What the hell is going on with Youtubes new "design"?!?

[Beamin]

Completely off topic here, but...

I believe youtube takes all the comments and sends then directly into a non rotating non charged black hole so that the information can be lost forever.

Actually, not all information is lost when it enters a black hole  The Hawking radiation kinda preserves some of it... I think. Too lazy to search for this right now

I never really understood that whole concept of information loss. I thought when you turned something into a plasma you were only left with ratio of atoms and number of atoms maybe with momentum. I consider plasma complete data destruction.

[T3sl4co1l]

I never really understood that whole concept of information loss. I thought when you turned something into a plasma you were only left with ratio of atoms and number of atoms maybe with momentum. I consider plasma complete data destruction.

You've reorganized the original data, so many times and in so many ways that it is utterly inaccessible as its original format.  But that hasn't destroyed it, only mixed it around.

Remember, entropy is the state of maximal information.  Why is it so hard to compress white noise?

What we commonly call "information" is a pattern of only modest entropy.  A signal which contains enough information to be useful, but not so much that it is impossible to extract meaning from it.

Tim

[Beamin]

I never really understood that whole concept of information loss. I thought when you turned something into a plasma you were only left with ratio of atoms and number of atoms maybe with momentum. I consider plasma complete data destruction.

You've reorganized the original data, so many times and in so many ways that it is utterly inaccessible as its original format.  But that hasn't destroyed it, only mixed it around.

Remember, entropy is the state of maximal information.  Why is it so hard to compress white noise?

What we commonly call "information" is a pattern of only modest entropy.  A signal which contains enough information to be useful, but not so much that it is impossible to extract meaning from it.

Tim

But how is it still data if it can't be put back into order only using itself (Not needing extra data/energy to get the info back)?

[IanB]

But how is it still data if it can't be put back into order only using itself (Not needing extra data/energy to get the info back)?

Data is not the same as information. Data can be random and have no information content.

[T3sl4co1l]

Put three red balls into an urn filled with ten quintillion vermillion balls and mix them up.

Have you destroyed the red balls?

It's actually worse than this, because the number of permutations is hugely greater, and the red balls are changed in the process.  (Which is to say, we're not talking about particles, even assuming we could uniquely identify particles when they are identical in the quantum mechanical sense; we're talking about states of particles, an even more nebulous and ephemeral property of the system.)  But the principle is the same: it's not destroyed, per se, it's just mixed in so thoroughly that you can never get it back.

Another way to put it: suppose we take some entangled particles and dump their partners into a plasma; have the other particle pairs been destroyed in the process?  No, they're still there.  When we measure the states of the saved particles, we don't get meaningful answers, because the entanglement has been mixed in with all the other particles.  In principle, if we could measure all those particles perfectly (neglecting uncertainty for a moment, as if), we could disentangle all the particle states, rewind time and confirm that the original entangled particles did, in fact, correlate.

Tim