fuckyeahcomputerscience:

Today, I want to talk to you to a long, but finite, sequence of random ones and zeroes. This sequence is thousands and thousands of digits long. Part of this particular sequence looks like this: 

It certainly seems random, and so it is. One can almost imagine that this sequence was produced by repeatedly flipping a fair coin. Now you can’t touch or feel this sequence of numbers like it was a real object, but it is definitely real.

It lives its life in the Platonic ether, floating freely and happily along with an infinite number of other sequences and other mathematical constructs - like space-filling curves, Klein bottles, and infinite dimensional manifolds. It has an absolute existence independent of any human mind able to conceive or contemplate it. They all come from “The Book”.

In fact, if you look far enough into the binary representation of pi, you would most probably find this exact sequence embedded somewhere in there.

This random sequence of numbers existed before you were born. It existed before the storming of the Bastille. It existed before Caesar crossed the Rubicon. It existed before the Egyptians built the great pyramids. And before the dinosaurs roamed the earth.

And because its existence is abstract - transcending space and time- it most likely existed at the beginning of the universe.

Now an amazing thing about this sequence is that you can turn it into almost anything by feeding it into a certain machine. You could build a machine that would turn it into the third movement of Mahler’s 4th Symphony. You could build a machine that would turn it into a moving series of pictures.

Or you could build a machine that would turn it into a general-purpose operating system - and someone has.

Now the single “smartest” (and most brazen) thing that any person has ever done…

…was to convince the world that this abstract sequence of numbers was his property.

C:\GENIUS!

(via Abstruse Goose)

(via lostmymusic)