NCCP 700-1016 Qwernomics Path Dependency & Semiotics Fatality Session VI

Hello and welcome to the sixth session of Quornomics, Path Dependency and Semiotic Fatality. I'm going to pass the mic off to Nick Land. Right, great, thanks, Theodore. I'm treating this session as a introduction to coercion analysis session and I'm going to try and do everything in uncontroversial steps. hopefully I'm gonna end up with it in an initial discovery as far as I'm

concerned and hopefully it will be persuasive but to people by that point but let's see whether that is in fact the case one Kind of substantial digression on the way that I hope also might be useful So I'm going to actually begin by just posting a link To something that I hope Some of you guys can probably do something more with Than I can I'm only taking it some some very sort of a minimally suggestive elements from it it's it looks incredibly interesting I

think and the reason I'm I think it's relevant definition this paper is trying to show that there's this general schema cutting across all these different fields um um strong echoes and which involves basically understanding relations between two object connected by um to a morphism and and i think that what we're dealing with is a morphism um

and it even seems to me that that term isn't particularly stretched but this is something i'd be interested in seeing what other people's uh feedback is on this question so minimally we have the same set of elements shuffled between an alphanumeric series and a QWERTY sequence and we're trying to get some maximally rigorous purchase on what has happened in that transformation and what and I think this is the same question

as what is actually the kind of structure of the morphism concern which is highly complex I think in this case and needs to be sort of broken down into pieces and looked at in stages. So my preparatory digression on this before looking at QWERTY in particular is to contextualize what we're doing within a field based on the analysis of abstract apocalypses

and i want to i want to um just present fairly quickly a simple of an abstract apocalypse that i think is then through some kind of analogy relevant to what we're looking at in terms of QWERTY. So, my neat toy model of an abstract apocalypse, I think, is a poor than one. And I'm going to call it hexaclysm. and it's it's the abstract apocalypse proper to the e-jing or the or the joey

among other things and it's produced purely through binary exponentiation and digital reduction decimal numeracy so it involves six elements or ultimately more than six elements but a morphism that connects two sets of six elements and it's to start off with the first zero counting numbers one two three four five six if each of those numbers is treated as the binary

exponent so we're looking at two to the two to the zero two to the first second third fourth fifth sixth etc sorry it's so I'm I'm already young yeah sorry let me let me rephrase this it's it's we can do that by so you see by twisting it around it's a cycle but it's it's it's neither if we just if we just say it's each of our counting numbers minus one is by an exponent so two to the zero through to two to the fifth

and that our transformation our equivalent of the transformation between the series is that one two three five six goes to four eight seven five I don't know whether this is actually even working on the sidebar it's interesting among other things for our purposes but I think this series is important over and over again in the decimal in the decimal numerals it it structures the

I Ching, which is the oldest book in existence, perhaps, and almost certainly the book of numbers that we have. It has other implications. and but for our purposes um there's gone it's weirdly gone into reverse for me on this thing if you look at these two these two series the morphism between these two series it actually has a strong you can see clearly what has happened what has happened in this in this transformation is there's a there's a set of zones you can say

depending on how you're going to think about it three or four zones first of all there's a zone of consistency like the first two digits of this series remains unchanged this is sort of of weirdly suggestive of what happens obviously in our case with the with the numeral segment of the of the keyboard but that there's no solid basis for seeing that as anything more than than purely suggestive and then in the remainder of the in the last four digits that there is it maps it very graphically vividly in maps an event

in the middle of those room of those remaining four digits there is a there is a an impact or intergression of alien elements these two new digits eight and seven uh impact upon the upon the sequence and in doing so you can see very specifically they then produce a nebula or halo around them is is basically a splash zone the digits four and five are pushed are pushed out to the edge of that impact site and two other digits are ejected entirely so three and six for for interesting reasons it it turns out that probably could be on what I want to

hey are simply ejected from from the series and so in this morphism in this in this transition in this abstract apocalypse that takes place converting this this this six digit string into another six digit string there's a um there's basically a graphic vivid image of an impact from outside that produces a a a splash or crater and and ejects um certain elements outside of the system concern so i think it's an extreme i would say a beautiful little uh apocalypse and we can

see really clearly what what has happened when we see that and and its relevance is also very pronounced because because it's as i say it's it's it's an abstract apocalypse that has produced it produced the oldest book of numbers in in anywhere in the world our apps quavulsion is vastly more complicated and the introduction of certain methods as a set of interlocking

changeable methods in all confident progress with what it is we're seeing there's there's nothing that is immediately as graphically obvious about what what has happened when we're looking at for Volschen as opposed to the hexaglysm so what then so what are these what are these methods um well I take this in two stages because I think first of all there is a sort of set of methods that relate to the issues that came up in the first

part of course about processes and path dependency so obviously in terms of if in so far as we're looking at path dependent complex process it's defined as we saw by David as an anagotic process this is something he'd taken this is absolutely standard Santa Fe definition of what you're dealing with with complex processes And that's to say that when we're looking in this mode of analysis that I think we've

now crossed away from, but I'm just returning to momentarily, when we're looking at the QWERTY as the social historical technological process we have to be definite the complexity people tell us that we're not looking at an ebgodic process there is no free process of selection from some series of random possibilities that between them exhaust the whole range of possibilities we're locked in to a much narrower path constrained set but I think it's still worth for us to at least look at what would happen if we were in the mode

scientifically convenient mode even though it's deeply missed misleading in in these cases if we were looking at our object as if it were an ergodic process that was at work and so what would what would our sequence look like as an ergodic process it's very easy to to um you simply have a set of uh 36 um scrabble tiles but with the 36 because you also have the decimal numerals you put them into some kind of container shake them up like thoroughly randomize them and then just pick

them out one at a time place them in order and produce their for random reshuffling of the alphanumeric sequence. This kind of mode of analysis is obviously very, again, suggestive of thermodynamic statistical mechanic type of backdrop that the complexity people are working from. But that's, I think, a little bit misleading. Because just the arithmetic of what we're looking at here is not based upon logarithms and

exponents in this case it's based upon factorials so the number of different ways that you can sequence a set of elements n is equal to n factorial you know if you've got one element it can only be sequenced in one way so you know one factorial is one two there's just two opportunities two factorials two and then it starts very quickly factorial is six four six four factorial is 20 factorial is 120 each time applying the total you've reached by the next number

in the sequence. So the full alphanumeric series has this there's 36 factorial different ways of arranging that sequence. A 36 factorial is a very large number. If we're just looking at the um it It obviously climbs super exponentially. If we just, as we have been doing, cut out the numerical sequence of that and just concentrate on the alphabetical segment of it, 26 factorial, it's a number that busts your calculator display.

um my sort of quick calculation of this says that 26 factorial is something north of significantly north of 3.6 times 10 to the 26 which is a big number it's not it's not quite elementary particles in the universe number that's that's I think 10 to the 79 or 10 to the 80 but it's it's it's extremely huge and if you were dealing with an agotic process the chance of any particular

total outcome if you if you reproduced the alphanumeric sequence by pulling it out of this this thoroughly shuffled cup then the chance of doing that should be one over 26 factorial it should be it should be this minute super improbable number and obviously the same modes of calculation with sort of restrictions cut all of the that you find in the QWERTY sequence and within these terms the amount order we see is

just immense we've thought that the numerical segment is almost replicates the it's in the alphanumerical series I think it's worth like breaking that into two parts it's all you're doing it adjusting one element in the sequence but but also all of the ten numerals come at the beginning of the sequence which is highly improbable outcome and I think you can put a number on that my my I think that the chance of just

those numerals together in any order whatsoever let alone in the highly ordered form in which you've got them is equal to 36 factorial minus 26 factorial that again is astronomically improbable. So this is all at this level simply confirming the fact that we are very, very, very distant and a Godic distribution. It's simply, as the complexity people are asserting in this other context, it's simply absurd to think that we are actually dealing with anything like that, that QWERTY is some kind of randomization in a strong sense.

A new REC series. But if it isn't a randomization, then what is it? I think this is then sort of narrowing our task a little. This is where I think that we need some specific relevant methods for trying to get a sense of the amount of order and the distribution of order and the specific structure of order in the QWERTY sequence such that we can understand what happened. What is the morphism? What is the abstract looking at when we see this transformation? and so as i see the the the method that i think make just direct sense at this point

the overall look at it in in a couple of different ways to try and suggest that So, we want to, if we're going to end up, I'm going to want to do some hypotheses about what has happened, we want some sense of evidence. And we can see that we can't use these, we can't use any readily accessible notion of negative entropy or its close equivalence to understand that. We need something that's closer to the grain of a highly restricted path dependent.

And I think the obvious way to start with this and to introduce some quantities into our analysis that we're going to recognize a minimal information of transposing one element. So moving one character from one position to another position is a unit of transformation and therefore we can kind of produce numbers attached out to how thoroughly certain segments

of our object have been reshuffled. lots of things that people might want to do people I partly mean things that a strong temptation for and I certainly don't want to rule out but I'm at least shelving because they are unnecessary complications at this point you might want to say for instance we don't want to just quantify we don't want to just treat as one unit moving one character from one position to any other position but we want to measure the distance that is being traveled that that there's we want to mark a difference between moving one character in the sequence or a short

way obviously it's not it's not difficult to add definite numbers for that but I think the level of complexity that we introduced would not immediately pay off for us and I and it was just unnecessary complication so we're saying at this point that that is a a unit of change a switch involves moving one character from any position in the sequence to any other position in the sequence um so we now go to our talk to the to the qwerty distribution which is comes obviously in four rows which analytically is helpful I mean it sort of suggests ways that we can break it up and we've already

seen that there are good reasons for treating the numerical sequences as a separate and shelving it and at least temporarily to to if we were taking our out of a bowl and putting them in order we would expect that roughly half of the sequence would be in order i don't mean consecutive i just mean in order um so if this is if i

unit of change is just one of these switches the state of equities for system if there's is going to be one half of the unit considered so for instance numerical segment there's 10 units there we would expect to put it in order we would have to do five because you're gonna get a certain amount just by chance you're gonna get a certain amount of water free there's only things can

only be I there's only two possible state it can either be or out of sequence and if something if you're getting more than half of your units out of sequence that's a sign of an actual order it actually starts becoming improbable and and this is relevant to to our object as we'll see a miracle segment of QWERTY one fixes it takes it into it's completely symmetrical it takes it either from the alpha new eight series to QWERTY or you have to do is move zero from either the beginning or the end of the sequence to the other

the other side so that's that has that part of our object has just one switch as I say we'd expect because there's 10 10 elements in that in that going to take five switches to do it so um just one switch being required shows um a very very substantial amount of water in that in that system so while we're just looking at this at the at the point of putting it on the shelf let me just switch to the other mode of doing this which is completely equivalent which is that

this number, the number of switches 1, is the reciprocal of the number that you get if you take that sequence as it exists and you simply try from any position in the sequence to produce the longest ordered sequence of elements. So we can see we've only got two choices with our numeral section of the QWERTY keyboard. Basically we can start with one and count neatly all the way to nine and then we lose it because zero is then out of order. But we've got nine elements in order and only one out of order.

So we can get to our one switch being required by simply 10 units minus 9 equals 1. The two are exactly the same. So what happens if we start, if we do now put the numerals on the shelf and look at the rest of the keyboard? And there's one thing that immediately massively jumps out at us, which is that the middle row of the letters the home row is again vastly ordered in a in the terms that we're employing now it's approximately as

ordered as the numeral section it's not quite as ordered because it's only we're only dealing with nine keys rather than ten so going to is going to lower the amount of order that we're talking about but in exactly the same way we can try these two reciprocal operations how many keys how many characters do we have to switch around to put it in order and i'm not saying just to repeat sequence just in order one you obviously all you have to do is move the s from the second position to the last position in the in the sequence or again reciprocally you start from any position you want in that in that sequence of

characters and you just count the number that are in order and all of them are in order except the F so we count we've got eight characters already in order there a d f g h j k l all neatly in order only one and normally in that in the in the series so I think this is this is this is kind of a striking and crucial phenomenon that way when when looking at here this is just an extremely strong indication of tendency in action of the distance that we are from any kind of

ergodic distribution and in our question that is constantly lurking like what happened however we're going to think about it concretely in terms of like the psychology shows his personal psychology the ergonomics of distribution of the keys various high concrete hypotheses we might have about how the keys that they did it however we approach this concretely and we will always be in hypothetical mode doing that I think because the historical evidence is just fuzzy on this um rigorously has to be said that what has happened is we hear that the system has just inherited and reproduced and conserved the order that it was already

incarnated in the our new rex series does it's beyond any serious question that there is just basically a chunk of the alpha and ux series that has been reproduced on the home row minimally minimally uh adjusted um and exhibiting a level of order that is comparable to that that's found in the numeral section of the of the keyboard so we can see already from that that we're not dealing with a homogeneous object we've got we've in our four rows of keys we've got two now

that are that the other two rows the the Q to P row and the Z to M row are much more difficult to to get a purchase on and again the method is the same you can go either of the way you can just you can just now you can use actual Scrabble tile put those put those rows each in turn in front of you how many switches does it require to put it into alphanumeric order not consecutive

order but because we're just dealing with a segment but into it so that every character is follows in the same in the same sequence that it would follow and in in the alphanumeric series that no character that is prior to another in the alphanumeric series it comes later in the qwerty series and the the top pro is hugely disordered and in a way that's extremely intractable so intractable that i'm not going to try to make sense of what's going on in there at

all um in this in this session everyone is invited with great enthusiasm hypotheses about it um but it you have to move no less than six um characters to put it into into order and which is obviously more than we would expect a complete fusion taken out of our shuffled cup um intriguingly from from my point of view for reasons i hate if you this is more this is more disorder this is

improbably disorder so so what happens if we turn it around uh what if we treat it that somehow it's backwards and we try to put it in order and it's actually more disordered in reverse just marginally more it takes it takes seven only you can only consistently there's ten characters in this in this Q2P row you can only the largest number you can count in order hopping freely along the rather when it's the Q to P order is four that's so that's obviously the reciprocal of our number six for the number of shifts that we need if you

turn it around you can only find units in order you know if it's it's extraordinary it almost seems to be that somehow some kind of effort has been put into ordering it and making it um intractable um but as i say i'm i'm now bracketing that problem as as beyond the prospect of immediate progress i like my last stage of this right now is to move on to what i think is a discovery what's it and and I'm hoping it kind of provides a model of what a question that a

question question analytic discovery looks like and you what we then make of it I think is then a supplementary and that that happens when we look at the bottom row in particular and and what we find there I think is very definite evidence about what has happened track sense as I say this there's you can introduce a a psychological story an ergonomic story all kinds of these concrete narratives about why but we're

dealing with it at this level of and I think goes beyond that where so our question what has happened is is highly abstract and is independent of any of these concrete hypotheses about the sociological psychological process that has been in this distribution and what we find with the bottom row is that It takes it's only seven characters in length. It takes no less than five switches to put it in order. That is, again, crazily disordered. and it's and the again reciprocal conclusion rigorously there you can do

it this way instead is if if you start from any position on the bottom row counting forward left to right how many keys can you which micro sequences or sub sequences can you produce that are in order and the answer is only two characters you cannot there's no way to construct a subsequence out of that bottom row that has more than two characters in alphanumeric order but I think the absolutely decisive point then is unlike the top row the bottom row of the keyboard is clearly has clearly been inverted and it's not only been inverted

but it's been that the bottom two rows have been folded so just take the bottom just take the bottom segment of the keyboard on its own round so now you you have rather than zxcv b and n you have mn bvc xn it now only takes two switches to put it into an alphanumeric order and to at the risk of extreme repetitiousness that that means that no less now than five characters can be constructed

there's only one way to do that neatly which is mnvxed all of them um are in are in order when the when the uh row is reversed the b and c character characters are clearly insertions they've been they've been flung out of the home row and inserted um again in in reverse order but there's only two so i i'm not going to make much out of that um but the the remainder the other five characters are already in order if it is reversed and as we can see um if we are just proceeding along the home row and we get to l we not only have uh

alphabetical order in proceeding to m and n we have actual consecutive continuity between those between those two rows so I think this we have the first in terms of looking at this as a kind of abstract apocalypse or a kind of geological convulsion we have definite graphic result we can see that what has happened here is that a A sequence preceding basically ASDFGHJKLMNBVCXZ has been broken and folded over to rows.

And, you know, we have this weight of evidence behind that conclusion of the fact that it's just the amount of order that is revealed on the basis of that hypothesis is huge. it only takes three switches from the whole of that sequence that's now 16 characters going from a folding over to Z only takes three switches to to put the whole of that in in alphanumeric order if we if we make that one assumption so i'm basically going to kind of uh stop monologue phase at this but just to say so you know this seems to me like a a confident analytical discovery

about what has happened in the production of the keyboard. That, you know, however, whatever the concrete story is about that decision-making, we can see that that has taken place purely by this mode of sort of the distribution of order in those keys, which is telling us a story about how this has actually happened. and so I think that there's a bunch of questions with it's probably just like what does what we make of any of this or what consequences it have but the more immediate procedural question is that so you know how can we make any kind of

sense of what is going on on the Q2P row of the of the keyboard of that that section of the QWERTY sequence um but okay I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna hand it over now or whatever um

um i'm hope that i'm yeah yeah this last point about the spell typewriter that that is obviously one of these concrete you know quite how you categorized it whether it's it's kind of partly ergonomic commercial whatever and it's a it's a a really important element of the narrative the historical narrative behind i think it definitely can't be ignored but i think that there's then a question

of like um if you if you then pursue that to the maximum level of abstraction what are you what are you wanting to say about it and so for instance if you just wanted to engage in some process that the and the only criterion of that process was that you ended up being able to write typewriter just with the the top row keys and and i'm not at all um resistant i mean i think that's extremely compelling sort of narrative that we have there um but it obviously is only partially explanatory um of the kind of other elements that we find in that in that system it it doesn't tell us why we've got q in that row at all or or the other or the other elements of it so

i think we can try to integrate that with something that is more uh abstract and detached than just a um historical narrative of any kind Thank you.

Yeah, I don't know whether I'm hearing any. If anyone's trying to speak, then I'm not hearing them. I think it's working fine. I think everyone's just taking it in. Good, good, good. I'm looking at the pattern you were just tracing, and the biggest ejection point is between the B and the V. if you start at A and you look you just go step by step and see what has been switched or ejected when you get to the B and the V you've already you know in this process just now you've already swapped out the B and put it back between the A and the S

but then so we would be at N so then between N and V There's the largest chunk of characters which has been ejected At a sequence into mostly the top row That's just something I noted between B and N in It what if you're starting from the alphabet if you're starting from that out of numeric see yes Yes, but also they've been I don't know that because obviously Obviously, almost all, if we're defining order by conservation of alphanumeric order, and consistency or constancy between these two sequences,

almost all of that order, if we're not looking at the numerals, is in this home row. it's it's it's immense like that and let's sorry let me just take one step back because if the total number if you if you treat the QWERTY sequence naively as a whole and so you've just got Q through to M and you're you're saying what how how much disorder how much reshuffling has happened I think it's

17 you need 17 switches to put it in order and I see this without 100% confidence but quite a lot of confidence because it's again the sort of check option here is to is to just see how many characters you can put in order by starting from anywhere in that Q to M series and what's the longest sequence of ordered characters that you can produce and almost all of that is is in that home row because you go from from d through to l it's almost not only

ordered but almost consecutive isn't it i mean e and i have been kicked out um but other than that you just can't you're just going straight through and so um from the only character prior to d in the qwerty sequence uh that is also in order is a so you you don't get anything at all in the top row um you get um you're just getting this massive amount of order just on the home row and then you add you can add just one more um from the bottom row if it's if it's ordered naively on this left to right order like

you know you you've got a d f g h j k l eight eight characters all all in alphabetical order and then what you know you can go lz lx lv lnn l lm but you you're only going to add one more ordered character whichever you choose uh proceeding then forward to the to the um bottom row and if you're going in the other direction you you you lose order because if you're not starting with a you want to start with something else well you can start with e but that means obviously you have to lose d as well you're you're you're sac you're becoming more disordered whatever you try to do. So it's this massive repository of stuff.

So now if you say, well, in the alphanumeric sequence, something's happened between B and N, you might ask, well, why do you start with B there? You know? It's like a... C is also out of place, isn't it? and M is also it plays so it's that particular chunk of characters D through to L that is your if it's your repository of order that has been

conservation I'm sorry, Anders, maybe you can push that again. And I might not just be getting... Yeah, sure. Let me just clarify what I was saying. And you were breaking up a little bit, but I think I got everything you said. I'm just saying that if we follow your method of starting at A and then going to the right and then on top of that method, well what I was imagining, I was just going through the alphabetic sequence and seeing where each letter went.

So if we start at A, next is B, we can see that shot down to the lower row, the fourth row, and then C shot down to the fourth row. And then we have to do S. And then E got bumped up just up above, just like a little short distance away. And then F, G, H, I got jumped up into the right. J, K, L, M, N, O shot up to the right. P shot up to the right next to O. And then now we're back at B. So we've done a large jump back to the beginning of the alphabet in terms of the distance of the letters in the alphabet. But um, and so we have to deal with when you go back to be mean Yes, I guess but but so I'm just counting the number of characters which were ejected and

And and the and so when we go from after we deal with B Chuck tough a minute and this can I just take a second because I just got thrown off and oh sure. Yes, just yeah so i just probably missed like a sentence oh okay i was just saying um b uh yeah there first of all there are a few characters s and b and one or two others that i mentioned which are larger jumps in the alphabetic sequence going either back or forwards but then after we deal with the hurdle of B and we get to V between N and B is the largest number of ejected characters from the original alphabetic sequence going to QWERTY so um let's O P Q R right okay

S T U all yeah okay so that's okay this is good this is good because what you're obviously it's got to be part of what we decide about the uh it's yeah seven characters some and deep and there's seven characters in the in the homeroom it's the same number of characters in the homeroom as our as our order yeah oh bro is from this particular and the bottom row that position with yes strong isn't it you you get almost you get the majority

of the top row by by seeing how being extracted from this particular interval that is sort of represented by the letter B isn't it yes I'm getting you totally and persuaded cool yeah and only s CB only S's doesn't end up in the top row SC and B I think are some of the largest out-of-place jumps in the sequence overall yeah I mean the b the bc thing it's such an effort for me not to get into dodgy notaracom space because you know where all of these dates this you know what's going on in ad and bc and um

a thousand plateaus if you if you start being at all suspicious about that and then you notice how anomalous this the these particular letters are in the um qwerty sequence it definitely you know sets weird bells ringing a little bit i think um but i i i guess i'm trying to be constrained about that kind of i think that speculation gets a bit um unpersuasive quickly or in in into weird into weird space yeah but i think i think what you've just said and this is really great actually i i i if i seem

to be reserved about it before understanding i i take that back completely without any hesitation now because i think that's totally right we we've identified we've identified a big part of this thing what has happened that most of the top row whatever we're going to say about this typewriter story the word typewriter story has we found what has happened it's been extracted from this identifiable zone and relocated onto onto its own onto its own strata yeah i think it's i think it's also potentially very significant that it's the same number of characters that are consistent in the home row as have been ejected from the

largest ejection point in the fourth row um yeah i think the ejection this this like tracing the order that you discovered going from the home row and then inverting on the direction of the fourth row it's a really interesting method but i don't know where to go from here how to make a persuasive argument for how each of these ejections was decided or why or if it you know yes well i don't know one suggestion possibly is this is we can attain a level of abstraction and analysis where we don't have to ask that question it's not that it isn't potentially interesting but um essential to what

we're trying to do you know the the the pure QWERTY analytic discovery is independent of any sort of historical narrative about what was uh what was the the reasoning behind that or what you know we we don't have to narrativize it because we can we can identify something that has persuasively taken place that has occurred without needing to justify that through this kind of type of historical storytelling I see I think there's two separate let's just take your example

so there's this chunk of there's this chunk of letters from o through to u um we can see where they've they've come from we can you know their source in a certain sense when it's relocalized in the query sequence and we can see where they've ended up there's been this just process of uh um transposition or transportation that has a certain kind of systematic structure to that and and that is true and irrespective of the motivations that were required or a sort of lay between lay behind that decision so let's just

say oh you know that there's that kind of of economic commercial historical motivation to be able to write the word typewriter on the top row and that that somehow played a causal role in this transformation that we're talking about but the actual structure of the transformation itself is independent of of whatever that story ends up being I think you know that story is never going to be more than hypothetical whereas we can actually we can I think We can we can say what has happened At a level of analytical confidence that exceeds that of the purely hypothetical historical narrative

We attached to it Yeah, yes look Yeah, sorry. I was I'm not being distracted now little bit by Theodore's got a question I think it's good and that's one in terms of these principles and method I think that that is a that's a very persuasive one you know if we're gonna say well how are we gonna count these transformations so is it that we can say rather than just a switch is to take one character and place it in a different position that you can take one character or any chunk of consecutive characters

and treat that as one unit of transformation. And that is highly persuasive. There's only, though, when you notice half the sequence as it is right in front of us and you're ignoring the numerical segment, there's only two zones of consecutive order on the whole keyboard. well three in a little way because the on the home or it's interrupted so i has been taken out and so you've got these you know fg and h and jk and l are both ordered and then we've got o and p are ordered on the top row but there are no other ordered sets of keys um to be found anywhere

unless we unless if we do this thing of switching reversing the bottom row of seeing it as this process of folding and breaking that that means we should be reading it back to front then MNN are also in order and that but then that's it only provide to you this one other little thing I think it's a good suggestion because it makes us think about what is our unit of transformation and the unit of transformation is almost certainly complicated than just moving one key from a certain position to an to another position but but that we don't

have a lot to work on in the sense of like once we're off the front row it's there's almost a negligible amount of consistent consecutive structure to work quick. Yeah and can you clarify something? I was working off of kind of an insertion model so when you go from A and then B gets ejected it gets inserted between I'm thinking V and N. But you could also do a swap where you take the you know you swap s and be what's written on them

It's it's just a you can do either one, but we're Sorry, I think you need I need to get you to run that past me one more time I don't I don't I'm not quite okay, so so if you're counting if you're going F G H and then I gets ejected up into the right I Have been thinking that that if you wanted to make that a swap you wanted to reverse that operation. I would get pulled back between H and J and a new key would be inserted there Whereas you could also think of it as a swap So you would have to swap what was written on the J key and the I key in order to Reverse that operation okay two ways you could do it If this The is going to be messy, isn't it?

Like it seems to me like the first way you related that that I has been simply taken out and much easier to think about transposed to the goal works much better than saying that we'd have to swap it. I mean, there's no way you can swap it without producing more disorder than you're introducing it, isn't it? or producing more disorder than order. Like if you had to swap J for I and then J's out of order, and you know what I mean? You're not, you're, in terms of the sheer economics of this order, the measurement of order, you're not making it cleaner.

You're making it messier by saying that. Yeah, yeah, I just wanted to clarify that. And so then it is more of a sequence. We're looking at it as more of a sequence than like a grid I Think that um I don't know it's an interesting question because it's like it's back to this principles of method and and I'm trying to keep our kind of Quantification where you could sort of if we're talking about as an abstract apocalypse our sort of devastation index for these different zones of the of the query sequence I'm trying to just keep them

keep that process of measurement as neutral and practical as possible without introducing certain hypotheses like if we were to say well we have to do all of this by process of swapping then it seems to me we're sort of introducing some substantive hypotheses about the kind of process that we're dealing with and it it might be that that's helpful i mean i think in certain cases it's very persuasive um but it seems to me that it's like you're you're losing a certain amount of neutrality in in doing that because you that this original measure is is is so is so lacking in any hypothetical commitment

whatsoever it's just simply a way of trying to get a get a quantitative estimation of the amount of order that has been preserved or lost in any particular transformation as as mutually as possible you know is there a sense that the method we use though might have to respect the the physical layout itself as a cost of reordering so in other words you know if if what has happened with the disorder going from the alphabet to the QWERTY is in a sense a function of this kind of historical mechanical process then to

account for the amount of damage that's been done would you not also have to include maybe lost the sentence can I just get you to repeat I just you've just glitched out oh sorry if in a sense we're looking at them the disorder that's done as being a function of kind of this mechanical historical process then And should we include in the numerical cost, in the quantified cost of reordering, the same criteria for mechanical reordering? So in other words, if we reorder by moving tiles rather than swapping them, are we not properly accounting for just the amount of difference that initially constructed this change?

If that makes sense. I know I think it's really interesting and complicated and yeah I think it big because there's there's two different levels this is working out I think I'm trying to have trying to be coherent between them is is is a challenge one is is the most abstract level of this so we're really trying to kind of describe what has happened with maximum independence from any kind of concrete narrative um so you know what's it what's the highest possible level of abstraction that you can you can apply to this to this

transformation and then the other one is to try to be maximally realistic or it's got to at least be compatible whatever you end up it has to be compatible with a realistic socio-historical technological story so now you're taking us I think importantly you're saying well let's not lose this second part of it And I think that's a complicated question. We're going to try to be realistic on this second level and say that however we end up setting up our kind of analytical principles,

it has to at least be compatible with a historical story. But what is that, you know, when we now are trying to be concrete, what does that mean? because you know what is actually easy or difficult at that level at that concrete level like you know when Scholes is drawing up the key bit the keyboard for the first time I'm sort of assuming okay I'm gonna be really really crude and I hope that other people can can can make this a bit more sophisticated but the most crude thing you know all he'd need is just a piece of paper you know a set of blank police key slots and he can just insert these

characters anywhere he wants at this stage let's assume he can insert these characters anywhere he wants on those blank key slots originally about of a mechanical typewriter keyboard the only constraint is that there's you know there's only a certain number of keys and then we have these an equal and ergonomic features to do with we don't want the actual keystrokes to interfere with with each other mechanically in the mechanism and these kind of constraints but they they seem very different to these kind of abstract semiotic constraints so easier on that concrete level of characters together or to swap

as opposed to just extract and introduce very clear about this what I'm trying to say is that I'm not really seeing where what the costs you know these concrete costs are in this you know what we would expect or predict if we're going to try and build that in realistically right I mean that makes total sense I guess what I'm thinking is if it's just going to be a symmetrical account of what the cost was to get there to begin with so yeah I mean you're right you can you can abstract it you have the sheet of paper that you can reorder it and then replace as the tiles. And that will give you an idea.

You could figure out what the cost is just to reorder those. I think what you don't have, though, is... You would just lose that symmetry of the cost of what that original disorder was. I'm not sure if I'm making sense with that. No, I'd like... It seems to me important what you're saying, so I would like to press you to... clarify that because it does sound important i mean sorry can i just say i think this notion of cost is something that is probably really worth trying to get a grip on and it's a very slippery notion for me here you know i think if we that if we really did have a kind of concretely

realistic sense of of cost that we're introducing into this into this analysis it would obviously be relevant but it would probably be extremely complicated you know for instance it would be a cost this is like the typewriter story sorry I'm sure everyone's familiar with it but I should just bring it in it's one of these kind of basic narrative components of the query story which is this thing that the the driver of the distribution is that you can't have two keys actual sort of typing heads close together if they are regular if they regularly occur

close together in instance TNA it's got those two keys they're actually next to each other on the on the writing heads then those those two things will kind of jam together and interfere with each other and I don't know whether and here is old enough as I am to use but this did actually happen you know you did you I think and and you get these kind of typing heads would just kind of together and interfere and you know that so that's the real cost so there's an economy in a kind of distribution that

avoids that kind of mechanical error but I'm not but I'm finding it hard to sort of either to generalize or abstract this notion cost in a way that will kind of transport us up to the abstract level of analysis neatly I was interrupting but actually trying to get you to to come back with what you're saying because I do think it's a no I know that's absolutely understood that no I'm having the same problem there too I feel like that is definitely

something that that should be accounted for but you're right I mean I have no I'm not clear on exactly how you do it. I mean, one thing that would be fantastic... Can everyone else hear me? Did we lose Nick? Yeah. Yeah, we lost him. Yeah, I can hear you. I think I'm going to tell us to. Okay, he's back, I think. Sorry, I just got chucked again.

That's all right. Can you speak for just a second? We'll see if your signal is okay. Yes. Okay, well, I'll try and say what I was trying to say before being chucked off, which was which was that um to to try and coordinate these two different levels of analysis would be just fantastic but i think really hard to do which is the sort of questions that would bring us like back to this zone theodore was talking about for instance like you know do we do we want to talk about moving uh chunks or blocks of characters around rather than just talking about

treating each individual character as a kind of totally discrete unit that so that's on this very abstract i think semi-odic level of analysis and then this level that michael's introducing about um the the concrete technological costs involved in the mechanism and how that is actually producing constraints on the distribution for keys now if there was some way if there was some translation system between those two sets of concerns that would obviously be completely fantastic but right i'm not seeing what the clue is uh at the moment for for for bringing those two things

together um so yeah that's an open interesting open question for me of whether that can be dark nick did you see the last episode a few minutes ago um here i'll post it again Sorry, sorry, Anders. I didn't catch that. I said, did you see this link I posted a few minutes ago? I just posted it again in the sidebar. Oh, yeah. Yeah. My computer's, I'm assuming all these problems in my end. So again, I'm a little bit nervous about bandwidth. Let me get you a direct link and it will load better. If I can do that.

OK, it's all right. I think it seems to be OK. I've loaded it. OK. Oh yeah, this is a base 26 numogram that I made using substituting the alphabet for the numbers. So it's just a direct substitution, so A is 0. And just one note about it, it's interesting in that unlike any other numogram that I've done from base 10 below or base 16, it has a path going back to 0 from XC back to A. But I was just looking at this, and I noticed that a lot of the syzygies in this fold the alphabet directly in half, similar to how the lower two rows of the QWERTY keyboard are a folded alphabet, sort of, that's had an apocalypse.

A lot of the syzygies are adjacent keys on the keyboard, either... Okay. Yeah, but sometimes across the rows vertical. Yeah, yeah. So this so this is this let me just make sure I'm getting the the mechanism which is which is that I'm a Syzygy in this system is something to 26. Is that right? Yeah Is that so you're starting you're giving a value zero? Yeah, so Z would be then 25. So there's something to 25. Oh, yeah Yeah, yeah, okay. I think that's yeah. Yeah, I think that works. I Mean it's a great it's a great diagram. I think it's going to take some Processing obviously, but but you're saying that there's a pattern that you think comes out that it actually does

reflect certain Patterns that you're seeing on the on the keyboard. Yeah, so you have to count how many of these did show up adjacent on the keyboard to see whether it was You know significant, but it first glance I noticed several that like X and C C is popped way out of its original sequence so that it can be right next to X And that's the you know the third you've got No H and S are a syzygy and L and O are a syzygy, but L and O are next to each other on the keyboard Okay, so what's this this s to L arrow that okay? I think I have bigger arrows of the currents the smaller the gates. Okay. Okay. All right Yeah, yeah, it's just a little hard to read because there's so many letters and arrows.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it needs some calm reflection. So I probably shouldn't try to process the whole thing right now. Well, you can it's the same pattern basically a spiral on the top of the bottom. Yeah, I shouldn't I'm worried and as if I ask you some of the obvious questions, but come up from this I'm gonna be taking Everyone off on a weird digressive path that might be really strange I just wanted to have you found in all your mole different modal numagrams that they all tend to have these kind of peripheral

vortical systems or is that something that only arises in some of them? Yeah, I've only done numagrams from 0 to 10 and then I did a base 16 hexadecimal one and then I did this base 26 one a base 16 numagram which I could also post the image for that has an interesting little island similar to the X, C, island. It's kind of floating off to the right there. But the island in the base 16 numogram only goes back to what would be 9 or Z. So it doesn't go all the way back to 0. It only goes back to Z. Base 26 is the first one that I found, the lowest one that I found. Although I only did the ones I mentioned. Base 26 is the lowest one that I found that goes all the way back to 0. I did them wrong because it doesn't even...

I don't even understand why that would happen on some of them and not others. I'm going back to zero. Sorry to interrupt you, but I'm now just regressing into a really gross practical mode, which I can see Amy saying that she's got computer problems. Is there internet catastrophe happening at the moment? That's not just my problem. It's just coincidence that Amy's also got a... got a problem. Amy, is your internet okay? Because I'm getting quite a lot of people, it's generally manageable.

I'm asking lots of people to repeat sentences. Anyway, maybe there's nothing we can say about this. Yeah, it seems like both you and Amy are having some connectivity issues. I think it's coming up on Nixon primarily, but I'm not positive. But I think Amy was just saying she's down for the trip down the rabbit hole with Anderson. Yeah. Hi, are you there?

Yeah, Amy was saying her connection's not down. She's not down with the discussion. Sorry, can people hear me all right? I can hear you. Okay. I can hear you. I haven't had a problem with anybody but Nick yet. Okay. I think my problem is also localized here. I've been having internet problems all day, so, you know, continue on.

It's cool. Okay. Yeah, I mean, mine is just behaving really badly as well for some reason. Anders, did you want to continue? I don't want to interrupt you if you were saying something earlier. No, actually, I was finished. I just wanted to share that diagram, point out the interesting feature of that diagram, which is that it has a path to zero, and point out that I noticed a lot of the syzygies from it happen to be adjacent on the keyboard, whether horizontally or vertically. And I don't know where to go from there. Am I understanding what you guys were talking about right?

That it's hard to go up with a of what a cost is when we're talking about why there's a switch what the transformation is? Yes. Okay. So sorry, yeah. Yeah. Sorry, Anders, were you just going to say something about this cost issue? Oh, no, I just wanted to understand it correctly. There's, you know, there's a few ways you could come up with it.

You know, you could measure the actual distance on the keyboard that it's ejected or the number of spaces alphabetically. um when i was did you did you see this list this algorithm i wrote if you scroll up a few screens um i can paste it in again if people want no yeah you might and because every time that i get chucked off i lose the sidebar and so i'm afraid let me paste it in again here okay i just i just wrote this and uh so there's there's the alphabet at the top and then i'm just counting through the alphabet and listing all the operations that are necessary to go from the alphabet to qwerty But without the element of physical space to that says where they're ejected exactly which would be the last part right? Yes, yeah, okay

Yeah, that looks again something and it's interesting pretty minimal the number of operations required Yes, I mean this is look I think this this undertone to this conversation that that is difficult and but it's really important do with trying to harmonize these different levels of analysis because I think we we don't want abstractly to be inhibited by the necessity of a historical narrative which is only going to be hypothetical on the hand we do want whatever we end up concluding about the order of the QWERTY distribution to be at

least consistent with some plausible sense of what has actually socially historically psychologically technologically taken place it it it's no use to end up with something that just couldn't actually be part of a historical story. And obviously what you're doing here, I think, is a very good intermediate type of discussion of this. because whatever just concretely happened to the keyboard i i think it's surely safe to say it's going to be something roughly like that you know let's just say shoals is sitting it would

just set up a kind of fake but in principle not absurd historical hypothetical narrative and we've got shoals sitting around with his business partners and you know all of these people he maybe he is in the role of the kind of mechanical expert of of the actual functioning of the type writing machine um and got a sales person who's saying to him wouldn't it be cool if we had type writer on the on the top line and all of this kind of thing and what and and they're discussing how they're going to move the keys around they all start with the default alpha numeric series Culturally accessible to them it's it's like if you were just simply going to

Go with the default to just enter in path dependent terms if you were just going to follow the path without the slightest deviation or You would do is you would just simply reproduce the after the max series on on the on the keys but they obviously they for various technical reasons that isn't what they they do and so it so they have some kind of let's say to use your algorithm that is telling them well we're gonna do this and that and this and the other and after you've executed those series of procedures say you know

like maybe there's some has to be an implicit hypothetical narrative it's ergonomically improved to put s on that side of the keyboard we want s on the home row you know it's kind of in terms of the weighting of the two hands it's improved if we if we have a kind of common character like s on this and whatever you know i think we can just in a sense bracket the the details of that narrative but you want in principle there to be some narrative of that kind that could be formalized in a way much like you've done it in that in that version and and and that formalization is going to communicate

in both directions it's going to it's going to describe at the abstract level what has happened purely in terms of the semiotic redistribution but it's also going to potentially be these hooks for these concrete historical narrative this letter was moved from here to here because of x y plausible historical motivation so i think that's i think that's really good thank you i have this visualization also of like when you resize a web page and some things you know drop down to the next line if you started out with just the alphabet on a single line

and then you were to you know squish it and resize it which letters would pop out first which letters are the lowest priority to maintain their ordering and they would uh they would be ejected with priority um and then it's just a matter of where do they land which direction are they being ejected and where did it stick but okay that again that's like interesting i'm going to be skeptical to maybe just post you a bit further on it because like let's just say we've we've seen that the home row is a very peculiar privileged zone of the sequence so let's just say that that we're starting from the home row and stuff is being ejected

from from that sort of for the in the in a way find understanding you're suggesting it it it doesn't seem to me that the pattern that you're seeing is that is that like you know you b and c both seem to me to be letters that you would hold on to and before like for instance i don't know j or j or k i mean uh i would imagine would the e which is the most uh common letter in english language as noticed it's it's one of the ones that gets um squeezed out so whatever the criterion for this squeezing out processes it isn't

an obvious one is that yeah exactly i don't know what it is it's not that you're essential row and squeezing out process going off Did we lose you again Nick or are you still there?

Yes. There's at least two other conversations going on in the side, both of which I'd like to get more of a grip on. I don't know what order to do them in. Like, Amy's asking or making suggestions about Notaracon. And there's, can I just ask, because it's the one that's totally mystified me most, how did we get on to the Nephilim and the giants and the LOM, sorry. Is that connected to the Notaracon point, or is it, or where's that coming from? It's a little bit of a coincidence and it's just based on a conversation Amy and I were

having a while back. It's just the passage from what I guess looks like a manual of Notaricon and Kabbalah, practical Kabbalistic work. The passage quoted from it in the wiki is about the Enochian canon, or sort of like the Enochian story of the Nephilim, of the angel of the Grigori coming to earth and mating with the daughters of men and all of that. an apocryphal text it's about like a coded reference to that in genesis psalms you know from psalms right which i'm sure it must be in genesis yeah yeah it's bizarre how much it's in genesis yeah it was a it's the nephilim yeah which i just thought was interesting like a

relationship between the esoteric practice and the apocryphal canon and so we just sort of we're getting right we're riffing we're riffing of that yes yeah yeah okay i mean my my sort of initial thing is going to be a bit disappointing because by notaricon i'm meaning something really inane which is just simply the actual associative characteristics of the particular letters rather than just engaging in this kind of quantitative mode of discussion that's kind of oblivious to all of these wider kind of cultural connections that might be might be involved because I think once you do get into that which is extremely tempting but you

in much territory and territory where your hypotheses become hard to to to to make compelling to a to a to a skeptical audience so at least on one level and i'm hoping that there's things that can be put in place in terms of what it is to analyze the the qwerty distribution that are just profoundly uncontroversial and don't require any kind of commitment to arcane and implausible beliefs or ideas and I'd have to say on the surface at least saying that

the kind of the driving the driving process behind the QWERTY distribution is in some fundamental way tied up to the Nephilim mating with the daughters of men in the Garden of Eden would have to go in the wild hypothesis category I would have thought oh yeah two things I did notice in making that list of steps that algorithm is it seems like

you can analyze it as well one common operation is ejecting characters together as a pair or a longer sequence and another one is inserting characters between others to split them and Then right and then only I noted that a or s b and c are the biggest time traveler characters and that S is pulled in near the beginning and B and C go very far back in the athletic sequence. Yes. Yeah That's right now again limits of that mode of analysis well I don't know it's interesting I think you're on to another stage for analysis because look the good thing about this is that it extremely

crunchily in terms of you can put definite uncontroversial numbers on these transformations you know the distance certainly it's if once you go into two dimensions it becomes more complicated obviously because things are not migrating actually along the line so it's it's much nicer to linearize it um because then you just have absolutely perfectly clean numerical operations about a certain character moving a certain number of places or in one or the other directions for in the transformation from one sequence to another it's obviously I guess just to be a bit repetitive in

saying is that that that if the goal is to interlock ultimately with some plausible call narrative about the functioning let's say of typewriters then um it's got to be the two-dimensional distribution that matters more doesn't it I'm assuming you know the one the one-dimensional distribution is like very is highly abstract and notional in relation to the actual functioning of a typewriter whereas the the two-dimensional in all these ergonomic mechanical senses it's a two-dimensional distribution that actually is going to

be the one that takes us into this language about costs and advantages of particular modifications. Why not the third dimension? It seems like the digits are really important here. Well, it's a two-dimension only because you can just produce a map of the keyboard on a you so you don't need to actually build a three-dimensional keyboard to fully translate the information key to content of the keyboard and so that would be you

know I don't even know how any three diamond I mean there obviously is some because it is a real physical object there's obviously is a third dimension but I don't know how to describe that three three-dimensional aspect or how the three-dimensional aspect has been historically propagated and conserved so you know shoals this keyboard note you know machine was a three-dimensional machine but it seems to me it's only the two-dimensional features of that machine that have been transmitted to us in in the keyboard layout and when you save and lay out you're talking about that two-dimensional distribution not

anything that might have been happening in a third dimension yes I don't I mean if people are going to go away and dedicate some at least some fraction of their time to thinking about this um about the nephilim and the elohim what what is it that that should

be the guiding points of that I mean I can certainly see the they taught us to I think that that's definitely is the in the oral tradition it's supposed to definitely be the case isn't it that the whole the whole magical tradition has come down through the actual spoken of the Nephilim yeah I'm going back and trying to find the passage now because like my head won't let go of this for some reason I don't know just maybe look at some of the Greek and Hebrew describing the things that they taught us and if there's

anything particularly interesting in there like I never noticed like you know the the egregore kind of theory I mean like this is totally kind of off topic of um you know abstract or collective intelligences that organize us yeah yeah for sure yes yes yes that's when egregore is the same word used for the watchers for the angels sent down to earth egregore is where gregory comes from it means a watcher yeah interestingly yeah but I mean just wander off so if there's more discussion to be had closer to topic um yes let's see would someone quickly summarize the the connection again to the nephilim and the

alone um there were just there are three prongs or two prongs really in terms of relation and just one was that i was looking through about like about notaricon and one of the sort of more famous examples is this relationship between Psalms and Genesis where references to the Nephilim are encoded elsewhere in the Old Testament and the other bit was just that the Nephilim are described or those angels the Grigori are described as having taught man I believe like numerical techniques and counting and like generally simple things like magic I mean like there's a huge list of stuff that we that we get from the metalworking and cosmetics and

But among them I believe is like esoteric arts and numbering. So it's just kind of interesting there. Oh, I see. Okay. This ribbon farm piece is super cool, Nick. I don't know whether you saw it before. These guys have a kind of egregore running thread.

I mean this is I think yeah it's not not even sure it's going to be that he's talking particularly but the fact that we're talking about the Nephilim and I think I would even put it in it there's a on a certain sufficiently abstract of um anders uh modulus 26 numagram in a certain sense belongs in a in a in a at a similar level of this which is the the suggestion that um

the QWERTY distribution has some kind of a cult teleological distribution destination you know that that there's kind of that pattern like when when Anders says you know he draws a 26 a 26 element numagram finds these kind of relations between the characters and then sees certain kind of echoes of that on the on the keyboard um the thing that's obviously like totally striking about that is that it becomes

if not exactly incompatible in principle with a kind of uh what i've been calling like a concrete historical explanatory story about the distribution at least is stressed to an extreme degree isn't that I mean what one is kind of pointing at is it's some extremely deeply buried mechanism that that is generating convergence between a sort of set of practical mechanical concerns that that pushes some redistribution and an

outcome of that redistribution that encodes these I'm assuming very precise definite and necessary semiotic results so Definitely see obviously the attraction Both of these levels, but I think if To me the center what what are you trying to achieve with quantum mix is to try to build it so at least it doesn't become fully detached from this, the ground level that we started with, with the socio-historical process.

Because as soon as it does, even if you want to end up saying, actually, this semiotic distribution is a kind of message, you know, it's not at all that I can't see the appeal of that, but it's going to be just it's going to lack theoretical compulsion unless it can at least be seen as being a plausible narrative on this kind of historical I'm assuming fair assumption

This is kind of what I was getting at with that visualization a few minutes ago of if had a the alphabet just sequentially in a single row and then you were to like shrink the box and have letters pop out one by one as the box is shrinking and yeah what the question is what is the decision-making process for which letters get popped out first and where they go so right so yes yeah an example

of that that what one example is you could say either the the smallest chunks get popped out first or the biggest chunks get popped out first and if we said the biggest chunk got popped out first it would be those seven characters between n and v or n and v on the bottom row. And this is getting to my point here which is those seven characters all of them except s go to the top row which what it looks like we could kind of reconstruct the history and this and so then we're going from this timeless abstract mode of analysis to the historical side is that originally maybe they started with the top row, the second row that has a Q now. Starting instead, maybe their first typewriter, you know,

it's just A through Z across the top row and then the second row and then the bottom row. And then they realized that that was slow. And so they shifted it all down one and they popped out those seven characters and put them on the top row because those were chosen as seven characters which needed to be typed faster because they're being pulled from like the most hard to reach zone of the keyboard which is the center lower middle and then put into one of the easiest places the top spread out um so it's going back and forth between like this yes no i think that's right at a fine grain i think this is right i think that look there's two elements to this and i think that we can be confident

both of these things have happened okay maybe my the maybe your fundamental proposition here is actually in the end the most uh the most unproblematic in terms of of of sort of tricking the least sort of theoretical resistance where you're saying you know this particular chunk of keys have been just lifted out and deposited we've got a question then about the the procedure that was involved in in ordering them because we've seen that that top row is extremely extremely disordered you know it's actually to a degree that's quite fascinating

it's ordered way disordered far more than one would expect it to but the second thing which is the fact that somehow this bottom row was folded backward and reversed like I mean I I guess what I'm sort of wanting to argue there is I'm fully confident that that is the process that happened there you know what I mean it's like um you cashed out into something like a scientific p-value and I cannot do that at the moment I'm not even sure exactly how you do it but but

in terms of the kind of different ways you're constructing things and it seems on the base of that absolute sequence on the bottom row is reversed and and and you can see it's been folded over from the row above because of the fact that you just consecutive keys that you just follow in an absolutely strict sequence jkl and and so so then the question is well okay um what concretely are you suggesting happen there you know if it's kind of if you're

confirming it at some abstract level that's definitely what you're seeing like oh if you like almost information theoretically that that's just there as a fact that that has happened what what's the kind of historical narrative for that um you know you i have to be suggesting that somewhere along the line uh shoals more or less lucidly took a block of the alphabet and just turned it upside down turned it around um and and i think i am sort of forced i'm forced to try and argue that even though i have no at the moment sense of how you would kind of you tell a story like that or construct that as a as a narrative and so what

i'm saying is that that is a kind of that's a general syndrome of what is going to happen as you start trying to map this thing that you that if you if you find something that seems totally convincing on just on this level of pure pure semiotic process then to the degree that you attach to that is the degree that you're implicitly committing yourself to at least a hypothetical story on this um technical and historical level and and i think that your story you know is sort of invitingly compatible with the with the typewriter

the typewriter sort of hypothesis isn't it meaning when it were you know that we need we need these particular keys on the top pro so our salesman without having to skip between rows Can write the word type by no and impress potential customers going door-to-door trying to sell this machine it you know It looks like those two different modes of an approach At least you can see them fitting together. I think You're you're sort of yeah, you're sort of algorithmic mode Looks to me like it could kind of skip between those two levels relatively plausibly yeah it does seem like it can be a middle ground but it's always it's always incomplete because

because it's going between these hypothesized stories and the imminent observations and which are also yes almost a kind of hypothesis because we're choosing how to describe those transformations yes well I think the thing is that the between those two levels a kind of infrastructure that then allows these more exotic hypotheses to develop themselves from because, you know, your theories have to be consistent across this whole spectrum of analysis, doesn't it?

It's something, whatever is going on on the level of communication with the Nephilim has to be something that plausibly could instantiate itself historically in the mechanical production of the typewriter. There has to in principle be some kind of translation protocol that a certain set of mechanicals, if not in themselves strictly mechanical, at least they have to be compatible with a set of mechanical considerations that are that are being processed by Scholes and his team at the point that they're setting up the typewriter have to then be compatible with these exotic semiotic functions that that arise once

QWERTY has been installed as this new cultural matrix I'm wondering in terms of Amy's point about the these keys when that happened like obviously I think it's now become a convention hasn't it on a on a computer keyboard I wonder whether anyone knows when that appeared um so i because i better i better not sort of go too far down this because

i'm gonna i'm gonna get into bandwagon problems um i'm assuming that those were not standard symbols on the on the old mechanical typewriters yeah let me see like okay I've got an old where's this one from an old Remington

Rand now what is consistent I haven't got a date on it um the the qwerty order is exactly the same but the keys the the you just have these punctuation keys so it's got it's a little bit hard to see actually I guess I shouldn't stop posting as the people all right sorry I I'll stop I'm just me and I'm just meandering. I'm just meandering. Yeah.

up. Okay. Yeah, that's getting a in the sidebar. So where are we trying to go with this? Are we trying to produce something? Are we trying to produce the method or some type of conclusion or vision of QWERTY? or both well I think obviously it's it's it's not something that I can program on behalf of I would like to see at least as part of it is that there is a there there is a set of kind of

confidently installed analytical methods and a set of specific quercie analytic conclusions um and by by and by that i mean yes i mean for me that the the one that i brought to this class is is for me a kind of a guideline in my own sort of sense of this of what it is to discover something about the keyboard and it is the fact that this you know if i'm asking this question which i i always

keep coming back to you know what happened what was the actual abstract event the the the um the morphism that that took us from uh the alphanumeric distribution to the the qwerty distribution then you know part of that is this is this particular sub event of the this particular segment of the letters being kind of folded over and broken at a particular point that is an event and it's it's It's for me why I find it so hard to resist bringing the geology of morals with this.

Because it has this geological character to it to me. What's happened there is something that just is so resonant, logical process of stratification. stratification. It is this process of just fold, buckling, folding, stratic compression that then happens and leaves you with these two bottom rows that you can just... what do you make of that okay there's that that whole set of questions

and then there's the other more down-to-earth question is like well um even if to your satisfaction you've demonstrated that this happened on this abstract level you can sort of see it just by counting by counting process based upon shoot Hey, Nick. Okay. I was thrown off again. That's right. I think you're okay right now. Yeah, sorry.

Just to finish off this thing, it's just to say, even if you can see that that has to have happened, you can see it's happened, how did it happen? You know, why, what... The difficulty with that is that you're never to be just stuck in not get beyond hypothetical mode. Like, you know, other various possibilities that there's some kind of there's come some kind of conscious or unconscious psychological transform. involves is thought processes in relation to the disease that leads to this to this systematic inversion at a certain point I don't know it's not it can't possibly be more than a

a kind of hypothetical thing because I just think that we ... ... imaginable historically, that assuming we want there to be a level of just realism, compatibility with a realistic historical story. It seems like if you're talking about the abstract transformation from the alphabet sequence to the QWERTY sequence,

if you're going to look and see what the abstract transformation was, it almost is like it has to be a single step is what I was going to say. Okay, you can go in there. I'm really sorry about this, guys. I don't know why my connection is so terrible tonight. So sorry, Andrew. Can you hear me? I can get you to repeat the last sentence. Sure. Great. Okay, cool. I was saying that if you are, if we're looking at the abstract transformation which has occurred between the alphabet and QWERTY, it seems like if it's abstract, it necessarily kind of happens as

a single step, or you could say, what is the meaning of the transformation? I don't, I'm not, you know, into like intense semiotic philosophy, so I don't know if that is accurate to say, but to me, it seems like it's this single kind of swoosh of movement going from, so what is that, what is that shape? What is that transform? And what that transform means kind of is going from this kind of idealized abstract prior order of the alphabet to the instantiated distance in space-time and in history. So it's like someone spoke a word and made this previous pattern or you could even go a step back further and

say there was a step before that where we went from some type of non-alphabet or unordered alphabet to the initial alphabet ordering, and then a second step from there to QWERTY. And each one is going from more abstract and less instantiated, so therefore it has less of an order and less historical influence on its current form to more of that, maybe. I don't know if that plugs into what you're thinking or not. Yeah, I'm not 100% I'm getting look you see one of the ways that it's kind of subsequenced nominally is by something like your algorithmic model isn't it and that is completely compatible

with with a kind of transformation like you know we we but but but very little so so basically we do this and then do this then we do this that that is is that the temporality of that

process is completely again abstract not that you had a series of keyboards released into the market Which incrementally manifested these various You know the whole set of transformation I think we lost Nick again. Okay. We're also, just so everyone knows, we're five to one, and I'm going to have to end a little, just sort of on time today.

Can everyone hear me right now? Yep. Okay. So, I'm not sure. Right now is probably not the best time to end the broadcast, but maybe when Nick comes back, we'll just reiterate that we're meeting tomorrow evening for EST. And yeah, you guys will have to translate the 7pm EST to wherever you are. I don't know if anyone else delved into it, but I think Nick mentioned it last week or the week before, reading the Three Novellas Plateau from A Thousand Plateaus in relation

to the what happened question. I don't know if he's still interested in going into that, but that could be like this one kind of thing we can think about doing as well. I'm just saying this like in his absence um which is kind of useless but um just thought i'd mention it in case anyone else was interested in going going there yeah i'd like to go back to that too um but how many lessons have we got left left including um tomorrow tomorrow um will be the 7th and then the last session will be next week Saturday which is the the 10th

um and that's the five the two more cool So I guess maybe we'll wait a couple more minutes for Nick to bounce back in, and if he doesn't, we'll end the broadcast and start again tomorrow.

Andrews, can you expound on the encore thing? Enquare is how I was pronouncing it. Okay, so the argument I've been building over the last few minutes is Nick was saying that He's thinking of like what is the abstract apocalypse which occurred. I think he's mostly saying to the alphabet, kind of let's assume that we're starting with the alphabet, and then what's the abstract apocalypse or transformation which occurred to change that into the QWERTY either linear sequence

or physical keyboard arrangement. So what I was saying is that that transformation, if you are trying to define it as an abstract type of transformation, you know, the abstract is, is, you know, extended and unextended. It's a single point and it's everywhere. So it's, it's, it has to be a single gesture or a single flow of movement from the initial sequence to the final sequence. So it's a meaning. So what is the meaning of the difference between the alphabet and the QWERTY sequencing as a single word? And so I said that word is inquire is, and what that word means is going from the abstract to a historicized arrangement. I might have to repeat that now if people like it.

Yeah, I'm really sorry. I was completely computer. I don't know what the hell is going on with my thing. Well, actually, just because we're... So, yeah, Anders, what did I miss? Okay, yeah, go for it, Anders. Okay, I'll just repeat that. And let me just also just take a moment and retype for Nick what I, because it won't let me copy and paste, what I put in the sidebar. So just hang on one second. Saying that the word itself, I'll just say it out loud. So the argument I've been building for the last few minutes is that if Nick is trying to think of the abstract apocalypse, which occurred to the alphabetic sequence that transformed it

into the QWERTY sequence, if it's an abstract apocalypse, It necessarily has to be a single gesture or movement. And that that is, it has a meaning or it is a meaning. It's basically a meaning. So what is the meaning of the transform between the alphabet and QWERTY? And then I said I defined that word as inquere. It's like someone speaking a word from the alphabet or on the alphabet. And when you say, when you command the alphabet in queer, it means in history from this idealized former self. Yeah, so I'm defining that word as that imperative of going from abstract and eternal and uninstantiated to historicized, influenced by that, and specified. Like in Buddhism, they don't make the type of distinction in Western philosophy.

instead they say fully specified reality and not fully specified reality so it's a continuous continuum in that in that epistemology yeah no it's like I think this is it's totally consistent with this this paper I connected to um from from which I've been drawing this language of morphism because among the sort of a the set of strict analogies that that the author is trying to draw between these different fields science and saying that this

intermediate that the morphism it can be translated into computer science as a program so that you know you've you've got your data structure a execute the program data structure B or whatever so I think what you're saying about you know the word it's the implementation of a program that is quite complex but will just produce this comprehensive transformation and manifest a particular outcome. And obviously the manifestation we have, we have the QWERTY distribution, which

allows us to set this up as this question, what happened? Because we can just like in the Deleuze-Guattari novella thing, you see the situation, you see the outcome, and then that's revealed to you. that's manifested and the question is just well how did how did it come about that we have to result this outcome is be consistent with the kind of vocabulary that you're suggesting as well Your vocabulary in a way is coming more from the other side, but I think it's totally consistent.

So we actually have to end the session sort of on time today just because we have to end the session. But we're going to be meeting at 7pm EST on Sunday. Okay, cool. All right. And I do apologize to everyone for how crap it's been tonight. And so, yeah, thanks for everyone's patience in that respect. All right, sounds good. So we'll see you all tomorrow. Yeah, okay. Thanks, Theodore. Yeah. Okay, thanks for the stimulation as always. Okay, see you tomorrow, hopefully. See you. Bye-bye.