When Noise Is Information

Have you ever devised a letter-for-letter swap (c=a, e=b, etc.), creating a secret code with your friends? Have you ever listened to the wind passing between two rocks, creating a pulsating whistling sound? Have you ever looked at a colour-coded representation of sound waves bouncing back and forth in a room?

Have you ever listened to Kaija Saariaho, industrial music or experimental avant-garde anything? Have you ever looked at a loom and watched the weaving of coloured/textured threads, thinking about punch cards and Pareto charts? The last time you passed by a big bridge in the city, did you notice the same group of people standing along one side of the bridge and appearing in different positions once a day (say, around lunch time), sending semaphore messages to a person standing with a video-recording mobile phone at an elevated subway train platform?

Have you entered a room of a house, its contents looking haphazardly stacked, noting with great attention to detail the exact placement of every item, returning every day to note changes in the items' positions, and then going back to your computer to decipher the three-dimensional message being recorded by a friend for you? What if the person who lived in the flat across the alleyway from you opened her blinds for a few minutes each day for just such a purpose? Would you be willing to spend the rest of your life writing down the once-daily scripted text, just to discover at the end of your life that the message was part 1 of a three-part message meant for someone two generations after yours?

Do you believe what you see with your eyes? Do you know all the scents your body gives off? Can a robot's skin blush? Some people have dry skin. Some people have oily skin. Some people have a combination of dry, scaly and oily skin. Which one should an artificially-skinned android emulate? What should s/he smell like? One overall scent? A variety of scents? Scents that change with temperature, time and social situations?

Have you ever listened to white or pink noise? Would you recognize and differentiate random serial tones from ones which require a special filter to hear patterned sound or music?

Would you recognize a spaceship if you were born on it thousands of your species' generations after the spaceship was created, the details and nuances of the spaceship's creators' language/culture forgotten in the dust and noise of living daily on the new vessel?

If you know what you're doing, you can do whatever you want in plain sight of those who do not know what you're doing and who do not want you to do what you do. The idea is to blend seamlessly into their world while you carry your world with you.

One person's annoyance at the sound of a loud leaf blower is another person's saxophone/horn sending out beautiful avant-garde music to those who see that a leaf blower operator is a gift from the gods, sent to test your understanding of the desire of one person to magically/artfully move leaves, dirt, cigarette butts and tree seeds without touching them. We all are artists using our bodies as paint brushes and the universe as our canvas, our movements like musical notes written in an invisible score on stage and in the arena with ballet dancers and ball players.

This is my world, my canvas, completely full of every one of you, my art creations, perfection personified. I am excited to know you, to see you, to not see you, to sense you when you're not here, to know you're the face of one of the dice I've just rattled in the cup of a game of Yahtzee.

You are my friend Joey, who, when as young teenagers about the same age (12 or 13), introduced me to the book, "The Search for Joseph Tully," and taught me that who we think we are is not what others think or act upon. You are my friend David N. who made me envious when you got a greenhouse when we were in secondary school and whose work in the chemistry field still makes me envious of your genius.

You are my coworkers Ron, Frank, Henry and Tommy who taught me that it takes a team of dedicated designers to create a masterpiece. We never know what we had until it's gone and in the hands of marketers and technically-savvy hackers who turn a simple high-speed data transmission device into a portable server/client system. We learn that our customers are often better at extracting a product's worth than what our BOMs and profit margins say, that it makes more sense to get a product out the door with obvious flaws that we ask our customers to help us fix/improve than it is to imagine what perfection is supposed to be.

Without my friends, I am no one. I am noise without a filter, post-industrial music with no appreciative listener. It's not about who I am - you is the only it that matters. Settling into a subdivision/housing estate in Latvia is only important if Latvia's where it's at for you, know what I mean? Otherwise, if/when "They" decide to cut off your natural gas supply in winter, then it's not where you want to be at, is it? Makes me wonder what's going on in Minsk or other Belarus ruses. Just when you thought Chechnya is under control, you have to pay attention to the chilies in Chile, do you not? See why I pay attention to the music? All messages are not hidden in the noise of JPG photos. Some noise is in plain sight, just like me and my three-dimensional towers of powerful "tunes." Encrypted computer hard drives are for weenies to decode. Low-tech is still worthy of consideration. Sigh...why do I tell you what you should already know? I guess because I know that the espionage folks have made their thoughts into a business/industry, perpetuating and expanding bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake, eating each other's tails for breakfast and regrowing them in the afternoon, never knowing they're consuming the same thing the next day and the next day and the next... Remember, never be a member of a club that you don't agree with or understand - otherwise, you'll find yourself justifying your membership to your friends who know better and wonder when you started believing your own lies. "Look, Mommy, there's an airplane up in the sky." [Quick! Pick their pockets while everyone's looking up!]

Distraction. That's the key to understanding what these words are all about. Maybe we can pick up this lesson another day when you're ignoring the superficial message of these words and listening to the sound waves they produce. YAWN! Time for my afternoon nap and then I'll look at the data I collected to see the interference patterns caused by my microwave oven while I'm sending data across my WiFi link - then maybe I can figure out the effect of microwave radiation on the radishes growing next to the radicchio to see why they're turning into pomme de terres of another sort.