Saturday, January 10, 2009

a tale of the internet

One day when I was a graduate student in Chicago I for unemergent reasons decided to write to the embassy of the Soviet Union. This was 1989.

I had a map of the world on my wall, a big one. I put sheets of random numbers I got from a table, expressed in my then base ten number character set I invented myself, all around the Soviet Union. Then I took my calculator with a determinant calculating program loaded in it and took determinants of numbers at various places around the sheets.

These determinants I put on a letter.

Above the numbers I put in my own binary code for English the word "message". Then above these figures I put my character set numbers from one to ten in a circle and around the circle I put in my code the words, "revenge for batek".

Then I sent it off to the embassy.

A week later the Romanian president was assassinated, Soviet republics all over the place were falling like zapped flies. Eventually the whole Soviet Union fell.

As a result of the fall of our global enemy, the internet, then used for a provision in case of nuclear war and not in the public domain, was turned public.