So, I guess that Sanjay had to spoil my surprise but Project Babel is now in motion. You see I have finally gotten a working interface between my Jade plant Babel and my computer at the cabin. Strange enough I had to use a power inverter of sorts which changes DC to AC along with an amplifier and provide some small battery power into the soil. If you want shoot me an email and I would be glad to provide some more specs. I will bring some along in November. Anyway things were slow going at first, but as I got things started working I was soon buried in piles of data. Here is a snippit of Babel’s first output:

rnilsn5mss7h7a3kjlsla[i1i’jjwpy[ynlwdmhdnslj3jdm.;dk=eookd0-wndgnaz.eo9

Now I know that you are looking at this and thinking WTF? Yeah I was basically in the same place when I first read it. However I thought about it for some time and I realized that I had given Babel the entire set of characters to spit out. Seeing as he has never learned English or any language I realized that all of these characters would be pretty confusing and there is no reason to put any kind of order to it.

So basically I decided to restrict Babel to three letters and then see what happened. Check this out:

abbcbababcabccabacbabbbacaacaacababbbcacabaccccaaccaaabacacccacacc

Now you might have guessed that I used abc as the three letters. At this point Babel was spitting out letters at a rate that was much too fast. I guess that he has got a lot to say! Anyway, by tweaking some things I was able to get the rate slowed to about one letter per second, so what you see is about a minute of Babel talk.

What is interesting here is the diminishing occurrence of b’s as Babel continues. The first quarter is almost 50% b, the first half is 37% b, the second half is only 17% b, while the last quarter is just 6% b! This was definitely interesting to me. Apparently Babel was eliminating one of the characters to settle upon a binary system! I was really happy that Babel felt comfortable with such a familiar language! I made the switch to 0’s and 1’s, and this is the first part of a long string that Babel has produced for me:

011010101000101010101000101101101111101001010101001001010110111

Well there is plenty more where that came from and I have been working on it for some time now but feel free to take a crack at it if you like. I was thinking that maybe Brian might have some insights. Thanks again for blogmastering Sanjay.

Blaine Selassie

BD: May 20, 1962 Cambridge MA, 02139