Excerpts of Babel
The Excerpts of Babel

This is an online library inspired by the "The Library of Babel"; a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. Rougly speaking, it contains every possible small chunk of text (every possibly combination of up to 240 characters). The virtual library consists of 10100 buildings, each with 10100 floors, 10100 aisles, and 10100 bookcases in each aisle.

Take a Look

Feel free to browse the library here. Alternatively, you can lookup an excerpt in the library here.

This library is something of an oddity. By virtue of the fact that it contains every possibly excerpt, it contains all of the following (either as a single excerpt or as the combination of multiple excerpts):

MitigationThere really is nothing new under the sun.

The vast majority of the library, of course, is completely unintelligable garbage. In addition, for each useful excerpt, there is a unending number of similar excertps which are incorrect, misspelled, lies, or just plain confusing.

But the largest reason this isn't really all that exciting is that the URLs for excerpts in the library are incredibly long. Because the library contains every possibly excerpt, the amount of information you need to find something in the library is approximately equal to the amount of information contained in the excerpt itself. Or, put another way, the entire virtual library can be viewed as simply a language translator which turns library directions into excerpts. (and, indeed, it is implemented in exactly that manner)

Why?

To a large extent, I constructed this virtual library to see if I could get sued for copyright infringement, and, more generally, to highlight some of the absurdity of intellectual property law.

Copyright ownership works both ways, of course. Some excerpts in the library contain copyright notices and some of those copyright notices are claimed by you. If you're feeling saucy some day, feel free to try and enforce some of the many copyrights bestowed on you from the Excerpts of Babel.

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