It’s entirely fair to design a new measurement with human needs in mind, as long as the measurement is internally consistent. By comparison, there’s no natural reason why a single degree Celsius should cover a wider range of temperature than a single degree Fahrenheit—it’s just that many people find it convenient to think of water’s freezing point as 0° and its boiling point as 100° and define the degrees in between accordingly. Choosing whether to think of information as a quantity that increases exponentially or linearly with message length is a matter of human convenience in the same way,
...more
