GoodReads.com is taking off as a social reading and recommendation platform.

This seems like a good opportunity to remind the thinkers and Hive Minds at QuizAxeHatRack they might want to check into the novel, Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson (Life isn’t all Snowcrash). Not only will the Hive get exposed to neat topics like Van Eck phreaking but a really neat chapter going on about RIST.

“RIST is a bit-pattern designator is a random series of bits used to uniquely identify a RIST. For example, the organism traditionally designed as Earth (Terra, Gaia)has been assigned the designator 0577. This Web site is maintained by 11A4 which is a hive mind. RIST 11A4 assigns bit-pattern designators with a pseudo-random number generator. This departs from the practice used by that so-disant ”hive mind” known to itself as the East Bay Area Hive Mind Project but designated (in the system of RIST 11A4) as RIST E772. This ”hive mind” resulted from the division of ”Hive Mind One” (designated in the system of RIST 11A4 as RIST 4032) into several smaller ”hive minds” (the East Bay Area Hive Mind Project, the San Francisco Hive Mind, Hive Mind 1A, the Reorganized San Francisco Hive Mind, and the Universal Hive Mind) as the result of irreconcilable contradiction between several different semantic memes that competed for mind-share. One of these semantic memes asserted that bit-pattern designators should be assigned in numerical order, so that (for example) Hive Mind One would be designated RIST 0001 and so on. Another meme asserted that numbers should be organized in order of importance, so that (for example) the RIST conventionally known as the planet Earth would be RIST 0001. Another semantic meme agreed with this one but disagreed as to whether the counting should begin with 0000 or 0001.Within both the 0000 and 0001 camps, there was disagreement about what RIST should be assigned the first number : some asserted that Earth was the first and most important RIST, others that some larger system (the solar system, the Universe, God) was in some sense more inclusive and fundamental.

A hive mind is a social organization of RISTs that are capable of processing semantic memes (”thinking”). These could be either carbon-based or silicon-based. RISTs who enter a hive mind surrender their independent identities (which are mere illusions anyway). For purposes of convenience, the constituents of the hive mind are assigned bit-pattern designators. The genetic part of the memomes share 99% of it’s contents with the data set produced by the Human Genome Project. This should not be construed as endorsing the concept of of speciation (i.e., that the continuum of carbon-based life forms can or should be arbitrarily partitioned into paradigmatic species) in general, or the theory that there is a species called ”homo spaiens” in particular. Also, The semantic part of the memomes are still unavoidably contaminated with many primitive viral memes, but these are being gradually and steadily supplanted by new semantic memes generated ab initiao by rational processes. ”

Good read…

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