An open letter to the information theory gods
Dear Esteemed Information Theory Gods,You have been entirely looked over in the pantheon of gods. The work you do -- namely: creating and maintaining entropy -- is of immeasurable value to us. You allowed us to do away with mechanistic determinism. You give us methods to create microstructures. You saved me from not having anything to say on my history of modern science qualifying exam.
However, and please do not cause me to decay rapidly with Your Immense Powers, I find something in Your All-Knowing Wisdom disconcerting, incongruous.
I recently got an electronic copy of a dissertation that I wanted to read. It is on the introduction of quantum mechanics in Japan. It is 488 pages. It took years to craft. And it is 3.606 MB.
And then there is "Do Somethin'". That, in case Your Esteemed Presences are wisely not immersed in tween culture, is a song by Britney Spears. It is 3:22 minutes. It wasn't even crafted. And it is 3.870 MB.
So, I beg of you, IT Gods, in all Your Greatness, what the heck is this all about? It is a rather depressing thought. Years of work are equivalent to one Britney Spears ditty. Why?
Sincerely,
SS [entropy entropy]
posted by Sameer @ 6:28 PM
7 Comments:
The meaningful Kolmogorov complexity of the dissertation is probably higher than that of the song, which is most likely a construction of a bunch of short samples combined with Spear's voice and delivery. It would probably be possible to specify her voice and a delivery (words, notes, intonation) that would be interchangable with the original (that is, listeners who liked the song would like this
verison just as much) and would come in well under the 3.8 MB. If you didn't care about the singer in particular, all you would need is the samples, words, and the score. The size of the song has more to do with the fidelity of the recording. If you were to take the first draft of the Principia and represent it to the same fidelity, that representation would be quite large.
Also, symbolic representations of things rely on a great deal of state already in reader's heads, and you can think of that state as part of its complexity. To "unpack" the information I need what amounts to a huge lookup table. The song is represented in an
almost self-sufficient format; all I need in addition to the song representation itself is a little algorithm.
Not that this wasn't rhetorical or anything.
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Do the information theory gods have anything to do with smiting comment spammers?
With regard to your original note, I would take some solace from the substantially greater information density of the dissertation: If the information theory deities need to compress or delete the hard memories of their adherents, think of the savings involved in jettisoning such trifles as Spears' "music" and how many worthy dissertations would then have homes.
Good point. If I just deleted the 20 GB of music on my computer, I could write TRILLIONS upon TRILLIONS of dissertations.
I deleted the stupid spammers, hopefully.
As a fellow graduate student, I find this blog quite amusing. Keep up the good posts.
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