Gescom, MiniDisc and Mind-boggling Mathematics.

EI3LH · 13 September 2026 19:27

Au Revoir!

Things have been reasonably quiet at Casa EI3LH recently. Mainly because the other day I went back to school after 30 years to pursue a Masters.

Part time, but it is eating up what limited spare time I have already. Maybe thats a good thing some folks would say!

I have spent a LOT of time recently conducting some research in to a MiniDisc album I purchased many years ago and recently revisited. Little did I know that the novel concept behind the album would open up mathematical doors that literally blew my brains to smithereens!

It is 1 jillion percent an off topic post, but I know there are folks that may get something out of the utterly absurd mathematics I uncovered, as well as some of the nice generative AI work and quotes from my bookshelf that I discovered upon deeper research. That is why I risked posting it here (and hopefully won’t be eaten alive for it! ).

I hope you enjoy this post anyway, I put a serious amount of effort in to it (like actual full days of research and checking my maths in Wolfram) and hope it finds a suitable audience…as well as perhaps some secret Autechre fans! It is also a bit of a practice piece for me for when I get to writing the bigger stuff during my Masters process.

Here is the post (and some related artwork I generated - read the post if you want to know the meaning behind it). I hope you enjoy it.

72 44.

G4TGJ · 13 September 2026 19:59

I assume your masters is not in mathematics?

EI3LH · 13 September 2026 20:00

Not a hope! I’ve the IQ of a bubble in a Malteaser!

MM1ROS · 13 September 2026 20:40

Ah see you said it was the bubble in an Aero in the blog post, inconsistencies again!

Other thoughts: The AA batteries idea might not be much use unless we discover a couple of mega planets made of nothing but zinc and manganese dioxide. If you were able to rig up a solar power setup for your Minidisc player (and you’d manufactured new drive gears from synthetic diamond), how many iterations do you reckon you’d make it through in the expected lifetime of our current sun? That’s assuming we don’t all get plunged into nuclear winter by the very AI doing the calculations going all Skynet on us…

EI3LH · 13 September 2026 20:49

No, I had my response on shuffle!

Now that is an interesting thought. I guess at that stage you’d have left our universe and taken a couple of Earth’s worth of AA batteries with you for the journey so you could continue listening while migrating to a suitable Universe.

I just love the absurdity of the task generated from a music album. It is utterly bonkers.

EDIT: Thinking about using solar power is novel too. However that then changes the entire premise and all of the calculations would go in the bin because you’ve altered the control factor.

Plus, wouldn’t you need to calculate a sufficient supply of solar panels (and related equipment) to replace the panels as they wore out? An example might be home solar panels, in that they last how many years, is it 10? 20? More? You could potentially use that as a basis, but then that would be your control and would not be able to change.

Thus, when the day comes that you have to leave our Universe for a new Universe (and what if the next Universe you arrive at isn’t a suitable Universe that can continue the task?) that doesn’t mean plastering solar panels all over your starship!

Jaysus I need a Panadol. I’ve been researching this for days and it is brain melting!

MM1ROS · 14 September 2026 20:12

Might I suggest the significantly fewer playlist permutations of Sleep’s one-track wonder, Dopesmoker? Although it’s usually something other than a panadol folk tend to take with that, something it sounds like the lads from Autechre had been trying out a bit of when they came up with this idea!

EI3LH · 14 September 2026 21:36

If we’re going down that road, I suggest switching media and popping on a copy of John Henry Timmins IV’s magnificent octopus (and definitely not on the Academy ‘Best Picture’ list) The Cure For Insomnia.

Made in 1987 and weighing in at a fairly nippy 85 hours long, it’s the longest film ever made. Alas it was only ever screened once (possibly twice but I can’t recall where I found mention of it, it isn’t in my copy of Spinegrinder - where I usually find my viewing fare ).

Good luck finding a copy, although there is a couple of short excerpts from it on a dodgy 80’s Cannibal splatter VHS. I’ve never seen it, though you’d probably have more luck finding the original negatives of Jim Morrison’s 1969 fillum HWY: An American Pastoral than you would finding all 85 hours of The Cure For Insomnia.

Then again, 1 million feet of 35mm and 16mm was found under the floorboards of a sound stage a couple of years ago that contained all of the footage ever shot (and a lot of it unseen) from the legendary 1971 Steve McQueen fillum Le Mans (best motor racing film ever made in my opinion).

So there is hope yet!

EDIT:

Just an aside, back on topic (even though this is off topic) - I have set up a codespace for my Gescom Runner software. I wanted to make sure it works in any environment and doesn’t fall over.

You can replicate it in your own Codespace if you wish to. Apologies, I haven’t finished writing up the readme yet. After 8 hours (yes really) of checking the article historically and mathematically, I’d had enough and just published the code and the article around the same time.

I will set up the Github properly when I get a sec. The code is all commented anyway. Just to demo, here’s a screenshot showing a dry run. It calculates a confirmed permutation, then generates the playlist. It won’t lose your place either if the host crashes, reboots or suffers an outage. The only real difficult part is on you, the listener, to listen to the album in it’s entirety, which is impossible!

I suppose you could spend a day listening to permutations, then apply cryogenics, sleep for 24 hours, defrost yourself and go again. Rinse and repeat.

MM1ROS · 14 September 2026 22:20

Jeez, between talk of this and the minidisc, I’m now getting daft ideas about the minidisc’s big weird video cousin, the XDCam disc