All of that email about translation (yep. there's more... ) earlier also set me on a tangent on classification, and obviously, I wound up landing on the Borges essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins." It didn't really help much, but it was fun to read again, in that frame of mind.

Also, although i allegedly read Hume in college, i don't recall running across this sentence before.

"The world is perhaps the rudimentary sketch of a childish god, who left it half done, ashamed by his deficient work; it is created by a subordinate god, at whom the superior gods laugh; it is the confused production of a decrepit and retiring divinity, who has already died" ('Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion', V. 1779)

The context doesn't matter to me at the moment. That sentence alone is a great story.

Anyway, after rooting around on Wikipedia more (especially the nice one on Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,) i landed on "On Exactitude in Science." First, i had no memory of Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno. Obviously i need to read it. Second, this map of exact scale of the territory that it represents... it's quite possible now, isn't it? Not physically, but as resolution of Google Earth and engines like Second Life advancing, it's inevitable. I'm sure that it was realized it was possible in the late '70s or early '80s, but it only seems years away from being fully realized now. And is this exact scale map also the world of Tlon?