I have read that American drones are a big factor in Afghanistan and other places. As I understand it, these are airplanes without humans aboard that are controlled by a computer and its operator. This seems to be a version of rocket warfare, as conducted by the Germans on Britain in World War II.
I also read somewhere that in the case of repressive regimes that don't allow information about their country, lives and situations out, that other nations have thought of seeding information cameras, tiny in size and probably equipped with microphones more or less randomly to watch and listen and send out signals about what is going on. I keep running into mentions of the topic of information. Where is the target? Where is the rocket? Where are the civilians? Where are the drone managers? How many people are gathering for a riot?
The most heralded book on information is probably James Gleick's The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. But Charles Seife's Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes was the first one that got my attention. I have read articles by Seife and I respect his ability to explain things. However, Decoding was not very clear to me. Then, I ran into Information: A Very Short Introduction by Lucian Floridi, which has not done too much for my understanding, probably because I have only read a little of it.
I do know that Claude Shannon created his master's thesis in 1948, the first mathematical attempt to theoretically quantify information. Once we get to digitalization, where we express letters of our alphabet in binary "BITS" notation of 0 or 1 instead of base 10, we can get the idea of quantity of information. We now have much experience with the digitalized pictures, sound files and movies. We can say how many bits or groups of them (bytes, megabytes, gigabytes, etc.) are in a library. However, in human terms, an emotional person like me immediately feels that one bit (Did I win (1) or not (0)?) can be of great value while a terabyte of bits of the relatives and comments of the third pharaoh is literally worthless to me. So, I guess I am hung up on a need for some measure of usefulness and that may have to wait awhile.
Lynn had some medicine from the doctor for her cold. You should see the little folder that came in the box with the medicine! Printed on extra thin paper and folded way up, it measures 21 x 16 inches and is printed on both sides with very tiny print. It is a doctoral dissertation and uses flowery, inflated language, maybe scholarly or lawyerly. But is it informative?
Version 11 of iTunes is out now. Look at the scrollable information I had to "ACCEPT" (whatever that means to a judge and jury) to get the file. Was I informed by it? Am I currently capable of being informed by it in a finite and prudent period of time?
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
