Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/10/13
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]>> Going to our friend the dictionary: > >If you need to know how to diagnose, say, heart disease, do you consult the >dictionary for that as well? We are looking for the meanings of words: the dictionary is a sensible place to look as it is a repository of the meanings of words. I might use a dictionary to determine what "heart disease" means (or what a more specific word for it, in the jargon of medicine, might be) before going to a medical text to look up how to determine whether a patient has it. Even heart surgeons use reference texts to assist in the diagnosis of illness. >> The advantage of encoding information as numerical >> quantities is that you can apply all the rules of numerical >> manipulation to the information. > >You can do exactly the same thing with letters. Only when the letters are represented by numeric values. Given the alphabet, Anthony, what is 'A' multiplied by 'H'? What is the sum of 'G' and 'M'? Answer that without giving a numeric translation. Digitally encoded information allows mathematical transformations on the digits and abides by the rules of mathematical proof. If you say that the alphabetic values 'A' multiplied by 'H' is equal to 'Z' (or anything else) and that none of them are numeric, I'll ask you to prove it. Godfrey