the internet is fantastic. you can explore an effectively infinite space while eating pringles. some rooms of the giant jungle gym have leaves, some have ferns, and some have animated gifs of baby jesus. you never know precisely what you’ll find, and there’s enough that the joy of discovery rarely fades… but you can still have at least some say in where the results go, leaving you feeling comfortably in control.

the jungle gym that is the web is N-dimensional… well, more like a giant network of boxes you could climb around and explore. many sites – this one included – link to more than 6 sites, giving them more than six degrees of freedom. this means the space must have more than three dimensions. this has a ceiling of infinite links to infinite sites, but that’s kind of hard to do in practice. so, i’m just calling it N-dimensional due to the presumption that a given site will be somewhere between some and maNy.

pages are chained together, little pageclaves in the giant jungle gym. most pageclaves have a purpose: sell books, confuse the book-buying consumer, blogging about either of the aforementioned book-related topics. you name it, there’s likely between one and many pageclaves covering it… but there would, likely be fewer pages about blogging about blogging about any of the aforementioned three book-related topics… this is interesting, my brain is translating that referential recursion of probability as a chain of decaying slopes. i’ll have to look into this avenue of research more… later.

anyways, many web pages today are dynamicly generated. the server gets this post from a database, gets the template from the drive, and mashes the two together according to some computer programs written in PHP. if you think about this, you realize that rather than designing a single web page, the programmer is specifying an entire SET of web pages. this page, for example, is the set of every possible blog post as rendered by the template we are using: an infinite number of pages. if you expand our definition to include the programmatic features, such as switching templates, the set size would become an even larger infinity (lol mathematics).

the great-grandaddy set, of course, is the set of every page ever possible. it’s theoreticly possible to code up something that has the potential to specify this set using some bastardization of turing machines and perl, but most programmers settle for something a little less painful to define: a smaller infinity of web pages, or even a finite set.

here are some DYNAMIC web pages:

http://www.qtard.com/
http://www.strangebanana.com/generator.aspx
http://www.superbad.com/
http://randomwebsite.com/
http://www.ricedoutyugo.com/headerimg/
http://www.perl.com/
http://www.google.com/
http://wizardishungry.com/
http://www.ricedoutyugo.com/wtf/
http://www.chinscratcher.com/
http://www.actsofkindness.org/
https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/
http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/
http://www.fxbox.110mb.com/

remember: when in doubt,  use F5.

Jared Tarbell programmed the terrifically complex looking Offspring, a visualization of the pair bonding process of a theoretical robot colony. Tarbell says:

Each robot is assembled, ages through youth, comes into a reproductive stage, and eventually dies of fatigue. If a robot is lucky enough to find a mate during it’s reproductive stage, baby robots may be assembled.Visually, the Offspring image is a historic graph of robot colony size and distribution. Males of the population are represented by single horizontal lines while Females are shown as double lines. The vertical position of the line indicates the robot’s time of assembly, and the horizontal position of the line shows it’s location in an abstract physical space. Faint diagonal lines connect parent and child. In this manner, older generations of robots are shown on the bottom of the image while their descendents are supported above them.

PingMags’s Chiemi wrote an interesting article which started with the question “Can I see your desk?” emailed to people and friends they’ve interviewed in the past. Primarily artists and designers from the UK and Japan responded with images of sometimes orderly, sometimes untidy desks and working environments. Interesting to note are the sorts of desks, computer setups, books, chairs, paintings, notepads, tools and other creative artifacts that makeup the ambience of the individual work spaces. Check the Desk Project set over on Flickr for some images that didn’t make it to the article, and dig Atsushi Toyama’s comment:

I live in Handa in Aichi prefecture. My studio is in an attic of a very old temple. This attic was used as a study by a professor of uni before, I really love the big desk which is very good to make a big paintings. When I moved to this place, I looked under the desk to put some stuff… And I found a mysterious hole which is big enough to crawl along…!! I think it’s connected to somewhere by the ceiling of main room, but I’m too scared and can not check it by myself. Sometimes I can feel warm gentle breeze coming from the hole. So I covered it with a canvas one day. I haven’t touched it since then…If you are up for checking the hole for me, you are very welcome. But it’s not my fault even if you can’t come back from the hole. If you find some treasure I can give you 10% of that. Maybe the hole is the exit of next life… I don’t know… My imagination about this hole will never end…