Land of Diskgrinder

Study for a large painting 

Happy new year

 The living daylights are a series of orange squares, each one an animated diorama, that get knocked out of you by angry mums

  There was a thing that happened when he came. We'd been waiting for about an hour, mostly in silence except for the rustle of another traveller shifting in their seat, or the occasional bitten back sob from Bêbe, followed by Fusel either sucking his lips or huffing his moustache. There was a tap from outside. You'd have thought it was a gun going off the way it made the soldier jump— he'd been leaning against the door smirking at everyone, and if he saw me looking he'd snap his finger and thumb in front of his eye and wink (because he's got my camera).

   In the sullen dormitory He spat and he spluttered and walked up and down the ranks of bunks. He swore and coughed. His head down and forward, a glower on his brow, he was dark and sour and ill-lit by light from his lantern burning yellow. We called him long- knife, and cowered in our beds, waiting for him to pass. Because: if he turned; if he turned at your bunk; you didn't want to know, and hoped he picked the one above, below, just not you.

Normal numbers are quite interesting - they have every substring of numbers in them. So an encoding of every book is in them, if you use, for example, ASCII. You'll get a sequence of numbers that encode every book somewhere in the number. They don't know if pi is a normal number, btw. If you go far enough along the normal number's digits, you'll get a sequence that encodes any string in subsequent ASCII. For example, 90113  would encode "i am". Where 9=i, 0=space, 1=a and 13=m (There's a couple of "artificial" normal numbers that have been constructed. So they exist, and are computable.) So a question occurred to me.  Say there's a place in the digits of a normal number where the encoding of a book starts. Call that B. For any book, B is going to be pretty big. Say, for example, the encoding of "the catcher in the rye" starts at the ten trillionth digit of this normal number - ASCII translation of the digits after 10 trill...

just checking in after a brief hiatus isn’t it 

Continuing the story. Where was I? Oh yes, up a hill with spiders in tins and talking baboons. Just there. right where I ought to be.