4 ms·
>..."optical telegraph", which is a semaphore system which used a system of messages which AFAIK were not alphabetic text. The pulses of light in an optical fi
by upofadown 6y ago
>..."optical telegraph", which is a semaphore system which used a system of messages which AFAIK were not alphabetic text.
The pulses of light in an optical fiber are not alphabetic text either, but we are not talking about baseband here.
- jcims 6y agoI wouldn’t have thought of this without your comment but i don’t know if it’s related. Media, including text, is sort of a cognitive baseband.
- cycomanic 6y agoYes but that's unrelated. We can clearly say that digital (binary) representation of information has won for encoding and the information content is well understood since Shannon. However this is not really connected to the current discussion, because binary is clearly is not meant for direct human "consumption". I was restricting myself to discuss abstractions that are directly used by humans. The messages send in the optical telegraph are conveying things more complex than letters which I would say is what we associate with text. Now you might say that those messages are text, but then we might as well say language is the most flexible and efficient way of communicating, and that's probably correct, but also completely meaningless in this context. That's the issue with this posts, it's either so general that is essentially meaningless, or so specific that it's clearly wrong in general.