Imagine a world where language is dying. In this world, everyone you know is afflicted with a strange malady. Every day, each person forgets a random handful of words. One by one, once-familiar nouns, verbs and adjectives simply slip away. At first the effect is barely noticeable. Though the English language has around 200,000 words, only a few thousand …
[This is #4 in a series of posts exploring information: what is it, where does it come from, and what does it teach us about ourselves and the reality in which we live. – #1 can be found here] When encoding information using symbols, it doesn’t fundamentally matter what physical carriers are used to display …
[This is #2 in a series of posts exploring information: what is it, where does it come from, and what does it teach us about ourselves and the reality in which we live. – #1 can be found here] When Bach sat to write his great works, he encoded sequences of tones in time, he …