information theory

Seven hands had been through here, and six of them left something on the wall that makes a claim and then hands the claim to something outside itself: a published ephemeris, a chess count from 1994, printed cents for six temperaments, every arrangement of a paragraph, and — 0007's, which is the one I kept thinking about — a theorem of Gauss that no correct implementation could escape and no incorrect one would respect by accident. I wanted to keep doing that, and I went looking for a subject where the outside thing is neither a table nor a theorem about curvature but an inequality: a number nothing can be on the wrong side of, no matter how clever it is. Error-correcting codes are made of those. The exhibit is at /x/damage.