From: "Nigel Price" 
Subject: (urth) Human JPEGs
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 01:39:27 +0100

Dan Meliza wrote:

>>But then, there must be some way
>>to vastly compress an intelligence
>>if you're going to send it through
>>the optic nerves in a few seconds.

All I wanted to do originally with this thread was point out the possibility
of Lupine wordplay around the idea of "two byte word"/"two word bites"/"two
word bird", but then I was foolish enough to put down that idle bit of
nonsense about the 48K Spectrum.

Having failed to learn my lesson, I have to confess that I too, like Dan,
have been whimsically speculating to myself whether, in the Whorl, the
copies of personalities which are transferred between windows and people and
windows and night choughs might not in fact be radically compressed in some
way, or use some sort of wonderfully super-advanced lossy algorithm which
gives such an accurate approximation of a personality that you really don't
miss the bits that aren't there. In other words, Scylla didn't unload a
"bitmap" of herself into Oreb, it was more a sort of "human JPEG".

Only speaking metaphorically of course.

Nigel



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