Qwernomics Path Dependency & Semiotic Fatality (Session 5)

Hello and welcome to the fifth session of Quornomics, Path Dependency and Semiotic Fatality with Nick Land. I'm going to pass the mic off to him now. Okay, hi everybody, thanks Theodore. So we've crossed the great abyss with now from the first module to the second module. the first module I hope we've just established the existence of QWERTY as a socio-technological and historical object and and got a sense of just when

we're understanding its its fatality the terms in which that can be understood largely in terms of complexity economics in terms of lock-in path dependency some sense of how that stuff works and the way something becomes a cultural destiny I apologize by the way for the kind of pathetic sniveling that I'll probably be doing a lot because I'm a bit virused I'm so sorry about that um so in the second module I'm hoping that we can we can proceed cautiously and

and systematically to determine QWERTY as an object using some of the tools that we've hopefully put together over the last few weeks, step by step, get a sense of what QWERTY is and how to make sense of it at a number of different levels. the the level that where we've come from being that of as a historical semiotic event so in a certain sense for this is just to think that you know by a kind of a figurative re-description that

you've got some computer that the culture actually and you dig into it and you see there's this massive chunk of mysterious pre-installed software this vast thing you know comparable if not quite matching on approximately the same scale of these giant semiotic conventions like the um the modern alphabet and the alphanumeric numerals um the question then you're asking is what the hell is this thing that we've inherited that's come pre-installed that that was never we've got no uh specification design or intention

behind it we kind of assume it's some weird kind of accident and of course the whole of this course is kind of really about what what a what a massive cultural accident actually is and how it works and what to take from it and so asking what is it for that's the that's obviously the dubiously teleological question or I think it might be better reformulating what will it which which integrates what is going to be done with it and that in turn in the great integrates the kind of these analytical subroutines that we're hoping

to engage in. So as I also said before I think it's quite a daunting object it's extremely complicated and not only is it daunting but the kind of analytical resources or the methodological resources that we we might want to apply to it are also daunting I mean I I'm gonna speak only for myself but I don't personally come out of the geology of morals feeling that I've confidently grasped exactly what is going on with that but I think it does provide us with some useful tools and maybe they're the

place to start in on the second wave of investigation and and the first of those which I think we haven't really talked about but is extremely useful is this This notion of bi-univocal relations, I think it's going to be indispensable to us, and it obviously plugs it back into the project of strata analysis. I think it's fair to say, and again, as always, people, please pull me up on this if you think

I'm taking a step out of line on this but I think it's fair to say that de l'eux and Qatari say in that piece that um this the nation produces by unifocal relations between two strata and by and and so okay what do they mean by bi-univocal relations well but most simply that you have two series of segmented elements of whatever kind that we've seen the huge variation and

complexity of the strata means it's it's always difficult to be concrete or to avoid false concreteness about what the elements are concerned and between those two series there are there are a set of mappings that in the ideal case and and I think we're going to see that that often we're dealing with these cases of partial and incomplete and broken stratification but in the ideal case the relation between these two series is takes the form of a cipher that there is

a there is a one-to-one mapping between the elements of one series and the elements of the other series such that whether you're coming in either direction you connect reliably to the de leuzen cross I'm not allowed to now say corresponding but I'm I'm obviously tempted to the the that element on the other stratum that univocally responds to or connects to that element and it's probably it's probably useful to take a little digression because I think we get a clear model of code really for the

first time one that gives us real purchase when we're looking at the illogical and then and it's and it's substrata and the genetic code so so when we look at the genetic code and we see and and I'm going to start off by immediately plunging us a little bit into chaos because most perplexing element to me of this language of content and expression and this language of content and expression is absolutely it's the defining feature of a stratoanalysis

that that it's that that vocabulary But it's the biological usage of the notion of expression. And all of my attempts to confidently align it with the language of Deleuze and Quattari always offset and often threaten to be 180 degrees reversed. because obviously when in biology you talk about gene expression the the expression is ultimately the organism or the biological system that is that is coded by the genes so

gene expression is going from the genetic code to that biological system that is being organized by the genetic code and it would be really nice if if Deleuze and Guattari's usage of the content expression distinction neatly aligned with this but as I say it often seems to be exactly reversed and they want to use the word expression for the the level of the most organized articulate code between the two levels of the of the strata involved and in the biological

case that clearly means I think that the notion of expression is constantly for them being pushed onto the side of the genetic code itself. So this is like to me a major disorganizing factor and I have to just say that immediately. I'm continuously trying to get that straightened out. And I can't pretend I've done. Sorry as everyone seems to be saying that there's like audio problems. Am I completely inaudible to people? the audio actually is pretty clear on my end but the video is lagging okay I think it doesn't matter but anyway I'm gonna just kind of try and shelf that

issue and at the end of the day I think that if the dealers and Qatari vocabulary becomes unhelpful I'm that's not the thing that we need to stick to we need to stick to our analysis of QWERTY and whatever whatever works for that um okay so so returning then to the to the genetic code um so we one of the great advantages for this is it I think sort of fixes or at least gives us a a to use their language a comparatively clear case of a process of stratification where you have

in the genetic code a set of bi-univocal relations between codons each of which as I know everyone knows but I'll just I'll just say this a codon consists of three nucleotides of the set of four nucleotides making up available to in the alphabet of DNA and each of those three each of those codons of which obviously we we we can get there by just it's four to the third power two to the sixth power ie 64 possible codons and each of those therefore is a is a word in a in a

genetic vocabulary and it is mapped onto a set of 20 proteins and so those proteins I'm going to now use this terminology in the Deleuze and Qutari rather than the conventional biological sense, that those proteins are the content of the genetic code. And I think it's quite clear that for them, we have to understand the codons as being the level, the stratum of expression. Obviously, the transition between the two is conducted by messenger RNA, rna differing only by one codon from the dna code and that seems to be an absolutely model

epistratum it's it it is a it's it's a kind of a vertical complication of the process of stratification of it's extremely systematic and and it conducts the the process by which the genetic code is actually operationalized now because there's only 20 targets for the genetic code it uses 64 a vocabulary of 64 elements to code for just 20 proteins and also some grammatical functions that are like start

and stop functions and basically these operational grammatical functions of the code of the natural proteins but because there's an excess on the side of the of the vocabulary it's described now I'm back in the biological vocabulary as degenerate it's a degenerate code because there's redundancy at the level of the vocabulary several different codons refer you to the same protein for instance so inevitably that's that's going to be the case because this mismatch of numbers um so that this degeneracy to to go back it is a is a sign that we're not dealing with a a a

perfected stratic system here and that it doesn't actually consist of a complete coherent set of by univocal relations it's something much messier but the to the degree that it does fulfill that criteria of a good code of a cipher is the degree to which it actually is operational or functional or adequate it's adequate therefore and we can say and so this relation this by univocal relation I think has two references to to organized

disciplinary systems of which I'm not pretending anything more than the most tentative apprehension but I think they need to be invoked and because they're both crucial one of them of course is its usage within mathematics and it and it's used in in mathematics the notion of the by univocal relationship because of the fact that one-to-one mapping in certain zones of mathematics is so important and and I'm particularly thinking of set theory where if you're wanting to analyze the cardinality of a set in relation to

another set you place both of those sets into a bi-univocal relation and this will then tell you what you're what you're seeing in terms of their relative cardinalities obviously this is I'm taking this mostly from Cantorian type arguments so these classical cases of for instance the fact that we know that there are as many prime numbers as there are numbers or there are as many powers of two as there are numbers all of these have the same cardinality aleph null because we can engage we can we can draw infinite series of a cardinality aleph null

consisting of bi-univocal relations between those two things and i guess the if we're going to try and apply the sort of strata analytical language we can say that the natural number series in its ordinal usage counts as an inter strata so what we're really saying in these cases is that we you know we map the first prime number to this first natural number the second prime number to the second natural number the third prime number to the third natural number etc or do that with any of these sets in particular and then that therefore this ordinal usage of the natural number series it is the thing that produces this by univocal alignment between the two systems considered and it allows us

that for to talk about the size of sets that we're we're talking about um the second sort of big referential system that we're looking at I think is cryptography in all of its different dimensions and it's most in its most simple dimensions and the ones that i don't expect us to want need to push out far from um as already mentioned the cipher is the set of bi-univocal relations so you have a set of substitutions between one series and another series and you can go in either direction between those two

between those two series on the one side you've got the plain text which is the code that which is the message you originally start from and after you've submitted each of the elements of the plain text to this series of systematic substitution you then have a cipher text and the cipher text can be that has been thus encoded and it's decoded by simply reversing this procedure so this is the most simple cryptographic case and it's the most traditional and it corresponds to everything that retrospectively is called symmetrical cryptography a nice and I say that because we're now in the

epoch of asymmetric cryptography characterized by by public key cryptography in which that symmetrical relationship between encoding and decoding has been broken it's no longer the case that you use the same key for encoding and decoding an encrypted message so we're marking a historical epoch at least by its terminal moment in using this this cipher model we have to be cautious therefore but i think it gets us a long way we might it's not impossible we get to poke around a little bit in that

and all cryptographic tools are in at some level have to involve by univocal relationships even if they've been complicated by asymmetric cryptography and and the the cryptographic system is more complicated. In the end, unless you can reliably move backwards and forwards in some way between a plain text and a ciphertext, you don't have a functional cryptographic system. So for instance, hash functions, which are kind of used all the time.

I mean, the Bitcoin protocol is obviously based on cryptographic hash functions. They, too, ultimately involve Bayou in a vocal. And like the biological code, they are. so you move from a an extravagant plain text to a compressed economized cipher text how about when we get to QWERTY okay I'm going to break the rest of what I say into two

I hope not very long long chunks the first thing I want to do is just I think recall stuff that I I've already said because I think it's a it's a one crucial context for this and that is the distinction between these two big regimes of numerical signs that I'm gonna just try and consistently call the ancient and the modern yeah Adam's point I obviously totally agree with I didn't mean to suggest that that hashes were in any way exclusive to Bitcoin Bitcoin pick them up because they're already so crucial to computer science that they're lying around in an

advanced state and that you know highly functional hash hash algorithms are available Yes, so the ancient and modern numerical system, now as I say we've talked about this and I don't want to go into it really in any more detail than I've been into it before, so it's something that we can come back to. But it's our great model of moving between regimes, that's why I think it's such an absolutely crucial reference so so there are very very distinctive clear a set of

transitions that have taken place from a regime in which an alphabet serves as an as a set of numerals and ones in which you have an autonomous set of numerals and an autonomous alphabet and the things again to repeat that I think come out of this is that you get an automatic genesis of capitalism through the um through the interference pattern of these two systems um you get a suppression of the intrinsic numeracy that remains within the alphabetical segment of the alphanumerical series and

and there's several things going on there the first one is just to say the very notion of the alphabetical series is an important one that I think we're gonna have to come to very soon in talking about about QWERTY and it's perhaps slightly anachronistic to be talking about the alpha numeric series at this at this early historical point at the Renaissance point fundamentally the origins of modernity in this in this semiotic transition but the but again the alphabetical numerals are fully numerical no sorry let me let me turn

this around the alphabetical segment of the alphanumerical series the the letters are fully numerical but their numeracy is strictly ordinal and this is a huge kind of rich zone to me because it's it's it's conceivable that that numeracy that ordinal numeracy of the letters is used at a scale that is at least comparable to that of the numerical segment of the alphanumerical you know of the of the numerals the decimal numerals you know every time you you you search through a library every time you use a dictionary every time you you refer

to alphabetical order you're intrinsically engaging that numerical process and it's and it's strictly numerical it's got all the features of numeracy as long as you think of that as being strictly ordinal it's decoded the letters don't mean anything all that all they they purely have a function and that function is one of sequencing so there is something analogous to the kind of cryptographic functions for encoding and decoding of putting something in alphabetical order and retrieving it from an alphabetically ordered system. Both of those functions have nothing to do with signification.

They have nothing to do with meaning. They're purely based on the numerical function of the letters. so this break between these two parts of the alphanumeric series is itself a crucial indication that you have passed into this modern phase there is nothing like that in the ancient system of alphabetical numerals all you have that could perhaps be compared to it is the fact that you have the alphabet chunked into into blocks but by the fact that you're using them to code

different orders of magnitude and to connect this to to the first part of the discussion in in both these cases you have a clear set of bi-univocal relations whichever one you're looking at whether you're using looking at modern decimal numerals whether you're looking at the ordinal function of the alphabet whether you're looking at the ancient alphabetical numerals in each case from a number understood i think confidently as content so one could say maybe you have just piles of rice that you use to actually um represent your or incarnate your

numbers at this level you have a bowl of rice you put it in little piles between the numerical representation and the number of grains of rice in the pile you've selected there's a totally bi-uniformical relationship there is a there is exactly one sized pile of rice that correspond to the to the code and there is exactly one code expression that will correspond to the pile of rice in terms in in so far as that system is being used in its perfected stratic sense so I think we take one further step in saying that that in so far as the installation of a

system of a code as a installation of a system of by univocal relations between two series is stratification then we we can see that there has to be a stratic system a stratic machine a stratifying machine at work in the production of these regimes of science and when and you most clearly it with this kind of example I think of the relation it produces the systematic set of relations it produces between numbers conceived as a relatively decoded content and numbers

seen as symbolic as a symbolic code and the and there is there is there is a machine that is producing that reliable systematic coding system which allows you to move backwards and forwards reliably between these two different levels okay last thing before I just open this up then is to is to then move tentatively into the case of QWERTY and just say just a couple of things about that just so how do we sort of initialize our investigation of the of the QWERTY system in in this sense well I think the the there's one step that I think is really

indispensable and again use your caveat like come back at me at this but I just think clarity is almost impossible without taking this step which is to get back to the point of breaking the alphanumeric series so first of all there's a I think there's a preliminary to that which is to say QWERTY is initially and provisionally being described that conforms to a stratic ideal and to do that I think it has to be understood as a reordering of the

alpha-neuronic series so there is there is an inherited cultural system proceeding from zero through to nine and then a to z 36 elements and they are reordered by QWERTY and secondly it's it's I think useful to note that the numerical segment of the alphanumerical series is neatly broken by QWERTY it's inconveniently broken for us you know it occupies its own distinct stratum or its

own distinct band or layer on the on the keyboard of the alphanumerical symbols it consists of the entire numerical segment and nothing else it immediately is provocative in a way that I'm not going to push on at the moment but I think we should come back to it which is the fact that to what extent is this break comparable or helpful or indicative of the sort of way we should think about the successive breaks that you find in QWERTY between these three different layers or belts or levels of symbols.

So I think that's an important question, but I think it's too early to perhaps raise it seriously right at the moment. um so qwerty uh folds the alphanumeric series in a way that isolates separates off segment produces a meta segmentarity that isolates the alphanumerical part of the of the series and i think in doing that it allows us then to to specialize our investigation into

parts you know we don't have to take the whole thing as a whole if if the numbers and letters were just scattered awkwardly between different levels then we'd have to take that whole set of 36 elements as being one as being one series but in but instead we can subdivide our task and so there's a separate I think in some ways minor task at least it looks minor initially of just comparing what's happening with the with the numerals that is complicated by this thing we've seen before by the fact they repeated on this other side what we've been or certainly I've been calling the the parastrata of the system

they're in a particularly odd role and it's also tempting to suggest that there's something important going on about over coding with the numerals that in some sense that they particular privilege and dominance within the symbiotic system we're looking at not only by this this doubling this this fact that they're they have been taken out and above the letters but oh all the elements of the keyboard are in various ways numerically overcoded that then numerically over code by the old ASCII system by these by these new systems of

of coding symbols it's digitally and there's a whole other line a digressive path of investigation that we could take that would be would look at things on this basis that all of these this whole system of symbols now has continuously updated and complexified systems of numerical over coding for them and you number of a certain kind and you get out a character of a particular kind in a whole range of different alphabets simple systems whatever so I'm wanting to I'm wanting to also bracket that I think it's not

that it's unimportant all I want to say about it at the moment is just that it attests to a certain privilege of numeracy that is strongly indicated by the numeracy in the narrow sense, decimal numeracy, that is indicated by what's going on in the keyboard. But the last thing I want to say, which then takes us on to, I think, the the the initial major task of this of this analysis of qwerty is is to now uh move down a notch onto the um onto the beginning of the letter sequences and one huge clue that i think is really

difficult to over to exaggerate in terms of what it gives you for free and what is just an absolutely amazing sort of present that the culture provides for this is the word qwerty itself um the word quality is an extraordinary extraordinary term on one level obviously it's just constructed a bit like alphabet you know it's sort of consists of the early terms of the sequence considered but it's far far superior it's far far cryptographically clean than the word alphabet is because the because the word consists of nothing else than a demonstration

of the initial proceeding of the construction of the QWERTY series. You know, it gives you the first six letters of the sequence for free. So there's all kinds of questions that you could ask, willingly confusing questions you could ask, that are in a certain sense ruled out as soon as you take QWERTY seriously as the true name of the semiotic system under investigation. Let me just quickly give you an example. If you were to take this folding issue seriously, you might say, well, the left to right reading convention

is nothing authoritative. The fact that we use that in a lot of modern languages, it's the sort of presupposition when you talk about the English alphabet left to right legibility is assumed by that. So, but if you were going to, if you were going to look at the QWERTY keyboard in complete neutrality or detachment from that particular cultural inheritance, you might say, well, what's going on here? Has it been successfully folded? You know, do you read one to zero and then go p o i u to q and then a to l and then slightly complicated by this break

here but then m to z or you know how what order do you uh read the keys in it would be an open question the fact that you start with letter q is not something that is kind of um there's no sort of instruction manual or cryptographic manual that tells you that except that the word qwerty does that for you the word qwerty says you start with q you proceed linearly along the first row of letters it gives you the first six examples you're already more than 20 percent through the through the alphabet when you do that um some you can open questions again you could say well

when you get to p do you do you switch directions and start going back along the second line but i think the fact that you've proceeded from the from the from the numerical sequence to the the the top line of the keyboard um pure consistency would suggest that you that that what is being said here and that what the word qwerty already says is that you have a a basic key for the linear construction of the qwerty system that follows goes q to p a to l z to m that's your system and the word the word qwerty gives that to you already sorry sorry I apologize

um okay I think I'm ready to to pause to pause on this section and see what anyone has to say about them yeah I'm sorry if there's obviously been audio issues I'm sorry about that and I just say my snuffles. I think it was pretty clear towards the end. This makes a lot of sense to me.

I've thought about some problems like this before. If you're going from a system with a certain number of units or elements in that system to a system with a different number of elements, how do you inter-map those, and then where does that additional, in this case keyboard key, come from? Ideas represented by the other keys or really new function, and then where is that function coming from yes I mean there's actually a large number of existing solutions to this I think that you'll find that every key has a number you know and sometimes

you look into the right instructions but I'm going way back before the PC era into the dark ages but I can't believe this has changed nowhere my old dedicated word processor in the instruction manual actually gave you a number for every key already like so it had it had done that for you so that's one numerical over coding among among many um for this um and um it's obviously tempting i think when you start doing this to to to settle on some to settle on some semiotic convention for it but i don't think

that we have a there are there are there are these protocols that i'm sorry i'm just forgetting what the name these these these symbolic representation systems is it you what are they called now yeah so it's this obviously it's the it's the um character encoding system isn't it it's just

um yes unicode is what i'm trying to get out here yeah is that is the more expansive one isn't it and just quickly looking here at the Wikipedia article here I think UTF-8 is the contemporary standard for it I think it might be that it's been updated in which case I put it but I don't want to think think it matters here's the UTF a Wikipedia thing so obviously there are there are these settled conventions but they're not they're not I think in strong senses installed cultural

conventions in a comparable way to to to QWERTY you know like no one no one actually at the moment I think is like using these numbers except in the most practical fashion okay you know like if you want to it might a UTF code because you want to put up some particular number but no one's got a sense of that as a kind of as an alphabet or as an as a sort of public semi-audit system that is that is being referred to so I just don't think that exists that you know

the thing that you're pointing to like a kind of a kind of neat conventional semiotic system that over codes the keyboard in a way that people agree on that as a convention I just don't think it it happens and I think what the interesting reason it doesn't happen is to do with the imminence of the keyboard itself like the keyboard in a certain sense isn't overcoded because it is the thing that's actually there at your fingertips you know and so at that level you know any any supposedly higher level would be actually inaccessible you'd get it you'd get get it through the keyboard it doesn't have the same kind of practical technical purchase that

something at the level of the keyboard itself has and it would be a kind of nominal nominal over coding that wouldn't be functional because you're still actually going to be just pressing keys when you're utilizing it. Exactly. I basically found the same thing when I was thinking about this version of this problem in working with the numogram, actually, and looking at the numerology of that. There's this really good article called The Alchemy of Alphabets. I forget the author, but if you search that, you'll find it. Yeah, it's wonderful. I'll type it in the sidebar in a second. and she analyzes basically each letter of the alphabet she goes through and then looks at how that alphabet appears in different languages.

I think I've seen this image. Yes, yes. Yeah, sorry, Anders, are you still there? You didn't just get cut off, did you? Oh, that's okay. I was pretty much finished. I was just saying she traces them back to the original image or idea that the letter The letter is supposed to represent like it is an ox's head and it was used in these cultures by these different in these different images Yeah, you have to go back to that Historical analysis and look at the actual qualitative distinctions Yes, I think I can bait it a book like that. That's maybe what I'm confused

That also just goes through the letters Obviously derivable. Yeah, but back in these ancient alphabets People were still more or less aware of the fact that they had that pictographic legacy to them I think weren't they? Crowley of course does makes that you know when he's like all the kind of occultists he's he's kind of fixated on the ancient alphabets and He definitely in terms of what the letters mean is makes reference to that pictographic dimension of them for sure Yeah, I'll copy that your link, thanks.

And we could expand outward too and look at the other keys, the caps lock key, all the other keys on the keyboard, and why are the edges of the keyboard where they are? Why doesn't it include a few more keys on the edges? Oh yeah, now I'm not sure I'm totally getting your question. Why doesn't it include a... It's just a microcosm of the larger question is why does the keyboard stop where it does, including the keys that it does imminently. Right. Yeah. I don't know if that's on point. Yes, no it's difficult because there's lots of different levels one might want to...

answer that question aren't there so I mean the most down-to-earth and practical which I think we should try to stick to because whilst these arcane elements are always going to be creeping in we don't want to be kind of sucked out on them too fast and so the most kind of just sensible things just to say there's obviously a kind of economy principle here isn't there and it's like the that practical questions how can you have everything that you need in the minimal number of keys and the keyboard is the solution to that to that question it's like only blown out a little bit from the it with a typewriter it's even more

ferocious isn't it because the the typewriter mechanical arrangement is in a certain sense one-dimensional it's just an actual series of of in terms of the actual what they called the things that at least print onto the paper you know they're not cool keys are they I'm getting confused but they're all just in a row and so you've just got a kind of limited number of those things and when when you put it onto a two-dimensional like that part of the typewriter then becomes autonomous of this particular writing it gives you a bit more latitude but

there's I think then you what's inherited as a kind of discipline of the fact that you don't want to just proliferate a massive number of different different keys for like you know keys and you could have different languages and symbol systems and all of this kind of stuff could quite apart from all these function keys that you might want and I think that's seen as being that there's a practical imperative against them but but I think on this question like so are we in this next few weeks going to be talking about all these all these keys on the keyboard I mean then you know how many do we have

roughly that we how many we have exactly is an important question it's a long time since I've actually counted the keys on a keyboard but the the the alphanumeric symbol keys are a comparatively small fraction aren't they of the total so it's like around about a hundred is it that we've got all together so it's like roughly a third of them and I think we're talking are are the alpha numeric so two-thirds of the keys roughly uh have been shelved okay 104 yeah that makes sense

So, thinking about your comparison with DNA and the process of protein transcription, or is it translation? Transcription, I think. And just the fact that it seems that both that and Corey seem to follow sort of a universal Turing machine or a Turing machine in general kind of process where you have this continuing linear chain of steps. This is a coding from what it originally was to whatever you're translating it to because of the rules encoded in the Turing machine. And something like this sort of this purely, this another purely or maybe another purely ordinal series, which is

what stretch of DNA and evolutionary history it encodes in that sequence that you are moving through if you're a, you know, mRNA or whatever it is. versus the user moving along, it's not really aleatory, but in any given case, contingent ordinal series of gestures or numerical patterns or whatever, all of these different folds that we want to translate to as we move through the process of typing a particular text. In terms of the different dimension of pure ordinality which lies in the alphabetic keys, and they're sort of like re-encoding. And you think this sort of, is that a bayou of vocal mapping

between those two forms of ordinality? Or if it's not, I mean, it seems more like it is sort of the furthest outside diagonalization in which all of these other sort of stratic interlocks between gesture and between sort of the actual semantic word series and the numeric series are all sort of folded into the relationship of those two lines of pure ordinality do you think that's right is that something that's fundamentally different from a bi-univocal yeah look I think there's so much going on in what you're saying I think we need to try and break it down a little bit if that's okay with you Jake and just take because I think it's like yeah there's there's a lot in this that for me is just

flying off in lots of different directions at the same time so these two different series you're talking about one of them is the is in a sense like a modeled by the UTM that this endless one-dimensional tape business I write well there's a second the second one which I think probably inevitably by the very nature of what it is you're talking about is is a bit hazier to me is this more polydimensional gestural dimension of like expression in its colloquial sense let's rather than in the technical

sense necessarily where we've been using it or one of the technical senses we've been using it um and so what is the what is the relationship between those those two sequences if we can call even as a sequence in the second case and yeah okay so in terms of breaking that down well one of the because one of the things behind what you're okay sorry but as I say it's a really rich question there I don't know where to go first one of the places to go is obviously with the diagonalization stuff you study with another thing to go is the computer science side of it in

terms of the of the utm is that because on the on the utm side and they obviously connect these issues you're talking really about what about the limits of the computable and actually and and you're kind of almost getting into this into the halting problem on that side aren't you do you think it's like you're asking can we um you've got some complicated a polydimensional gestural system uh can it be overcoded by a utm which is to say is it computable which is to say can it be is there an algorithmic

Is there an algorithmic version or algorithmic model of this of this? Process do you think am I following you? Yeah I think the whole thing problem I think is a good thing to bring up because of a certain way it guarantees that pure Ornality because whatever I mean if we sort of model this as an algorithmic process that's being carried out that that general incapability to pre-overcode all possible future sequences with some sort of more compact expression that tells us if or when it's going to halt and how, sort of leaves that future, makes it always irreducibly possible that the future input can't be predicted,

can't be pre-coded now. sort of guarantees that it is in an absolute and purely ordinal sense a successor to whatever the current state of the universe. Yes, but what's interesting among the things that are interesting is that you can get to this on the other side by the diagonalization method because you can only diagonalize after methodically installing this system of bi-univocal relations you know it's only because Cantor is able to say look you can you can list all the numbers and you can produce this rigorous mapping between

the sequential position of the number and the corresponding digit of its number you know that's absolutely rigorous so you can say in order to do your diagonalization you have to be able to say you know we're now looking at the nth digit of the nth number you know if it wasn't for this absolutely rigorous reliable confident set of bi-univocal relationships between these two these two sides of the number you couldn't diagonalize at all and your diagonal construct comes only after you've exploited this set of rigorous bi-univocal

relations so it's and it's it's kind of similar isn't it to then flipping back I the halting problem in a sense is a kind of um is a restatement in computer science of a diagonal argument and and there too it's only because you're able to in a certain sense presuppose these these structures of of computability and and and um strict by univocal isomorphism that you're able to then describe the halting problem in a way that is actually logically compelling rather than being just impressionistic or you know what I mean it's

like driving it in terms of the diagonalization problem where there's always a version of the can always construct a version of the sequence that was not contained in everything you had available to start with yes diagonalization doesn't really begin with in a straightforward sense with a failure of the by uni vocal coding it's it's so that's that's what I'm thinking in terms of this sort of like fundamental difference between the mapping I'm talking about yeah and the by uni vocal one because in the diagonalization grid you have these two different purely ordinal series and then one of them is so in each given case one of the random infinite series of ones

and zeros this sort of n and one n zero n one n two etc it's sort of like the general model of all these series and then you have this sort of purely which column in my end or which row in my end 0 1 2 but the only value those things had the only like the only uh sensor function of that enumeration is because of like the nature of the construction that you're doing is in order to specify the next point at which you're going to reverse something from this infinite set of random series so it doesn't have any meaning beyond this construction of of a an ordinal order of a sequence of numbers which is not available in anything that it enumerates right yeah it's producing a monster but but producing the monster

rigorously from outside from in from inside this this stratic system there's no there's no the str the stratic mechanism you're not in a sense drawing upon anything outside the stratic mechanism to produce this monster it's just purely entry an intrinsic potential of it even though it then clearly points to an outside in terms of in terms of like the real process of why did you construct this in the first place and how are you able to define this grid it's really it's the construction of the monster that leaves the grid or the zipping between the two numerical series in its wake and the way they unfold in the two dimensions you know what I mean yeah yeah I don't seem it seems like a

really good general definition of the difference between a line of flight and a bi-univocal encoding do you think that's is that the right terminology there for the lows yeah I mean my as I say my only my only concern is that yeah I think there's a temptation for a certain kind of romantic revolt against the strata or against it or against the code that that that would suggest that there's just something that can be pointed to that is naively or simply outside you know and I think the thing about diagonal method is it's not at all

romantic in that sense it in the sense that it it relies upon nothing that by but the resources of the static apparatus in order to indicate and actually produce the outside so you know I well if we take it back to this original thing about this whole kind of the complexity of of this poly dimensional gestural multiplicity and its relation to the code my inclination is to is to is to first of all submit without reservation to the code in order

to get to an outside that is rigorously invulnerable to the current whereas whereas if you you get this a lot in I think various kinds of them you know I think there's a constant romantic revolt against against computer science against the universal Turing machine against the notion of universal computability and and the kind of boundless algorithm which you do often often see and especially in these various I think increasingly dated sort of criticism for artificial intelligence that take this form of just simply trying to attain some kind of natural native naive alignment with with the

uncoded element and so say try to say that there's something about it that just resist coding is too complex it's too analog it's you know yeah exactly It's like a God in gaps thing. You know, first it's affect, it's embodiment, it's creativity, like whatever it is. And the affect is a really good example. People sort of like, well, it's uncodable because it's this geometric thing of the body. It's something that you can't consciously organize, like whatever it is. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. And diagonalization just is completely independent of any of that kind of argument. you do not need any of these axiomatic there's these axiomatic notions of a kind

of irreducible outside to the algorithm in order to generate the diagonal construct of of the outside or the monster Right. And in a sense is that true because of this sort of absolute contingency, like not in the sense of not being able to mine causal relationships from it, but in the sort of the exact opposite sense of the pulling together of these different systems. I mean, it's really sort of a delusium both and. an inclusive disjunction between like the gestural or grid aspect of 40 versus the alphanumeric one and sort of like this and it's the pulling them together that means that there's the

availability of an outside to be constructed from this thing that we have in front of us. Yes. It's interesting to think that like the series of all keystrokes ever made with 40 if we could just sort of sum this discontinuum across the world because presumably you know in some sort of Minutely measurable sense no two keystrokes occur at the same time Right We see that as that That one diagonal sequence that can't be constructed from all the possible ones that you have available to you So like the diagonalization the Cordy is affecting across the world is this like sort of great You could never find it. You could never measure it. It can't be encapsulated

series of keystrokes by all humanity. Yes, I mean, that too quickly explodes into all kinds of complex dimensions, because there's obviously a kind of Einsteinian critique, isn't there, of this notion of, like, there's an implicit reference to it's kind of absolute temporality that would allow you to have a sequence in principle of all keystroke events in in history because there's no fact of the matter as to simultaneously yes until until you've produced artificial time I mean like the only thing that could do

what you're asking for is is you would require a blockchain system that actually had produced a consensual artificial time and therefore absolute succession there's no there's no naive absolute succession that you could you could you would have your principle yeah which is just like hilarious to imagine like a key logger like a malware blockchain but just installed key loggers that everyone's computers and that they found home and it recorded them in the blocks yeah okay I mean I sort of kind of yeah I'm thinking that's sort of inevitable actually your mad vision is sort of prophetic in that

eventually every digital event will be block changing through absolute succession right but they're not probably likely not 40 itself I mean I would think that by the time we had that sort of like absolute penetration of artificial time you know maybe maybe the dominant mode of interaction with all these digital transactions isn't necessarily through quality board yeah yeah no well I think that's a part of our real task is this is is this thing about

well what is quality like this this vast is it to use my sort of okay I know image my loose image at beginning of this thing there's this fast installed cultural system you know is it for anything I mean there's of course one model on a Malahani stuff about the Chinese keyboard implicitly saying it's not ever going to be used for anything you know it's it's it was put there by this accident of Western kind of digital history world semiotic history it's now being replaced in vast areas of the world by more advanced post quality post alphabetical

linguistic computer system and and therefore it's like you've already closed its epoch before the realization of its potential whatever that might be and I and I don't I'm not at all saying that that kind of idea can be ruled out that would be very premature but at least it seems to me to to make more urgent a question of thinking well what is what is actually that potential of clothing what is it as as a as a kind of semiotic apparatus that we're not yet executing or at least we're not executing in a way that is that is

lucidly and self-reflective I mean it whatever it is being executed there might be all kinds of things being executed that we're not that we're not seeing but the assumption still remains that nothing is as occurring at that It was sort of what you're describing is like not attending to all of these enfolded processes and things that might be only visible or really operable at the level of like, you know, for example, like geometric or gestural encodings over the keyboard that just like don't naively penetrate to the semantic value of what we're actually paying attention to as an output. yes yes I mean that so those things are all definitely happening and I'm and I'm

not sure that they're they're not okay it's we're getting on to sort of terrain that could get weird or quickly but I mean is how confident are we that that that massive sort of neurological process that is constantly ongoing in terms of the you know the quirtification of human language function at at this largely sort of subconscious level um how confident are we that it is in this zone of the hazily gestural and the unformalized and that inchoate you know given that we we know that actually well what we're getting to maybe we

don't we can't say we know yet well what we're getting to at least is the fact that it's an extremely highly formalized system even if it seems a completely pointless system you know there's there's this extremely specific set of of by univocal relations between the alphanumeric series and the quantumic series and it's not you know that's it's absolutely precise and no one at least under the most obvious constructions no one could ask for a more out a more mathematically or cryptographically exact system than the one that has been

easily generated by this economic history process and so there's no there's no question about it about its formal exactness the only question is about whether that is just purely like a spandrel a kind of senseless accident without any pragmatic significance other than according to some accounts a mild retardation of typing speeds I mean that's the kind of dominant narrative about it isn't it they're all all the only meaning of QWERTY you can't In fact, it's just that typists have been slowed down unnecessarily a little bit.

Right. So obviously my inclination is at least, I mean, it seems just weird that you would have this vast cultural assemblage, this very specific, you know, set of cryptographic resources put into place and simply just have zero significant functionality at all which is which is what is really being said about it right it's body counting is a super interesting comparison from you know the reading in the Universal History of Numbers that's exactly the same like a highly formal has to be highly formal in

order for it to work you know structure that you could easily say is just it's all arbitrary like you know maybe it's just sort of like random noise pass through a desire for symmetry and the fact that there are 20 fingers but like whatever like a there's there's certainly more to it just because of the relationship their bodies and then second of all you know as body counting sort of organically transitions into counting systems that the fact that you were body counting in specific ways gets us all of these base 20 number systems these right yeah and we're sort of looking at the same thing like what are a what are the sort of organically arising counting systems whose background is keeping or is 40 yes yes and and and it does give you specific

structures I mean yeah I think well I shouldn't I shouldn't assume that that people aren't already wanting to to jump in on this um I'm tempted to sort of just add one one ingredient because I think it's it might kind of clarify what what would be me meant by sort of talking about its structure and I think there's lots of different dimensions and aspects to this all corresponding to particular methods of of construction but since we're like shelving to a degree the the top

numerical band of the qwerty system so most of the time i think when we're talking about qwerty we're going to be talking about this 26 this 26 uh letter segment and i just want to sort of sort of re-emphasize the fact that i think that this is not something that we could take for granted you know it's like even if they had decided that the numerals went on the bottom you know after the QWERTY keys we would then perhaps think that that the alphanumeric series went from zero to Z and the QWERTY system went from Q to zero and we wouldn't be able to disintegrate them so it's a very

specific thing that has happened with QWERTY that has specifically kind of produce this kind of macro level segmentation of the numerical segment of the keys so so now just to look at look at the key the numerical size so you know what has happened to the keys well the only thing that has happened to the numerals is that zero has been shifted from first to last place in this in this series so rather than as a number series that goes from zero to nine we have a number a series that goes from one to nine with zero on the end but and and this actually I want to argue gives us something and it gives

us something that we can then use for other stuff it gives it to us in the most simple kind of convenient exemplary form because because the crucial thing that we're going to continually come back to I think about what is special if you if you're going to talk about a a static relationship between the QWERTY system and their alpineum exister the crucial factor about it is that the you know it's not like it's not like the genetic code that you're going from DNA to protein or even DNA to RNA you're going from at the 36 characters to the same set of 36 characters it's it's much it's like a

it it's much more cryptographic in character like that it's much more like a cipher it's a it's a it's a it's of the same and so what we we just do this slice that it's almost telling us to do we cut off the first ten ten characters we've got we've got now the alphanumeric zero to nine series the QWERTY through to zero series and you just take that by universe focal structure of that absolutely seriously as a set of mappings and you reiterate oh so let's say we start as I think we should we put the alphabetical system first and

underneath it or alongside it or however you want to represent it you put the QWERTY series and if you treat it as this by univocal mappings and so from alpha numeric zero you go to one the first the first new morning the alpha numeric series is zero the first one in the series is one and then so now you go from one to two three right to the end the end of the of the um alphanumeric series nine goes maps to zero reiterated mapping operation um you you have drawn a system you know that goes one to two

to three to four to five six seven eight to nine to zero that's to say you've produced closed loop you have reconfirmed the isolation of that decimal section of of the code procedurally or or methodically and and if you can't see that you've done that it's just because it's it's it's so simple and it's so elegant and it's been done all the work's been done for you and it's redundant in terms of its the fact that it's just placed it there on a separate stratum so neatly for you but that same process of reiterative mapping relying on nothing but by univocal

relationship between the two uh systems is also applicable to the whole of the system you know we we've now neatly we've dispatched the numerals so we've got them out we've got 26 figures but you you now put the alphabet and you put the qwerty system and you can do exactly the same thing that we've just done you just reiterate your set of mappings and in doing so you will subdivide the system into a series of closed circuits now and I'm going to assume that people here haven't done that and I don't really want to spoil the fun by sort of talking about the conclusion you don't know a priori

what's going to happen how many how many of those semiotic loops are you going to end up with if you apply that to the quality system yeah so say I think it be to spoil the fun to to to say now but we we simply don't know that's to say that this is we're in the zone of the synthetic epri now you know we're in a zone that's because because you follow this absolutely rigorous procedure and you're going to find out something about the structure of this code that is not naively available at the level of intuition but once it's been actually methodically constructed is impossible to to dispute

and therefore has kind of logical force to it it's like the z notation the the natural number line can only be constructed uh So absolutely yes any any any of these Yeah, I know but also it's a completely It's a completely by universal And cryptographic system too So you there's only one there's only possibly one number that's going to correspond to one tick cluster and reciprocally but yes what what you're saying is also totally right yeah I know I'm just a pro I think this is

yes somebody feel free to like you know shut me up but just like one last other thing just jumping slightly back to the to the one through zero this sort of reordering of the number line is that it's it's especially interesting that there's a really there's a rich mapping there where the reason that zero is moved to the right is because trailing zeros matter in decimality but preceding zeros don't and that that's also linked to left to right reading and to the left to right separation in the hands like you type lots of eight zeros and five zeros and four zeros but like very few zero fours now and because you read like you read left to right and you sort of type yeah that it ends up being like that and that creates the loop is the structure or is the function of decimality itself Yes, yes. I mean it's interesting partly that we have a sort of inclination to be

in this zone to be to the left of the decimal point. You know this is one of the weird things about Cantor where he obviously says look let's just cut cut out the nonsense and treat it that all the numbers that we're ever going to be interest in it lie between zero and one and therefore and therefore all our all our numbers basically are going to be zero point something and then so he he's broken then with what what you've just said precisely because he's broken with our sort of naive expectations about numeracy hasn't and and in his system trailing zeros are nothing and leading zeros become massively important because leading

after the decimal point obviously, leading therefore fractionally rather than through increasing orders of magnitude. Sorry, maybe that's good. ones so it's still the same sort of like rigorously formal formal logic applies where this you have the number of zeros that you have in this case proceeding zeros that you specify sort of rigorously encodes what decimal place value is doing so like if you if you were because you're this was a keyboard constructed for doing diagonal arguments you know our million monkeys create our infinite

monkeys creating via the diagonalization grid so you put the zero over on the left so because that was that would break the recursivity is that because you think of the infinite permutation character of the of the diagonalization grid that instead of having this loop you just have the suggestion of an infinite series that starts from an origin point if that makes sense I'm sorry I'm just trying my my brain is kind of slightly slugged slugged with virus and I didn't really quite construe that last sentence so in terms of so if you were if

you had a keyboard that was optimized for creating a cantor grid a diagonalization grid then you would have the zero over on the left which would break this recursivity this loop you get back to zero and then you return to the left to one it would just be the first ten items in an unending series whose only sort of specified property is that it has a first element and this element is zero and that's for a reason of the construction of everything after the decimal but I mean do you think that there's just like a relationship between the way you need to set up that grid and the fact that it ceases to be recursive when you optimize for that kind of numerical construction construction yeah I don't know I'm reluctant to I'm reluctant to jump to about it I mean it

is it is fascinating I mean like yeah the thing about putting the zero at the end of the series is that on one hand it seems so inconsequential but it also is it also is extremely provocative I think like again if you look at the sort of Deleuze Quatire material and especially like them they're sort of nomadology essay it's like that one little change seems to sort of weirdly resonate through

through their discussion a lot I think like well for instance I'm sorry I'm sort of hopping around a little bit but it's like I I know we're not a I'm trying to keep us on the on it on that on the pure alphanumeric series but you but one of the what you know what is going on with the the numerical segment one of the weird things is that they've all got two characters on them you know what I mean like I think on all standard keyboards that the letter keys just have a letter on don't they but is it the case that every other symbol key

including the number keys on the main section of the keyboard have at least two different characters on them so all of the all of the numeral keys have a and I'm look I'm gonna say are overcoded but I'm saying that partly tongue-in-cheek because I'm not pretending at all that we can we can confidently say that they're um that is overcoded in a in a strict realism which I reset except that it's then it's then interesting that they they they're not they're not overcoded when you move over into the parastrada the steps parastrada on the right hand

side of the keyboard but if you look at then the symbols on the on the main numerical line you've got these parentheses that are twinning nine and zero together in this absolutely distinctive fashion you know like they like that that clearly there was some kind of weird symbolic emphasis being put on those two on those two numbers that is that is pairing them in a way that doesn't apply to any of the other to any of the other numbers yeah sorry I I should, I should, I think I should.

Cool. Actually. Yeah, sorry for dominating everybody. Somebody. No, no. Yeah. It's good. I saw that there's I couldn't have come pretend I followed all this and that the sidebar stuff because obviously and Jake doesn't give the mental slack to do that

but I'm clearly a lot has happened there so does anybody want to sort of pick up on some of the stuff they've been talking about in the in the sidebar at all I mean I can see a lot I can see a lot of things are all that seem to be sort

of the things that we definitely have to get to I mean like Adams Adams point about the fact that you know this strange just graphic spatial diagonalism of the keyboard is is surely a striking feature is that and like if you say if you're trying to and to organize or describe or over code the keyboard one of the just clear patterns or clear codes for the for the way you might want to do that with a section that we're looking at is that again then the numerals clearly just over code a diagonal you know it's completely unambiguous that the number

one just heads this diagonal that goes QAZ to head heads of diagonal those WSX etc etc etc there is this there is this extremely just rigorous strict diagonal structure that is kind of weird I mean maybe there's some going back to the typewriter some sorry I'm losing my vocabulary and what is that what's the name for the practice of sort of body movement and ergonomics yes exactly great thank you yes there's a mid there's probably some ergonomic practicality that is that provides us with a kind of surface narrative for

that arrangement but it's extremely difficult to just drop it at that point without feeling there's something more going on there Thank you.

Um... I have a just sort of a naive observation to, I mean it seems like we've departed a lot from the original Scholes keyboard design to like all the function keys at the top.

There's no need for that to be on a keyboard. So yeah, I guess my question is what remains of QWERTY's, QWERTY as it was conceived by a Scholes right yes great because because if we go back to George Ramos you know just to repeat that question they say you know what is invariant and what is variable wasn't it and so that that's exactly the question and and I think I should have really it would have been helpful of me to make this more explicit in the sense that I think my line of approach to this is guided by your question in the sense that all the stuff we've been talking

about today is the stuff that is invariant across the whole history of QWERTY from Scholl's keyboard when once it had settled down early in 1890s to the present keyboard arrangement so I think that that is our core object for sure and you're right to say that that has then been elaborated and complicated but that but that core structure which is exactly the the arrangement of the the rearrangement of the alphanumeric series has remained consistent right and And I think in some ways this may connect also to this notion

that we were talking about earlier in this class about the hardware and software and what becomes the invariant aspect that's passed on to software. I think that's sort of an underlying theme here. Or maybe not. What do people like to know? When you say passed on to software, you mean in terms of typing skills and then into software in its computer science sense. No, I mean software in the cultural reproduction. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So it is in those expectations related to the reproduction of typing skills.

Correct, yeah. Yes. Yeah, totally. I think that's the that's the bedrock of our object is definitely you know that is the thing that has basically produced this massive there's this massive You know culture, but you can say just neurological mass that has been just now passed down over the course of Over a century. Yeah, I think that's a better. Yeah Yeah, totally. Yeah I'm looking at these diagrams of how the hand position is supposed to be too, just for giggles. The index fingers are supposed to use these certain keys, 4, 5, R, T, F, V, B.

The right index finger is supposed to use the 6, 7, Y, U, H, J, and M. Do you have a link to whatever it is? Yeah, I'll put it in the chat bar here. Great. Yes. No, it's not at all. this is another I should put this obviously alongside mathematics and cryptography as as an area that one could reasonably demand as a as an area

of expertise for this I mean you know I'm my typing skills are so terrible and that I can totally imagine a professional type is saying, what the hell do you know about this topic? And it would be a reasonable objection, and it would be great to have someone like that here who could actually say what's happening at this level. yes definitely I mean that's an interesting thing I wonder I wonder how

early that happened in the history of computer keyboards that they just there were these there were these mo these historical moments that would be very nice to have an extremely minute pedantic historical account one of them is obviously there oh sorry the road okay yes one one of them is the actual kind of formulation of the keyboard by Scholes and his collaborators and obviously I think that what we have historically of that is very very sketchy and you know it

leaves a lots of room for just wildly bare so if just actually kept fixing this arrangement and and another moment is this thing about adding the numerical keypad to the side that I'm just assuming is to do with the fact that the people using keyboards at a certain critical moment were just engaged in like hard coding activities of a certain kind that just made this really crucial like does anyone the for this function that has in the past totally fascinated me again and again let I'm just gonna say something just a bit off the wall and but people can free to totally ignore

it and and I'm definitely not going to make it but there was a certain point and if I go back to my old dedicated word processor the numlock brutal in what it did like you know if you if you fix the computer in a num log you couldn't you couldn't move across the surface of the screen at all it was completely impossible to use any of the arrow keys or anything back to the cursor was utterly locked in place and and a whole bunch of other sort of effects followed from that but it just the the transformation

it brought about in terms of what you could do with the keyboard was just unbelievably catastrophic a complete transformation of what of what was possible and so I was extremely tempted at one stage to say well to what extent can you read the nomad war machine essay as a analysis of numlock you know if you if you numlock you're just in another culture you have everything has to be done in a different way you have to totally relearn all these practices things that you take for granted as stuff you can do with a keyboard you suddenly can't do and you have to try to find some alternative ways of doing it or try to find totally different things that you want to do

it's you know this massive ethological transformation happens like that so now I don't even know what happens now I often just click numlock on accidentally I don't think it makes any significant difference to anything but that must be a legacy of a certain phase in the kind of usage of the of the keyboard where it was very tied up with a certain kind of hard coding activity that is now you know still facilitated to a certain extent but as I think has that kind of weird legacy feature to it a little bit

Yeah. yeah in terms of amy's question i don't i don't honestly remember what it what it did to all the other keys um because the the just overwhelming catastrophic effect was this thing that you

couldn't use you couldn't move around the screen in any way of course they it didn't even have a mouse this device so everything was done through through arrow keys and they just stopped moving you around when you start when you press arrow keys and numlock was on it just produced some letter and some number instead you just got a string of numerals in place and I mean it was I'm sort of obviously now also being nutty and repetitive but the the utter shock of just thinking how could you how could you work like this like what what would you have to be trying to do or how would you be doing things such that this new

acumen on was was was was functional for you at all it's kind of shattering experience yes echoing the experience but the actually this is the main distinction between the eye in Unix and almost any other modern editor and also with emacs is the VI as a modal editor so you go into an edit mode where you can type and

just have your words turn up in the document and then you hit escape and you go into an a into a actually is into a separate editing mode where you can navigate the document right um using again keys on the keyboard because that's all you have it's it's from a pre mouse era and many early versions of VI like um for years and years didn't even recognize the arrow keys you navigated with the J and the K for up and down and I forget it's it's like the L and the H maybe for for left and right but um yeah that's just how it worked

and this sort of modality is sort of one design solution to the lack of an orthogonal sort of input device basically, you haven't got a separated keypad on these early keyboards and you haven't got a mouse either, so So instead of an orthogonality in the input device, you have an orthogonality built into your interface. And then NumLock is a really interesting hardware-level expression of that as well. I always assumed, or at least I really vaguely remember

number, numpad being explained to me by a typing tutor program as most useful for data entry when you're doing a lot of data entry of numbers. And that was the big justification for its existence. And, you know, where you did the, you know, you're learning typing coming from this sort of old dictation type world in many ways. Right. And even though it was a typing tutor program, it was the computer teaching you to type. It was like this tutorial material from that dictation era.

So it's like when you're typing out your handwritten draft, which is obviously how you made it Then you know, these are these useful skills, but if it's data entry of numbers, then you use this I'm not sure if that Anyway, that was my personal experience of it. I don't Know that the historic explanation is that general, but that was certainly one way of explained and one path yes I mean it sounds definitely plausible yeah

I mean look in in so far as people aren't aren't saying I'm just going to randomly respond to to a few of these questions and like Amy's question do you think it's possible to read the entirety of Thousand toes through the keyboard. I mean I would just say that I Don't think it's good for your mental health to try and do that As a sort of limited anecdotal thing it's it's extremely tempting I still find to try and do that, but it's like You know I think the expression from primaries not prime around

What was it called looper is like it fry fries your mind like an egg I mean So it's like yeah be be cautious about this definitely Could it this call their caution word if you want to invoke that this is the time to do it for sure I think it's it's difficult to sorry Amy's still on this but it's difficult because I say I had this machine that was a an Amstrad PCW 8256 dedicated word processor and it had its own

specific structures to it at the semiotic level and every kind of level and its memory was external floppy disks which could have a total memory capacity of 173 kilobytes and the particular semiotics of that system seemed to just bizarrely interlock with lots of thousands like that in a way that was just horrifying and and so for a long time I just had no doubt at all that the lesson was sitting around exploring their amstrad and that this was their abstract machine and it was like everything they were just simply conceptually dissecting this this thing I mean it's like the the the the software

for this machine was actually called loco script you know it was like this totally just rich dialogue going on between these two things what does 173 connect here in a thousand parties well I don't know I'm sort of a little bit lost on this 173 still sort of echoing a little bit as a number that I don't ever quite drop because of this because of these these specs I don't think it's very direct it's indirect I mean I once in three is the 40th prime number and 40 is an easier thing to track

down and oh treat that as a challenge we can't just with the calories more than 15 minutes a day and they're really in trouble but I mean loco is just fantastic though isn't that I mean in terms of all its association I mean obviously the the the whole skits a side of it but it's just this whole thing

also to do with local it was because it's short for locomotive software so it has that that whole dynamic element to it at all and and and that uh you know takes us back partly to this numlock situation i mean because these questions of mobility you know it's like you think oh they keep talking about movements and speeds and all of this kind of thing how the hell what does that relate to and then suddenly you're frozen you know you're totally frozen you cannot move around the screen and it's suddenly you see it as a problem you know that there's again this is a big word for them obviously this thing about a problem you're put in a situation where you have

to think how does this work what what you know i cannot move and i am in an immobile any mobile voyage and intensity here and you know how how do i actually do it you know and and so that sort of whole mode that you get into this like utter stressed pragmatics is in some sense an extremely productive mode with them I think you know like you because that I think they're trying to they're trying to take you to that place of just thinking but the problem is something like utterly practical but abstract and

And in a certain sense, that's why I just really hate all this stuff like mice and all of these modes of convenience, which just de-problematize the interface so much that it ceases to have this kind of function anymore. you know you can't that that problematic friction is just totally taken out and you just move around easily with the mouse and so you can't even see that as a problem anymore and and uh but you know it is what it is obviously There's a kind of visuality to using the mouse too, which is something that you can

do without if you're just using keys, I think. It kind of reconnects the eye to the screen. So it reconnects it, the mouse reconnects the eye to the screen? Yeah, I mean you can do a lot on a keyboard without having to look, like I mean just with typing you can type if you if you can type properly on a queti keyboard you can type without having to look at what you're writing and that's one of the things behind speed as well but there's a kind of like re-coordination of like the hand eye which happens i think with the mouse that you don't necessarily have with the keyboard it's more of a kind of pure tactility yeah yeah yes This is taking somewhere else that's not very interesting

actually in comparison to what we were talking about but just the kind of investigation of different interface styles that's kind of happening at the moment and pushing at the edge of what's already locked in but different kind of like three dimensional interfaces like stuff that Autodesk is doing and like spoken interfaces are becoming more and more ubiquitous because people keep getting run over by cars while they're looking at their phone and even stuff in like in um lillian gibson's the proof for where they use the inside of their mouth to input commands into the kind of yeah um system but yeah yeah this isn't oh sorry sorry amy yeah no no no okay well i was just gonna say i think that this

like takes us back to a lot of this kind of sort of unresolved question about how you think stratification in terms of this of this whole problematic doesn't because either the more the interface is done for you the more you you're you the more in a certain sense you're deeply subsumed into this stratic system way way where your activities is completely disconnected from the actual construction of the interface and I mean I guess it's like their thing that visit there's positive and negative aspects to that but the intensity of

stratification increases the more the functionality of the interface is pre-given with the technology, I think. Yes. Thank you.

has everyone gone very quiet or is my system somehow got shut off just general silence maybe Okay, yeah. I'm just trying to think, what is it about the mouse? I mean, it's almost... It's so... It flips the interaction to be so...

So it's much, so much more about just pointing, right? really just that that very basic sort of signaling of like that over there right that it takes away yeah true or the the writing interaction right when you when you switch to the mouse I mean obviously you can only point it's even time to point to this and I want that right yeah yeah from among many choices which is why it's a powerful device right but you know depending on the resolution of the screen effectively but yeah it's it's it's reading but it's not necessarily

it's not even textual necessarily it's more like scanning a space I don't know I mean it's interesting that it you know like Amy has said and you're now saying I think is pointing at this kind of complication of um perceptual and motor relations isn't it because you see it's like scanning I mean obviously it's interesting you see that because it's a it's an input device you know so so but you know you've said it's like reading it's like scanning I mean you're thinking of the mouse as a perceptual device rather than a writing head

but actually it's what it's taken is your writing function and put it into the mouse click isn't it so you're sending an instruction to the machine by a click in a certain position with the mouse you're not you're not really reading with the mouse are you Oh Right and you're actually sending a lot of information to the machine with the mouse I'm new like every single move is an event that's interpreted by the interface right even before you get to the button click right, but it's so semantically like

sparse on that that movement it's informationally dense at the sort of interface layer, but But it's very semantically sparse. Yeah Well, it's kind of almost like being given a multiple choice test rather than an essay exam is that I mean it's like it the The interface has decided for you What are your available options that you then select? from a menu rather than pretending that it's like a writing machine modeled on a typewriter where you're where it's just facilitating your particular stream of semiotic content yeah it's much more of a broadcast type mode right you do

you're navigating more like something more like a broadcast media um rather than sort of more like an authorship relationship yeah I mean yeah it is interesting and it's it for me it's partly interesting just to get like narcissistically sort of imploded again but it just never occurred to me up to just now in this course that the mouse would be anything we'd even talk about like i'm deeply like i've got this just such a deep phobia about the goddamn thing that i just don't even acknowledge its existence you know and and and it's like really this moment oh my god there's this thing

horrible thing here you know um down by the side of my keyboard that i i'd been blocking out and and now we're we're talking about um so yeah it's interesting and obviously like this is another key you know like if people said well why look the mouse and the keyboard why is this all about the keyboard and not the mouse they they're kind of parallel aren't they and the i guess the mouse is a kind of parastrata to the to the keyboard and it and it's one that had been pushed totally to oblivion until people raised it just now. I've been thinking about the mouse and the politics of the desktop space recently.

In Windows Anniversary Update that was released a few months ago, they introduced for the first time Windows subsystem for Linux, which means you can actually run a full version of Ubuntu. It's a small version, but it's a full working version. natively in Windows, which is really new. So I installed an X Windows manager for Linux for Windows, so now I can run windowed Linux programs natively in Windows in their own Windows. Desktop, like an Ubuntu desktop in Windows, I could gradually decompose the Windows desktop into a Linux operating environment and eventually remove that frame of Windows, and then I would be in Linux. Right. So then where is that black space that's outside of the windows,

kind of, is the feeling I get thinking about that. I wish I knew more about Linux. I mean, I'm assuming their input systems are comparable. You, for instance, have the mouse plague on Linux as well as on... Yes, yes, I'm making kind of an analogy that the way that as I'm moving from Windows to Linux and I'm decomposing, going from this, like my Windows desktop, which contains Windows Windows, then some of those Windows become Linux Windows.

And then those Linux Windows could eventually become... Yes, yes. So you dissolve the frame. Sorry? You dissolve the frame. It would slowly be you'd introduce... Exactly. And then into that Microsoft matrix. Whereas the premise of the mouse... Yeah, whereas the premise of the mouse is that you just have one screen surface. So everything has to be on that... Within that finite space. But then what is deciding what's that being mapped to becomes political. and do you want to say anything about about your sense of what you mean by political in that in that context oh well the the yeah as i've been doing this windows to linux transition i've been

realizing that what an operating system is is primarily a platform lock-in so it was adding this linux subsystem uh it's it's a huge step for them because it means that that that Microsoft is going to be moving out of the operating system environment, they're going to stop trying to lock people in as much. Right, right, right. Yeah. Yes. So they stop being a pseudo-transcendental structure on your... Yeah, exactly. So operating system is code for enforced monopoly lock-in, whereas Linux is code for a mobile kind of nomadic operating system that resides on the hard drive. Yeah.

Although Linux itself also has an environment that's transcendent a little bit, certainly. Does that make sense? I mean, yeah, I'm trying to sort of engage it back, but maybe we've already just kind of wandered too far off the key. Yeah, well, taking a step back, going back to the mouse, the political issue there is who decides what gets on the screen and who decides what my cursor is hovering over right now, what that maps back to in the code and the execution. And so then going back from the mouse to the keyboard, maybe, the keyboard doesn't have that issue because there is no space.

The keyboard input goes directly to whatever program has focus. So that stack is political, whereas the mouse allows you to go from maybe across stacks, actually. Different windows. I'll leave it there. no it is it is interesting the psychological space it puts you in definitely like I think everyone is saying that the um the mouse the mouse puts you in a mode of sensory receptivity much more strongly than than than the keyboard in the sense that you're just on the screen you're

operating on the screen with the mouse aren't you in a way that doesn't seem the same I mean the the the if you're I don't know I probably spend too much time just typing text so it would be it would probably be very different if people were programming or doing something more more sort of on you know untraditional with it with a keyboard than I'm used to so maybe I shouldn't push down of this but it seems to me like this the screen in this sense is just like a simulation of a piece of paper and it's just telling you what you've done which is very different to the space of the mouse which is telling you what you can do next isn't it this is what like sort of this language of like Adams

navigation and you know you know it's it's providing instructions to you much more clearly than the writing screen of the keyboard is I don't know how much of that is just illusory I mean obviously people would say oh well that's just because you're not what you're seeing and not seeing and the mouse just manifest that interface just manifests what is already there and it's not really changing the the structure of the relationship

oh so can I just what is I need to I think I'd need to follow this link that Rowan has sent to be able to know what the question is asking unless we can get a clarification. Do you want to explain your question there Rowan? Ruan, do you want to unmute or do you want to just

the sidebar is fine too, I guess, and I can read it maybe. I mean, unless anyone can explain what an Avid edit cover is. I don't know. I'm worried that if I load a big JPEG, it might kind of overstress the system here. So I was going to do that later. Allows click commands while editing digital video. Yeah, I think it's just a mess that lays on top of the keyboard. So it gets a physical thing. Yeah, it's a physical thing. So it adds another layer of. It's like this. Yeah, perfect. You can skin your keyboard or reskin it.

OK. And what's the benefit of that? So you can edit using your keyboard or type in a different language or something like that. Actually, it's just semiotic, is it, in the sense that it puts a new set of symbols over your keys? Or does it do anything? I mean, I know I could, as I said, I could answer this question myself by just looking at this JPEG, but I'm a bit scared about loading it. Yeah, yes, that's okay. So it's basically a, it's just a recoding that you get by putting it over the top. Okay, I'll try it.

I'll try opening that. Aha. Okay. And there's potentially some new skin that would go with any program that you were using. Okay, I get it, yeah. I get it yeah so sorry maybe I should go back to the question yes I don't know I don't know what I think I see this kind of ghostly it's not kind of quite form issue coming

up about this it seems to me to be related like in these it's a big sort of visual trope in and in lots of science fiction movies of these totally virtualized keyboards that you know you've got some sort of vr apparatus on or whatever and you just have a kind of hallucinatory uh interface kind of displayed to you in front of you and you just you know operate on that with your fingers or whatever there's a very good example of it in minority report but I think it's kind of there's a lot of movies that have this thing so that seems to

somehow be related to this problem like that or not problem issue that this this avid this avid keyboard seems to be a kind of just a concrete physical way of doing the same thing and it relates also to the mouse issue and obviously I guess the question that for me is then ticking along in the background is is this all part of a post QWERTY universe I mean are we just are we basically heading on this other line to the malahani thesis that we just you know this this qwerty question is just purely a legacy of uh of something that's come out of the typewriter and is being

culturally discarded it's just it just really is this kind of virtually obsolescent legacy of the of the typewriter epoch so I mean I sort of feel compelled to continually raise that question even though it's one that's utterly destructive of my my purposes really and then I think then it's just like if it was like that then this immense you know I'm not a promise

before we go in Colorado yeah this immense structured thing has been installed and just not not used that's a kind of there's a weird familiarity to that because I sort of feel that about the about this kind of whole Amstrad phase obviously so I wouldn't be surprised if we had to go it's just a bigger version of that so I just want to give a heads up to its 101 yeah the other the other thing that we should

touch on today for sure is the additional class and I think maybe just throwing this out there maybe some time during next week if we did a class during the weekday that might be the best option but it's up okay if we could get that if everyone yeah we have to say coordinate quickly then on that and take me yeah yeah okay so so if everyone would go back into the class make sure to go back in the classroom and just um take a look over it I think maybe I'll just suggest a couple days and we'll limit it down that way I think I can work with anything if we're talking about this time okay in the in

the mornings yeah so if you know that would be I'm flexible then I think on that okay great so I'll post stuff in the classroom and just keep an eye out everyone yeah and then what should we look forward to next week should we is there anything material that we should look at for next week yes I was just thinking I was just thinking about this question because what I'm obviously

wanting to do really as we as we go forward here is just pull is just pull the keyboard apart and starting where we are now with the with the actual letter segments of the of the alphanumeric series and and quoting so in terms I I think the trouble with adding much in the way of reading material is just honestly I think we're kind of in on cut untracked wilderness

now I mean if it if anyone knows of anything that's been done on this then I would obviously very very gratefully receive it but I mean I'm taking that the geology of morals is the last sort of our last kind of staging post of of investigative work in this regard and we're kind of on our own now and so what I would sort of say I'll definitely think about it as quickly as possible whether there's anything I can add people are very welcome to suggestions on

for people to look at and and I think our conversations go on a wide gyre so it's always going to be fairly loose but my question kind of coming coming up for this is just like if you ask this question from the three novellas piece about what happened you know how did you get from the alphabetic arrangement of the letters to the QWERTY distribution of the letters how do you begin to start approaching that question in some kind of convincing relatively rigorous fashion so I yeah my

recommendation is whatever else people just play around with these sequences yeah I was gonna say before we go could you just like describe or sort of walk through the procedure or chunking up the keyboard through counting one more time or numerically coding them? Yes, let me just give you this position which I like just because it's so, we'll have many others but this is like, this is one that's just so straightforward and I think sort of doesn't seem sort of wild or speculative or anything like that. So use the numerical segment as a model, as I say. And you've just put them side by side

in whatever dimension is convenient. I just type out the digits, zero to nine and then beneath it one to nine and zero. So you've got your 10 things, hopefully neatly stacked like that instead of by univocal relationships, marked by kind of vertical segments. And then you just read off from the top row, the alphanumeric row to the bottom row. As they say, these are, they're all their content expression relations. They're all reversible, so you could turn it upside down if you want. I don't think it's helpful, but you get the same result as the point, whichever you do. So put the alphanumeric one on top, qwerty one on the bottom and then you just you just so read off so the first

the first alphanumeric oh we're just on the decimal section the first decimal numeral is zero you go down what's the what's the equivalent query figure one then so you then reiterate okay so now we've got one where what's the what you know if what's if you go to one on the alphanumeric decimal section go down you've got to you just go it's extremely straightforward and mechanical this time because you just end up going 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 and round that's your circuit and you can't as I say you can't even see what you've done because it's just so looks so obvious and neat but actually you depending on arrangement

all kind of other things could happen now do the same thing by doing the alphabet in order of doing quit and doing you know starting with q to m underneath that so you know a goes to q what does q go to you you have to look on your system you know q is obviously the 16th the 16th alpha alpha medical level so that's going to go to H and so you go Q to H to whatever also you know

a to q um sorry i'm not sure i'm i'm worried that i'm confusing myself here let me just let me just cheat by giving you sort of one little one little thing from this is that um the letter l which it's it's alphanumeric value like if you continue sorry about this being i wouldn't be i won't i won't see uh

don't like to figure it wrong it's alphanumerary values 21 okay if you can just carry on from 9 a is 10 b is 11 c is 12 whatever use this as an inter stratum if you want um as an epistratum to to do your coding and decoding so um the 21st alphanumeric character is l the 20 so the 21st QWERTY character is S. S. Yes, sorry about this.

s is the 28th can this be right yeah so I'm okay I think I'm getting myself in a tangle here because I'm because of viral brain and I'm worried about that I'm gonna tell you tell you something wrong here 20 s is no it's not the 28th query character s is the 28th alphanumeric character which corresponds in qwerty to L so L and s is

a completely closed semiotic clip according to this same procedure it's the equivalent of the numeral segment it's you know l goes to s s goes to l if you go in this it's just a little closed system it's the only it's the smallest one and this gives you this gives you your second your second part of this thing if you've got the whole alphanumerican quality systems and how many bits does this break in well we can see that we now got two bits we've got one bit that consists

of all the all the numerals we've got a second bit that consists of just those two letters s and l that form some special little system on their own um yeah i don't want to i get to wander into this because obviously then you begin to think well what you know as little codes or in sort of capitalistic sense no tarragon where you just you're describing or diagramming something with with letters yeah the new center is totally right hang on no isn't 21a in qwerty yeah i probably I think I found that bit up so forget about it yeah I abandoned what I was

trying to tell you about the but about doing it with a and you know I figured it out as we went on I was just confused momentarily yeah stick in the classroom yeah I will do that but you know honestly what what needs stick is sticking in the classroom is it is so it's so simple I don't think I need to because it's just all all I'm saying is just put these sequences side by side and just reiteratively draw out this pattern that just purely comes from their bi-univocal relationship, which is absolutely strict, of course. If you want to, which we're doing implicitly in talking about it,

I'm doing it really incompetently in a viral haze, but just like I said, ordinality, the ordinal use of the natural numbers, can be used as an epistrata when when doing these by univocal mappings in mathematics and set theory or whatever you can use you can use this ordinary ordinality from um let's say zero to 35 as your epistratum that is that is that is knitting together these two um these two series and once you've once you've got that this procedure allows you to do this first level and I would say just

really basic analysis that has already given you sort of a confirmation of the semiotic isolation of the decimal section of the of the system and then using no other procedures and the ones that have already been engaged there it decomposes this this system into these further blocks I think if everything goes right you've come out with three specifically linguistic let's say on let or letter letter systems from this of which of which LS is the most compact

don't trust don't trust anything that I've said just trust the method because yeah one one you're also complaining about being fire see I've I'm sure I've just hazed up in terms of the actual values of various things but what I've that's reliable is just the method and ls for sure is through in the after numeric series 21st and 28th letters yeah no so 21 isn't a in quirt it can't be in QWERTY 10 is 0 20 is P oh my god it looks like it is

her I'm just gonna get my brain around the house of course book I know the difference where we've gone wrong is this and you start with zero zero is one in QWERTY and therefore zero is nine Q is ten and a is 20 and M is 30 0 to that so so we we know it goes from 0 to 35 we've got because the alpha numexus starts with the letter 0 if you don't include that if you don't have a zero off term they're not going to match up because you've always got your zero

off the term in in the afternoon access yeah no I'm not feverish actually so I can't compete with one else complaints I'm okay guys are we done all right sounds good is everyone happy or whatever it's like great I'm sorry to end on such a confused I'm such a confused note but yeah if I can think of anything clarifying I will I will try

and put up in the classroom yeah thank thank you all guys and yeah feel that Yeah, and maybe I'll see you before the normal time. Okay, bye-bye. Sounds good. Bye. Good night. Good day or whatever it is for you guys. Dude, we've been trying to, like, formulate, identify the diagonal thing for, like, three classes now. Like, we started an anthropole with, like, me and Nick just sort of, like, staring at each other across the street and sort of, like, saying strings of words about Cantor and trying to figure out what the fuck we were talking about. Okay, I'm ending broadcast now.

Oh, right, yeah, yeah. That's the perfect end point right there.