| I have been thinking about this for a long time. Thanks for the link. The biggest advantage of character-based encodings is that they can be decoded by humans (as opposed to dot-based encodings), which means that you don’t need a camera or a scanner to recover the data. This is an interesting point. In our post apocalyptic future scholars will be using their quills to translate archives of these (in my imagination anyway). Of course they would have to translate into binary and then into human chars. I can imaging they will be sad they cannot listen to the mp3's. Adding color allows on to code more information per dot (3x more with three colors). Is this right? Wouldn't it be base-3 encoding? Three bits of binary can count to 8. Three trits of base three can count to 27. Color has all sorts of disadvantages but maybe a much greater payoff (unless I m mistaken). |
I am very skeptical of this idea that people will be able to write but unable to produce useful digital computers. Computers are a mathematical discovery, not an electronic invention. Electronics makes them a thousand times faster, but a computer made out of wood, flax threads, and bent copper wire would still be hundreds of times faster than a person at tabulating logarithms, balancing ledgers, calculating ballistic trajectories, casting horoscopes, encrypting messages, forecasting finances, calculating architectural measurements, or calculating compound interest. So I think automatic computation as such is likely to survive if any human intellectual tradition does.