WHups, Auggie -- sorry, hit send too quickly...!

>> According to Shannon's narrow definition, information is a _measure_ of
>> entropy. In other words, information is not the signal in a noisy
>> channel, but a measure of the signal's content. It's a quantity not a
>> thing. The more information in a signal means more randomness (noise)
>> in a signal. A signal with lots of redundancy has little information.

and to think that the engineers have been suggesting greater redundancy for
control and survivability!

> Ah, yeah, the entropy connection,
>
>> Shannon is also careful to unhinge "meaning" from his concept of
>> "information".

yeah, I've got to re-read the paper again, it's dense...

>> It's more complicated, subtle, and interesting than what I describe
>> above, but that's the gist. Most of our communication technologies
>> depend on these ideas.

oh yeah, definitely, even if only regarding the energy necessary to maintain a
negentropic/ordered/controlled situation for communication to occur via!

>> The stuff on coding theorem and stochastic signals is what I find most
>> interesting. What makes a large part of his information theory work is
>> that most "human" signals (music, writing, etc.) are stochastic;
>> non-deterministic but statistically predictable.

I suppose each living being is constantly receiving a huge range of such
stochastic (random) 'signals' from all other living forms around them (in the
form of expressed energy in a wide range of 'forms' and from the environment),
and the end result is that life on the planet continues to project itself into
the indeterminate future, still alive! Life has to discriminate between food and
not-food (& danger!) and this sensing process relies on sensing the 'right'
alternative. Life has evolved under this rubric since the beginning -- maybe
that discrimination is, itself, a fundamental characteristic of Life!

>> One interesting thing regarding stochastic signals is that you can
>> remove parts of them and still send enough communication for it to be
>> "understood". Eg: I cn wrt t y wtht vwls nd y shld b ble t ndrstnd

but there is always that threshold where it all breaks down... so, following on
the heels of twitter, when we are down to 5 character messages, and then to one
(on/off), our communication becomes binary! And no one understands anything:
[end of species]

Cheers,
jh
--


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
John Hopkins
Watching the Tao rather than watching the Dow!
http://neoscenes.net/
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
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