Lumpy Information

Abstract

From Introduction: "In the context of this editorial, the articles we publish occupy a certain scale range in a hierarchy of information. Part of this hierarchy is the computer you are now using to read this editorial. It too operates across a hierarchy of scales. At very small scales, invisible electrons are cycling; for example, my computers clock cycles about 3 billion times per second. Larger but still tiny circuits called microprocessors shape the electrical signals. These processors aggregate bits to bytes to strings, all of which are lumpy, through complex instructions from programs to form the characters on the screen. These characters in turn aggregate to form the articles we publish. Over even longer time scales, these articles form a corpus of understanding. The journal is now a dozen years old, with hundreds of articles in the archives."