SCSI logic

Some time later, I was fixing my computer when I realized that the Revelations of St. John of Patmos were neither Serial (chronological) nor Parallel (concurrent), but was in fact SCSI. (Let me know if that doesn't make sense and I'll explain it in another post.)

Since someone asked, I'll now attempt to explain it. Please bear with me if my descriptions are not 100% accurate.

A Serial connection is used when you have to send a discrete series of data in a very specific order. The classic example of this is a joystick input: the data for "up," "down," is effectively worthless if it is received in the wrong order than it was sent. (You zag instead of zig, and your Doom avatar gets fragged.) Because it is optimized for receiving data in sequence, it's not great at handling massive amounts of it. Think of it like a chute, and each bit of data is a horse being led to a barn: you have a great chronology of data there, but it's easy to get it backed up.

A Parallel connection, on the other hand, is GREAT for large amounts of data, like a print request, that doesn't need to be executed particularly quickly. In this case, the analogy is like the starting gate of the Kentucky Derby, with each horse again as a data bit: you open the gates, the data-horses stream down the track, and regardless of who gets there first they all end up at the finish line. If you imagine each race as a discrete packet of data, then a print job being sent to your printer is a lot like a new race starting the moment the horses are out of the gate: you don't care which bit (horse) gets there first, but you can't mix up the races.

SCSI is the best of both of these, and is effectively a bunch of serial connections all running in parallel. Meaning, you can shove a whole lot of data down the pipes quickly, and your horse race becomes a cavalry charge.

So that's all well and good, you say, but how does this relate to the Book of Revelations? Well, the common conception regarding any kind of prophecy is that it's a kind of checklist to be marked off: First you have the Seven Seals, and until and unless that Seventh Seal is broken, you won't hear the first of the Seven Trumpets sound. This is pretty much the definition of serial. But when a Seal is broken or a Trumpet is sounded, it brings with it a lot of pretty densely packed information that a simple serial connection couldn't handle.

Now, I'm not saying that the Apocalypse is literally a computer program that God executes on his massive cosmic computer (though if you're a student of the Kabbalah you can immediately see how the Tree of Life could represent the Universe as Operating System), but -- well, take a look at this and tell me that you don't see a SCSI array:

(from www.babylonfalls.org/revelation_chart.html)

There you go. I'm either mystically enlightened or utterly mad....