big mustard - Thursday November 30 2000
Profound realization made last night: I've already forgotten it. Trust me, it was great.
It's a miracle! Now I remember! (I thought it was gone forever.) The realization concerns information and entropy and the density of storage or the bandwidth of transmission. If one thinks of entropy as being the same thing as information, then the higher the density of the information, the more like either "grey goo" (extreme entropy in matter) or white noise (extreme entropy in signals) it becomes. If, for example, you analyze the placements of the magnetic domains on the surface of a filled-up multi-gigabyte hard drive, it resembles the random flecks of white noise on a late-night television non-broadcast. But if one looks at legacy storage media, magnetic tapes from the Pioneer Missions, say, the information (and thus the entropy) is much lower. You can actually hear tones if you play the signals on these tapes through an amplified speaker.
The only difference between "absolute noise" which contains no information and the "ordered noise" which contains high-density information is that someone somewhere knows how to interpret that ordered noise. The moment the last of those people vanishes (or the last of their technology is irreparably broken), the information is lost forever.
By the way, given that our brains are such high-density information storage units, is it any wonder they are comprised of a gooey substance that is grey in color?
One of the many dispensations of working in a dot com is overhearing business types talking to overzealous tech recruiters on the phone:
"I know, but come on, you're a recruiter!"
"No, I can't give you my CTO's number!"
"I only want to see three resumés. If you send me any more I'm not going to look at them."
"...and his social skills are?"
"Is he 20 or is he like 30?"
"I want to pay $10 an hour."
"Cold Fusion? Are they even still using that?"
"I'd like someone who has led a team of developers, if possible."
"I promise on my mother's grave I'll get back to you on Monday."
Click on the head for more info!
(Sent in by Fandango Matt)
In the evening John and I went to Smart and Final on a run for staple food items: tonic water, grapefruit juice, bread, peanut butter, baby clams and mustard. The mustard was our most remarkable purchase. We somehow managed to get a half gallon of the brown deli variety for a little over two dollars. The first thing I did when we got home was to refill our eight ounce squeeze bottle by slurping mustard into it from our huge new plastic mustard container. That's the way to do it.
