Open source

Something fascinating about the arts - art itself, literature, music, hell, even Twitter - everything is a blank slate. Every painting starts off empty. Every book and poem is devoid of words. Every song initially consists of only staves. Every tweet begins at zero characters. The fact that we have all of this potential in these works is incredible.

Follow along as I do a little bit of Twitter math. Consider a 40-character tweet. One that's about as long as this sentence. (That sentence was 42 characters, to be exact.) In those 40 characters, you can use any letter of the alphabet (let's assume lowercase only), any digit 0 to 9, a space, and any of a comma, semicolon, period, question mark, and exclamation point. Use the hashtag, too. By my count that's 26+10+1+5+1 = 43 different characters you can use across 40 places in which to use them. Want to know how many combinations of those 43 characters you can use in 40 places?

Two billion. With 54 more zeroes at the end.

That's how many different 40-character tweets there are. If you want to use all 140 characters, then you have a 4, with 228 zeroes after it. Have fun trying to type out the perfect tweet now.

Everything has started off with a clean slate. All of my blog posts have started off with a blank screen with no words prewritten on the screen. All 461 one of them. That's neat to think about.