> In your example *uestion, you
>realize q is appropriate because you have English words in mind.
The difference between the word "information" which has the connotation
"meaning" and "information" defined by information theory can be illustrated
by the following. What meaning is there in the sequence:
"Yingwei ni zhi dao yingwen zi shou yi ni li jie '*uestion' xu yao q "?
Doesn't convey much meaning to you but that is a loose translation of what
Brian said written in the pin yin form of Chinese.
The meaning is the same (loosely, I am not a great chinese translator) but the
information content may not be the same. There are 93 characters in the
English version of this sentence and 68 in the Chinese version. A true
measure of information requires a lot of work but I bet that there is more
information in the English version even though the meanings are approximately
the same. The longer the sequence of characters usually the less compressible
it is and thus the more information it has.
glenn
Foundation,Fall and Flood
http://members.gnn.com/GRMorton/dmd.htm