this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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Irrational numbers are an infinite source of information. (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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They're probably the only things that "create" information in the sense that you can always grab another slice. Thank you delicious pi!

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Is it actually information?

Yes. For every bit of number pi you get one bit of information.

I can give you the number two

You gave me log2(10) bits of information. Thanks.

but it's not useful information until I also tell you which digit is significant and what the number means.

You are misunderstanding what informatiob is.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I can give you √2 which is 16-bits of information as characters. It's also an irrational number. How you express something doesn't change the amount of information is contained in the message.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

How you express something doesn't change the amount of information is contained in the message.

Welcome to the world of entropy coding.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

How you express something absolutely does change the amount of information in the message. That’s the foundation of compression.

Bitmap image files tend to be larger than png files, even when they both represent the same image.

1.41421… can be thought of as an expanded form of sqrt(2). In this case, the expansion is to an infinite number of digits.