Comments by "EebstertheGreat" (@EebstertheGreat) on "The Hidden Geometry of Error-Free Communication" video.

Flatland is a very strange book. It's not really long enough to be a novel, or detailed enough to be hard sci fi, but it's still usually categorized as a hard sci fi novel. It describes itself as a "romance," but there is no romance. And as you say, although it is a satire of English society, it's not a particularly poignant one. What I did like about the book, and I think what most people like, is the playful yet semiserious consideration of how a two-dimensional world could work, such as how people could work out details if everything just looks like a line.
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@mmlgamer "Light novels" are Japanese novels targeted at preteens and young teens. So it's not that. "Novella" is a better description.
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@DontMockMySmock You are sort of halfway between when "romance" meant "vulgar" and when "romance" meant "love story." The older sense survives today only in "romance languages," while the newer sense is standard. Other examples of terms at the halfway point include vocabulary specific to the "Romantic era," like "romanticism." It also exists in "romantic" strategies in chess, medicine, and other fields. ("Heroic" medicine is sometimes described as "romantic," as are some psychological approaches at the time.) The book Flatland is at the midpoint, where "romance" commonly but not always meant courtship and sex. Even still, it's not romantic at all, in any sense of the word.
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@michaeldunkerton3805 An allegory is a rhetorical device comparing situations which are related in a relevant way. Most allegories are similes or metaphors, where the comparison is either explicit (in the case of a simile) or at least obvious (in the case of a metaphor). Sometimes satirical works draw more subtle allegories that can be easily missed. Parables are instructional tales, with the quintessential examples in modern Western literature being those of Jesus. Although they aren't literally true (and in some cases cannot be literally true, like Aesop's fables), they are morally relevant, and their heavy-handed conclusions bear on real decisions. Aphorisms like "look before you leap" often go hand-in-hand with parables like The Fox and the Goat.
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@ipudisciple With a distance of 7 or 8, you can only correct 3 errors either way. If there are 4 errors in a message encoded with a code with Hamming distance 8, there will be at least two valid codewords that you could correct to, each a distance 4 away.
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I don't fully understand why the 23-bit code is rarely used in comparison to its 24-bit extension. Since the 23-bit code is perfect, it can't really be compressed, which means the best possible compression of the 24-bit code is the 23-bit code. It's less than 5% savings, so maybe that just doesn't turn out to be relevant, but 5% isn't nothing. Why isn't the 23-bit code sent and then expanded at the terminus when necessary?
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@chaoster111 Modern CPUs actually operate on 64-bit words. But that's not really relevant for internet communication anyway. I don't see why transmitting 12 bits in a 24-bit codeword is better than in a 23-bit codeword, especially when virtually all traffic is compressed.
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