84 kilo bytes of entropy

I obviously was conscious of the fact that I hadn't written anything for a while. But I was shocked to realize that the last one was posted more than 2 years back. I must admit, it was not due to lack of trying. No, it wasn't a blogger's block.

One of the reasons, as I vaguely remember was my idea to pause for a while, take time to read, absorb ideas and process them before I wrote anything. A bigger one though was probably my confusion about the whole purpose of writing. Having given the blog a grandiose title of Making Sense Of It All and having found that it was easier said than done, the very format of a single page with multiple articles, each of which was expected to do its bit for standing up to the challenge of the title was a bit intimidating.

So, I decided to reformat the blog to make allowance for the fact that it is only very rarely that I'm making sense of anything. Most of the time, it is a reflection of jumbled competing ideas in my head trying to grasp this intricate world - sometimes oversimplifying it and sometimes just missing the point.

Like a good engineer, I wanted to backup the blog before I messed with the design template. My first shock was to see that I only had 22 posts in all. A bigger one was when I copied all the pages and zipped them up. The zip file was only 84 kilo bytes long. And I'd guess that most of it was just the html markup.

Less than 84 kilo bytes of entropy? That doesn't sound like a lot. But how does one make sense of this number? I just did some calculations - that's less than 4 bits of information for every hour that I've lived. Is that a fair comparison though? If you zipped up all of JK Rowling's works, or Shakespeare's works or Feynman's papers, how big is it going to be? How many bytes would it take to write down the theory of everything?

How many bytes of entropy would it take... to make sense of it all?