I love where Dan Digitaldust is going with this:

“There are 484 million internet users in the world. Maybe half of them own a computer? Most probably have about a 14″ screen. A 14″ screen is about 100 square inches, about 0.064516 square metres. (Err on the conservative if erred on the optimistic before, there’s lots of bigger screens, but also lots of people who are more than doubled up on computers.)

That’s about 31 square kms. Or a square computer screen 5.5 km on a side, or 7.7km diagonal. It would look quite small from orbit and wouldn’t be much use for working with from there, plus the mouse cord wouldn’t reach.

James suggested that they could be used to make the world’s largest particle accelerator.”

A grid-particle-accelerator. A giant internet-scale machine for proton pelota.

Excellent!

Reminds me of something silly I wrote for /play: “The Literature Accelerator” but /play doesn’t have permalinks for good reasons, so I’ll whack it in below:

Sunday, June 22, 2003
The literature accelerator

First we built websites, then webrings. We connected and conjoined ourselves.

Our hobbies, our stories, our passions.

It wasn’t enough for us.

A small number of small changes in small things, that made other small things just a small amount more difficult to do than they might of been, in order for us to talk to a small amount of people; after a time gave us weblogs.

Together, alone, we connected the weblogs – and created the literature accelerator.

The literature accelerator: a network-scale machine, the biggest known to man; that both attenuated and amplified meaning. A Blog-beaten and word-welded torus of the culture was forged, through which all could be accelerated.

Chinese-whispers in reverse – the strongest, most common memes become stronger.

Ever more polarizing and ever more unifying – the same stories played over and over from infinite perspectives still give you the same stories. My hero with a thousand faces is your legion of supervillainy.

A network-scale machine. Monitored and maintained by each of us, every day. Growing with every new storyteller that contributes a patchwork piece of a particle to be accelerated.

An accretion disc of afterthought around the event-horizon of events.

Spinning us into the singularity.

Hyperasychronising human history into

one

repeating,

pervasive pattern.

Delivering the unified theory of human storytelling.