
Borges’s Mirror - prismatic
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/10/borgess-mirror
======
aprescott
(Edit: I emailed them and the article has been corrected.)

> a Library that contains 251,312,000 volumes of random sequences of letters
> (1,312,000 being the number of characters in any given book, each of which
> admits of twenty-five variations)

This seems to be a typo of sorts. I believe the correct number is 25^1312000
(sequence length m, n possible values for each, n^m distinct possible
sequences).

Having hit this in the past, my guess is it was originally written with a
superscript, then the text lost the formatting (leaving 251312000), and an
editor left it as 251,312,000. Always worth checking final rendering for any
text you expect to include superscripts.

~~~
anvandare
Correct.

>"... each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines,
each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color."

>"The orthographical symbols are twenty-five in number."

25 ^ ( 410 * 40 * 80 ) = 25^1312000 ≈ 10^1834097 possible books.

There are an estimated 10^80 atoms in the known universe.

~~~
SamBam
It's always staggering to really meditate on the unimaginably vast size of the
universe, and then come up with some simple idea such as every combination of
letters arranged in books, and realize that our universe could never fit all
the books that would require, even if stacked side-by-side between all the
galaxies.

(The observable universe is also on the order of 10^80 meters cubed.)

------
macando
One of my favorite writers. In his collection of short stories the two
opposing math concepts are mentioned:

The Aleph - A point in space through which the whole universe can be seen and
comprehended.

The Zahir - An object that has the power to create an obsession in everyone
who sees it, the obsession so strong that after a short period of time
everything else disappears.

The A and The Z. Infinity and Zero.

~~~
cambalache
Mine too,one of the writers I (and many people) really resonate with.On a
personal level I think I would have hate him, he was mildly racist and
misogynist, kinda of a coward and made apologies for brutal dictatorships.He
had good traits too of course. This only shows the apparently forgotten fact
that you can separate the work from the person.

~~~
fcsafsafsfvc
You're not wrong, but I think it's a bit unfair to judge him.

"mildly racist and misogynist,"

Maybe by our standards. Quite the opposite by his era.

"made apologies for brutal dictatorships." As did most Argentines when the
bastards took over in the late 70s.

"kinda of a coward" From what I hear like most Argentines who turned a blind
eye. The Dirty War had few heroes.

"...apparently forgotten fact that you can separate the work from the person."

Agreed! I just don't think that we should be so harsh on Borges, already
blind, old man during the dictatorship.How few among us have suffered the
infamies that Borges suffered?

~~~
cambalache
Well I disagree, he was those things even considering his times, especially
when you contrast his worldview with the position taken by some of his
contemporaries (Sabato, Marechal and in a younger generation Cortazar). For a
more drastic case see Celine. He was not only racist because of his times, he
was a racist and fascist, period.Fantastic writer though.

By the way I dont think he was a bad man for hating Peron, that does not
bother me at all.

------
peter_l_downs
Can't believe this doesn't include Borges's most famous quote about mirrors:

"Los espejos y la cópula son abominables porque multiplican el número de los
hombres"

(mirrors and copulation are abominable because they increase the number of
people)

~~~
a_e_k
I was surprised by that omission as well. It is from his short story, _Tlön,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius_ (one of my favorites) for those who don't know the
reference.

A lot of the concepts that Borges writes about have always struck me as
relevant to computer science, and _Tlön, Uqbar_ is no exception. For example,
identity vs. equality when comparing things:

> They said that the heresiarch was prompted only by the blasphemous intention
> of attributing the divine category of being to some simple coins and that at
> times he negated plurality and at other times did not. They argued: if
> equality implies identity, one would also have to admit that the nine coins
> are one.

And this bit always makes me think of reference counting and garbage
collection:

> Things became duplicated in Tlön; they also tend to become effaced and lose
> their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway
> which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his
> death. At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an
> amphitheater.

------
songeater
As a related aside, I once put together a "wiki" of one of Borge's short-
stories as a fun/short day-project:

[https://tlon-uqbar-orbis-tertius.fandom.com/](https://tlon-uqbar-orbis-
tertius.fandom.com/)

His work is "inherently hyperlinked" so i thought the format may suit it
well...

------
a_e_k
> In a footnote, the anonymous editor of “The Library of Babel” imagines a
> book containing “an infinite number of infinitely thin leaves.”

Borges expands on this idea in the separate (very) short story _The Book of
Sand_.

------
aiexplorations
Enjoyed reading the Library of Babel, referred in this article. Other Borges
masterpieces - The Lottery in Babylon, Blue Tigers, The House of Asterion.

------
eosophos
Is anyone aware of an attempt to make an infinite hexagonal library of code in
the same vain?

~~~
rbistolfi
That would be a subset of The Library of Babel. I tried searching some of my
favorite lines of code here:
[https://libraryofbabel.info/](https://libraryofbabel.info/) \-- It is an
interesting experience :D

~~~
rbistolfi
Hmm, allow me to correct myself here, Borges' library may not include all the
characters required for representing code in some of the programming languages
we love

