The Infinite Alphabet and the Loss of Knowledge

Type: Book

As of November 2026, The Infinite Alphabet and the Loss of Knowledge has been mentioned in one podcast episode on Machine Learning Street Talk (Dec 2025). In the episode "Why Scientists Can't Rebuild a Polaroid Camera," César Hidalgo recommends the book The Infinite Alphabet and the Loss of Knowledge, highlighting its central focus on the scientific and policy ambitions related to the laws of knowledge. He notes that the book has two main ambitions, making it a significant reference point in the discussion.

Data are a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted formally. A datum is an individual value in a collection of data. Data are usually organized into structures such as tables that provide additional context and meaning, and may themselves be used as data in larger structures. Data may be used as variables in a computational