Devine Lu Linvegan on Nostr: I have three talks lined up, and coming up quite fast, about digital archival and ...

I have three talks lined up, and coming up quite fast, about digital archival and esoteric computation models. I somehow lucked out this year, for I got myself presenting a full forty minutes on FRACTRAN of all things, in front of I swear non-imaginary people; and paid; and in Sweden! I must be the luckiest person alive. And if I can eloquently and captivatingly share my love for multiplication, rewriting, prime numbers, tropical arithmetic and fractions; doubly so.

In the hours of the day when I'm not trying to stitch together some 300 slides into a coherent story about dead programming languages and preservation, I've been reading the history of auxiliary languages(like Esperanto, that sort of thing). In Peano's desire to make a portable preservation medium, a kind of mathematical object to encode scientific ideas, I find something of a kindred curiosity. But more than that, I find places within his work that could be improved by elements that didn't exist in his time.

I read Sylvia Pankhurst's Delphos feeling like it was celebrating an unfinished monument, Peano stripped Latin down, sure, he did, but never formalized the grammar and left a whole lot of flexion in. His logical notation(⊃, ∈, ∩, ..) has not dissimilar issues, they're compressed and minimal but arbitrary. Compare that to Zellweger's Flipstick alphabet. Had Peano kept pushing, I like to imagine Formulario's margins filled with something closer to that, symbols that carry their own logic in their shape in a language that is truly transparent.

As for me, I think there is definitely something romantic about documenting a frozen system in a dead language, I'm just not sure how it all connects yet..

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