Redundancy of English language is a Goldilocks zone for C...

In Shannon’s terms, the feature of messages that makes codecracking possible is redundancy. A historian of cryptography, David Kahn, explained it like this: “Roughly, redundancy means that more symbols are transmitted in a message than are actually needed to bear the information.” Information resolves our uncertainty; redundancy is every part of a message that tells us nothing new. Whenever we can guess what comes next, we’re in the presence of redundancy. Letters can be redundant: be...

 Themes in "Oh! You Pretty Things"

The resonance of “Oh! You Pretty Things” comes from how it uses these Nietzschean SF trappings as a metaphor for how a generation regards its successor with longing, fear and resentment (never more so than with the so-called Greatest Generation and their children the Boomers), or, even closer to home, how a parent can regard his or her children. Once you become a parent, you lose precedence in your own life—your own needs and desires are shunted aside, and you spend years as servant and...