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From: jsl@barn.COM (John Labovitz)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,sci.bio,sci.psychology,alt.cyberpunk
Subject: Re: The Bandwidth of the Brain
Message-ID: <5745@barn.COM>
Date: 10 Jan 91 04:23:09 GMT
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In article <2755@infinet.UUCP> sena@infinet.UUCP (Fred Sena) writes:
>I don't think that you can just assume that you know the difference between
>"noise" and "data".  It depends on what you are looking for.  [...]
>Information that was not there,
>all of a sudden is there, because we not care.  I guess information is in the
>eye of the beholder.

Exactly.  A blob of data means nothing except when put in context.  If I
give you a book, but it's written in a language you do not understand,
that book is not information to you.  If I teach you the language in
the book, it will then become information.

I think the ultimate computer system would let you take any data and
organize it any number of different ways.  You could build systematic
structures of the data, and link those structures with other
structures.  It's difficult to do this with today's databases; it's
easier with hypertext, but still not quite right.
-- 
John Labovitz		Domain: jsl@barn.com		Phone: 707/823-2919
Barn Communications	UUCP:   ..!pacbell!barn!jsl