{"id":379,"date":"2007-03-07T07:27:55","date_gmt":"2007-03-07T15:27:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=379"},"modified":"2007-03-07T07:50:10","modified_gmt":"2007-03-07T15:50:10","slug":"naming-each-of-the-ten-octillion-atoms-in-your-body","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/07\/naming-each-of-the-ten-octillion-atoms-in-your-body\/","title":{"rendered":"Naming Each of the Ten Octillion Atoms in Your Body"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s a few paragraphs from my novel-in-progress Hylozoic<\/em>, along with a note on the math involved.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Passage from Hylozoic<\/b><\/p>\n

\u201cYou just have to listen. Like this.\u201d\u009d Thuy teeped him a new mental maneuver she\u2019d invented to convert a silp\u2019s self-image to an English name.<\/p>\n

Jayjay listened inwardly to the crabby spirit of the stream. And, yes, Thuy was right, the silp\u2019s name was Gloob. Gloob had telepathically overlaid a face upon the stream\u2019s eddies and lines of flow, the visage of a stern old man with trembling cheeks and flowing beard. He didn\u2019t like their talk of a dam.<\/p>\n

The friendly rocks at the stream\u2019s edge had names too: Clack, Bonk, Rollie, and Harvey. And the redwood overhead\u2014her name was Grew. Unlike Gloob, Grew was happy to have Jayjay and Thuy as neighbors. She was looking forward to their fertilizing influence upon her roots.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Intrigued his newly-learned ability to sense the silps\u2019 names, Jayjay teeped down into the aethereal chorus of atoms that made up his body. Each of his ten octillion atomic silps had its own timbre and, thanks to Thuy\u2019s mental gimmick, he could encode each little voice as a name consisting of six English words. Anonymized superabsorbent oratorical sluggardly expectorant. Exoteric velocipedal trigamist township conglobation. Villanous inky gowk curator walloper. Like that. Crazy as it seemed, Jayjay had room for all ten octillion names in his endless lazy eight memory.<\/p>\n

Teeping a bit higher up the great chain of being, he perceived that his organs and muscles had voices and names as well. Larry Liver. Ben Bone. They\u2019d still be talking after he died. At least for awhile.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Note on the Passage<\/b><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the calculation that a human body has ten octillion atoms <\/a>has a name. So how <\/em> does Jayjay come up with ten octillion different names? Well, ten octillion is 10 to the 28th power. According to the Global Language Monitor<\/a>, English has about a million words now. If I pick five words at random, there\u2019s one million to the 6th power ways to do that, which equals 10 to the 30th power, which is a hundred times as big as the range I actually need. So I can definitely give each atom in my body a name consisting of a five word English phrase. In order to come up with some truly random samples, I found Word Browser<\/a>, a cool site providing random English words online. (I suspect that the main users of this site are spammers wanting to make filter-baffling email messages, but it\u2019s nice to have it for the rest of us.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Anonymized superabsorbent oratorical sluggardly expectorant.
\nExoteric velocipedal trigamist township conglobation.
\nVillanous inky gowk curator walloper. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve cheated just a bit and made Jayjay\u2019s sample phrase names for his atoms have a decent grammatical form, but there\u2019s room to do that, given that I only need to use one in a hundred of the possible phrases. If I wanted to craft my phrases even more, I could bump it up to six-word names.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But, oh oh<\/em>, someone might protest that I\u2019ll need a different <\/em>set of names for different <\/em>people\u2019s bodies. In a way I don’t (if I’m just talking to my own atoms), but in a way I might (if I want to talk about other people’s atoms too).<\/p>\n

An easy solution would be to use topynymic surnames, that is, to append the name of the owner object to an atoms name, so that Jayjay\u2019s \u201cVillanous inky gowk curator walloper\u201d\u009d would have the full name \u201cVillanous inky gowk curator walloper of Jorge \u201d\u02dcJajay\u2019 Jimenez.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Or I could bite the bullet and assign a separate name for each atom on Earth. Once again going online, I find there are 10 to the 50th many atoms on Earth<\/a>, a number which you could also call a hundred pentadecillion. I need to raise a million to the ninth power to get more than that\u2014actually a million to the ninth is 10 to the 54th power, comfortably bigger than I need.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So I can give each atom on Earth an individual name by using nine-word names, and I can be a little picky about which nine-word phrases I use (I only need one out of ten thousand of them).<\/p>\n

Going back to Word Browser, I get this name for this one particular atom I just breathed in:<\/p>\n

\u201cHi, lurch nonmental hearty unsteadiness multiplexing putrescent unrepented immoderate nucleoplasms!\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cHi, Rudy!\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s a few paragraphs from my novel-in-progress Hylozoic, along with a note on the math involved. Passage from Hylozoic \u201cYou just have to listen. Like this.\u201d\u009d Thuy teeped him a new mental maneuver she\u2019d invented to convert a silp\u2019s self-image to an English name. Jayjay listened inwardly to the crabby spirit of the stream. And, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}