Rough Beast

Rough Beast
Grifo Mecanico - Diego Mazzeo

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Email to Dr. Kremer re: information

The information in a book is a message (the information) encoded in a string of symbols. The raw information (the meaning of the string of symbols) is measured by information entropy. The plastic shell of that fan next to your desk has low information entropy compared to the petroleum in the ground from which plastic is synthesized*. The international space station has (for our recreational area of space-time) much lower information entropy than a Prius in the parking lot. In the limit, the a pile of chalk dust has high IE but a trace of chalk dust on a blackboard that forms the string of symbols "E=mc^2" has the lowest IE most people can decode. And even then, most people cannot decode the information in the symbol "c" as a universal constant of value 186,000 mph.

Stare at this long enough and you will grok the fullness.


--
-Kirk
512-761-7307

*The information content of petroleum stores the history of the universe that includes the presence of life on Earth. The plastic, in turn, symbolically represents a petroleum plant in Beaumont, a mold in Shenzhen China, and several engineering schools populated by urban primates.

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