Human JPEGs

Nigel Price · 23 Apr 2002, 00:39 · from urth-v0204.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Nigel Price" <nigel.a.price at virgin.net>
Subject: (urth) Human JPEGs
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 01:39:27 +0100
Message-ID: <urth-v0204-760 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0204/760.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Dan Meliza wrote:

>>But then, there must be some way
>>to vastly compress an intelligence
>>if you're going to send it through
>>the optic nerves in a few seconds.

All I wanted to do originally with this thread was point out the possibility
of Lupine wordplay around the idea of "two byte word"/"two word bites"/"two
word bird", but then I was foolish enough to put down that idle bit of
nonsense about the 48K Spectrum.

Having failed to learn my lesson, I have to confess that I too, like Dan,
have been whimsically speculating to myself whether, in the Whorl, the
copies of personalities which are transferred between windows and people and
windows and night choughs might not in fact be radically compressed in some
way, or use some sort of wonderfully super-advanced lossy algorithm which
gives such an accurate approximation of a personality that you really don't
miss the bits that aren't there. In other words, Scylla didn't unload a
"bitmap" of herself into Oreb, it was more a sort of "human JPEG".

Only speaking metaphorically of course.

Nigel

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net