4 ms·

Can I rant about the 5D? "It's been dubbed five-dimensional (5D) digital data because, in addition to the position of the data, the size and orientation are ex

Can I rant about the 5D? "It's been dubbed five-dimensional (5D) digital data because, in addition to the position of the data, the size and orientation are extremely important too" Orientation is inherently important anyway. Have you ever tried reading a book upside down, and what does size bring? Other than lowering density. And obviously position is important, it's the difference between data and randomness.

simonh 7y ago
Books only have one orientation, so they're not actually making use of that dimension to encode data. The rest of your points... oh my. None of the dimensions count at all, really? So rant away, but it's nice if the sound and fury at least signifies _something_.
- benj111 7y ago
  No 2 dimensions are important at least :) Regarding orientation, are you saying they printed half the book over the first half, but at right angles over the top? Ie you see different data from different orientations? Ps I've seen old (18th century?) letters where they wrote at 0, 90 and 45 degrees to get more on one page. Postage was charged by the page so it made sense. Newspaper also used to be taxed by the page (in the UK at least) so you had origami like folding of one sheet of paper into a newspaper, not aware of them 'double printing' in this way though. I assume that's why 'broadsheets' were so massive up until relatively recently.
  - simonh 7y ago
    I think they encode the data as asymmetric marks in the material, with different orientations of the marks corresponding to different values. Imagine you could print a page containing just a grid of 100x100 numbers. If you can orient those numbers so the top of each digit could be facing up, down, left or right and use those 40 different glyphs to encode in base 40 instead of base 10, now you can fit 4x as much data into the same two dimensional area.
technothrasher 7y ago
Yes, I've tried reading a book upside down. Reading speed decreased a bit but the information is the same regardless of orientation.
- benj111 7y ago
  If orientation truly didn't matter, surely you could read the book whilst it was rapidly changing orientation?
jimktrains2 7y ago
Absolute position isn't always important, and position may not always take full advantage of the available space. Take a magnetic tape (or a radio transmission), it's essentially a 1-d data steam (magnetic intensity), not a 2-d matrix. Moreover, depending on the encoding, just taking a specific slice may not let you decode that specific bit of data, you need to know some number of previous states. Now, that said, the stream itself is defined by a 3-dimensional dataset: amplitude, phase, and frequency. Every modulation technique is some way of twiddling those 3 dimensions.

simonh 7y ago

Books only have one orientation, so they're not actually making use of that dimension to encode data. The rest of your points... oh my. None of the dimensions count at all, really? So rant away, but it's nice if the sound and fury at least signifies _something_.

benj111 7y ago
No 2 dimensions are important at least :) Regarding orientation, are you saying they printed half the book over the first half, but at right angles over the top? Ie you see different data from different orientations? Ps I've seen old (18th century?) letters where they wrote at 0, 90 and 45 degrees to get more on one page. Postage was charged by the page so it made sense. Newspaper also used to be taxed by the page (in the UK at least) so you had origami like folding of one sheet of paper into a newspaper, not aware of them 'double printing' in this way though. I assume that's why 'broadsheets' were so massive up until relatively recently.
- simonh 7y ago
  I think they encode the data as asymmetric marks in the material, with different orientations of the marks corresponding to different values. Imagine you could print a page containing just a grid of 100x100 numbers. If you can orient those numbers so the top of each digit could be facing up, down, left or right and use those 40 different glyphs to encode in base 40 instead of base 10, now you can fit 4x as much data into the same two dimensional area.

technothrasher 7y ago

Yes, I've tried reading a book upside down. Reading speed decreased a bit but the information is the same regardless of orientation.

benj111 7y ago
If orientation truly didn't matter, surely you could read the book whilst it was rapidly changing orientation?

jimktrains2 7y ago

Absolute position isn't always important, and position may not always take full advantage of the available space. Take a magnetic tape (or a radio transmission), it's essentially a 1-d data steam (magnetic intensity), not a 2-d matrix. Moreover, depending on the encoding, just taking a specific slice may not let you decode that specific bit of data, you need to know some number of previous states. Now, that said, the stream itself is defined by a 3-dimensional dataset: amplitude, phase, and frequency. Every modulation technique is some way of twiddling those 3 dimensions.