When 1+1=11
At a recent exhibition at the British Museum there was a collection of stones with strange writings on them. It was the language of a culture closer to The Game of Thrones than anything present day. I looked at these stones wondering "Why on earth would anyone go to the lengths of carving code in stone when they already had paper? It does not make sense.
Last night I woke up and watched another fascinating programme on the BBC between midnight and 1.00am where Professor George and Doctor Ian from Exeter University dissected the membranes and receptors of the back of a human palm in "The incredible hand" to explain how the hand operates and how tissue membranes help regulate finger movements to subtly create music on a piano. Then he sliced open the fingertip (which made me cringe) to reveal the 20,000 receptors we all have at our disposal.
There was a wonderful part where another researcher placed a banana on Professor George's forearm and he could not tell what it was, but the moment he placed it on his fingertips he could tell through information gathered via those 20,000 receptors we all have in each fingertip exactly what it was. In a repeat test he showed how those fingertips can discern not only a coin, but one coin from another. That's 100,000 bits of information in each hand which can rotate through 360 x 360 degrees. That means each finger can store 2.592e9 bits of information each, which presumably is why a blind person can easily read braille.
That was an eureka moment for me.
It was the moment I realised why King Nabopolassar of the Babylonian Kingdom decided to chisel out all his accounts in stone. To my knowledge, they did not have lightbulbs in 626-605 BC. However, I am sure the king in those days must have awoken in the middle of the night worried about scribes fiddling his accounts, and if they chiselled them out in stone, perhaps the king was capable of reading braille in the dark, which makes sense of the form of writing, because the king could check on his scribes' accounts at night without any of them knowing he had been there, and because the information was cast in stone it was unchangeable and in the morning, he would chop their heads off for making an error.