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Our furniture includes iPods and plasma displays,
March, 2018 - kind of makes me wonder what else has changed - what else has happened in the field - since this book was written
Many years later, lanterns in Old North Church likewise sent Paul Revere a single precious bit, which he carried onward, one binary choice: by land or by sea.
Which was it? Do we remember the media better than the message?
“Lo! the raptured arithmetician!”
“This may not be what George Washington looked like then,” a tour guide was overheard saying of the Gilbert Stuart painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “but this is what he looks like now.”
A number is (we now understand) information.
“At each given moment there is only a fine layer between the ‘trivial’ and the impossible,”♦ Kolmogorov mused in his diary. “Mathematical discoveries are made in this layer.”
It made sense now to say that a dynamical system produces information. If it is unpredictable, it produces a great deal of information.
The laws of mathematics being universal, we tend to think that Π would be one message any intelligent race would recognize. Only, they could hardly be expected to know the Greek letter. Nor would they be likely to recognize the decimal digits “3.1415926535 …” unless they happened to have ten fingers.
