Where Does Our Information Come From? : Science After Sunclipse

Search

Profile

Blake Stacey is a physics boffin and science-fiction writer who wandered the Earth and eventually settled in the nation-state of Denial.

Reader Favourites

Spiffy Icons

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike 3.0 License.

Blagnet

« Incomplete Spectra | Main | Down-Home Cyber-Pulp Baggage »

Where Does Our Information Come From?

Category: Pictures • Wobosphere Silliness
Posted on: May 27, 2009 6:44 PM, by Blake Stacey

The vertical axis, if you were curious, is in furlongs per femtofortnight.

Spending all day calculating Shannon-Boltzmann-Gibbs entropies makes one sensitive to loose use of the word 'information'.

Original via P-Zed.

Update (28 May): A larger and cleaner version of this image is available here.

Share this: Facebook Twitter Stumbleupon Reddit Email + More

TrackBacks

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://scienceblogs.com/mt/pings/110989

Comments

The purple area next to LOLCATS is "overheard cell phone conversations"

Posted by: 'Tis Himself | May 27, 2009 7:10 PM

Complete nonsense! It's 2009 now, yet quite clearly we get far more of our information from Bubble Gum Wrappers than that.

Posted by: Brian | May 27, 2009 7:36 PM

Nice.

Posted by: truthspeaker | May 27, 2009 7:40 PM

This is rich stuff. When I first saw the original I thought it had to be from Ray Kurzweil. There's more of them?

One video that's been floating around recently yarps about "half of the information you learn in your freshman year of college will be obsolete by the time you graduate." Really? Roman history? Avogadro's constant? Dutch baroque paintings?

Once upon a time one of my bosses sent me and a co-worker to an Edward Tufte seminar on the company dime. Completely changed how I look at data and presentation. It's a lucky experience that I'd share with every laborer in the academic fields, if I could.

Posted by: george.w | May 27, 2009 8:49 PM

Well, absurdist units are better than none, but now you've got me trying to figure out how to come up with some measure of information that might sensibly have dimensions of velocity.

Posted by: Eric | May 27, 2009 8:59 PM

Oh, that's great. I may borrow it. I have a particular interest in debunking the "professional judgement" meme that a certain profession loves to throw around without ever examining its actual performance.

Posted by: efrique | May 27, 2009 9:02 PM

Nice.

Posted by: Goldenmane | May 27, 2009 9:06 PM

Delightful.

Er, in a slightly weird idle moment of doodling, I rebuilt the graph from scratch with your labels. It's somewhat clearer, so if by chance you want it, it's here.

The original's all in vectors, so it's very editable if you'd like anything tweaked. I'm sad to see that you don't have David Attenborough as an information source, for instance. Just a thought...

Posted by: Chris Davis | May 27, 2009 9:27 PM

Nice work! Where would we be without weird idle moments to fill with doodling? :-) You've got a "Kutzweil" and a "Societyof" in there, but other than that, très spiffy!

(I made my version in a few minutes of GIMP paintbrushing whilst waiting for a simulation to finish, so it's not as if I'm particularly attached to it.)

One video that's been floating around recently yarps about "half of the information you learn in your freshman year of college will be obsolete by the time you graduate."

It's not that the information became obsolete, per se, it's that we've forgotten it thanks to all the booze and pills.

What?

Where did you go to college?

Oh, and Tufte is awesome. In the movie, he needs to be played by Samuel L. Jackson.

Posted by: Blake Stacey | May 27, 2009 9:33 PM

I once (apparently) impressed upon my students the necessity of citing one's sources, but slightly less so the necessity of actually having decent sources to begin with. Evidence: one student cited (in appropriate format) "the lift attendant at Wildcat Mountain."

I don't see him on your graph, so it must be incomplete.

Posted by: Anon | May 27, 2009 10:20 PM

Why does your graph ignore valuable sources of information like Immanuel Velikovsky, Gene Ray, or Wired magazine?

Posted by: llewelly | May 27, 2009 10:26 PM

I am not ashamed to admit that I'm addicted to "Overheard" sites. I know you all are, too.

Posted by: stogoe | May 27, 2009 10:35 PM

So where is ScienceBlogs? Must be that really thin light blue bit between Professional Judgment and Overheard Cell Phone Conversations.

Posted by: qetzal | May 27, 2009 11:48 PM

Grateful thanks for your error-spotting.

The image is now fixed, though I suspect its moment has passed.

Re the information censorship in college first year - yeah, I was surprised to see no universal data black-hole from '65-'75. I though that happened to everyone, but my sources must be in error. Damn bubble-gum wrappers!

Posted by: Chris Davis | May 28, 2009 5:00 AM

Several of my friends have indicated that if you made this as a scarf they would buy it.

Just a suggestion.......

Posted by: Tim | May 28, 2009 8:24 AM

I believe the vertical scale is incorrect; it should be log10(furlongs/femtofortnight). Whenever anything is too clear, one must always throw in a log scale to achieve correct obfuscation.

Posted by: anon | May 28, 2009 9:12 AM

So, information has an average velocity of approximately 16.6 billion meters per second (if my math is correct).

Cool... but where does that leave us?

Posted by: s1mplex | May 28, 2009 10:15 AM

Oh, and Tufte is awesome. In the movie, he needs to be played by Samuel L. Jackson.

OK that cracked me up. Now I'm gonna be reading Tufte in Jackson's voice. Folded into movie lines.

Posted by: george.w | May 28, 2009 1:32 PM

I suspect that "bubble-gum wrappers" also includes "insights or conversations while in the presence of rolling papers."

Posted by: Wordweaverlynn | May 28, 2009 4:40 PM

Surely The Onion should merit inclusion as a prime source?

Posted by: arnie | May 28, 2009 5:41 PM

I was going to ask if the RSDAWMDP Proceedings are published on line. Then I considered some of the entries in my RSS feed and thought, yeah, definitely.

Posted by: jackd | May 28, 2009 6:07 PM