2: Complete Understanding is Elusive

James Gleick "The Information" chapter 12, page 353

***

And you keep coming up with these realizations. 
"What are you talking about?
You made this thing, but your explanation changes each time you talk about it."

Well.... duh.
Who said anything was supposed to stay still around here?
That's why we picked this major in the first place, isn't it?

Sure, there are absolutes in code, word counts, and deadlines.
But the real reason you're here is because you hate that stuff. 
The real world is not an absolute – and neither is the Internet.

It's constantly changing, morphing, evolving – or, arguably, devolving.
We adapt.
That is the experience.

That's why they teach us how to think,
so that the doing comes naturally out of our fingertips when we sit down to keyboard.

I know a guy who goes crazy when things don't line up just right. 
He's NUTS. Neurotic. Anal, I dare say. 
Throw a wrench in his gears and all hell breaks loose.
That guy needs to be in geometry, or a church. 
Somewhere things stay the same for a long time.

That was a pretty quick lesson when we learned to "do the Internet."
Nothing stays the same for long.

Isn't that why you're here?

***

"But Shannon also considered redundancy within a message: the pattern, the regularity, the order that makes a message comprehensible. The more regularity in a message, the more predictable it is. The more predictable, the more redundant. The more redundant a message is, the less information it contains" (Gleick 329).