Repeating Sequential Entities.’ Fluid
dynamics describes this process: you see, the virtual array of parallel
processors necessary to move that many bits through a pipe of ever-
decreasing diameter forces you to translate them into units
resembling the flow of a compressible liquid. That can be done by
reductive iterations of duplicate elimination through logic gates. This
resembles a river going over a precipice, the water picking up speed
as it breaks up on projecting rocks and funnels into an ever-narrower
stream by the time it hits bottom. CURSE can process thousands of
five-hundred-page books per second into sets of purely arithmetical
values. That’s just the first step.”
A squirrel had joined us, sniffing at the asphalt next to Ludwig’s
feet. I felt a twinge of sympathy for the rodent: not much
nourishment down there, either. The mastermind scattered gems, not
crumbs.
“I’m not the first to use cybernetic firepower to perform content
analysis. But those researchers knew what they were looking for; as a
result, they examined a small set of texts for internal or external
connections. The same thing is done with paintings and, for all I
know, musical compositions or recorded performances. My
innovation in CURSE is to open that set completely: it has no
inherent limit in the number of texts to be input and CURSEd. Only
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