sej: What you are proposing (adding transparency to PostScript) is adding nonstandard extensions to PostScript. It's possible, but I'm not sure what the real advantage is over PDF.
Jeff Darcy has written an interesting piece on protocols that contain reimplementations of TCP. Looking through the archives, Jeff has a lot of good stuff on protocols. Designing good protocols is an esoteric art, and should probably get more attention. It's nice to see writing in the open, even though Jeff works for a proprietary company.
Roughly, Jeff is to protocols as David McCusker is to trees. I think we should do a Vulcan mind-meld of the two, because I think an efficient protocol for remote access to trees is interesting. It's a central component of the Athshe vaporware project, but I freely admit that there many aspects I don't how to do right. Maybe in the absence of mind-meld technology, we can just bounce ideas off each other.
Dirt and noise followup
I wrote a few days ago about "dirt and noise". One of the things I was thinking about is the demonstration in Wolfram's book that the simple "rule 110" automaton can run a universal Turing machine. The straightforward implication is that, even for such ridiculously simple automata, if you know the initial state, you cannot predict whether a certain pattern (corresponding to the halting of the Turing machine) will ever occur. Simple universal machines are not new, but Matthew Cook's proof that rule 110 qualifies certainly pushes the simplicity envelope.
But here's a question. What if your cellular automaton didn't proceed purely mathematically, but had occasional bit errors? Does this make the halting problem go away? If so, does predicting the presence or absence of patterns become tractable?
Incidentally, the best review I've seen so far is this one, posted on the MAA website.
The book may be more interesting as art or literature rather than science. Certainly, the argument for deep equivalence in all fields of human intellectual endeavor is at the heart of Magister Ludi (Das Glasperlenspiele), by Herman Hesse.