jonotrain
As for your present argument, i would first point out that you should not treat quantitative differences as essential differences. Any archival system requires some sort of key system for retrieval. Print libraries have the Dewey decimal system, the internet has URLs, and libraryofbabel.info has its book locations, strings of letters and numbers which you are correct to point out are just as information-rich as the texts themselves. But you claim that because of the size of keys, the texts in this digital archive do not exist - this is fallacious. How large must a key-value system get before it ceases to exist? If a poem's title is longer than its text does it cease to exist? Greek philosophers parodied the confusion of quantitative and qualitative thought by asking how many grains of sand we needed to add together before we had a heap. Once again, you have confused a practical and an ontological argument - the length of keys (and quantity of text) may affect the usefulness of libraryofbabel.info, but they cannot affect its existence.
You consider three heterogeneous things in your examples - a floating point register and the set of possible floating point numbers, libraryofbabel.info and the texts it contains, the human mind and what it "actually thinks about". Let us begin with the last - you claim that the human mind only contains what it "actually thinks about." If this is so, what is a memory? Your failure to grapple with the difficult category of possibility leads to the ontological confusion in your argument.
If we limit our consideration to practicality, I would agree that the libraryofbabel.info is not useful in the same way as a digital archive like JSTOR. In other libraries, one can find texts by subject matter, author, period, etc. and learn something new from their contents. libraryofbabel.info exists to show us the same language we have encountered already in a new context. This allows us to reflect on the essence of language, which is not restricted to the intentions of a conscious and rational speaking subject (as you imagine when you speak of what we "actually think about"), but is always open on irrational excess.
As to your other question, I'd say 1)The library undermines the integrity of rational thought or endeavor, and thus teaches us to reconfigure our thought to do without purpose. 2)On the other hand, when decontextualized pieces of language can take on new, unforeseen meanings - they can become more meaningful, not less.
The library is a paradoxical place. It's up to us to do what we will with it.
Thank you for the excellent suggestion.
As for the second idea, the forum exists for librarians to share any sorts of discoveries they make in or thoughts they have about the library. But I would never say there could be a page with nothing interesting on it! After staring at these pages for a possibly unhealthy length of time, I can tell you that there's something interesting to be found in all of them.
and keep in mind what Borges said: "In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense. It is useless to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons under my administration is entitled The Combed Thunderclap and another The Plaster Cramp and another Axaxaxas mlö. These phrases, at first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a justification is verbal and, ex hypothesi, already figures in the Library. I cannot combine some characters - dhcmrlchtdj - which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god."
I'm the programmer of libraryofbabel.info - thanks for letting me know about this. Which pages is it happening on?