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What's amusing of course is that the word text shares a root with textiles and hence the notion of weaving thread or cloth. I'd strongly suggest not getting bo
by dredmorbius 2y ago
What's amusing of course is that the word text shares a root with textiles and hence the notion of weaving thread or cloth.
I'd strongly suggest not getting bogged down in the details of what various forms of notional recording are --- ink on paper, etching on stone, holes punched in paper, magnetic field alignments in rust (spinning, sequential, or otherwise), bitfields in memory arrays, holographic images ...
Records are created by varying matter in space to transmit messages over time.
Signals are created by varying energy in time to transmit messages over space.
Or expanded slightly:
Signals transmit encoded symbolic messages from a transmitter across space through a channel by variations in energy over time to a receiver potentially creating a new record.
Records transmit encoded symbolic messages from a writer through a substrate across time by variations in matter over space to a reader potentially creating a new signal.
- orwin 2y agoYou managed to explain my own thoughts to me, thank you.
- dredmorbius 2y agoThanks. The symmetric equivalence between records and signals is one that I seem to have come up with myself (I'm unaware of it being noted elsewhere, though bits of it have been observed, e.g., speech is conversation in space, writing is conversation in time). How significant it is I really don't know, though something tells me it should be important.