Human JPEGs

Jason Ingram · 23 Apr 2002, 08:09 · from urth-v0204.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Jason Ingram <j_ingram at mac.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Human JPEGs
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 01:09:18 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0204-764 at digest.urth.net>
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One question that has perplexed me is why multiple copies couldn't have=20
been 'downloaded' at the same time, and why all the 'data' seems to have=20
left mainframe whenever downloading occurs.  I can think of reasons why=20
the narrative might demand this, but I'm not sure what the logic is.

One possibility: there is a 'one copy per person' limit because of a=20
rough analogy to  a soul (not identity, since Typhon and others seem to=20
retain their personality even after uploading; and Silk remains 'in'=20
Silk, presumably, even as Pig contains a downloaded Silk.  The timing of=20
the last part might warrant some scrutiny, however).

If it's just data, why not have three or four or four hundred versions=20
at the same time?  Perhaps Typhon wouldn't have trusted himself; maybe=20
it's hypothetically possible, and an innate desire to think ourselves=20
unique prevented duplication; but I seem to remember hints that the data=20
were irreplacable . . . no backups possible.

Strange, considering Severian--or perhaps a purposeful contrast.  Serial=20
versions of the new sun, single duplicates in the long sun, bilocation=20
and identity sharing in the short sun.

Of course, maybe I've gotten my facts wrong again.

PS I hope this is now in plain text format.

Sepia

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Nigel Price" <nigel.a.price at virgin.net>
>> Having failed to learn my lesson, I have to confess that I too, like=20
>> Dan,
>> have been whimsically speculating to myself whether, in the Whorl, the
>> copies of personalities which are transferred between windows and=20
>> people
> and
>> windows and night choughs might not in fact be radically compressed in
> some
>> way, or use some sort of wonderfully super-advanced lossy algorithm

--=20

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