ram@nucsrl.UUCP (03/03/87)
A breather: (from the American Cryonics Society Newsletter-with mods) The *BIT* has long been believed to be the indivisible unit of information. out of which all words and numbers are constructed(3). We believed otherwise and hypothesised that the super-market tabloids would contain bits of information bound to undergo decay. An item was selected from the STAR, concerning Mr. T's love-child with Mrs. Gorbachev. Experiments were conducted using our powerful megomega computer. The bit was loaded and accelerated on the outer track of the main disk drive. It was then shot into low core memory, where it was further accelerated in a very tight, infinite "do loop". As the speed approached its terminal velocity of 1,000,000,000 nanoseconds/second, the loop's termination condition turned to plasma jelly, releasing the bit into the adjacent data space. This space has been loaded with a dense mass of anti-information, in this case NSC(Native Source Code). The resulting collision produced a shower of sub-bit particles, which have been named tidbits. (Our colleague who insisted on calling these particles itsies is no longer with us). The half life of tidbit was found to be equal to the time span between "okay to delete file (y/n) y" and "Ohdamnwhaddidido"!. The discovery heralds a new era of Non-Von Neumanian computronics, and even has implications for cosmology. Our team has been lead to posit a "big bank" theory of the beginning of information. We now have evidence that all information started 18 billion years ago as one extremely dense datum. In the beginning was the number, and the number was the sqrt(-1). the resulting crash of the Big Compiler in the sky triggered the information explosion that now engulfs us. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. The establishment has invested billions of dollars in computer equipment which our latest research proves can't possibly work. Fearing reprisals, our team members wish to be known only by their passwords. 2. Dave McComb, "Bisecting the Bit", Journal of irreproducible results 31:10, 1985 3. Of course the utterings of politicians and professional wrestlers are built from the bit's anti-unit of information, the *bs*. renu raman ...ihnp4!nucsrl!ram Northwestern Univ. Comp. Sci. Res. Lab. ############################################################################### # # # My memory is so volatile that they assined my login name as "ram" # # # ###############################################################################