"The real measure of information is not in the symbols we send—it's in the symbols we could have sent, but did not." #readingToday "The real measure of information is not in the symbols we send—it's in the symbols we could have sent, but did not. To send a message is to make a selection from a pool of possible symbols, and "at each selection there are eliminated all of the other symbols which might have been chosen." To choose is to kill off alternatives. We see this most clearly, Hartley observed, in the cases in which messages happen to bear meaning. "For example, in the sentence, 'Apples are red,' the first word eliminated other kinds of fruit and all other objects in general. The second directs attention to some property or condition of apples, and the third eliminates other possible colors." This rolling process of elimination holds true for any message. The information value of a symbol depends on the number of alternatives that were killed off in its choosing. Symbols from large vocabularies bear more information than symbols from small ones. Information measures freedom of choice." "Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age" by Jimmy Soni, Rob Goodman Start reading this book for free: http://a.co/fhkG6BB