Bits: the atomic form of information
Words: the molecular form of information
Money: the only truly fungible form of information
Thoughts?
Money provides information, but it's not a form of information.
If you have two bits of information, adding a third allows you to
double what you can communicate.
If you have two bits of money, adding a third only allows you to buy
half again as much (9d?)
Utility-wise, it's the first bit of money but the last bit of
information which are most significant*.
Money provides information in the same way sequence numbers provide
flow control, only instead of estimating the bandwidth delay product
it estimates the product of margin and turnover period.
-Dave
* and speaking of significant digits:
Of course pairwise comparisons produce a sorting; in fact, it's
fairly
difficult to sort in any other way.
Radix sort.
radix sort requires that the individuals not only be directly
comparable, but can also be given a valuation in a totally-ordered
positional system (with known radix, etc.) 10 always compares better
than 9, even though 9 compares better than either 1 or 0; sorting
livestock easily leads to situations which are not so linear, as all
individuals are generally within the same order-of-magnitude, and the
same features can be qualities or faults depending upon intended use.
granted, there are exceptions; swiss dairy farmers were buying semen
from american swiss cattle for a while, because (at least before the
introduction of RFID in swiss dairies) swiss bulls had been evaluated
on a traditional ensemble of physical characteristics, while the
american bulls had a single (radix-10!) number that was, in fact,
more economically salient: average daily milk production of his
daughters.
however, for the majority of situations where the bottom line is not
so clear, it's pretty easy to argue that by the time one has weighed
together all the qualities and faults of an individual to get a
number suitable for use with a radix sort, all the hard work has
actually been done, and in most cases done by means of comparisons.
