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"Claude Elwood Shannon, the mathematician who laid the foundation of modern information theory while working at Bell Labs in the 1940s, died on Saturday. He was 84."I don't think you could name anyone who would be clearly more important in the formation of our global techno culture. You can read more about information theory here. "Information Theory regards information as only those symbols that are uncertain to the receiver." Yes, you read that right. "Information" is what is uncertain. A completely random process (if such a thing exists) emits maximum information. The incomprehensible ravings of a madman contain far more information than your nightly news report. As often happens with science, the more you learn about a particular topic, the more you see how scientific knowledge is greatly at odds with the "common everyday understanding" of many things. I thought about this Shannon stuff for a long time and it really turned my whole cognitive landscape inside out. Here's more from that lucent page: "The amount of information, or uncertainty, output by an information source is a measure of its entropy. In turn, a source's entropy determines the amount of bits per symbol required to encode the source's information." Shannon worked out in detail the mathematics dictating the maximum amount of information one can transmit over a given communication channel. This work formed the basis of all our computer network engineering, from the early voice (telephone) networks, to this internet thing we're talking on now. But his work also had more abstract influences. As we formalize the mathematics that seem to work in building machines (computers) that mimic human abilities (like communication,) we profoundly effect our understanding of how we, as humans, are able to accomplish those operations in the first place. I think Shannon's work on information was a prime motivator in the explosion of theory of language and theory of consciousness type philosophizing that took place in the 50's and 60's (and continues to this day.) His basic idea might seem simple today, but it was not in the 40's, and I bet that if you really think about the consequences of information being uncertainty, you'll start to be a little confused too. And confusion (is that uncertainty?) is the first step toward thinking something really informative. The world has lost a great mind.
Sure MP3s are cool, but now that Napster is trying to go legit and all the huge consumer electronics manufacturers are supporting the format, what does a young trend bucking anti-corporate music swapper have to do to stay ahead of the curve? Download the latest (beta4) preview of Ogg Vorbis, of course. It's the really free really good digital music CODEC. Or if you're like me, and you still find yourself using cassette tapes, but want to sound like you're on the cutting edge, you can just read this interesting interview with the guys behind Ogg. Burn baby burn.
Baaaa. I made zero progress yesterday, but I may have screwed some stuff up, so at least I wasn't completely ineffective. It's remarkably hard to work for eight hours on something you are not accomplishing (but I guess that's where the screwing stuff up part came in.) Must get out of the house today. Perhaps it will put itself in order while I'm gone. Seems about as likely as me being able to do it.