38: The Claude Shannon Episode: Surprise, Entropy, and Bits

What is Information Theory?

• Information is not meaning
• Likely things need very few bits to communicate, maybe less than 1! Unlikely things need more bits.
• Entropy is in the eye of the beholder. It’s what you already know that informs your ability to extract meaning from a message. To one person, it’s just noise; to one who holds the encryption key, there may be way less information’s, but m much more valuable meaning.
• This is the plumbing behind everything you rely on: communication, storage, encryption, compression, error correction.

Come join us for lunch!  Every Saturday, we and several of our friends meet for lunch at 11am at Biwako Sushi in Saline Twp, MI. It's just south of Ann Arbor. If you are in the area, we'd love to have you join us.

Hosts:
Jim McQuillan can be reached at [email protected]
Wolf can be reached at [email protected]

Follow us on Mastodon: @[email protected]

If you have feedback for us, please send it to [email protected]

Check out our webpage at http://RuntimeArguments.fm

Theme music:
Dawn by nuer self, from the album Digital Sky