08.05.06
Crashing the Answer Bus
I was happy to see that the Answer Bus had sent my site two web surfers this month. And it is only the third of the month. The site in question has almost no incoming traffic, so I was interested to find out what could have caused this great bounty. I went to the web site and read about how the clever trick was done. Then I tried a few questions of my own. My first question was “What does one put in coffee?” To its credit, the Answer Bus identified coffee as the key word and the five or six sites it recommended all contained references to coffee. But the phrases they quoted had nothing to say about what might be put into it. One was about brewing coffee. And that’s pretty close. Conceptually, if one drinks coffee black, one might imagine that one puts water and coffee beans in coffee. I, however, drink coffee with half and half, and have the stubbornly odd notion that one puts that in coffee.
Thinking that I really had not gotten the hang of riding on the Answer Bus, I decided to mimic one of the passengers. I clicked on one of the recently asked questions which was about what Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album had in common with Wizard of Oz, the movie. Evidently, certain events in Dark Side of the Moon correspond nicely with events in the movie. And, evidently, certain phrases and sounds in the album echo events in the movie. Start them playing at precisely the same time and the album works as a kind of alternate soundtrack. In other words, what they have in common is time. Well, also money. But that came some time later.
Listening to noises that are not part of a movie soundtrack is not a common practice for me, but I once rented Metropolis, an early twentieth century silent film with great, looming, dark, stylized visuals. I played Mile’s Davis’ Bitches Brew while watching it. There were times when the music seemed jarringly inappropriate. There were times when the music seemed to play independent of the visuals. But there were times when a chord, a note, spaces between notes, or whole phrases fit perfectly with the film. There were times when it seemed like they were somehow inextricably linked.
I believe the word used at certain web sites is ’synchronicity.’ In both of these cases, I imagine the synchronicity to be a little more literal than the Jungian term. My sense, in the case of Oz, which is informed by reading through all 38 points of sychronicity at one of the Answer Bus recommended sites is that that the subconscious space that Dorothy and company occupy is somehow disjoint from the subconscious space of Pink Floyd. And if the temporal synchronicity is purposeful, the band is clearly calling into question the reality of Dorothy’s ‘Over the Rainbow’ world.
I read the obituary of Sid Barrett in a recent Economist. Barrett founded the band, but his mind was compromised by powerful hallucinogenics, not far into his career. Members of the band, we are told, were greatly saddened by their fellow’s fall. Like Icarus, Sid flew too close to the sun and ended in darkness. Somehow ‘over the rainbow’ seems like a fitting way do describe his state of mind. Of course, the album cover’s rainbow art suggests this link.
I was glad to have been reminded of this particular album, for as a monument to a sort of existential ennui that pervades a world defined only in terms of money, time, and power, it towers above almost any modern work in its broad appeal. Sid was a kind of counterpoint to that world. He was lovable in a very strange way. And fragile. Shine on you crazy diamond.
Back from my brief trip to Oz via the Dark Side of the Moon, I got back on the Answer Bus. Being interested in this sort of thing, I clicked on one of the ‘how do they do that’ buttons at the right edge of the site. Up popped a page-long list of web sites about Artificial Intelligence, parsing documents for meaning, and automated answer generation. Four of the first five documents I clicked on produced a 404 - File not Found error. Clearly the Answer Bus was swerving close to the edge.
I decided to ask it one more question. “Why does this site have so many ‘error 404 - file not found links?’ ” This is a question, evidently that is impossible even for a very intellegent machine to answer. The Answer Bus crashed. One lives dangerously when one steps outside the realm of simple fact. But that’s where the beauty is. Beauty and danger. Sid would have understood.