Flick Harrison wrote: > I can understand the temptation to reduce "digital" to "numbers."
There may be such a temptation, but at the end of the day, "digital" and certain fields of "numbers" (namely discrete ones), as technical terms, are isomorphic. There's no reduction going on. > But I think it borders on tautology to define digital as "computable > numbers... computable only by a computer." Who proffered such a definition? (The conversation you're referring to was a while ago...) That last part is redundant, if not nonsensical. > As a filmmaker, I like to draw the line between analogue vs digital at > the binary code. And binary code is only "numbers" if you choose to > call it that. Any sufficiently reasonable and useful definition of "numbers" would include any binary code. This isn't simply a matter of nomenclature; the concept of countable numbers covers binary encoding. > (Maybe I'm missing some basic computer tech - > are there non-binary computers?) There are non-binary digital computers, and there are non-digital (analog) computers. There are computers of metal and computers of flesh and bone and computers of the mind. > "Digital" is the smooth information curve converted to binary code. That's "digitization". There are entities which are discrete ab initio, hence digital but never digitized. -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
