Today I decided to appease my curiosity and study the mysterious electronic box that I found in my suitcase after arriving at the University of Illinois. I spent the day immersed in an investigation to uncover its mysterious function.
The box measures 8in x 5in x 5in (determined by a ruler which I observed last week) and has affixed to its top, side and front faces, an array of knobs, dials, switches, and a six-figure digital numeric display. Inscribed on its top surface are the cryptic inscriptions: AM, ABBOTT, FM, PHONO, and VOL, hence I surmise the unit to be of foreign origin. Upon engaging the various knobs, dials, and switches, the unit issued forth a disturbingly disharmonious collage of music fragments and broken speech which were intermittently punctuated by a steady buzzing noise and an erratic advance of the numerals. I discovered that the most consistent way of silencing the beast was by removing its umbilical cord from a nourishing socket in the wall.
The numerical display consists of three pairs of individual displays or number-windows which each displays a two-digit number. I assigned a random variable to denote each pair which are denoted as H, M, and S, respectively. Within each pair in the display, I differentiated each number as either R, for right, or L, for left, based on their relative positioning as observed from an anterior view.
The following observations
On the numbers and their relations
Were made to seek the causes
Of their interesting gradations
The numbers in the numerical display, from the right side to the left, were found to advance in a repeating series of integers that ranged from (0 – 9), (0 – 6), (0 – 9), (0 – 6), (0 – 9), and (0 – 1) for the SR, SL, MR, ML, HR, and HL variables, respectively. Each completion of a cycle in the R-window of each pair was recorded by an advance of one integer in the window to the left. This led me to wonder where the numbers in the furthest display to the right, SR, were being obtained from, for I was unable to locate any faster moving cycle that SR might have been recording the completion of. At first, the furthest window to the left, HL, gave me a similar cause for bafflement, but I was eventually able to make corollaries to the advances the advances of its cycle. This number window is special in that it only advances from 0 to 1 in a repeating fashion. I was able to relate this advance to the changing periods of lightness and darkness outside, which is related to the earth’s cycle of rotation around its axis, which is related to the change of dialogue by Wolf Blitzer in CNNs Situation Room. The buck, apparently, stops there.
The relationships between the displays were found to be as follows: SL was found to advance 10 times slower than SR, MR advanced 6 times slower than SL, ML advanced 10 times slower than MR, and HL advanced, on the average, only ¼ as fast as HR. Also, not all pairs were found to operate on the same modulo, or base, system of counting. The S-pair and M-pair operated on a base of 60 while the H-pair operated with a modulo of 12.
All this was found to be most disconcerting, I can’t imagine any practical use for such a mess of misrelation, incoherence, and ambiguity. I must conclude that until I find the instruction booklet it will have to remain a mystery, although a more quantified one.