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Digression: Book Bandwidth The codex, a.k.a., the book, which we love dearly, has carried its information quite well over the centuries. A book carries, presents and in a sense "transmits" information. It is generally portable, allows sequential and random access, and it may even be possible to speak of the book in terms of non-book information storage devices of quite recent vintage. However, before we cast aside the book let us remember that before the book was the scroll and before the scroll was any odd bit one could scribble on. It was precisely the increase in bandwith over scraps of bark that endeared the book to the humanists. Electronic information storage devices can transmit information in measurable units - the term for that is bandwidth. The term originates from the early study of radio waves, but has taken on all sorts of metaphoric uses in today's information age. Essentially is is a measure of the rate of flow of information. In order for a computer to show a movie transmitted over the network, a certain width of the "transmission band" is required or the movie will appear jerky or not at all. It is instructive to apply the concept of bandwidth metaphorically to a person reading a book. Following the metaphor - information is stored in a book, when the book is opened and the eye scans a page, an information channel is opened and something moves from the book to another information storage device, the memory of the person scanning the pages visually. In the electronic arena, bandwidth is measured in thousands of characters moving from source to target in parts of a second. Since a biological organism has little awareness of parts of a second, we must conclude that the bandwidth of a reading process is fairly slow. The information bandwidth which a book can transmit - true to the electronic analogy - depends on the efficiency of the decoding of the biological organism's visual inspection routines as well as the assimilation and secure storage of the information in its new home, a carbon based neural network of ambiguous specifications. While the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) of the organism is quite good and superior to anything we can do with digital processing of light - the organism lacks a reliable way of assuring that information received is either accurate or securely in place in its target location. The organism seems to lack a consistent labeling and categorizing that is necessary to decode the information efficiently. There is no convenient check-sum that can be run on received information to assure accuracy. Through the ages, methods have been developed to give codex based information more reliable linear access and more flexible (and reliable) non-linear access. These methods apply to both sides of the data transmission. Additional markings are put into the codex to speed up the decoding of the reader. For example, in the 19th century, printers developed paragraph summaries in the margins. Today, magazines and newpapers routinely use bold subheadings to make the decoding easier. On the receiving end, the organism may use several strategies to aid decoding:
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