It seems we’re talking about different things. I am saying that there can be data less than one bit and you’re saying (if I understand you correctly) that any data requires an integer number of bits to store/encode.

Case in point, Stark could have taken data requiring large storage space but containing little information.

Btw, I am not really an expert (or even formally trained) in Information Theory, just interested in it.

Also, technically, petabytes of data IS “picobytes” of data, only a very large number of picobytes.

“Using this logic, knowing whether a card is a spade and knowing if it is the jack of spades have the same information value.”

No, that only sort of follows if you have two registers to populate, one that always represents “spadeness” and one that always represents “Jack of Spadeness” to assign 0 or 1 values, but then you’d be using two different encoding schemes.

But you missed the point, both of thoses peices of data require a minimum of one bit of data to encode, even if you use a special, unique coding scheme for each.

Please provide an example of how you would encode any piece of data in less than one bit.

I think you’re equating information theory with data storage/coding, and while they closely related, they’re not the same thing.

Information theory might say that if I send you 10MB of data, and you already had 9MB of it, that I only transmited 1MB of inforamtion to you, but I did transmit 10MB (gross) of data to you, and you didn’t know that you only got 1MB (net) of new information until you compared what you recieved to what you already had.

“…since the event either happened or it didn’t happen, knowing whether it happened or not represents one (whole) discrete bit of data, with a binary value equal to either 0 or 1 (0= it didn’t happen, 1= it did), independent of the weight or utility of that information…”

Using this logic, knowing whether a card is a spade and knowing if it is the jack of spades have the same information value.

I like to think of it this way. If you’re playing 20 questions, the best questions (questions that have answers with most information value) are those which about halve the possibilities.

When evaluating the papillary response in a patient, have them

You should have typed pupillary cmon Doc, haha…Great site.

As for #2. Perhaps Osborne knows the info he’s giving is B.S, and so he’s trying to bluff them. And it is the Green Goblin after all so rather than make the request plausible, he’s trying to confuse them with total technobabble.

“A byte (pronounced /ˈbaɪt/) is a unit of information storage representing the smallest addressable element for a given computer architecture. It often designates a sequence of bits (binary digits) whose length is determined by the architecture. However, the use of a byte to mean eight bits has become ubiquitous.”

-So originally a byte was the basic unit of data of a given computer architecture, but because the most common early computers were 8 bit computers with 8 bit bytes, common usage refined the byte as 8 bits. All hail the Apple II and its 8 bit MosTek R6502 CPU!