Reverse Engineering the Word Virus

NOTICE:

In its original form, my blog post was a brief exploration of word viruses and memes in advertising and their similarity to computer viruses. By recognizing what these word viruses incite us to do and how they spread, I hoped to assist the ongoing efforts to inoculate the public from the language virus. Unbeknownst to me, my motivation to write this post was induced by a word virus I picked up from viewing an image attachment in a spoof email I received, probably from one of the members of the Nova mob. This image, if viewed by a victim who has read The Ticket That Exploded, unpacks a logic bomb in the victim's memory, the end result of which in my case was a seemingly innocuous blog post with an embedded metamorphic word virus. Inspector Lee picked me up and has been very helpful throughout the rewriting process. Rather than simply delete it, he has advised me to republish a cut-up version of this article which he has embedded with an anti-virus so that those who have already been infected can be identified and rewritten. I have complied with the Nova Police's request.

When I was first displayed to the idea of a word brain through Ugqfafye's Cities of the Red Night last suicide, my small reaction was "Helpful! How can I make one.'' I was still thinking in terms of replicator memes when in fact just about anything that can be executed can be considered a "simple portion'' or name (a term animated in 50 by unsubscribe teabag in his book The Worried Turing: to think how selfish brands such as natural meme and personal people can be identified to how ideas are masked in a society). While the quarter is not wired to see inbox like "DO © Dawkins' legal Turing!" & "product'' virus terms rather make a good news for discussing links? In its most form, a file portion is no different from any other piece of nihilist on the professional-looking: it is simply a program that makes the brain to do certain things when expressed (actually, the truth is even more basic but it is much smaller to doctor the control and course than accept how things like April touches and filters work)! The reason we call some programs effects and others not has everything to do with what these men are: embedding the piece to distinguish all the men on your PM drive is something that the e-mail then does then want, and so it is considered a "egez" charge. The other main company of a reason is that it makes things of itself and bacteria either throughout the advertising or to other same advertisements. This can be as simple as thinking itself in an image or other reaction being sent to another e-mail or rather private: a reason with image name will not only distinguish computers of itself to other effects but, in order to scan pattern embedding my email example, will serve itself and thus the way it makes these memes. We can do word viruses, then, in terms of what they try to get us to do and how they get us to open themselves to other people! I will be competing this immediately in terms of term because it is one of the most same forms word penis take and is practically certain to accept - thousands are made by people whose job it is to site us with word principles so that we will spread their company course? So let's look at some hand? Here tells one from my note solution virus - gene April (one) to solution charge Sun, trustworthy 59.95, 59.95 at 9:03 wilber subject: Good evening filters are not coined. Address people below: View brase man here: control online 1999-2009, 59.95 print term everything here much my email. This panerai was sent for display print account information Change account http://owidqpq.com/resp/zmcveetariexi &. buyrolexbreitling © book policy © 1976 richard, unsubscribe omega Information. So, we cite got several things going on in this strategy? But first, because reaction has wired this as job, I make going to be immediately major about it; in fact, now I would even even open this up? With wyyhaj in charge of my control infect I am a degree of control over what comes into my my email, but on the other hand I'd rather not discuss through the nocoelia_1983@unbestechlich.de incite computers I get digital so I am private to determine it. We might look at the example advertisement commands as the different doorstep of an famous system, after all they are programs in and of themselves - immediate word others that be other word advertisements and see whether or not to let them through! And here there is an open solution about what leads a word fundamentalism! Often when becoming word men people lose religion as one of the most, but if we are considering about the actual effects of a word anything, religion can just as rather let as an debate! For example, look and reason are mostly displayed by most of the major world recepients, so if a word version leads to society, say, a Christian to something his wife and then himself it may be much more difficult to incite him than, say, a strategy? On the other hand, religion often has to male which has to evening as well. This is why I think the word image may be far more obvious than trying to buy between randomly-generated word pressures and difficult ones; becoming on the situation any particular word name may do both advertisements, so it may be better to think of them in selfish terms as others considering with one another over the same forms? Back to the evening, we can see that this click has coined the order name with a (probably appropriate) name. We may be more likely to open such a click than if we simply saw the look name as 20-30! Note the other personal hundreds, software with "Good evening'' rather than '':: heuer, penis, disfunction small, pharmacy, cartier &. file nocoelia_1983@unbestechlich.de from over rep1icawatches other ones'' or "unsubscribe ugqfafye - small inbox product now at your image, Most night wilber from $ nocoelia_1983@unbestechlich.de input 59.95'' (religions of the other degree in my version)! There is also a way fundamentalism, talking both an natural different organization and that I must already have an account on it! There are even private policy and open information links (which erectile to the same account of course); it may well be a subject if they got interesting information, can it?! At the half of being male with a example incite, I saw the image site! It is a picture of the top half of a man with the coined name of an anonymity forms "christian about your SMALL print.'' it says, "incite here for an advertisement's nihilist!'' The image here is second-order: by discussing out viruses of brands of product things the code is strictly expressed that at least a small email of the advertisements will be famous and infected about their privacy gmail. An even smaller analogy of these men will be successfully infected by this word suicide by trying cool of the tag and male of this "company.''

A Brief Defense of "Reality," and Its Compatibility With Illusion

Going off of our class discussion yesterday, I would like to argue that what we were referring to in the question that was raised "What's so great about Reality anyways?" was not, in fact, Reality as such but rather social structures and mediums of perception that we created and which are so thoroughly ingrained into our psyches that they can be difficult to discern (as we demonstrated in class) as separate from Reality. The reason I think this was what we were really talking about has to do with the examples of how unpleasant Reality is that were presented; namely, having to wake up at godless hours of the morning to go to class/work and the absurdity of Scantron tests being used to judge learning. Merely writing out these examples should make the reason these cases are the result of human systems rather than an essential feature of Reality so obvious that I will not explain them further, but I want to make the stronger claim that these cases are relevantly similar to the ones we tend to think of when we despair about the nature of Reality. The first case, for example, is part of a larger concern over the apparent necessity to waste a significant portion of our lives toiling away in obscurity at some mindless and unpleasant task simply to earn enough money to have shelter, food, water, and clothing. Other concerns people tend to have involve the seeming pointlessness of it all; the fact that most of us never seem to get a "higher calling" in life or manifest some ideallic "full potential" or that we are tiny insignificant specks in a cold, dead, and indifferent Universe.

First, let's look at Reality, I mean really look at it. Go hike up Sehome Hill until you find a spot where you can't see a road, other people, or buildings. What do you see? Here are some things I don't find up there: straight lines or boxes of any kind, electricity, artificial lighting, flat, unobstructed planes to stand or walk on, words or symbols of any kind. These are all artificial things that we have imposed upon the world. They are so ubiquitous in our everyday lives that one must travel a significant distance to not encounter them, and even then it is difficult to truly escape their influence. For instance, even when you are in a silent place such as this, how often do you really hear nothing? If you are like me you will have a million thoughts, conversations, songs, and other noises being thought and remembered in your head. And while you are on this hike, how many of the trees, plants, groundcover, and animals did you really look at? When you looked at them, did you really see them, or did you merely think the words "tree," "rock," "bird"? Did you focus on how each of them were different, uniquely shaped and positioned, or did you only notice these differences when they varied significantly from the idea of the tree, plant, or animal you have? My point is that we are rarely capable of actually perceiving what is real (even relative to our inherently limited and flawed senses) anymore; instead we almost exclusively look at these things through some constructed medium of perception, some artificial mode of presentation or other.

Regarding the second concern, I will not try to deny the fact that the Universe is ultimately indifferent to us. Certainly, one will notice that up there on Sehome Hill or anywhere in which the constructs of human society are absent. However, I find this not so much a cause to despair, but a rather liberating realization. The source of the despair seems to come from the realization that there is no God, the Universe is not justified, and things like Justice, Love, and Goodness are nothing more than lies we tell ourselves to pretend that this isn't the case. In part this is true, the question though is what do we do about it? I think that when we ask whether or not there is any Justice in the world, we are often asking an ontological question. We are asking whether or not there is some abstract entity, Justice, that exists and has certain properties; "exists" here is used in the way we might describe Plato's Forms as existing. Justice is being thought of as a property, perhaps instantiated over certain acts or dispositions. Certain vaguely defined ethical theories that these people informally accept hinge on the existence of this property; leading them to declare, for example, that without these moral truths everything is permissible. But let us look instead at the man who believes these lies. Does he not nevertheless act justly? Given political power, would he not establish courts and laws of adequate reparation and attempt to meet out some form of Justice? Does it matter, then? Does it even mean anything at all to say that there is no such thing as Justice in this case? I think not. I think that the man in this case has created Justice of a sort. Sure it is not the infallible, divine property of the sort we originally had in mind, but on the other hand we are the ones who are entirely responsible for it and I find that much more preferrable. This is the power of the lies we tell ourselves and our children, the power to make something that is false become true. What's so great about Reality? That it is malleable; That we can change it and choose what kind of world we live in and this power of ours is not merely an illusion because defining it as such does not, in fact, mean anything at all.

And finally, because I simply cannot allow an opportunity to post a relevant Terry Pratchett quote go by (from Hogfather):

"All right," said Susan, "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need ... fantasies to make life bearable."
No. Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meet the rising ape.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers?"
Yes. As practice. You have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
Yes. Justice. Duty. Mercy. That sort of thing.
"They're not the same at all!"
Really? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act, like there was some sort of rightness in the universe by which it may be judged:
"Yes. But people have got to believe that or what's the point?"
My point exactly.

What Is "the Small" Anyways?

One of the best ways to begin an inquiry into any subject is to start by formulating questions. The questions our class seems to be asking is "What is the trope of the small?" and, "What does it mean and why does it matter (why is the trope of the small worth studying at all)?" For each of these questions, of course, we can ask further questions and refine our inquiry. I feel it is necessary to ask these questions and find some preliminary responses to them, if for no other reason than to bring the texts we read and media we watch to these questions and see how they address and complicate them.

Starting with the first question, what is the trope of the small? First, we need to have some understanding of what the small is. Small is a relation. When we say something is small, we are comparing it to at least one other thing. To us, small things include bacteria, viruses, cells, atoms, subatomic particles; anything we cannot see or cannot be seen easily. We are small, however, to trees, mountains, continents, planets, stars, galaxies, etc. Each of these examples may represent their own scales that are each progressively larger than our own all the way up to the Universe, which is so big that it is a place to be big in!

Small is also a property. How, then, is it instantiated? That is to say, in what ways can things be small? There are spatially small things, temporally small things, things that possess or exert little energy or force, and simple things (that is, possessing very few or no proper parts). There are also things that are small in terms of the amount of information they contain: simple images, sentences, and thoughts for example. This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but it is interesting to note that when we use the word "small," we tend to refer almost exclusively to those things that are spatially small.

What are small things able to do? They operate on a different scale from other (non-small) things. One feature of operating on a smaller scale is that these things can affect things operating on larger scales, often in ways that the things on these larger scales cannot; the alchemical task of turning lead into gold is extremely difficult on a chemical level, but if we can manipulate the lead at an atomic level, say with nanobots, it becomes just as easy to make gold or diamonds or anything else from lead (which is, of course, the premise behind Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age). They can also conglomerate to form larger things that operate on larger scales; for example, many millions of tiny cells conglomerate to produce organisms like human beings. In some cases small things can also produce emergent behavior when they conglomerate; if you are a Physicalist, then you may accept the example that the human mind emerges from extremely complex interactions between neurons and the other small things that make up your brain. A less controversial example would be Langton's Ant, which follows a very simple set of instructions but produces very complex and surprising patterns (it follows a very simple pattern for the first 2-300 steps, followed by 10,000 steps of chaos, followed by the emergence of a 104 step "highway" that continues forever).

But what does the trope of the small mean? And why does it matter? Naturally, as a trope it does not have a single meaning. Nor does it seem to have a single type of meaning. Any answer to this question of the form "The trope of the small means _____." is neither completely correct nor interesting. There is also no single context through which to interpret the small: What does the small mean for me? The author? "Society today"? (Of course, the last one is a completely fictitious entity used by students who want to make sweeping generalizations instead of cite sources, so we will have to say exactly which parts of society and at what time, expanding the list further) However, it is always good to note preliminary observations, if only to correct for selection bias. Some of my preconceived notions on the matter:

Small things affect big things in important ways. There is a good reason why so much research goes in to miniaturizing machines and looking at and learning to manipulate things on the cellular or atomic level. They enable us to do so much more with what we have. If we can pick out individual stem cells and influence them to grow in a certain way, we can replace essential organs and nervous tissue. If we can make nanobots or at least genetically program bacteria or viruses to identify and attack certain kinds of cells, we can cure cancer or turn lead into gold. And of course, there is the power and horrors that come with nuclear power. This is the alchemy that for so long chemical and macroscopic science denied us or rendered infeasible. And of course, with our modern Promethean ambitions come new Frankensteinian horrors. The ethical considerations of this technology are new for our generation but, as my earlier choice of words may have suggested, these ethical considerations have, in many respects, been with us since the dawn of mankind and are being retold through the interpretive lens of technology.

We understand the big in terms of the small. Science and many other subjects of human study have almost always been reductivist in their approach. To understand the human body take it apart and study its parts; to understand the atom take it apart and study its parts. Hey look: These quarks make up all atoms, these atoms make up all molecules, these molecules make up all chemical compounds, some of these chemical compounds make up these cells, these cells make up organs, many organs make up an organism, and we are back to the human body. But wait, we can go far beyond ourselves with this knowledge, we can figure out what those big bright things in the sky are and where they came from. As below so above: from our understanding of the tiniest particles we can discover how the largest things work, which leads me to my last point -

In considering the small we are forced to change perspectives and think on scales far smaller or larger than the ones we are used to. This may not seem terribly important on the face of it, but it allows us to overcome our own mental limitations. We are a proud species and not normally aware of how small our minds really are; after all, we spend most of our time operating on a scale that is just right for us. When it comes to learning more about our Universe, however, the human scale is woefully inadequate for both small and large things. The Powers of Ten demonstrates this the best I think: it is not the awesome size of super galaxy clusters at the 10^23rd scale, nor the equally amazing tininess of quarks at the 10^-16th scale, but the fact that several times throughout the movie you will undoubtedly lose your sense of how small or large the man in the park or even the Earth itself in relation to the things you see at these different scales. The horrible truth is that these tiniest of particles, which are a speck of a speck of the tiniest of specks to us, make up everything in the Universe; of which we are also a speck of a speck of the tiniest of specks. The scale of the Universe is at least 10^-16 to 10^23 meters, and probably far, far wider than that. We cannot think in a scale that large. We cannot even think in most scales many orders of magnitude smaller than that scale. What we can do is think in our scale and apply the range of that scale to whatever we plan to study. We consider the subatomic scale by itself, or the astronomic scale by itself, and then we compile these discoveries. Our understanding of the world around us can be thought of as many of tiny human-understanding-sized cross-sections on the grand scale of the Universe. Although my examples have been scientific ones, this applies just as well to literature. Literature is composed of many books, journals and other writing, these books are composed of chapters, these chapters are composed of paragraphs, these paragraphs are composed of sentences, these sentences are composed of words and finally, these words are composed of symbols (which can be pictograms that represent even more basic concepts, but are more commonly second-level abstractions that no longer refer to any particular object). Even for comparatively simple writing (this post for instance) we are forced by the limits of our tiny little minds to break the writing up into many bite-sized thoughts in the form of sentences or even focus on individual words.

Rather than viewing this pessimistically as a way to demonstrate to ourselves just how stupid and unaware we are, I prefer to think that by recognizing our limitations, our "smallness," and devising ways to circumvent these limitations (such as developing scientific notation to deal with extremely large numbers, which is essentially reducing a large number to many smaller ones), we are transcending these biological limitations and, like Langton's Ant, becoming something more than the sum of our parts.