from An Introduction to Information Science

To fathom the workings of the material universe, theoretical physicists have developed elaborate structures of strings, quarks, forces and dimensions, spreading out from a generative big bang, maybe 15 billion years ago. Researchers in cybernetics are beginning to postulate similar structures to explain the development of the dataverse or cyberspace, which exploded into being about 441 quadrillion nanoseconds ago, around 1994.

Left: Radio Bob deploys bogon detection apparatus.

Instead of particles possessed of mass, cyberspace is thought to be composed of particles of information. And instead of charge, they have polar qualities of validity and bogosity. The irreducible units of information are known as the bogon and the cluon. The presence of bogons can be felt most strongly in the vicinity of intense bogon emission sources, such as political figures and sales executives. The development of the worldwide web was accompanied by a huge outflux of bogons, as evidenced by early websites such as "The Hamster Dance," and by the formation of the dot.com bubble. Cluons propogate at a slower rate, trailing the wavefront of the "bogon bang" by as much as two years. The spreadsheets of venture capitalists became a rich source of cluons that helped to stabilize the rapidly deflating, but still superheated mass. While the interplay of cluons and bogons explain much of the observable dataverse, researchers are still seeking evidence for a supermassive neutral information particle, tentatively dubbed the "npron."

As in the physical universe, particles are not uniformly distributed in cyberspace. For example, there is a peak in the field strength of the local bogon flux each year, shortly after the vernal equinox. For an excellent exegesis of recent research, see the Wikipedia entry on quantum bogodynamics.

Five ounce bag

Ever since I was a kid, everything has been getting smaller—phones, computers, stereos, my old neighborhood, the dollar—everything except soft drinks and baseball players. So one of the pleasures of working online is the seemingly infinite expansiveness of the work space. I think of my twin monitors as viewscreens on the bridge of the Enterprise, peering into vast domains as I bark orders and warp my way through galaxies of cyberstuff.

NCPR Online is entering the seventh year of its voyage to explore strange new worlds, so I’ve been doing a complete fresh backup onto the studio computer: tens of thousands of files, gigabytes of audio, video, and pictures, whole library stacks of text. Six years of work by a hardworking bunch. All this vastness squeezing down the tubes of the internet into what? A bite-size corner of a five-ounce hard drive. It just doesn’t seem right. The sucker must be made of dilithium, or neutronium or something. Right under my desk. It’s a wonder it doesn’t collapse into itself like a black hole. Or reach some critical mass and explode, blasting out the windows with the long lost voices of Jody Tosti and Gregory Warner, blowing off the roof with old news and art exhibits, festooning toxic blog debris miles downrange. It scares me just to look at it.