Information is calling up Gayle the Travel Agent to find out (again) what time your flight leaves. Information is having Gayle reserve a rental car. With a specific company. Information is you standing there at the counter talking to the young woman at the keyboard, seeing what cars in what colors are actually available, regardless of what they told Gayle and what Gayle then told you.
Information is what temperature it is in Boulder, Colorado, at 8 a.m. on Monday, January 23, 2006. Information is, that such a temperature means you should wear your brand-new tomato red Puffy Coat when going outside. Information is, than you can fly at whatever time with that airline in that seat.
Information is the fact that, when Those In Charge created the ASCII alphabet, a certain arrangement of eight bits (denominated a byte by John Tukey, of blessed memory) was defined to refer to a capital A. Then later, another byte (with a different internal arrangement of ones and zeroes) was designated to refer to a lowercase a.
Those In Charge, though on a different committee (heretofore assigned the name EBCIDIC), assigned a different arrangement of eight bits to refer to the capital letter A, and tried very valiantly to make the rest of the world agree to that. Regardless of whether the rest of the world used an alphabet that included a capital A. Or indeed, anything that could be represented by a group of clusters of eight bits of information (talk to the Chinese hand). A silly arrangement of eight ones and zeroes (or so we denote them) is seen by the word processor, therefore, as the capital letter A.
Do we know why they chose that particular arrangement? We certainly do not. Such an arrangement of bits could be read by another program on the same computer as an operator in a spreadsheet containing your vital bank data, or yet again as a bit of blue on a picture of a hat that your mother was wearing for unknown reasons to a Christmas party in 1959.
We, the erstwhile computer science student, are left to realize, though with some peril and much trepidation, that information is what we define it to be. Information is what I agree that it is, and you agree that it is, so that we both can understand it. Information is the very definition itself.
I know that I am on a flight from Denver to Cincinnati. So does the stewardess, and the pilot. I hope the navigator does too. I know that the Cincinnati airport is physically in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, though many/most of those travelling through there do not, and assume we are in the State of Ohio, though we are not, and it really doesn’t matter much as long as you can find your car and there’s enough gas in the tank to get you home to the cats, who are lonely.
Information is when the cats meow at you and wrap themselves around your ankles when you enter the front door, and you figure that means they missed you. Even if it actually means that they just want you to pour more food into the Genuine Replica Hemingway Cat Food Bowl.
And hello OTB!
white pebble 