Burgy had been privately telling me that there was a message but I am
particularly bad at that type of puzzle as it involves English and Burgy
knows how bad I am at English. Anyway, within the context of information
theory the lack of an L is a semantic meaning which cannot be measured by
information theory. This message is like the code of two spies who agree to
a secret meaning. There is no algorithm by which this "message" can be
detected or measured. Infact that message is lost to people of other
cultures. Why are these types of messages unable to be determined by
information theory? Because the meaning (NOEL) is not intrinsic to the
sequence anymore than the platonic category DOG is intrinsic to the
sequence "dog" or "gou". The latter is the mandarin term for dog. There is
nothing but cultural agreement. Pinker writes:
". . .the word for "blow" is pneu in Greek and pniw in Klamath (an American
Indian language spoken in Oregon), or the fact that the word for 'dog' in the
Australian aboriginal language Mbabaram happens to be dog."
~Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, (New York: Harper/Perennial, 1994), p.
255-256
Both of these are due to fortuitous cultural agreement. He further writes:
"In fact there is not one trick but two, and they are associated with
the names of two European scholars who wrote in the nineteenth century. The
first principle, articulated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, is
'the arbitrariness of the sign,' the wholly conventional pairing of a sound
with a meaning. The word dog does not look like a dog, walk like a dog, or
woof like a dog, but it means 'dog' just the same. It does so because every
English speaker has undergone an identical act of rote learning in childhood
that links the sound to the meaning. For the price of this standardized
memorization, the members of a language community receive an enormous benefit:
the ability to convey a concept from mind to mind virtually
instantaneously."~Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, (New York:
Harper/Perennial, 1994), p. 83-84
Let me try to explain what all this means. Mathematics cannot determine what
two people have decided. In information theory information is determined
not by what 2 people agree culturally or privately is information.
Information is measured by compressibility of the sequence. The alphabet
even minus the L has more information in it that does the sequence
isisisisisisisisis. This is highly compressible.
glenn
Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man
and
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm