The British Library is one of the six legal deposit libraries for the UK — and the only one that doesn't pick and choose, or have to ask for copies. That's a...
We’ve built several over the years. There are Libraries of Babel (wikis) within the Library of Babel (the internet). Alexandria burned, and the Incan accounting system is mostly lost, but they existed.
That said, the pun is a bit misleading. Big libraries are not bad things or “unholy pride” IMO. On the contrary, if god as described by religion hated science, or learning, why is godlike knowledge called “omni_science_”?
Babel. Bible. The many languages of the world probably didn’t start with a tower, but if I was looking for a monument to hubris, it wouldn’t be a library. It would be a temple, whether a literal church that fleeces its followers, or an actual monument to excess and inequality like Burj Khalifa. (Nothing against you if you live in Saudi Arabia, but please stop building skyscrapers out of sea sand and drinkable water in the middle of a desert? Dubai is not a city, it’s an architectural testing ground at best.)
Language is a strange thing. Unfortunately, it’s easy to be misled by people cherry-picking words from a book. Obviously that applies to me too, so feel free to double-check all this.
Borges’ Library of Babel was the size of a planet and had not just every book in every language, but they were interspersed with books full of gibberish and people spend their lives in the library looking for the book that will give them all knowledge but never find it.
We’ve built several over the years. There are Libraries of Babel (wikis) within the Library of Babel (the internet). Alexandria burned, and the Incan accounting system is mostly lost, but they existed.
That said, the pun is a bit misleading. Big libraries are not bad things or “unholy pride” IMO. On the contrary, if god as described by religion hated science, or learning, why is godlike knowledge called “omni_science_”?
Babel. Bible. The many languages of the world probably didn’t start with a tower, but if I was looking for a monument to hubris, it wouldn’t be a library. It would be a temple, whether a literal church that fleeces its followers, or an actual monument to excess and inequality like Burj Khalifa. (Nothing against you if you live in Saudi Arabia, but please stop building skyscrapers out of sea sand and drinkable water in the middle of a desert? Dubai is not a city, it’s an architectural testing ground at best.)
Language is a strange thing. Unfortunately, it’s easy to be misled by people cherry-picking words from a book. Obviously that applies to me too, so feel free to double-check all this.
Borges’ Library of Babel was the size of a planet and had not just every book in every language, but they were interspersed with books full of gibberish and people spend their lives in the library looking for the book that will give them all knowledge but never find it.