By the Hearing of Faith

Let’s recap:

1. People love Buzzfeed-style pablum (e.g., “Take this quiz to find out what a good-looking GENIUS you are!”), which is why this blog has maybe five readers, tops.
2. That’s four more readers than I ever expected.
3. Why bother?

This is a Dad blog, so what I’ve written here is mainly for the benefit of my kids. They can’t read yet, but at some point when they are reading, they’ll likely be pressured to accept the same fraudulent pseudo-scientific orthodoxy that was imposed on me to varying degrees through 20+ years of education. I can’t necessarily assume that I will be around at that point (even though I’m in reasonably good health), and so I hope these words will endure and give the kids something with which to answer the rhetorical questions that smug, self-assured teachers and professors use to bully smart and inquisitive students (and even fellow academics) into resigned conformity. They’re the same questions a visiting family member asked me some three years ago in the NICU as I held my infant son, who was born five weeks premature. Sleep-deprived and unprepared for a petty-minded war of rhetorical points, I didn’t rise to the occasion. That particular person seems incapable of venturing much beyond his own self-regard anyways, so I really didn’t miss an opportunity (other than to maybe feel what it’s like to try explaining water to a fish).

I can already hear people asking me, “Don’t you want your kids to know about evolutionary biology?” I do, and I’ll encourage them to read “On the Origin of Species” from cover to cover—although I expect they’ll soon realize that as an explanation for the origin of life, it’s about as scientifically credible as phrenology or flat-Earth cosmology. But I’m also going to encourage them to read the works of Stephen Meyer, John Lennox, and Alvin Plantinga (among many others). They’ll be educated, not indoctrinated, because nothing will be concealed from them. They’ll be taught how to think instead of told what to think, and they’ll be able to stand on their own two feet intellectually. That is one of my sacred ambitions for them as a Dad.

No matter what they read, they can hardly do better than this:

… [S]ince the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Scholars believe these words were likely written in Corinth in the Winter of 57-58 AD by the Apostle Paul, a product of both the rigorously logical Hellenistic and philosophical Hebrew worlds. The irony of this statement—about God’s “invisible” qualities being “clearly seen”—is intentional. While the original text is Greek, Paul employs Hebrew idiom by which the deliberate use of irony, paradoxes, and seeming contradictions (and sometimes puns) draws the reader into a deeper meditation on the text and consequently reveals more layers of meaning than one reading could provide.

And the deeper meaning here is a frank repudiation of reductive materialism and postmodernism: We can infer truth higher than the laws of chemistry and physics, and that higher truth is independent of our refusal to make the observations and inferences that necessarily lead to it. Way back when The Onion was still funny, there was a column titled “This Lump Under My Arm Is Probably Nothing” that brilliantly (if darkly) portrayed an author whose symptoms were screaming that he do exactly what he evidently most feared (go see a doctor). This is the same kind of nagging, ineluctable cognitive dissonance I struggled with as an agnostic. Three-billion-character-long data structures don’t just pop into existence by accident. Such things are engineered. And if the implications of that are extremely unsettling to you, just try to imagine how Michelangelo might have felt if people had said of his David statue, “Look what we found in a Tuscan marble quarry!” Some bluntness is warranted: As a finite mortal being, maybe it’s not so smart to insult your Engineer, Who necessarily transcends life itself (and also time, space, and energy), by asserting that you resulted from an accident. Refusing to acknowledge the truth could prove dangerous.

Behold what ignoring a piece of rock for 500 million years can do! Now for some pants ….

I said before that my son is fascinated with machines, and sometimes he makes his own machines (usually out of Mega Bloks, LEGOs, and old raisin boxes). It’s pretty basic stuff, but he is exceedingly proud of his work and invests lots of time trying to preserve prototypes and improve upon them. Any IT worker who’s ever written some code that worked well knows this feeling. We tend to love what we create. This is important because if we are the result of a design, our Designer probably loves us A LOT.

That’s hard for us to wrap our brains around because we tend to judge ourselves by human standards, by what we have or haven’t accomplished or by how others value (or devalue) us. It’s especially hard to understand for people who’ve experienced a lot of rejection in life, or for people who have a lot of shame and regrets from the past.

Or for people who’ve been literally treated like garbage. That’s what happened to Marcus Wallace. His biological mother didn’t want to have a baby back in 1985, so after he was born in her dorm room, she put him in a trash bag and threw him in a dumpster behind a local gas station. She left him there to die, but Michael Randelman, a 25-year-old painting contractor found the infant and rescued him. Thirty-one years later, Marcus tracked down Randelman and two police officers from the local police department in New Jersey who were also involved.

‘”I love you, Marcus,” Randelman told him. “You are special, and you were meant to be here. Don’t let that incident tell you otherwise.”‘

Those are some of the best and truest words ever uttered because they express how God views you, whoever you are, whatever you’ve experienced in life, whatever you’ve done or failed to do. Your life has meaning and purpose and value, and you were meant to be here, at this moment in time, because you are special, and you are loved by the only One whose love actually imparts eternal value.

Even if you don’t have silky pony hair.

(And yes, kids, I know Leibniz was wearing a wig.)

Let’s recap:

1. Neither David Berlinski nor Thomas Nagel have great pony hair; Michio Kaku briefly had something going on but then (disappointingly) dialed it back.
2. The chance of life resulting from an accidental collision of amino acids in some primordial soup is demonstrably zero (or something so close to zero that only MATLAB software developers care about the difference).
3. If you were raised in the North American or European public education systems, you might be reflexively warming up your verbal brickbats to thump me, probably because teachers left you unarmed with any substantial defense for the dogmas you were force fed. I’m going to address that, which is why you should keep reading.

Audie is obsessed with machines, especially engines, which is why he loves TV programs and expensive merchandise featuring a fictional blue steam engine whose name I will not mention (although it rhymes with “Thomas the Tank Engine”). The show/books/movies feature and contrast many different kinds of engines: electric vs. combustion, internal combustion vs. external combustion, gasoline vs. diesel, etc. My son is only three years old, but he already knows about spark plugs, pistons, and collision insurance fuel injectors. And he asks great questions that require a thoughtful answer. Recently, he wanted to know what would happen if you put gasoline into a diesel engine (or the opposite, putting diesel into a gasoline engine). So we experimented with Mommy’s car researched it on the Internet, and here’s what we found:

The nozzle for a diesel fuel pump is much larger than the typical aperture to a gasoline-vehicle fuel tank, so almost nobody accidentally fills a gasoline tank with diesel at the pump. This usually only happens when someone fills a gas can with diesel and then pours the diesel fuel into a gasoline tank somewhere else (like at a boat yard). Diesel fuel ignites by pressure alone (diesel engines don’t need or use spark plugs), but a gasoline engine’s pistons don’t provide optimum pressure for diesel fuel’s relatively higher flash point. The vehicle will continue to run mostly on residual gasoline intermixed with the diesel, but its performance will gradually degrade, the engine will eventually go out of sync, and you’ll wind up with damaged pistons and cylinder heads. The danger of putting gasoline into a diesel engine is more immediate: gasoline’s relatively lower flash point will cause the engine to misfire, likely resulting in serious engine damage. Gasoline is also less oily than diesel and will interfere with the fuel pump and fuel line.

Gas in your diesel tank? Better have it towed to a professional mechanic.

The big lesson here for my son is that it’s not the vehicle owner who gets to decide what fuel a vehicle’s engine will use; it’s the designer of the engine who makes that decision. It’s just as a software company gets to decide, as early as the design phase of the development cycle, what constitutes proper use of its software and what use will ultimately be consistent with the product-support contract. The fact that something has been designed strongly implies a designer, and that designer’s purpose and intentions constitute the basis by which we can judge proper use and misuse. Though you may own a motor vehicle or a software product, you are still in a very concrete legal way accountable to the designer of that product. You may be free to put diesel into your Honda’s gas tank, but you can’t reasonably expect to sue Honda Motors when your engine eventually dies. The law is essentially a moral instrument insofar as it declares what is right and what is wrong, and so the concept of design is therefore inseparable from the concept of morality.

And that, I believe, is why people totally FLIP. OUT. when you dare question the pronouncements of a 19th-century naturalist who died over 70 years before the discovery of DNA. If life is not the result of an accident, it is the result of a design and is therefore accountable to its Designer. This means that the postmodern idea that all truth is confined to a specific social and historical context (i.e., an individual’s own subjective and personalized moral code) is false—apart from its inherent philosophical contradictions. If we make up our own rules, or even claim that there are no rules, we still remain accountable to the Designer regardless of how congruent our “rules” are with that design.

If you’re like me, it’s disquieting to recollect how much of what you learned in school was wrong—for example, some of my secondary school science texts actually had renderings of Ernst Haeckel’s embryo drawings and couldn’t explain why airplanes can fly upside down—and so I understand wanting to believe you’ve been taught the truth, even if it consequently implies that life has no objective meaning or purpose or value, that your best and worst behaviors can never be oriented to any absolute moral compass, that there can never be any real justice for atrocities like the Holocaust, or that you have no business using meaningless terms like “good” and “evil” in any case. That’s why after terrorist attacks, some people like to gather around a piano and sing John Lennon’s “Imagine” while the bodies are still warm. They shut out reality, and imagine a world that never has been and never can be. I get that, but it’s all just a wish being father to the thought. As a former coworker of mine put it in his crass-but-concise Brooklyn patois, “Wish in one hand, s**t in the other, and see which hand fills up first.”

The late philosopher Jerry Fodor (whom you can safely count among the agnostic critics of neo-Darwinism) assessed that these ideas (i.e., “… nature is without conscious design, species evolve over time, the emergence of Homo sapiens was without meaning or telos …”) constituted a loyalty oath of modernity, and one can see how apt Fodor’s assessment was in how neatly these beliefs remove any moral obstacle to following the prevailing trajectories of modernity: If you believe the lie that you’re accountable to no one but yourself, it’s a simple matter to abandon your family, cheat on your spouse, smoke weed and play video games all day/night, or even take your own life. It’s also a simple matter to discard rational thought because Fodor’s loyalty oath of modernity completely undercuts the philosophical basis for reason itself … which might explain why doctrinaire evolutionary biologists rarely bother to criticize postmodern lunacy and even try to reconcile with it at times.

Let’s be honest: If you hold to the loyalty oath of modernity, you’re not motivated by science but rather by a philosophy … and not a very good one.

Let’s recap:

1. Ever since 1991, I can’t watch a Jodie Foster movie without expecting Anthony Hopkins to bust in and say “Hello, Clarice ….”
2. Information is considered to be the product of intelligence.
3. Matthew McConaughey could have had some serious pony hair, but he was never serious enough to really make it *pop* like Leibniz.

An important thing to realize about the movie “Contact” (1997) is that the SETI team defines a threshold: subsequent data events that meet or exceed the level of specified complexity in that first radio transmission are automatically deemed to be information, and that’s what happens in the film. The team refocuses its radio telescopes and picks up new messages of increasing specified complexity, culminating in a message containing instructions for how to build and operate a space-time transportation device that the team lead (played by Clarice Starling Jodie Foster) uses to visit the author of the messages. I know, it seems implausible and goofy far-fetched, but it’s science fiction. It’s also a captivating illustration of how Information Science could be used in an unconventional and amazing way.

Space-time transportation device; moves forward in time 3.6k seconds-per-hour. $1k OBO. Contact silkyponybff@hotmail.com ….

It also inspires a question that Sagan probably didn’t consider when he wrote his book:

What if the culminating message of the film didn’t contain instructions about a space-time transportation device but instead contained instructions for how to build and maintain a complex, multi-cellular organism?

Or to put it another way: Why should scientists consider a 1,186-character binary string expressing prime numbers to be an artifact of intelligence … but dismiss DNA as the product of a random, unguided (essentially accidental) process?

DNA is arguably the most complex data structure known to humanity: Human genetic material, for example, consists of some 3 billion adenine-to-thymine (AT/TA) and guanine-to-cytosine (GC/CG) base pairs, forming a binary quaternary string complex enough that the odds of its occurring at random are about (1/4)^3,000,000,000. That number is so small that when I enter 4^-3000000000 into my laptop calculator app, it simply replies “invalid input” like I’m trying to divide by zero or something. Maybe someone who has MATLAB can send me an actual value.

Even if we hadn’t known about prime numbers for millennia, we could still investigate what the numbers 83, 89, and 97 have in common and discern a pattern (they’re only divisible by 1 and themselves), and we’ve already determined what genes in the chromosomes of DNA have in common (they all provide instructions for making proteins needed for life). DNA is therefore both highly complex and specified; it is therefore, by the standards of Information Science, to be regarded as information; and it is therefore an artifact of intelligence. There is simply no reasonable alternative explanation because if you think that the prime-numbers message would definitely be an artifact of intelligence (as Carl Sagan evidently did), congratulations: You also necessarily believe that DNA came from an intelligent mind.

That’s the bed Sagan made for himself, and now he’s snoozing in it.

I considered naming this post series “Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False,” but then I realized that the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel beat me to the punch by six years with his 2012 book title. I also thought I might title it “The Deniable Darwin,” but I realized the agnostic philosopher David Berlinski beat me by 22 years with his 1996 essay of the same name. If you haven’t heard any good rebuttals to the dogma of Charles Darwin’s explanation for the origin of life, you can read a quite few … including some authored by actual professing atheists and agnostics. My point here is that you can’t simply dismiss criticism of scientific materialism/neo-Darwinism as some pathological theistic impulse; you’re obligated to address the substance of these arguments. By his own admission, Berlinski rejoices to poke his thumb in the eye of smug orthodoxies, especially those that wobble on an ever more shaky foundation, and though the deficiencies of Darwinism leave no shortage of opportunities for Berlinski to indulge his amusingly spiteful pastime, his criticisms cannot simply go unanswered. Otherwise, he wins by default. You can’t win if you don’t bother to play.

And it’s also evidently possible to simultaneously maintain agnosticism/atheism and disbelief in the neo-Darwinian paradigm—in case you’re super concerned about that—although in my experience as a former agnostic, it’s exceedingly difficult to endure that kind of cognitive dissonance for very long. I’ve struggled with insomnia for most of my life, and I know how difficult it can be to sleep with a storm like that raging in your mind.

Let’s recap:

1. Heavy drinking and science don’t go well together.
2. Information differs from random data in that information displays specified complexity.
3. It’s okay to talk about aliens now and then (while you’re waiting for the orderly to stop by with your meds).

Specified complexity is the formal mathematical characteristic of information, but there’s another very important informal characteristic: Information is considered to be an artifact of intelligence. Nowhere in our entropy-beleaguered world can we show where complexity and specification have spontaneously arisen unassisted from the chaos of a random non-intelligent source (although that claim has at times been made—not convincingly, I would argue). Just as the message “Gottfried Leibniz had silky pony hair” in your soup would have you looking over your shoulder for the rest of the day, so we automatically assume an intelligence whenever we encounter information. Police detectives make this assumption when they attempt to match criminal profiles to patterns of evidence. Insurance companies assume this when they investigate possible insurance fraud. If you start winning gobs of cash at a Las Vegas blackjack table, the casino owners aren’t going to assume simple random luck—no, they’re going to assume you have some kind of inside information and that you’re using it intelligently … to cheat.

This is why, for the better part of 50 years, scientists have been transmitting information into space in the hopes of initiating a conversation with an extraterrestrial intelligence; and they’ve also been listening for any attempts to initiate communication with us. We can’t physically travel across the Universe to search for intelligent life, so information is the next best thing.

A very large array (VLA) of radio telescopes. Note: You can’t do the old “black ring around the eye” prank with this kind of telescope.

Carl Sagan wrote a book about this, and in 1997 that book was made into a movie starring Jodi Foster and Matthew McConaughey. It’s a fictional account of a real (although somewhat fringe) branch of scientific research called the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). In the story, a team of scientists is listening on an array of giant radio telescopes for radio emissions from space, and they detect something that could potentially qualify as information. It’s a series of pulses interspersed with pauses. If you substitute 1s for pulses and 0s for pauses, you have yourself a binary string, and this is what the team hears:

1101110111110111111101111111111101111111111111011111111111111111011111111111111111110111111111111111
1111111101111111111111111111111111111101111111111111111111111111111111011111111111111111111111111111
1111111101111111111111111111111111111111111111111101111111111111111111111111111111111111111111011111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111110111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111110111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111101111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111110111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111101111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111011111111111111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111101111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111110111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111110111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111101111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111110111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

Go ahead and memorize that because there will be a quiz later. The string is 1,186 characters long, and because there are only two possible symbols (it’s binary), the odds of its occurring by random chance are (1/2)^1186, or:

0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000095153582181867572154916044783444

If we strictly observe Probability Theory, we’re not allowed to say the chance of an event is absolutely zero, but this is getting pretty darn close. It’s safe to say that this binary string is very complex. But is it specified? Maybe you see the pattern: 2 pulses, pause, 3 pulses, pause, 5 pulses, pause, 7 pulses, pause … or 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97, and 101. Those are the first 26 prime numbers in counting sequence.

The research team realizes this and starts yelling, “HOW DO IT KNOW?!?” rejoices because funds are running low, and it’s expensive to maintain and operate an array of radio telescopes. Now that they can scientifically demonstrate specified complexity in the radio transmission they just recorded, they can get more grant money … and resume their busy schedule of sitting around eating corn chips while staring at the ceiling.

Cha-CHING!

Let’s recap:

1. It’s really hard to break into someone’s garage by randomly entering numbers on the keypad and also get quality sleep.
2. Information tends to be more complex than random data, but random data can sometimes be complex, too.
3. Leibniz may have invented differential calculus before Newton, but he was bad at keeping notes and often suffered from bed-head.
4. Information also differs from random data because information is specified.

(Also, Newton did not have coruscating locks of breathtaking pony hair and so probably burned with jealousy every time he even thought about Leibniz.)

Leibniz circa 1676: An apotheosis of pony hair ….

Information is specified when it conforms to a pattern that exists independent of the data event. I realize that sounds really boring abstract, but it’s a super-important concept in science because “finding” patterns in data that aren’t independent of the data event is a severe form of scientific malpractice called fabrication, which nullifies your experiment and its conclusions (and your credibility, unless your “research” is deemed fashionable and politically correct by eminent scientists like Leonardo DiCaprio).

Here’s another illustration: Imagine you’re a shiftless drunk scientist who wants to determine how badly drinking beer will impair your ability to play darts. So you set up an experiment with two groups of people. Both groups will throw darts at a makeshift target that you’ve drawn on the wall with billiards chalk (someone stole your dart board), but only one group will drink beer first. Lots and lots of tasty beer. So the dart throwing is the data event, where the darts land is the data set, and the target on the wall is the pattern. But you’re far from an impartial scientist here because someone made a sarcastic comment earlier implying that you could play much better if you drank in moderation (fat chance), so you rig the experiment: You wait for the joyless sober group to finish throwing their darts, and then you erase the targets. After the beer drinkers throw their darts, you redraw the targets around where their darts have landed (except for the darts that landed in a potted fern above the bar and one that went into the street) and give almost every one an unjustified bull’s eye. Your pattern is therefore not independent of the data event, you’ve fabricated data, and you can discern no real information from the experiment.

Way to go, pal. You just made science cry. Are you happy?

If you’ve managed to read this far, there’s probably a voice in your head saying things like, “This guy is all over the map. Elves, pony hair, garage-door access codes, talking soup. He’s totally wackadoo. Watch, next he’ll be writing about aliens.” Well, you should never totally stifle that voice in your head, because sometimes it could be on to something.

And now a word about ALIENS ….

Let’s recap:

1. Elves watch what we do so they can better sell us things online.
2. Probability and complexity are closely related concepts.
3. Sometimes it seems like our food is trying to talk to us.
4. Information differs from random data in part because it’s more complex than random data.

(Also, Leibniz was a masculine manly man’s man … with shiny, full-bodied pony hair. And you can go ahead and admit that you soooo want to brush it right now. I won’t judge you.)

Moving on: Andy and I were watching our neighbors’ house, and they had given us the 6-digit access code to their garage door. Because we are such diligent and caring neighbors, we immediately forgot the code kept the code in a super-safe place, and Andy wondered in passing how feasible it would be for a burglar to randomly guess the code. I explained that there were 1,000,000 possible access codes (0-9 for 6 digits = 10^6 possible codes). The odds of a potential burglar randomly guessing the access code on the first attempt are 1×10^-6, or 0.000001, which are very remote. We then wondered how long it would take to arrive at the correct code by just entering 000000, 000001, 000002, etc., until the door unlocked—what’s known in computer security as a “brute force” hack. I can’t do that kind of math in my head, but I later looked it up on the Internet determined that if the potential burglar had one second to enter each digit, one second to press the Enter key, and one second to evaluate whether or not the combination were successful, it would take up to 92 days of non-stop data entry to stumble on the correct combination: 8×1,000,000=8,000,000 seconds, 8×10^6/(60x60x24)=92.593 days. Our neighbors would only be away for one week, during which time someone would surely notice a terribly sleep-deprived burglar trying to illegally enter through the garage. We concluded that our neighbors’ vast collection of pony brushes property was therefore safe.

A walking 17th-century shampoo commercial: “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful ….”

The length of the garage access code and the set of symbols to choose from are matters of complexity; the odds of guessing that access code at random is a matter of probability. But these are like two sides of the same coin: The high complexity of the access code is also an indication of the low probability that it can be randomly guessed, and the high complexity of the soup message about Leibniz’s magnificent shimmering pony hair is also an indication of the low probability of its occurring at random. (In fact, they’re not just indications of each other; the two measures are directly mathematically related, but I won’t go into detail about that here because I’m way too lazy that’s a whole other discussion.)

It turns out that complexity, while being a necessary condition for distinguishing information from random data, is not sufficient to do so. To demonstrate why, pretend you’re merry go-lucky Gottfried Leibniz, and you have a decision to make: You slept in too late this morning, and now you have a bad case of bed-head, but you need to update your notes so that Isaac Newton can’t convince everyone that he invented differential calculus before you did. So you decide to toss a coin. If it lands heads-up, you tend to your magnificent pony hair; if it lands tails-up, you update your notes and stay away from the mirror. You’re assuming that the odds of the coin landing heads-up is 50% (1 in 2)  because there are only two outcomes: heads or tails (H or T). You flip the coin, and it lands tails-up. Crestfallen, you decided to give the coin a chance to reconsider. You flip the coin again, and it lands heads-up. Now you’re encouraged, so you decide to flip again for the best of three. Bad news: it’s tails. So you flip again ….

Consider that third coin flip. What’s the probability that three consecutive coin flips would result in THT (tails/heads/tails)? Again, it’s based on the number of possible outcomes, and there are eight: HHH, HHT, HTH, HTT, THH, THT, TTH, and TTT. So the probability of THT is 1/8. You can greatly simplify the math here by applying the knowledge that each coin toss is a 1/2 probability and multiplying each: (1/2)^3 = 1/8. But what you really want to do is brush your shiny pony curls, so after 20 coin tosses (result: THTHTTTHHHTTHHTTHTHH) you give in to vanity.

The probability of 20 coin tosses giving an outcome sequence of THTHTTTHHHTTHHTTHTHH is (1/2)^20, or 1/1,048,576. That roughly corresponds to the probability of guessing our neighbor’s garage-door access code on the first try and also to the complexity of that access code. The point here is that somewhat random data events can have high complexity (even though chance is not the causal agent in a coin toss; it’s actually a mind connected to a thumb, but that’s a distinction I won’t pursue here because I’m still too lazy for the sake of brevity). Some additional criterion is needed to fully distinguish information from a random data event, and that criterion is specification ….

Here’s an old joke about a thermos salesman explaining his product to a potential customer:

Salesman: It keeps hot things hot and cool things cool!
Customer: But … HOW do it KNOW ?!?

I often feel like this customer. Like when I’m browsing a news blog and see sidebar ads for diapers and footie jammies and talking pony dolls with long silky pink hair. “HOW DO IT KNOW?!?” I shout, thumping my fists on my forehead in amazement. Then Andy says, “Please stop. You’re scaring the kids ….” and I go for a walk to calm down.

Commercial Web sites know you’re browsing for talking pink pony dolls—for your daughter, you’d like to clarify, even though there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a grown man wanting to brush some soft silky pony hair once in a while—because these sites are collecting data from your internet connection, browser, and device. These data points are then analyzed by enchanted computer elves (which industry insiders call “algorithms” when our wife is listening and we want to impress her with fancy computer talk) to construct information, which indicates something useful about what some weirdo Daddy has been shopping for online.

My point is that there’s a difference between data and information (and also that brushing pony hair can be soothing, so maybe give it a try before you judge, okay?). Data are raw, unorganized facts, whereas information is the result of organizing and analyzing data for some useful purpose. For example, an order of diapers is a piece of data. Age and relationship status are pieces of data from the corresponding account profile. Linked together, these data points indicate that the purchaser likely has kids. A single order of three different sizes of diapers indicates at least three different kids. The elves take stuff like this and make information, which they use to target their uncanny sidebar ads.

Here’s another (simple) example: The random collection of letters …

A I K Y P S Y I R L H O N

… is mere data, but if you rearrange those letters to spell …

SILKY PONY HAIR

… you have created information. However, the line between information and random data is often not so clear, and clarifying that boundary is the subject of Information Science and related disciplines like Computer Science. It’s possible for something that looks like information to actually be just a random data event, and the difference sometimes must be proven (like in a court of law).

One early pioneer of Information Science was Gottfried Leibniz, who had some amazing silky pony hair. Just … WOW.

Here’s an illustration. It’s flu season, so imagine that you have the flu and you’re staying home alone because no one wants to be around you and your disgusting crusty booger nose, not even your favorite pony family. You get hungry, but the only thing in the pantry is alphabet soup, so you prepare some in the microwave. As you’re carrying it to the kitchen table, you look down and see this:

Is this information or a random data event? You can clearly see the word PONY in there, but the letters are all jumbled around amongst other letters, and maybe you’re just noticing that particular word because you’ve been writing about ponies so much on your brony blog lately the flu is making you hallucinate. So it’s probably just a random coincidence. Just eat your soup and go take a nap, right? But what if you looked down and saw this?

Intuitively, you recognize that this is not a random data event. You could freak out and yell “HOW DO IT KNOW?!?” until you pass out in the kitchen and wake up hours later in a puddle of cold soup. But that wouldn’t help you recover from the flu, so just take some deep breaths and analyze the situation. You might ponder some questions, like “What’s the probability of this happening?” or “Is my soup really talking to me?” or “Maybe I should lay off the pony jokes?”

If you ask that first question, you’re on the right track (and if you ask the last question, the answer is “NEVER! I’LL DIE FIRST!”) because probability and complexity are closely related mathematical concepts, and one of the two distinguishing characteristics of information is that it is complex ….

Parent: Hey, let’s read your new dinosaur book!
Kid: Yay! Dya-boog!
Book: I’M A SMALL, FEATHERED DINOSAUR WITH WINGS AND TWO LEGS! WHAT’S MY NAME?
Parent: Must be an archaeopteryx.
Kid: Yah! Ark-pix ….
Book: DID YOU GUESS CAUDIPTERYX? YOU’RE RIGHT!
Parent: Uh, no. Nope. Wouldn’t have guessed that. I don’t think I can even pronounce that.
Book: I HAVE THREE HORNS PROTRUDING FROM MY FACE, A HEAVY BODY, AND A BEAK-LIKE SNOUT. WHAT’S MY NAME?
Parent: Oh, that one’s easy. It’s a triceratops.
Kid: Trisopots!
Book: DID YOU GUESS PENTACERATOPS? YOU’RE RIGHT!
Parent: Penta-wha? That’s a TRICERATOPS. That’s CLEARLY a triceratops. Right?
Kid: Fbbblbbbblbbgh ….
Book: I HAVE A LONG NECK FOR GRAZING TREETOPS AND A LONG TAIL TO SWISH AT ENEMIES. WHAT’S MY NAME?
Parent: Obviously a brontosaurus.
Kid: Yah. Bahbosooz ….
Book: DID YOU GUESS ALLOSAURUS? YOU’RE RIGHT AGAIN!
Parent: ARE YOU SH#–I mean, you GOTTA BE KIDDING ME.
Kid: Nonononono ….
Parent: I KNOW! RIGHT?!? That. Is. A. BRONTOSAURUS ….
Book: I HAVE BONY TRIANGULAR BACK PLATES AND A SPIKED TAIL. WHAT’S MY NAME?
Parent: Stegosaurus. You’re a steg-o-FREAKIN’-saurus.
Kid: Yah! Segosobooz!
Book: DID YOU GUESS DACENTRURUS?
Parent: Oh COME ON! That’s a TOTALLY MADE-UP NAME! NOT cool!
Kid: Dockasooz ….
Parent: Wait, did you say dacentrurus … or Dr. Suess?
Kid: Okay!

Two-year-old: Mary Ann slipped on the ice and broke her foot.
Two-year-old’s Butler: Oh, we should pray for her.
TYO: Yeah. What’s a Mary Ann?
TYOB: She’s a lady who got trapped on an uncharted desert isle with a professor, a movie star, a millionaire and his wife, and Gilligan. And the skipper, too.
TYO: Why?
TYOB: Well, their tiny ship, the SS Minnow, got lost and ran aground.
TYO: Why?
TYOB: Because they thought it would only be a three hour tour, but then the weather started getting rough.
TYO: Why?
TYOB: Because it was a storm.
TYO: Did Jesus calm that storm?
TYOB: No, it was a different storm.
TYO: Why?
TYOB: So that they could make a sitcom.
TYO: Why?
TYOB: Because people like to laugh.
TYO: Why?
TYOB: Because it’s better than crying.
TYO: Oh ….
TYOB: Yeah.
TYO: Daddy, why do we need belly buttons?

Audie: Don’t go. I must measure you first.
Me: Okay. What’s my measurement?
Audie: You are … thirty pounds tall ….
Me: Wow. Is that good?
Audie: VERY good.
Me: And you? What’s your measurement?
Audie: I am … very big.
Me: Perfect.