March 20, 2004

A picture is worth...

The pensive primate on the right was sitting at a roadside stand in south India when I shot this picture last August 16. The original is a 1704x2272 jpeg which has been occupying 1,187,028 bytes on my laptop's disk since I uploaded it in Bangalore shortly after taking it. A few minutes ago, I checked the Language Log backups, as I do occasionally. The compressed archive of all the text we've posted since I took that picture (and there were only 8 posts before that) occupies 987,890 bytes.

See the archives for September, October, November, December, January, February and March for a more qualitative experience of the text whose information content is a bit less than that of the digital photograph of this monkey. Well, 1,593,104 bits less, as long as we're counting.

I was going to say more, but I think I'll leave it at that.

Posted by Mark Liberman at March 20, 2004 03:35 PM