Compression of random binary data

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Sun, 29 Oct 2017 06:03 pm, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 29, 2017 at 6:00 PM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Oct 28, 2017 5:53 PM, "Chris Angelico" <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> One bit. It might send the message, or it might NOT send the message.
>>
>> Not sending the message is equivalent to having a second possible message.
> 
> Okay, now we're getting seriously existential. Is a non-message a message?

Is zero a number?

Is bald a hair colour?

Is atheism a religion?

Aristotle seriously argued that the smallest whole number was two. Zero was
clearly nothing at all, and one wasn't a *number*, it was *unity*. A number
is, by definition, a multitude of units.

https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/19533/why-does-aristotle-suggest-one-is-not-a-number

http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.14.xiv.html

No message can be a message. British nuclear submarines during the Cold War
had orders that if they failed to receive any transmissions from London
within a certain time period, they were to crack open the secret orders from
the Prime Minister. Nobody knows what is in the orders, as they were
destroyed when the PM left office, but they are popularly supposed to have
included:

- fire your missiles at Russia;

- surrender to whoever won the war;

- try to flee to Australia or New Zealand and join up with whatever remnants
  of the British Empire still exist;

- do whatever you want.

It makes a good, but ultimately futile, exercise to try to guess what the
various PMs would have said.



-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.